I think Daniel Walden gets this right: the idea that there is some single "civilization" running Gilgamesh-Hammurabi-Moses-David-Athens-Sparta-Jesus-Rome-Charlemagne-Renaissance-Glorious Revolution-Representative Government-Industrial Revolution-Democracy is a rather peculiar fiction. Better to remember that M. Tullius Cicero thought Britain was not worth the bones of a single Tuscan centurion, for there was not an ounce of silver on the whole island and the Britons were too stupid and uneducated for it to be worthwhile selling them as slaves: Daniel Walden: Dismantling the “West”: "What is this mysterious entity called “the West” anyway?...
...What do they think they mean by “the West,” what are they actually signaling by talking about “the West,” and why should anyone care about “the West” at all (since, spoiler alert, it’s largely a fabrication)?... I don’t pretend to have uncovered some great secret about the far right. Talking to these people mirrors the experience of talking to someone who’s just a bit too interested in German artillery from the First and Second World Wars, though the alt-right’s attempts at dog-whistle Nazi fandom are less like a soft whistle than a fifty-piece military band. The more mainstream right, however, despite its frequent disavowal of racism, upholds these very same visions of European superiority and colonial conquest, and, moreover, does so in terms that an attentive reader cannot help but gloss as racial...
#shouldread
#history
#romanhistory
#westerncivilization
#cicero
