[extropy-chat] CULTURE: Did Romans ruin Greek Culture?

[Damien Broderick]

At 12:23 PM 3/11/2004 -0800, The Avantguardian wrote:

>       Natasha, I don't think that the author of your
>book truly understands either culture or civilization.

This thread is hilarious. The apparently unrecognized name of `the author 
of [Natasha's] book' is Oswald Spengler. The book is THE DECLINE OF THE 
WEST. With Arnold Toynbee's subsequent vast A STUDY OF HISTORY, it was one 
of the two most celebrated and in some respects influential macroscale 
investigations of purported patterns in human history ever published. See, 
for some excerpts: http://www.duke.edu/~aparks/Spengler.html and on 
Toynbee: http://www.malaspina.com/site/person_1138.asp from which this grab 
is taken:

< Started in 1922 after Toynbee had absorbed Oswald Spengler's The Decline 
of the West (1918-22), when he observed Bulgarian peasants wearing fox-skin 
caps that may have resembled those worn by Xerxes' troops (as recounted in 
<http://www.malaspina.com/site/person_632.asp>Herodotus), A Study of 
History presents history as the rise and - with one exception - fall of 26 
societies, 21 of which are "civilizations", with the remaining 5 defined as 
"arrested civilizations".  He classified civilizations according to 
cultural, often religious, rather than national criteria, insisting that 
"An intelligible field of historical study is not be found within a 
national framework"[2]. Toynbee's civilizations include the "Egyptiac", 
"Hellenic" (including Roman), "Hindu", "Sinic", and "Western Christian" 
civilizations, while the "arrested civilizations" include the Spartan, 
Eskimo, and Polynesian societies. In Toynbee's view, civilization arises 
only in response to some extremely difficult set of challenges, when 
"creative minorities" inspire unprecedented effort to solve the problems 
faced by the society. These challenges may be physical, as when the Minoans 
conquered the sea; or social, as when Athens reacted to the Persian 
onslaught. The cycle of civilization comprises two major phases: a 
"universal state", such as the Roman Empire, that arises out of a time of 
troubles; and an "interregnum" dominated by a higher religion and a 
"Volkerwanderung" (migration) of barbarians in a heroic age. To Toynbee, 
only Western Christian civilization was in a thriving state, the others 
having gone through the three stages of breakdown: 1) a failure of creative 
power in the creative minority; 2) the withdrawal of allegiance to the 
ruling minority on the part of the majority; and 3) the consequent loss of 
social unity. The cycle of rise and decline was not inevitable in Toynbee's 
view: he allowed the possibility that a civilization could continue to 
respond creatively and successfully to recurring hardships. This was partly 
a reaction to Spengler's "dogmatic and deterministic" view of history as a 
series of inexorable cycles of "organic" growth and decay. >

Damien Broderick