Law and architecture for a start.... Dennis Claxton
----------
It's interesting that you picked law and architecture. These form something of an administrative and hierarchical structured overlay. While there is a continuity in some regions, in other regions niether of these were successful in dominanting the pre-existing cultures and languages. I am thinking particularly about Germanic and Slavic people in middle and eastern Europe.
But the national myths of state depend heavily on both law and architecture as their fundamental cultural expressions. Many countries, artists, writers, philosophers, theologians, etc, the whole cultural elite class devoted most of their energies to inventing this vast mythological system codifying customs into laws, elaborate social rituals and presentations into architectural forms, and of course the visual arts to render these forms and ideas as picture book stories for the masses. One of the best of these visual story books comes from Gruewald's altar pieces with panels that open to reveal other panels, and yet more panels in a cycle that moves through the Christian cycle of the year, and the human life cycle: birth, youth, revelation, faith, death, and ressurection. All of these symbolic forms (as Cassirer calls them) woven together create the human world within which we live, how we live, how we speak, what we think, what we do, etc, etc.
It's also interesting to look deeper into the breaks of continuity, like Egypt, the Middle East, and of course Germany and Spain, in the western periphery of the Roman world. Think about the rich blending of the Arab and European cultures in Spain. Or the multiple breaks and blendings in place like Egypt. These latter breaks and blendings remind me of how artificial Israel is as a western state. It's national identity depends on a series of western and european mythological constructs and artifacts (nationalism) that are insufficient for the rich demands that all people make on their greater social body. Hence Israel imagines itself isolated and besieged. If it had simply become a Middle Eastern state as its neighbors, an historical mix of Islamic, Judaic, and Christian worlds, it would find friends instead of enemies in surrounding peoples, in their languages, styles of life, architecture, law, cuisine, clothing, the rythm of the days and evenings. (Should I delete this last thought? I don't feel like arguing it...)
What I find fascinating is to mull over the breaks and blendings rather than the theoretical continuity or evolution. Both of these latter ideas come from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. One of the reasons I dug up Hegel's Philosophy of History is because he lays out what he thought was the continuity and evolution of western `man'. But I have never gotten very far into it. Just getting through the Introduction seemed next to impossible for such an abstract motivation. I wanted to compare Hegel's view and state of knowledge with our own. We have managed to unearth and research a vast amount of knowledge and artifacts since Hegel wrote his history and these modern finds depict a far more complex and much richer texture of life than we ever imagined. These together in effect form a radicalizing effect on the national myths of the modern state---illuminating the artifical nature of our own creations of mind. Well, the myth of state.
Chris Doss, ``I mean that, like narratives of the Third Rome or how the Reich is grounded in the ancient German tribes and other similar narratives, it serves to legitimize contemporary beliefs and practices by rooting them in the distant past. As for instance 19th-century Russian nobles would try to tie their family trees to the Mongols, so modern North Americans and Europeans attempt to think of themselves as the inheritors of the ancient Greeks and Hebrews.
Does this make any sense to anybody?''
Of course it does. It is the primary narrative we all carry around in our minds. We, okay, I always weave my thoughts into or in relation to this grand narrative. It is the best of all shaggy dog stories. I know it is fiction, but that doesn't matter in the slightest. Perhaps only some Russian nobles would like to link themselves with the Mongols, others like Prince Andrey (of War and Peace fame) dreamed of an authentic western Russian theme---the outland to Europe, the better half of Europe, the rustic life---that progressivism and modernity of Russia was to look West, not East.
If Tolstoy was anything, he was the master narrator for Russia, like our own Herman Melville or Walt Whitman. (Carl would add Emerson here, and perhaps rightly so, provided we can work in Thoreau.) This brings up something I have never understood. The Americans and the Russians as the outlands of Europe should be great cultural friends. It is a monsterous stupidity that we are not. There are passages in Turgenev that sound like Twain (if Twain had been a better writer) or Hemingway who styled himself on Turgenev to some extent. The deeper parallels between us are really astonishing, and yet we are made to be enemies by the prevailing Capitalist ideology---through its twisted mirror. Equally so for the Mexicans. All three of us are much more alike than we are different. It is a complete mystery to me that our greatest or most sympathetic friends are somehow made into enemies for the sake of the myth of Capital.
CG
ps. the narrative of western civilization, despite its fiction, is so vast, you could spend an entire life uneathing it and never get to the bottom. It is our best myth