A small discussion on social media has arisen about the idea that freedom and political and social freedoms are fundamentally Western. Setting aside the libertarianism present in non-Western traditions like Daoism (David Boaz devoted a portion of Libertarianism: A Primer to this connection), more interesting are questions of the form “did the Greeks invent democracy?” My contention, broadly, is that the Greeks did not invent democracy, but all modern democracies are genealogically descended from the Greeks.
Small self-governing political units have existed in many places. Early Iron Age India for example had many statelets that are often described as “republics,” like the that of the Sakyas. If you look at the history of Mesopotamia it seems clear during the early periods some of the city-states were run on an oligarchic, not autocratic basis. Across the Iron Age, the arrow of history pointed to despotism. This is true in Greece and Rome, as the original more representative and distributed political systems slowly gave way to top-down despotism. But, the transition, especially for the Romans, was pragmatic, gradual, and de facto, rather than de jure. This means that they did not turn their backs on their republican institutions, but maintained the external facade for centuries after they were functionally powerless. The republican facade faded piecewise between the reign of Septimius Severus (who began promulgating law in his own name rather than with the figleaf of the Senate), to the emergence of the autocracy of the Tetrarchy a century later, that initiated the Dominate and the end of the Principate.
This persistence, along with Greco-Roman articulation, explication, and literary detail and depth, means that the political forms of the ancients were stored away in a manner that could be resurrected through replication in later centuries. In contrast, the Indian oligarchic Mahajapandas are historical footnotes, while the republican city-states of early Mesopotamia left no cultural descendants. I believe autocratic governmental forms are cultural adaptations. The fact that they spread across much of the world indicates they’re effective ones, but that doesn’t mean they’re “natural.” Primordial human bands were not run anarchistically, but in all likelihood, power structures were flatter than what became the norm during the Iron Age. If the democratic impulse is common why are the Greco-Roman models so critical? Because the Greco-Romans engaged in extended and copious abstraction and systematization of their social and political forms, and this process lends itself to translation into literary form. The written word is immortal and echoes down the centuries. The memories of the Mahajapandas fades. The speeches of Demosthenes persist.
If only God had not cast an evil eye on the Amorites, we could be tracing our laws to Hammurabi instead of the Greeks and Romans. The Woke would be confounded by having to denounce brown lawgivers instead of white ones.
“the arrow of history pointed to despotism”
And it has turned back in that direction after a brief flirtation with a different direction.
It’s sad ancient Indian history is fading. If only our ancestors placed more emphasis on record keeping and history. The white man wins again. The future belongs to Western civilization and the Sinosphere partly because they know their past and can confidently define the future.
Yes.
Amit:
India appears to have had an oral culture, with if anything an aversion to writing things down. I quoted Steve Pinker citing an anthropologist on why elites might have found a lack of written history in their interest here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/consilience/
I wrote that blog post before I read James Scott on hill people being averse to literacy and peasants seeking to destroy records when they revolt.
@Amit: Self-confidence is more important than a historical record. The attachment of Indians to their myths, their sacred places, and their identity in general is much stronger than in the West. History is meaningless if your own people reject it.
And for that matter, Chinese people’s self-confidence isn’t exactly tied to historical fact. The average Chinese national I’ve met online believes without any doubt that:
Tibet was always a part of China.
Goguryeo (i.e. the predecessor state of Korea) was 100% Chinese, and Koreans are cultural thieves for claiming it.
In general, that any land owned or claimed by the PRC at any point is (and has always been) a core part of the China.
So, good news to Indian nationalists: Work on the national unity a bit, and you’ve got a pretty good claim to Southeast Asia. History pales before belief.
A parliament, the Althing, was founded in Iceland over a thousand years ago. Not sure of its relevance, but there have been alternatives to divine-right monarchy in the West for some time.
The Woke would be confounded by having to denounce brown lawgivers instead of white ones.
amorites were as white as the greeks
“amorites were as white as the greeks”
I understand that, but for the Woke it would present a problem. For most of them the Greeks and Romans are the progenitors of white male supremacy. And in the common understanding of the plain folk, “we” are the heirs of the Greeks and Romans, not of those brown “others” in the Middle East.
@iffen
Depends on the type of Middle Easterner. Christian Middle Easterners like Justin Amash don’t get the brown privelege that Muslim Middle Easterners like Rashida Tlaib get. In a world where Amorites are relevant, they would be tied to Christian(Jewish?) West rather than the “brown” Middle East.
@Amit Yeah, the world will be partitioned between China and either a Western state in the Western hemisphere. That state might be Mexico, Brazil, Argentina or even the U.S.. Which ever one it is, it will undergo a massive transformation in order for it to fix the current Latin West’s problems. Mr. Khan wrote an article titled “Our Three Body Problem”, I agree there is a problem but I think its a two body problem. However, I won’t challenge Razib on that, we’ll see who is right in the future.
“… means that the political forms of the ancients were stored away in a manner that could be resurrected through replication in later centuries.”
The Middle Ages saw the revival of republican institutions in cities/towns all over Europe especially in central and northern Italy where they were often sovereign states. They provided fertile ground for the reception of Roman articulations of republicanism in histories (e. g. Livy) and especially law (e. g. Corpus Juris Civilis).
So, Greco-Roman articulations did not pass straight from the ancients to the moderns but were refracted and added to by the medieval experience (e. g. Machiavelli).
The Carthaginians had a well-established republican system of government, so had they destroyed the Roman state and become the uncontested rulers of the Western Mediterranean, almost certainly there would still be a republican tradition in theory and practice throughout the Western Mediterranean in the first centuries BC and AD (of course there would be no BC-AD terminology then).
The Carthaginian state, with its more mercantile and less military focus, may have never conquered the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern European regions and also may have never Hellenized to the degree the Roman state would. We could then have a much more fragmented West Eurasian world (including North Africa) in terms of civilization and religion today. But the Jews could still be all over the place though.
The last sentence is a double-edged sword, since Demosthenes was a despicable populist, bribed by the Persian despots, who almost got Aristotle killed. The written word also helps to write propaganda.
@Onur Dincer
“But the Jews could still be all over the place though.”
But in your scenario, there would have been no unique persecution in the Roman Empire and its descendant cultures. The Jews would have likely assimilated into European culture just like all the other mercantile groups.
@Harry Jecs
If every reference to Roman Law in Western literature were replaced with Babylonian Law, wouldn’t that present more of a problem for people like Tlaib and the whole Said Orientalism POV?
This to me is fundamentally a Definitional debate.
Arguments arise over this because people assume/confuse/force certain different definitional meaning to the same Term (like Democracy).
Institutes like V-Dem (which measures global democracy levels) placed Switzerland as having greater participatory democracy index value in 50s & 60s than a place like India, all the while when half the humanity (Women) in Switzerland couldn’t even vote.
If then the argument becomes, But But we don’t mean Voting is necessarily what Democracy is about, then right there is the original point about Definitional Confusion/Muddling.
I mean sure it’s fair and fine if Voting isn’t treated as relevant to Democracy but then that has to be applied consistently for other states as well, it can’t be selectively applied to the West.
More humans today inside of China are responsible for selecting their Leadership than what was the case for early US. Meaning even by this premise of Voting Not Really That Important for Democracy, the modern West has incredibly weak footing on this debate.
@Var
This to me is fundamentally a Definitional debate.
If we designate voting as the key metric of measuring democracy, a compelling case can be made that the U. S. cannot begin to validate the claim of being a “democracy” until after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Once the focus is upon voting, there are many aspects of the voting process to be considered. To give but one example, who counts the votes, and is there transparency and integrity in the process? Do “the people” trust the process? Many were surprised to recently learn that there is a significant fraction of the American public that does not trust the electoral process.
@iffen
But in your scenario, there would have been no unique persecution in the Roman Empire and its descendant cultures. The Jews would have likely assimilated into European culture just like all the other mercantile groups.
There were already Jewish communities in many parts of the Mediterranean, including Western Mediterranean, centuries before the Roman imperial persecution of Jews. There were Jews in the Carthaginian realm too for instance.
With a scenario with no Christianity, the Jews would probably be assimilated less, not more. The Jews historically resisted paganism even more than they resisted Christianity. Christianity is much more monopolistic than paganism and there are less psychological pressures to overcome for the Jews when converting Christianity rather than paganism. Also, in my scenario of a very fragmented West Eurasian world the pagan faiths would be quite diverse, different regions would likely have very different pagan faiths, a geographically very distributed and somewhat interconnected people like the Jews would have less impetus to convert to the local religions in such a fragmented and heterogeneous landscape.
when converting to Christianity
@Onur Dincer
With a scenario with no Christianity, the Jews would probably be assimilated less, not more.
No. We will have to disagree.
If what you are saying is true, then there should be many other religious groups that survived in Europe down to the modern era.
Read Razib’s piece on the assimilation of Jews where they were not persecuted as opposed to those cultures where they were and such persecution crystallized the modern Jewish culture.
Stuff like “Brown” and “White” (and “Western”) are constructs. Trying to project what the Woke would do if “Western” civilization descended from Hammurabi is silly because it seems likely that stuff like Wokism, how the West is defined, who’s defined as white or brown or even who “discovers America” from the Old World first or colonizes large swaths of the world would differ a lot in such a world from our current reality.
@Onur, I think the big question though is why the Jews would disperse in your scenario anyway? As I understand from the Cochran version the story of the Jews is that this small post-Christian minority in Italy were both a) tolerated where other pagan minority cults weren’t, and b) allowed to lend money to Christians who weren’t allowed to lend to each other, and c) relatively commercially sophisticated relative to much of Europe.
In a scenario where they’re not especially tolerated, and not especially allowed to lend money, and there are a bunch of other commercially sophisticated Mediterranean folk about to compete and the locals can easily learn from them, they wouldn’t have a reason to especially disperse, or if they did, then we’re not seeing the kind of massive, specialist urban niche fuelled population expansion as in OTL (where an urban niche combined with massive European urban expansion in North-Central Europe in a very fortuitous way) and they’re more like Kaifeng Jews (basically some community that exists, but its not really genetically separate and it’s a footnote in this world’s equivalent of the Encyclopedia Britannica and no one locally thinks they’re very of interest in intellectual etc. terms).
There’s no doubt they could exist and might even resist assimilation more, but the unique thing about them in OTL is that they could expand demographically, and the conditions for that were a product of peculiar prohibitions and tolerances and intolerances within the Christian world, not anything particularly inherent to the Jews that would replicate to such a world.
I think we know that in OTL the Jews basically got displaced from Western Europe after around 1400 AD by Christian trading families (Fuggers, etc), which followed on from an innovation in 1200s were variou Italian Catholics “particularly the Cahorsins and Lombards, invented legal fictions to get around the ban on Christian usury; for example, one method of effecting a loan with interest was to offer money without interest, but also require that the loan be insured against possible loss or injury, and/or delays in repayment (see contractum trinius). The Christians affecting these legal fictions became known as the pope’s usurers, and reduced the importance of the Jews to European monarchs. Later in the Middle Ages, a distinction evolved between things that were consumable (such as food and fuel) and those that were not, with usury permitted on loans that involved the latter … By the later Middle Ages, Christian Merchants who lent money with interest were without opposition, and the Jews lost their privileged position as money-lenders;[“ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_banking#Medieval_Europe). The departure of the Jews from Western Europe followed swiftly on the heels of this within 200 or so years.
No usury ban, no Jewish advantage and in fact probably a massive disadvantage in lending and commerce given that common religions and cults “lubricate” business relationships with the majority. So most likely no North/Central European Jewry of any meaningful size at all.
@roelm2
Do you happen to know if the written law codes of the Greeks and Romans can be linked directly back to the written law codes in the Middle East, like Hammurabi and similar ones? Or did written law codes spring up sui generis in different locales? I am thinking of the transmission of religious ideas from the Middle East to the West.
@iffen
“Do you happen to know if the written law codes of the Greeks and Romans can be linked directly back to the written law codes in the Middle East, like Hammurabi and similar ones?”
I am unaware of any direct link between the code of Hammurabi and other Mesopotamian codes and Greco-Roman legal compilations but then I’m no expert on this matter. There was a significant time gap between the code of Hammurabi and the rise of the Greek city states after the Mycenean collapse for one thing. If there was any legal transmission, perhaps it was through the acceptance of mercantile legal customs in the Mediterranean (similar to the Lex Rhodia in Roman law). See the wiki entry on “General Average”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_average
As far as Roman law itself was concerned, it seems to have evolved quite distinctly from Greek law despite the strong Greek influence in other areas of Roman life.
“The Woke would be confounded by having to denounce brown lawgivers instead of white ones.”
The “Woke” don’t seem to have any particular problem when criticizing Christian religion (created also by supposedly “brown”* people of the Middle East).
* Yes, they probably were also not much darker than the Greeks, but…
About genealogical descendents of other republic/democracies that Greek-Roman, perhaps old Germanic tribal assemblies have more influence in the history of modern democracies than what is usually asserted? Some connection tribal assembly → low Middle Age assemblies of nobleman to occasionally elect the King → medieval “Cortes” → English Parliament / French Etates Generales → modern republican/democratic revolutions.
I think Montesquiou wrote something about “English freedom” being born in the “forests of Germany”…
@iffen
No. We will have to disagree.
If what you are saying is true, then there should be many other religious groups that survived in Europe down to the modern era.
Why should there be? In our world with Christianity and Islam, virtually all the pagan religions of the West Eurasian world were systematically persecuted and wiped out due to the strong monopolist tendencies of those two Abrahamic religions. The Jews were largely exempted from those persecutions due to their special status between the Christians and pagans or between the Muslims and pagans.
In my scenario with no Roman Empire and hence no Christianity and Islam, most probably there would be much less pressure on religions so the West Eurasian world and the world as a whole would be religiously much more diverse today. The Jews would be among the groups who would probably assimilate the least in such an already religiously tolerant and pluralist environment due to their fixation on Yahweh worship and their belief in being his chosen people.
Read Razib’s piece on the assimilation of Jews where they were not persecuted as opposed to those cultures where they were and such persecution crystallized the modern Jewish culture.
The Jews crystallized as a people with exclusive Yahweh worship and belief in being his only chosen people many centuries before there was Christianity and already centuries before the famous wars of Rome and Carthage. There is no indication of relaxation on these and other core principles of Judaism or a meaningful ratio of conversion from Judaism to other religions before Christianity. Sure, Judaism could evolve to be a more relaxed and adaptable religion in my scenario, but I really do not see a strong prospect for the absorption of a meaningful proportion of the Jews by various pagan groups in my scenario.
@Matt
I think the big question though is why the Jews would disperse in your scenario anyway? As I understand from the Cochran version the story of the Jews is that this small post-Christian minority in Italy were both a) tolerated where other pagan minority cults weren’t, and b) allowed to lend money to Christians who weren’t allowed to lend to each other, and c) relatively commercially sophisticated relative to much of Europe…
I do not think the Jews would disperse in my scenario as much as they have dispersed in our world either. I was basing their probable dispersion levels in my scenario on their dispersion trends until their persecution by the Roman Empire in our world. Like I said, the Jews were in many parts of the Mediterranean already before the Punic Wars. They clearly already had a tendency to disperse, the reasons of which can be debated.
@Marco
Self-confidence is more important than a historical record. The attachment of Indians to their myths, their sacred places, and their identity in general is much stronger than in the West. History is meaningless if your own people reject it.
And for that matter, Chinese people’s self-confidence isn’t exactly tied to historical fact. The average Chinese national I’ve met online believes without any doubt that:
Tibet was always a part of China.
Goguryeo (i.e. the predecessor state of Korea) was 100% Chinese, and Koreans are cultural thieves for claiming it.
In general, that any land owned or claimed by the PRC at any point is (and has always been) a core part of the China.
Pseudohistory and pseudoscience can be used to arouse national self-confidence and consolidation or for other uses and can bear fruits for a time, but at the cost of detracting from the outside world and reality, and really they do not have much chance to endure in the long run, truth prevails eventually. The modern Western world has its pseudo stuffs too for various purposes, but better concealed ones.
@miguel – “About genealogical descendents of other republic/democracies that Greek-Roman”
I don’t think Razib’s got a wrong take as far as I can see (with far less knowledge than him) but yes, wonder if this kind of claim can only ever be a sort of loose impression, whether we will ever really be able to do a true geneaology of ideas – too much admixture and lateral transfer and shared processes and not enough of a space of independent histories to look at?
Possibly rather autocracy as a “cultural adaptation”, it may be more like a relaxation for selection. Less making the culture fitter in competition with other cultures, as the result of forces and the absence of selection for other forms.
The idea sort of like that pressure for violent mobilization but no outside enemy, select against despotism towards fedualism or a patchwork of small-scale city states, a combination of high mobilization and small political scale. If there’s an external state, then you select for high mobilization and large political scale, which means you probably end up with something like democracy, or at least a mass state that has lots of stakeholders of some form or another, possibly an extensive bureaucracy.
In the absence of either of these pressures, you may get autocracy?
Example for that idea (my last comment): The collapse of the Mycenaean kings (and more generally the LBA Dark Ages) into a decentralized state lays the foundations for the polis, which then lays the seeds for the Greek model of warfare (mass mobilization, in service of the state) which allows the expansions of Alexander, which then leads to despotism, which leads to collapse. The rise of the city state of Rome leads to the Roman Empire (despotism), which collapses into feudality which leads to the city states of Italy which leads to then a later, eventual consolidation. Few “arrows” and more “cycles”.
@Onur: “The Jews would be among the groups who would probably assimilate the least in such an already religiously tolerant and pluralist environment due to their fixation on Yahweh worship and their belief in being his chosen people.”
For pagan (non-Abrahamic) environments, the Kaifeng Jews and the Cochin Jews seem like plausible good examples of what would happen in a medium term to Jewish communities in the absence of A) a particular financial niche that allowed them to grow *a lot* and maintain a strong consciousness, B) a generally non-Abrahamic environment in which the shared pre-Christian mythos was not a constant element of the environment (which probably also reinforced Jewish beliefs compared to a sea of paganism and their consciousness of differences).
Very small communities. The largely culturally assimilated Kaifeng group pre-1800 is possibly a better example because less reinforced by later European Jewish impulse to return them to normative Judaism compared to Cochin group.
I think in both these situations, it’s difficult to know how many left the community vs stayed in it, over time, because the sheer population size differential means that there will be virtually no detectable outflow detectable in the majority population.
The Kaifeng example is probably better again, because Indian castes would have blocked out-marriage from the other side, while Chinese had no real stipulations to prevent marriage other than normal prejudices and such (which we can assume would be like our counterfactual pagans).
You might have dispersal across the pagan world in a scenario without Christianity, but the actual communities seem to me on balance most like they’d be a lot like the Kaifeng Jews – heavily intermarried and with a somewhat garbled sense of what the original religion was and absolutely tiny in size. I guess they could be “all over the place” but in very marginal and not very recognisable form.
@Onur:
Jewish endogamy going back to the days of “Yahweh” is mythological. In an LD-pruned dataset of 145 populations calculating PLINK’s F (coefficient of inbreeding) ranked from highest (1. Surui) to lowest, Ashkenazi Jews come out
131 (“Sephardic” at 108). Also, Jews share a great deal of IBD with others (Older data: http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/08/fastibd-analysis-of-several-jewish-and.html). Where Christianity or Islam became the state religion, marriage to a Jew was a capital crime, this is the beginning of rather recent pedigree collapse for Jews. In addition, Jews are probably the most traveled peoples in the world. Jewish dispersion in the last two millennia is one of fleeing from persecution toward opportunity, again and again.
@Matt
For pagan (non-Abrahamic) environments, the Kaifeng Jews and the Cochin Jews seem like plausible good examples of what would happen in a medium term to Jewish communities in the absence of A) a particular financial niche that allowed them to grow *a lot* and maintain a strong consciousness, B) a generally non-Abrahamic environment in which the shared pre-Christian mythos was not a constant element of the environment (which probably also reinforced Jewish beliefs compared to a sea of paganism and their consciousness of differences)…
In my scenario of the world, different Jewish groups would have different (sometimes very different) experiences depending on the regions and time periods they lived. The Kaifeng Jews can be used as a proxy for a Jewish community that would go to the farthest parts of the known world and lose contact with the rest of the world Jewry for many centuries, but not for the bulk of the Jews, who would probably be restricted to the regions of the West Eurasian world and keep some level of contact with each other. Also, there would be less Jewish persecution and hence less Jewish dispersion in my scenario, so a community like the Kaifeng Jews may have never emerged. If you want to find good proxies for the bulk of the Jews in my scenario, you should look at the various Jewish communities in the West Eurasian world before the imposition of Christianity or Islam to those lands, they would be much more informative.
@Sgt
Jewish endogamy going back to the days of “Yahweh” is mythological. In an LD-pruned dataset of 145 populations calculating PLINK’s F (coefficient of inbreeding) ranked from highest (1. Surui) to lowest, Ashkenazi Jews come out
131 (“Sephardic” at 108). Also, Jews share a great deal of IBD with others (Older data: http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/08/fastibd-analysis-of-several-jewish-and.html). Where Christianity or Islam became the state religion, marriage to a Jew was a capital crime, this is the beginning of rather recent pedigree collapse for Jews. In addition, Jews are probably the most traveled peoples in the world. Jewish dispersion in the last two millennia is one of fleeing from persecution toward opportunity, again and again.
In my comments I have said nothing about Jewish endogamy. I am talking about how much the Jews would be assimilated or not by non-Jewish groups in a scenario with no Roman Empire, Christianity and Islam. I know that the Jews were more exogamous and open to accept converts in pagan environments. But none of these facts contradict with my inferences in my above comments.
@Onur, the Kaifeng group are interesting to me because they show that with a lack of demographic stimulus from a unique niche and a lack of the pagan world having a strong prohibition against intermarriage, these small communities can’t really afford to be that insular. If the question we’re asking is deeply related to the resilience as long-term, large communities in a pagan world with no special prohibitions or special status for them, and with no special economic niche adding rocket fuel to demographic growth, then they’re quite instructive, whereas the classical era communities are too short lived to really tell us how things would hash out in the long term.
Classical era communities, were still fairly small relative to the overall population, concentrated in cities with high mortality ratios, and not immune to influence from the outside world. Mostly Hellenistic and not really adherents to the codified Rabbinic form of the religion…?
Fundamentally we can’t have any idea about the rate of conversion in or out of their practices, in the short or longer term.
There’s reasonable substructure in even the Ashkenazi-Jewish communities as well – https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/36/6/1162/5370180 – so I’d not be too confident that the any small communities, if there were any, would stay in contact, more influenced by each other than going on distinct trajectories influenced by neighbours.
@Matt
I think the Kaifeng Jews are not instructive enough for my scenario for the reasons I pointed out.
As for Rabbinic Judaism, in my scenario with no Roman Empire, with no Roman persecution of the Jews and with no Christianity to resist, there would be no Rabbinic Judaism most probably. Rather, there would likely be different streams of Judaism adapted to different pagan environments (Hellenistic Judaism in the Greek-dominated Eastern Mediterranean, Punic-influenced Judaism in the Punic-dominated Western Mediterranean and so on) with a more Temple-based Judaism in Judea and environs, and much less tendency for uniformity and codification than in the post-Second Temple and post-Christian Judaism of our world with its Rabbinic Judaism.
Anyway, we have digressed too much from the main topic of the thread.
@ Onur Dincer
Anyway, we have digressed too much from the main topic of the thread.
I thought the topic was the manner in which modern peoples “reach back” and claim ancient cultures, or features thereof, and the adaptations, modifications, and substitutions that have occurred to those cultures and ideas, and the proprietary interest that some peoples develop in those ancient ideas and traditions which sometimes leads to ideas of exclusivity, uniqueness and orthodoxy.
@ Onur
“As for Rabbinic Judaism, in my scenario with no Roman Empire…”
Agree: Rabbinic Judaism grew out of the Pharisaic moment (Pharisees/Perusheem = Separatists) whom Josephus claimed was a minuscule group in First Century Judea. The Jewish “mainstreams” destroyed themselves in wars against Rome. From this defeated vacuum came the pacifists: Rabbis and Followers of the Way (in the Anointed One). The latter group gave birth to Gentile Christianity before being labelled as heretics by all sides. But eventually there had to be a “Rome,” a political empire given to aggregation. Given Temple Judaism’s ambivalence to proselytism, they would have been consumed by forces greater than themselves and disappeared.
Autocracy is normal, although not best.
“The 21st century has become a dark century because the seedbeds of democracy have been neglected and normal historical authoritarianism is on the march.”
David Brooks’ analysis of the past, however, is more sound than his suggestions for the future. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/opinion/liberalism-democracy-russia-ukraine.html
My last comment on the Jewish issue, so will be brief.
@Sgt
Agree: Rabbinic Judaism grew out of the Pharisaic moment (Pharisees/Perusheem = Separatists) whom Josephus claimed was a minuscule group in First Century Judea. The Jewish “mainstreams” destroyed themselves in wars against Rome. From this defeated vacuum came the pacifists: Rabbis and Followers of the Way (in the Anointed One). The latter group gave birth to Gentile Christianity before being labelled as heretics by all sides.
Fully agree.
But eventually there had to be a “Rome,” a political empire given to aggregation. Given Temple Judaism’s ambivalence to proselytism, they would have been consumed by forces greater than themselves and disappeared.
Maybe. The Temple may not have survived in the long run in my scenario, but I think it would be much more likely for it to have survived, however destroyed and rebuilt on some occasions. Circumstances and context of its destruction(s) would certainly be very important in this respect. But this is a too speculative subject and we have already talked a lot on my scenario.
Unrelated, but why does this website say I “like” or “upvote” posts and threads, when in reality I am not actually doing that? At first I thought it may have been me accidently doing it, but it happens far too often for that. I am not suggesting there is anything intentional going on, but there is something odd about the website software. I wonder if anyone else is experiencing this.
The Greeks believed only Greek-males could be citizens. Their opinion of their neighbors to the east, was that they should be subjugated, and treated like plants and animals. They believed all non-Greeks were barbarians; half-animal and of a servile disposition. Fast forward into the future, the naturalization act of 1790 in the United States stated that only “White Person(s)… of Good Character” could be allowed to become citizens. The Founding Fathers of the United States looked to Greece and Rome for inspiration, and believed themselves to be the spiritual successors to what they had created. It is easy to see how they could create a government where only a select elite of society, white male property-owners, were originally only allowed to vote. Therefore, elitism has always been at the heart of democracy, in the west. Nowadays, money equals speech in politics. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The second emperor of renown from Ancient India – Ajatashatru defeated a confederacy of eastern indian republics subjugating them for centuries. This directly resulted in the rise of first major state of India – Magadha.
Interesting What if moment – if Ajatashatru was defeated instead of the Vrijjis.
Later whatever remained of these eastern republics were slowly made irrelevant – though other smaller republic persisted well till the time of Central Asian invasion of the common era.