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

[Anders Sandberg]

Not that I have read Toynbee and Spengler...

torsdagen den 11 mars 2004 21.45 quoted Damien Broderick:
> 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. 

It is interesting to combine this reasoning with Richard Florida's criticism 
of the politics of creativity at http://www.alternet.org/
story.html?StoryID=17576

Could we be seeing a situation similar to 1) above due to this? The leading 
edge clusters of western culture are (perhaps) being blocked in the US, and 
as I comment at http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2004/01/
creative_sweden.html we may have equally bad problems in Europe. Whether 2) 
is going on or not is an interesting question, with probably no simple 
answer. A general distrust is clearly spreading, but that might actually be a 
good thing in open societies. And social unity might no longer be as 
essential as before, if systems of trust and negotiation can take its role. 

I tend to mistrust this kind of sweeping civilization models, but there is 
certainly plenty of emergent dynamics going on here, and it is not 
unreasonable to worry about demonstrated failure mechanisms.

Apropos cultures (not civilizations, which could be viewed as systems of 
cultures), there was a very nice paper in the latest Nature on culture and 
language: http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/
v428/n6980/full/428275a_fs.html
(cypherpunks, writecode)

Mark Pagel, Ruth Mace: The cultural wealth of nations
 
	Why, when the human race shows comparatively little genetic variation, are 		
cultural differences so widespread and enduring? Thinking about cultures in 
terms of biological species provides some provocative answers. 

A bit of memetics without the word meme. 




-- 
Anders Sandberg
http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa
http://www.aleph.se/andart/

The sum of human knowledge sounds nice. But I want more.