>>> Chris Doss
No, this isn't a joke on how nice it would be if
Western civilization actually existed. :)
Maybe this isn't an original idea or one that would closely survive scrutiny, but the idea occured to me recently that the notion that there is something called "Western Civilization" or "Judeo-Christian Civilization" with a continuous history going back to Ancient Greece and the tribes of Judea, and a cultural continuity uniting all the phases of its history, is really a modern foundation myth/historical legitimation narrative.
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?
^^^^ CB: I agree with your idea.
During the socalled Primitive Accumulation of capitalism, the rising bourgeoisie displaced peasants from the land, especially in England, forced them into the cities as the first ranks of the proletariat. The mode of production shifted from feudal exploitation of serfs to capitalist exploitation of wage-labor, as explained by Marx. This is one main pillar of capitalist origin. The other main pillar, colonialism and slavery ( also explained by Marx in one of he final chapters in _Capital_ I on "primitive accumulation) were not a logical result of the wage-labor system. I'd say the newly dominant bourgeoisie linked themselves as descendants of the Greeks and Romans as imperialists. For example, the latinization in "Rule Britannia", the imperialist slogan of the British. So, Western Civilization was retrospectively constructed by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois idealized and modeled the Greeks and Romans in the modern conquest of the globe. Notice the bourgeosie revived a slave mode. Slavery had ended in Europe during feudalism. This was an imitation of the Greeks and Romans, though the ancient slave mode was different from the capitalist slave mode.
The Greeks and Romans didn't project themselves into the future (smile). They didn't refer to themselves as "Western Civilization" did they ?