But Western culture is founded on Greek and Roman culture. It's difficult to argue anything else. Especially after the Renaissance, this heritage was found universally even in parts of Europe that never were part of the Roman Empire. And Christianity blended in perfectly to the Roman Empire, both in the West and also in the East, actually. The last remnant of the Roman Empire might well be the Pope, even if the ecumenical patriach of Constantinople is also still around. — ssu
Yes, did you notice that he was arguing about many people? — ssu
But Western culture is founded on Greek and Roman culture. It's difficult to argue anything else. Especially after the Renaissance, this heritage was found universally even in parts of Europe that never were part of the Roman Empire. And Christianity blended in perfectly to the Roman Empire, both in the West and also in the East, actually. The last remnant of the Roman Empire might well be the Pope, even if the ecumenical patriach of Constantinople is also still around. — ssu
Is this another episode of Yankees pretending they are European, when they are the most African nation outside of Africa and a few Caribbean islands, and the most Jewish nation outside of Israel?
I don't see anything European there, I only see another iteration of when Haitians killed all the French colonists and started wearing their clothes. — Lionino
I think the interesting question is just how Western actually Jewish culture is. Because the foundations of that culture are in the Orient, yet the diaspora having been so long in Europe, it's quite Western. And the Jewish have contributed a huge deal to what is now called Western culture. And also the real question is, just how universal was Roman culture in the Roman Empire? For example North Africa is quite different from Sub-Saharan Africa and there too the Roman empire has had it's influence. — ssu
Very uncool, I'd say. A disaster for the people in my view.How cool would have it been if Finland retained its Finno-Ugric religion.? — schopenhauer1
Much more reasons for having religious wars also! The first example that comes to my mind is how an 'interesting mosaic' Lebanon is with it's various religions and people. Beautiful country with not-so beautiful history.And if Christianity wasn't so good at converting tribal kings to the religion (thus converting their populations), there could have been a much more interesting mosaic of European and Western pagan traditions. — schopenhauer1
Christianity ultimately led to their downfall as their value system (the one which helped with their rise and success) was replaced with another. The Empire couldn't stomach Jesus. :rofl: — BitconnectCarlos
I take it to mean a thread of history running from the Greco-Romans (as ↪ssu pointed out), running through Christendom in the Middle Ages (by way of preservation of these writings and carrying on in the format in a diminished fashion), with a sort of "rebirth" in the Renaissance/Scientific Revolution — schopenhauer1
Very uncool, I'd say. A disaster for the people in my view.
We would have been attacked by crusaders well into the Renaissance, I guess. And afterwards we would have been second rate people. Good luck then trying to make those crucial trade links to Europe when you aren't a Christian, not even Orthodox. There are some Finno-Ugric people that still have still few pagans in Russia, like the Mari. Well, just like other Finno-Ugric people in Russia, they don't have much else than barely retaining their old language and customs and the 'Russification' of these people is obvious and in plain sight. — ssu
Much more reasons for having religious wars also! The first example that comes to my mind is how an 'interesting mosaic' Lebanon is with it's various religions and people. Beautiful country with not-so beautiful history.
Yet indeed an 'interesting mosaic'. — ssu
That honestly sounds pretty off to me. The Christian heritage in western culture is huge. The enlightenment was not a rediscovery of ancient wisdom, it's heavily influenced by Christian theology of the middle ages. It is also quite possibly influenced by experience with the American peoples, whose often specifically anti-authoritarian political arrangements may have given Europeans a few ideas.
The separation of church and state, specifically, likely has it's precursor in the christian concept of "religion" as something distinct from the rest of your tribal / family identity (which is not at all a given). And also, of course, goes back to the special role of the catholic church as a supranational organisation. — Echarmion
But, arguably, the fact that we even think about inequality as a problem is part of the Christian tradition. Greek and Roman pagans would not have considered inequality a problem in its own right. For them, people simply were not equal and that was just a normal fact of the world. — Echarmion
Imho, one of the biggest success stories of western culture is that it turned the Christian "equality in the eyes of Christ" into a secular principle of human rights. — Echarmion
This is now the widely held conception of substantive, universal, moral equality. It developed among the Stoics, who emphasized the natural equality of all rational beings, and in early New Testament Christianity, which envisioned that all humans were equal before God, although this principle was not always adhered to in the later history of the church. This important idea was also taken up both in the Talmud and in Islam, where it was grounded in both Greek and Hebraic elements. In the modern period, starting in the seventeenth century, the dominant idea was of natural equality in the tradition of natural law and social contract theory. Hobbes (1651) postulated that in their natural condition, individuals possess equal rights, because over time they have the same capacity to do each other harm. Locke (1690) argued that all human beings have the same natural right to both (self-)ownership and freedom. Rousseau (1755) declared social inequality to be the result of a decline from the natural equality that characterized our harmonious state of nature, a decline catalyzed by the human urge for perfection, property and possessions (Dahrendorf 1962). For Rousseau (1755, 1762), the resulting inequality and rule of violence can only be overcome by binding individual subjectivity to a common civil existence and popular sovereignty. In Kant’s moral philosophy (1785), the categorical imperative formulates the equality postulate of universal human worth. His transcendental and philosophical reflections on autonomy and self-legislation lead to a recognition of the same freedom for all rational beings as the sole principle of human rights (Kant 1797, p. 230). Such Enlightenment ideas stimulated the great modern social movements and revolutions, and were taken up in modern constitutions and declarations of human rights. During the French Revolution, equality, along with freedom and fraternity, became a basis of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789. — Equality
It's best not to paint too broad a picture as there was more pluralistic beliefs in ancient Greece...But yes, it was taken mainly as a matter of course that some deserved power based on birth or fate. — schopenhauer1
Don't most aspects of Western civilization predate Christianity in some near-Eastern traditions anyway? — AmadeusD
Generally speaking, it makes sense to be wary of groups that try to establish religious speech through government (as many conservatives seem to want), as well as groups that if their policies came to fruition would limit the rights of others (Nazis, religious nationalists, supremacy groups, you name it). So, what do you do when you are protecting their right to speech, but their right to speech is advocating for the abolishment of everyone else's freedoms of speech or otherwise? — schopenhauer1
Well, I can agree and disagree with this very conservative account of things. — schopenhauer1
I agree that organizations promoting free speech must be impartial, but we have to be careful what that means. In the US, the Supreme Court defines speech. They have defined things such as hate speech and "inciting speech", speech that causes a "clear and present danger". And those are there for a reason. — schopenhauer1
I agree that organizations promoting free speech must be impartial... — schopenhauer1
That being said, the article is right in the fact that this can happen on the left as well as on the right. — schopenhauer1
I don't find your overtly political reading of the article a propos. — Leontiskos
it is about the difference between rule of law and equality under the law; and finally it is about the trump card of fiduciary duties, which existed long before liberalism and communism. Andrews is basically saying, "The left is obviously content to snowplow liberalism out of the way, but we really should put our foot down when it comes to fiduciary duties." — Leontiskos
That being said, the article is right in the fact that this can happen on the left as well as on the right. The left can and does muzzle rightwing ideas, calling for their being cancelled, disbarred, fired, or pilloried. It silences the other side with a de facto point of view, much like, as Helen Andrews points out, the Communists used to do in the Eastern Bloc. This is certainly seen in academia where guest speakers are heckled and not allowed to speak. The administration often doesn't punish these students and some might promote it. They don't allow for decorum and respect for the rights of guests to make their case. They don't wait to the end for the question and answer session. They often make it so hard to get a guest speaker they have to cancel their even coming onto campus. There are "trigger warnings" and such for supposedly college-level students! If college campuses cannot be a place for full-throated diversity of opinions, then there is something certainly wrong. Surely, they can give roughly equal time to all sorts of points of views to expose students to the realm of ideas. It should also teach people to tolerate differences of opinion respectfully. — schopenhauer1
That whole online publication seems pretty conservative, so it makes sense it was a conservative article. — schopenhauer1
I actually don't think this at all contrary to what I eluded to here — schopenhauer1
My broader point was, what if the speech you are representing is trying to silence the other points of view in the name of X (religion, tradition, hate, etc.)? That is a tricky one to defend, no? — schopenhauer1
The book is protected by the first amendment. It is not legally tricky. — Leontiskos
True, but her point isn't so much that the left should be liberal, but rather that the ACLU should not infringe civil liberties. It's a tighter and less partisan argument. She is more or less conceding that the left need not be liberal. The whole conclusion is, "Even if the left wants to abandon liberalism, it should not abandon fiduciary duties." — Leontiskos
For example, I could write a book that argues for a change to the first amendment, restricting all ballerinas' rights to free speech. The book is protected by the first amendment. It is not legally tricky. — Leontiskos
I get it. I'm on board with that, but I think we have to look at it as a series what we mean by "abandon fiduciary duties".
If we mean
1) A specific lawyer is doing things like dropping their clients or misrepresenting them in court intentionally, then this is an obvious flagrant violation of fiduciary duties.
2) An organization chooses to no longer represent "free speech" on all sides that used to do that. Less egregious, but agreed that it is troublesome that it has shifted to only taking on leftist causes and not ANY speech, free or otherwise. But technically, if it is not part of the government, it can decide to change policy. I don't necessarily agree with it, but it is more about how the organization is deciding to take on cases at that point, which oddly enough, is their "right" to do. — schopenhauer1
Indeed, correct. I guess I mean problematic at what degree it reaches. At what point is it actually affecting other people's rights? I would say at the point that judges actually take those positions and agree with it and make it part of the common law in which case hopefully it could be appealed and overturned. — schopenhauer1
That may be legally tricky actually depending on the modes of enforcement your book called for. — AmadeusD
I'd say she means (1). The argument she makes pertains to expertise, entrusting yourself to an expert in a sphere in which you have extremely limited knowledge. She gives the examples of doctors, lawyers, etc. — Leontiskos
The ACLU once stood against this development. The national organization used to consider racial discrimination and “reverse discrimination” equally illegal. The New York Civil Liberties Union opposed racial quotas for seats on Mayor John Lindsay’s proposed police review board in 1966. Then, in 1971, the ACLU dropped its opposition to reverse discrimination. It endorsed left-wing theories of disparate impact, and its South Carolina affiliate even sued to have the state bar exam invalidated as unconstitutional because not enough black lawyers were passing it. Now, with its LGBTQ activism, the ACLU is on the front lines of pushing this type of law further. — Helen Andrews
Liberalism says that everything the state touches must be neutral in every respect. Professional standards say something more modest: that certain actors have a duty to be neutral when acting in positions of trust. The standard legal ethics textbook states, “A lawyer is a fiduciary, that is, a person to whom another person’s affairs are entrusted in circumstances that often make it difficult or undesirable for that other person to supervise closely the performance of the fiduciary. Assurances of the lawyer’s competence, diligence, and loyalty are therefore vital.”
Wokeness is hostile to this ethos. In 2011, when the Defense of Marriage Act was being challenged in the courts, pressure from gay activists forced the law firm King & Spalding to drop its defense of the law. The partner who wanted to continue defending DOMA, Paul Clement, was forced to leave the firm and provide this defense independently. “Representation should not be abandoned because the client’s legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters,” Clement said in his resignation statement. This would once have been an uncontroversial expression of one of the most basic principles of our adversarial system, that every client deserves representation.
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