The concept of the "megasaeculum", which led me to my series of "mega awakenings", has created the idea that what we think of as the "the West" today did NOT have its origins in Classical Greece and Rome. Rather, I see the West as beginning in tenth century France.

One of the startling features of the West is how the people living at the very edges of a rugged peninsula stuck at the ass-end of Eurasia, formed a collective of powerful polities that eventually conquered virtually the entire world. Clearly something is very different about the West.

There seems to be nothing special about Greece or Rome. The classically-derived empires: the Hellenistic and Roman/Byzantine empires are not different in size, power, technological prowess or artistic achievement that the contemporaneous Persian/Parthian, Arab, and Chinese empires. Indeed I would suggest that the civilization that began with classical Greece lived on through the Byzantine empire and the Orthodox faith and may be represented today by Russia. If so, I would point out that the orthodox world (mostly the Russian empire) did not develop along the lines of Western Europe, but rather more like a traditional empire such as the contemporaneous Ottomans.

The beginning of the West was in a warlord society living on the shards of one of the great empires of antiquity. The strongest element of the West, its Anglo spur, began with in a re-paganized barbarian society, that was Christianized in the 7th century, and in the 9th century was a hodgepodge of Germanic, Brythonic, and Scandinavian elements, with essentially nothing left of Rome at all. There then received a dash of the Latin element from the Norman-French invaders, but preserved their Germanic language and a good deal of their political traditions such as English common law and the idea of a council (Witan) that offered policy advice to the King as a good idea, which was transmitted to the new Norman elite, eventually manifesting as the Magna Carta and subsequent development of Parliament.

The West did infuse their culture with Latin elements. For example, during the papal revolution of the 11th century, systems of law were created in various policies in Western Europe using Roman law, the common law, and the Christian scriptures as models. But this synthesis was done by modern people for modern people, the Roman law was not something they had in inherited. Contrast this with the creation of the Arab state. The Arabs conquered an enormous territory, including the entire Persian empire. They quickly moved their capital east, into Persian territory and employed the pre-existing Persian institutions to govern their empire. They did not impose their own Arab systems of administration because they did not have any. They did not develop a mixed system by combining elements from a long-defunct Persian empire along with their own more recently developed ideas because they inherited a fully-functioning empire intact. The Persian empire had existed right up to the point when it became part of the Arabian Empire. So it was like a hostile takeover, the top layer of Persian management were displaced by Arabs, but the faceless bureaucrats who actually ran the empire remained to do their jobs for the new boss.

And you can see that the Persians, simply replaced the Parthians, and they the Selucids, and they the Persians, and they the Medes, and they the Assyrians, who invented government. There has been a more or less continuous polity in the Middle East for more than 2500 years. Same thing for the Greek world. Greece became Macedon, became Rome, then Byzantine, and finally Turkish.

But the West was different. The barbarians conquered the Western Roman empire, but were not able to keep it going, it just fell apart. Initially it looked like they would keep it going. There was an Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy, a Visigothic Kingdom in Spain, and a Frankish Kingdom in France. Britain had gone full-barbarian. But then the Franks split up into four petty squabbling kingdoms and a lot of what were still Roman fell into disuse. Italy was used a football by a series of invaders, and ended up a bunch of small polities. Spain was mostly conquered by Arabs and so ceased to be Western for a long time. So the Western Roman empire became a mess, with the highest functioning portions being those under Arab management.

The Franks managed to get it together briefly to create a strong polity under Charles the Great, which immediately started to collapse after his death. In the East the imperium remained, but in the West it completely fell apart, and a warlord society similar to that in Britain, now existed in France. Rome was dead. What developed afterward was a new thing, the modern West.

The "western world" as I see it developed out of its Greek and Roman and earlier predecessors, starting with the split between the two halves of the empire in 395 AD, I think it was. The age of empires, as you say, consisted of various empires that were not all that different. There were some differences, which were passed on and further developed by their successors. The Roman Empire included much of what is now the Middle East, Turkey, and the southern parts of Eastern Europe. So we can consider the successor states of the Eastern Empire such as Byzantium and Russia as "western" in a larger sense, but there is a marked difference between them and the western half's successor states such as France and its relatives like the UK.

The split developed quickly, and the Christian Church split apart as well into Catholic and Orthodox, a split finalized in the 11th century. In the 20th century this split became the "iron curtain." Some healing of the split has occurred since it fell in 1989, and more healing may occur in the future as the eastern half catches up more with the western half democratically and economically in a globalizing culture. But the results are clearly seen in the life expectancy differences today between the western and eastern successor states of the two halves of Rome.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

The concept of the "megasaeculum", which led me to my series of "mega awakenings", has created the idea that what we think of as the "the West" today did NOT have its origins in Classical Greece and Rome. Rather, I see the West as beginning in tenth century France.

One of the startling features of the West is how the people living at the very edges of a rugged peninsula stuck at the ass-end of Eurasia, formed a collective of powerful polities that eventually conquered virtually the entire world. Clearly something is very different about the West.

There seems to be nothing special about Greece or Rome. The classically-derived empires: the Hellenistic and Roman/Byzantine empires are not different in size, power, technological prowess or artistic achievement that the contemporaneous Persian/Parthian, Arab, and Chinese empires. Indeed I would suggest that the civilization that began with classical Greece lived on through the Byzantine empire and the Orthodox faith and may be represented today by Russia. If so, I would point out that the orthodox world (mostly the Russian empire) did not develop along the lines of Western Europe, but rather more like a traditional empire such as the contemporaneous Ottomans.

The beginning of the West was in a warlord society living on the shards of one of the great empires of antiquity. The strongest element of the West, its Anglo spur, began with in a re-paganized barbarian society, that was Christianized in the 7th century, and in the 9th century was a hodgepodge of Germanic, Brythonic, and Scandinavian elements, with essentially nothing left of Rome at all. There then received a dash of the Latin element from the Norman-French invaders, but preserved their Germanic language and a good deal of their political traditions such as English common law and the idea of a council (Witan) that offered policy advice to the King as a good idea, which was transmitted to the new Norman elite, eventually manifesting as the Magna Carta and subsequent development of Parliament.

The West did infuse their culture with Latin elements. For example, during the papal revolution of the 11th century, systems of law were created in various policies in Western Europe using Roman law, the common law, and the Christian scriptures as models. But this synthesis was done by modern people for modern people, the Roman law was not something they had in inherited. Contrast this with the creation of the Arab state. The Arabs conquered an enormous territory, including the entire Persian empire. They quickly moved their capital east, into Persian territory and employed the pre-existing Persian institutions to govern their empire. They did not impose their own Arab systems of administration because they did not have any. They did not develop a mixed system by combining elements from a long-defunct Persian empire along with their own more recently developed ideas because they inherited a fully-functioning empire intact. The Persian empire had existed right up to the point when it became part of the Arabian Empire. So it was like a hostile takeover, the top layer of Persian management were displaced by Arabs, but the faceless bureaucrats who actually ran the empire remained to do their jobs for the new boss.

And you can see that the Persians, simply replaced the Parthians, and they the Selucids, and they the Persians, and they the Medes, and they the Assyrians, who invented government. There has been a more or less continuous polity in the Middle East for more than 2500 years. Same thing for the Greek world. Greece became Macedon, became Rome, then Byzantine, and finally Turkish.

But the West was different. The barbarians conquered the Western Roman empire, but were not able to keep it going, it just fell apart. Initially it looked like they would keep it going. There was an Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy, a Visigothic Kingdom in Spain, and a Frankish Kingdom in France. Britain had gone full-barbarian. But then the Franks split up into four petty squabbling kingdoms and a lot of what were still Roman fell into disuse. Italy was used a football by a series of invaders, and ended up a bunch of small polities. Spain was mostly conquered by Arabs and so ceased to be Western for a long time. So the Western Roman empire became a mess, with the highest functioning portions being those under Arab management.

The Franks managed to get it together briefly to create a strong polity under Charles the Great, which immediately started to collapse after his death. In the East the imperium remained, but in the West it completely fell apart, and a warlord society similar to that in Britain, now existed in France. Rome was dead. What developed afterward was a new thing, the modern West.

Celtic and to some extent Germanic peoples were good adopters of foreign ideas, notions, idioms, etc they found useful. After Rome started to degrade, the various tribes who'd been previously conquered kept what they thought was the best of old Rome (letters, certain Latin words, various cultural features, etc) whilst reasserting their own characteristics. I do concur that all of this reached an inflection point after the 9th or 10th century leading to what we now consider to be "Western Civilization." Interesting thing is there now seems to be an increasing schism between the Anglo-Celtic-Norman-Saxon camp and the what I'd term the Franco-German camp (mostly coming from this latter camp, lots of bitching about "Anglo Saxon" things). That could end up being a fascinating development.

Mikebert,

I enjoy reading your summaries. This is the sort of thing I find valuable on this site. Thanks.

Mike, I overall agree with this, and with XYMOX that it's changing.

Mikebert

Yeah, this pretty much echoes Spengler and Toynbee, vis the separation between Classical and Western civilization.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Mikebert

Yeah, this pretty much echoes Spengler and Toynbee, vis the separation between Classical and Western civilization.

That's good to know, suggests I am not off the deep end.

Mike -

I get the feeling that you're conflating the spread of the Romance
languages with the spread of Western civilization.

If you really want to talk about civilization rather than languages,
then you have to start with Athens during the Golden Age of Greece.
Ancient Greece developed principles of governance, philosophy,
history, art and literature that were passed on to Rome and other
countries, and became the building blocks of Western Civilization.

John

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Mike -

I get the feeling that you're conflating the spread of the Romance
languages with the spread of Western civilization.

If you really want to talk about civilization rather than languages,
then you have to start with Athens during the Golden Age of Greece.
Ancient Greece developed principles of governance, philosophy,
history, art and literature that were passed on to Rome and other
countries, and became the building blocks of Western Civilization.

John

Lots of early societies provide building blocks. Christianity is a key part of Western Civilization and that was Semitic in origin. What I am suggesting is that unlike elsewhere, in Europe the Dark Ages provided a "civilizational reset". Greco-Roman civilization in the European portion of the Western Roman Empire collapsed, whereas it continued on in the Eastern Empire.And where it did continue it developed along similar lines to the other great Empires of antiquity. Western historians tacitly acknowledge this with their division of history into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern era. This makes sense for Europe, but not elsewhere. The Arabian, Byzantine and Chinese empires of "medieval" times were not markedly different in terms of size, relative power, cultural achievements from the Persian, Roman and Chinese empires of antiquity. All of these polities were able to exercise sovereignty through a centralized government.

Compare to Western Europe. That had once had government, advanced culture and a centralized Roman state that exercised sovereignty over its territory and they lost all that. Roman England had a population of about 4 million, while under the Anglo-Saxon population was about 1.5 million. Why? Because it was not safe to settle lands far from fortifications because of rampant internal violence. The Romans did not have this violence because they were civilized, that is, their culture possessed memes for normative pacification that kept ambitious individuals from acting like ISIS. The Europeans invented a form of normative pacification in the 11th century, which was exported to Britain with the Norman invasion, after which population grew back to Roman levels. An in the 13th century the Western Europeans re-established government. So by 1300, Europe had caught up with the rest of the civilized world in terms of their organization. They were still culturally and technologically backward, but this would change too.

Because the West basically developed an organizational system all over again, it was a different system. And that system allowed Europe to develop in ways that the other policies, still using the old ways did not. For example the ancient great powers typically carved out large territorial empires. In this way the later Arabian and Ottoman empires were not greatly different from the Persian and Roman empires that that preceded them. Rome had ruled North Africa, Eqypt, the Levant, Turkey and the Balkans simultaneously for centuries. The Byzantines, Arabians and Ottomans were able to duplicate the Roman results.
Rome also ruled all of England, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy simultaneously for centuries. The Western Europeans who followed them did not do this.

It's also the premise of Samuel P. Huntington's civilization classification. Published in the 90's to much criticism, The Clash of Civilizations is one book that largely stands vindicated by events.

Yes, I think there is a lot of value in this early medieval "reset" idea. Due to the relative disintegration of the classical world, the west could eventually rise to prominence because it had to devise something essentially novel. It's not an entirely new idea either. In fact, I believe you can find it underlying much of Marxist history writing from the 20th century when it comes to explaining the shift in modes of production. For example, it also identifies a difference between Feudalism model West and Feudalism model East (Byzanthine/Orthodox/Russian Empire where a civilization genealogy was not as rudely cut off).

A sweeping way to push a similar notion would be to say that IQ comes from the north, culture from the south, and when they clash something magical happens.

Originally Posted by Tussilago

It's also the premise of Samuel P. Huntington's civilization classification. Published in the 90's to much criticism, The Clash of Civilizations is one book that largely stands vindicated by events.

Yes, I think there is a lot of value in this early medieval "reset" idea. Due to the relative disintegration of the classical world, the west could eventually rise to prominence because it had to devise something essentially novel. It's not an entirely new idea either. In fact, I believe you can find it underlying much of Marxist history writing from the 20th century when it comes to explaining the shift in modes of production. For example, it also identifies a difference between Feudalism model West and Feudalism model East (Byzanthine/Orthodox/Russian Empire where a civilization genealogy was not as rudely cut off).

A sweeping way to push a similar notion would be to say that IQ comes from the north, culture from the south, and when they clash something magical happens.

I think Huntingdon has either too many or too few civilizations. His grouping of all of sub-Saharan polities into one civilization suggests he is using a broad brush, but then he splits a "Latin" category off from Western civilization (that interestingly does not include the "Latin" countries of Europe) and splits off a Japanese category from the Sinic civilization. I would suggest that the North:South split seen in the Americas is mirrored by one in Europe, with a Catholic, less economically developed South and Protestant, more developed North. Since the Hindu and Islamic civilizations are done on the basis of religion, it makes sense that the entire region colonized by Catholicism and its Protestant offshoots would fall into one civilization.

One area I think we see this is why US postwar policy in Asia has been so unsuccessful. American meddling in Asia was initially based on successfully pre-war meddling in Latin America. America was able to depose a Socialist in Chile, and saddle the nation with a brutal dictator and maintain on reasonable good terms with the country 40+ years later. When America did the same in Iran 20 years earlier, the result was the opposite. After they got rid of our guy 35 years ago, they have been an enemy ever since. Americas invasion of Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein had way more blowback than America's invasion of Panama to get rid of Manuel Noriega. America was able to suppress a Communist insurgency in the Philippines (a Catholic nation with 350 years of experience as a Western colony) but utter failed in Vietnam (a nation that has been a Western colony for less than 70 years, and was still mostly Buddhist).

Originally Posted by Mikebert

I think Huntingdon has either too many or too few civilizations. His grouping of all of sub-Saharan polities into one civilization suggests he is using a broad brush, but then he splits a "Latin" category off from Western civilization (that interestingly does not include the "Latin" countries of Europe) and splits off a Japanese category from the Sinic civilization. I would suggest that the North:South split seen in the Americas is mirrored by one in Europe, with a Catholic, less economically developed South and Protestant, more developed North. Since the Hindu and Islamic civilizations are done on the basis of religion, it makes sense that the entire region colonized by Catholicism and its Protestant offshoots would fall into one civilization.

One area I think we see this is why US postwar policy in Asia has been so unsuccessful. American meddling in Asia was initially based on successfully pre-war meddling in Latin America. America was able to depose a Socialist in Chile, and saddle the nation with a brutal dictator and maintain on reasonable good terms with the country 40+ years later. When America did the same in Iran 20 years earlier, the result was the opposite. After they got rid of our guy 35 years ago, they have been an enemy ever since. Americas invasion of Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein had way more blowback than America's invasion of Panama to get rid of Manuel Noriega. America was able to suppress a Communist insurgency in the Philippines (a Catholic nation with 350 years of experience as a Western colony) but utter failed in Vietnam (a nation that has been a Western colony for less than 70 years, and was still mostly Hindu).

There are almost no Hindus in Vietnam. Vietnam is mainly Buddhist with a substantial Catholic minority after that a sprinkling of others. Since Communism, religion has declined overall.

I meant Buddhist. Sorry.