Yes.
> Bernal's criticism of the Aryan Model which
>misrepresents ancient Greece as "the pure cradle of Europe" still
>stands, since it is an analysis separable from the rest of his work.
Yes, but treating Greece as part of the Western tradition in my sense is not subject to that error, because I look forward, not back. What makes Greece "western" is that we look back to it, not that it came from "Ayrans."
YF:
>
>(A) In the sense of the "Invention of Tradition," yes, there exists
>the "Western Civilization." Courses in it are taught, books on it
>are written, etc., recreating it daily in culture.
>
>(B) And it is an empirical fact that the "West" (Western Europe &
>North America, & maybe Australia & New Zealand) is indeed today far
>richer than the rest of the world, with an important exception of
>Japan.
So we agree.
>
>The problem is that those who speak of the "Western Civilization"
>are, even now, seldom aware that it is a historical construct in the
>sense of A. For many -- though not all -- of those who lived in the
>late nineteenth century & the early twentieth century, as Weber did,
>certainly ancient Athens was _really_ of the "West" before the "West"
>came into its social & ideological being with the rise of capitalism.
Well, I don't know what "really" means here: sure, Athens is really of the West, although there wasn't the west there is now back then. I grant that Weber, like Marx and Hegel and Spengler and Toynbee, buys into certain Orientalist myths that were popular back them; theyw ere not self-conscious about how traditions get invented that way, although Marx and Hegel, and indeed Weber, had the equipment to see this. However, they were partly right, if not for the right reason.
>YF: >BTW, is Japan "of the West" in the ideological sense? During the
>Cold War, it partially & temporarily was. Now it isn't. It's a
>"crony capitalism dominated by an inefficient bureaucracy" ("Oriental
>Despotism" redux?).
I think it is in some ways and isn't in others. It's a liberal capiatlist democracy that sharesa lot of characteristics and institutions of the West. It's also an Asian country with its own distrinctive traditions. It looks back both to Athens and old Kyoto. Russia's like this too, a mixed case.
>
>Aside from the question of Japan, I'd like to, more generally, call
>attention to the simultaneous claim to & rejection of universality
>advanced by believers in the "Western Civilization." For instance,
>Max Weber writes: "A product of modern European civilization,
>studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to
>what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that
>in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural
>phenomenal have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of
>development having _universal_ significance and value"
Fair enough. Weber had no right to say this on his own terms. "Universal significance" means "important to someone with mu background," no more.
--jks
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