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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-myth-of-the-dark-ages-ignores-how-classical-traditions-flourished-around-the-world-180982190/>
"Origins matter. When we pose the question, “Where do you come from?” what we
are really asking is often, “Who are you?” This is true for individuals,
families, even countries. It’s also true of an entity as large and complex as
the West.
The term “the West” can mean different things at different times to different
people. Today, it usually refers to a set of modern nation‐states that are
geopolitically aligned and share cultural features and political and economic
principles, including representative democracy, market capitalism and a secular
state overlying a Judeo‐Christian moral tradition. Of course, nothing on this
list is exclusive to the West or universal across it. The same can be said of
many symbols of Westernization—Coca‐Cola, opera houses, shopping malls. But one
defining feature of the West is the notion of a common origin resulting in a
shared history, a shared heritage and a shared identity.
This story imagines Western history as unfurling backward in time through the
Enlightenment, the brightness of the Renaissance and the darkness of the Middle
Ages, all the way to its origin in the classical worlds of Greece and
Rome—“from Plato to NATO,” as a popular 1998 history book put it. This has
become the standard version of Western history, both canonical and clichéd. But
it is wrong. Today, all serious historians and archaeologists acknowledge that
the cross-fertilization of “Western” and “non‐Western” cultures happened
throughout human history, and that the modern West owes much of its cultural
DNA to a wide range of non‐European and non‐white forebears. Yet the nuances of
these cultural interactions have yet to be fully untangled, and traditional
narratives about Western history remain stubbornly ubiquitous."
Via Joyce Donahue and Christoph S.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
