So god is a gay, dom, misogynist (edited to add), by that I mean the Abrahamic god…
First you claimed Athens had constitutional democracy. Now you claim that, when other cultures have similar institutions, and more democratic institutions, they aren’t enough.
What is your evidence here?
With theater, as with philosophy, we are talking about things which draw on common humanity. Knowing that these things were invented in one place is simply not evidence that these things were not also invented elsewhere. Hellenic society was literate, it was widespread, it was influential especially in the Hellenistic era, etc. so we have more evidence of developments in Hellenic society than in most other societies. Hellenic society and Roman society have both become parts of the founding myth for European supremacism so it is very important to watch out for the fact that they didn’t achieve all that is credited to them, that they were brutal slave societies, and that other societies also achieved much of what is credited to these.
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Don’t forget Lilith.
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That’s why I qualified it with the KJV, which is what most Christian fundamentalists use as definitive book. 
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Please offer a specific example of a pre-Athenian constitutional democracy.
Well, first there’s the plays of Aeschylus. These were original dramas written for a directed presentation in a theater to an audience. If you can offer examples of the same from some other culture, I’d be fascinated to learn. There were some interesting developments in China, though the pre-Greek ancient Chinese entertainments were more along the lines of circuses with acrobatics and fire tricks, and not the presentation of scripted dramas.
There’s also the evidence from the archaeological record, where we first see theaters created in ancient Greece, and disseminated to neighboring cultures. In the Hellenistic era, we see the first examples of Indian theater and drama appearing, drawing heavily from the Greek influence, while in ancient Rome the same influence appeared with Roman authors drawing heavily from the Greek sources. If you know of archaeological evidence from some other culture that backs up your claims of pre-Greek theater I’d be interested to learn about that too.
Polluting history with politics makes for very poor history, and doesn’t make a whit of difference in politics. The Greeks were an epicenter of much invention, esp. in philosophy, mathematics, theater, warfare, literary criticism, and various other domains. They certainly borrowed from their neighbors, just as their neighbors borrowed form them (as with all invention), but that doesn’t diminish what they did accomplish. Their ancient accomplishments don’t justify bigoted Eurocentric political views, but distorting history with a political agenda really only reinforces those who hold ignorant Eurocentric views.
Chattel slavery was a norm of the ancient world, it’s nothing to admire, but it’s peripheral to whether the Greeks managed to invent the things they did.
Please offer an example of an Athenian constitutional democracy. (And a Roman representative government, also.)
I thought the general consensus was that Athenian democracy, and its counterparts, grew out of the need to mobilize so many able-bodied men in war, which is why they could have democratic institutions/structures without democratic values.
I am not a specialist in earlier antiquity. Long before Athenian democracy, there are arguments about democratic ideas in the Harappan civilization, based on settlement layout, though I don’t know how to evaluate that. I know that democratic institutions/structures were widespread in classical and later antiquity, however, and I don’t think this can be attributed to Athenian influence. For example, there are arguments that some structures in the oppida of the Treveri were intended for assemblies and for voting. And there is evidence in that there was conflict, not only between classes, but between democratic and aristo/kleptocratic institutions in some early Germanic societies.
I don’t see how this evidence shows the absence of theater elsewhere. I don’t think theater depends on theaters either, or necessarily leads to the construction of theaters. I think storytelling is universal, and epic poetry, also associated with performative storytelling, is well attested from many nonliterate cultures, so the presence of some form of theater, where population density, etc. allow multi-person performances, should be the default assumption.
Which is my first knee-jerk reaction to the way our society glorifies Hellenic and Roman societies and parrots neo-Confederate lost-cause lies. But my second reaction is that politics draws so heavily on history, so, for example, our present concept of class struggle today depends on our knowledge of class struggle in antiquity, such as the conflict of the orders, that we can’t separate them. And misleading history enables destructive politics.
Chattel slavery was widespread but not the norm. I suspect the turnover from late Hallstatt to early La Tene in central Europe, which is associated with the rise of a warrior aristo/kleptocracy, may also be associated with an escalation of the slave trade to the Mediterranean. I think Byzantine sources describe something similar to indentured servitude among the Slavs. I get the impression that chattel slavery was associated with large-scale mining, plantation agriculture, etc.
Have a read here:
That’s a constitution for democratic governance.
Sounds very speculative, and certainly isn’t the academic consensus. The history of the origins of the Athenian constitution make it clear that mobilizing for war was not a central impetus. The Athenians would have been far more effective militarily without voters.
Given how little we really know about Harappan culture, we can guess all we like. We’d have as much basis for imagining that they were despotic slave holders. We have ruins, an undeciphered Indus script, and no literature from any neighboring states referring to them. There are some Indologists who idealize them, but they haven’t got anything to go on but guesses as to what form of governance they had. A constitution is a written document that establishes a form of governance under the rule of law. Ruins aren’t a constitution. Maybe we might find one assuming their script is deciphered, but we can’t assume that.
The purpose is speculative, and the structures post-date Athenian democracy. Again, no evidence of a constitution can be found in ruins, since it’s a document.
You’re mixing up the general human activities of story telling and drama with theater. I’ve gone out of my way to define theater, and distinguish it from those. Theater is a dramatic art form, not just storytelling and acting.
What I did offer was a concrete example, a point of evidence for the origin of theater. If you want to counter that, all you need to do is bring up a specific concrete example that shows theater existing prior to the Greeks, which you haven’t done yet.
Well, our government was carefully drawn from Greek and Roman models with various provisions to attempt to learn from their shortcomings and improve upon them by importing Enlightenment era ideals. The fact that we have a Constitution is a direct product of the Greek and Roman constitutions. While some might romanticize the Greco-Roman world, vilifying it is just a knee-jerk response. I studied Classics, in grad. school, and one thing that was conspicuously absent was romanticizing. “Romanticizing” was a particularly cutting insult to toss out. We’re better off seeing the history of any era for what it is without preconceptions, as there are many things to be learned that can inform one’s understanding of the present in many ways. The ancient world is quite fascinating for what it was, as are the Enlightenment, ancient India, ancient China, the ancient Near East, etc. I don’t really see any relation to the neo-Confederate lost-cause myth, other than that it’s more romanticism that isn’t interested in seeing things for what they are without preconceptions, and is more of politics inventing history.
While you could say chattel slavery wasn’t the norm, that’s because there were various forms of slavery in India, China, Africa, among the Pre-Columbian indigenous peoples of the Americas, and elsewhere, but they weren’t typically chattel slavery. If you look at the world of 500 BCE and look at any large scale agrarian society, slavery was the norm.
As awful as it is, chattel slavery tended to be less cruel than some forms, since slaves typically were paid and could buy their freedom (that’s not to say it wasn’t fundamentally immoral and unjust). There were some prominent Greeks and Romans who were freedmen (Claudius tended to hire freedmen as civil servants). The non-chattel slavery by the Spartan’s of Helots or Thessalian penestae was far worse (or China, or many other hideous examples), since there was no hope of manumission.
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We don’t seem to agree on the definitions of constitutional democracy, representative government, multiculturalism, theater, or philosophy here, so at best we are arguing past each other, and of course we aren’t going to find written constitutions from nonliterate societies.
It is speculative, yes, but it is based on cross-cultural evidence, and it is widely used. I thought it was still the academic consensus, but it does seem to be debated now, and Scheidel states the the evidence is equivocal: Princeton Classics (last in the list)
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You do use some unorthodox definitions, so we have talked past one another. The definitions I have been working by are fairly run of the mill (save multiculturalism, where I can’t say I really know what the words means, and representative government, which is mostly used in modern contexts of parliamentary and representative democracies).
If you take democracy to mean a form of government where citizens have input into governing choices through a system of voting, then Athens was democratic. If you read the Athenian Constitution, it’s really mind-boggling how far the level of citizen participation went and the kinds of things they’d vote on. I did add “constitutional” to that, since formally that’s what Athens is recognized as beginning. If you take it to mean something more extreme and limited like all citizens regardless of gender, and require citizenship to mean something special, then you could keep pushing things to the point where there have never been any democracies and probably never will be. You seem to want to use a very loose definition of democracy when trying to refer to potential democracies prior to Athens, but a very strict one when Athens itself is involved.
Philosophy per se is a bit nebulous, with a very different meaning to the ancients than to moderns. While you could consider to some Indian and Chinese thinkers as philosophers prior to the Greeks, it wasn’t until the point of what was either Greek influence on Indian thought, or a coincidental development not long after the Greeks that they approached the topic with the kind of rigor that the topic is usually defined by, and the Chinese had a very unique approach that never really gained systematic formalism until they adopted Buddhism very late.
I think your definition of theater just conflates theater with drama. I made it very clear what I was using as a working definition, and why that definition rejected some things, but we didn’t ever hash that out.
Athenian democracy developed in response to a set of fairly understood crises which weren’t military, and their military structure didn’t fundamentally change after adoption of democracy. Besides that, their power was primarily derived from their navy while obligatory participation by citizens was as hoplite ground troops (once Sparta developed a functioning navy, Athens was cooked). There are some digressions there since triremes carried some hoplites, but that’s heading for footnote material. So that’s why I disagreed that Athenian democracy grew out of the need to mobilize so many able-bodied men in war, and in what I’ve read on the formation of Athenian democracy, the focus has been on the set of political crises that were understood as causal, where the military hadn’t been something I’d seen as anything but a footnote.
High school? Far too late, this is at best a middle school level problem. (Actually, propositional logic is middle school math, most just don’t make the jump to applying it in everyday life).
@MarjaE: Depends what you mean by democracy. Rule by consensus was the norm in many societies, but as far as I know the idea of formal democratic equality among citizens - that you decide what policy to adopt by counting votes, one per person - was invented exactly once.
And we could add to that point that the only way to really reject pluralism is to close you borders and remove yourselves from the world. History doesn’t speak well of what happens to cultures that do this.
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I live in Canada. I’d like to think homosexuality here is a bit better than ‘tolerated’. I might currently reach for the word ‘accepted’, and hope that someday the concept reaches the point of simply being a delineation without associated bias.
Granted there are still jerks here with a bias, but as a society we’re working away from that.
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Commonly this is said about the Roman empire. In fact, of course, what accompanied the decline and fall of Rome was the rise of the Christian church. The Romans, prior to adoption of Christianity, had accommodated all the many religions in the empire, ensuring that all had space to worship, even in Rome itself. To ensure that no one felt left out, the city government provided several altars to unspecified gods, just in case. After Constantine, of course, Christianity was approved and all of the others were driven out. Consequently, many of the peoples of the empire concluded that they were better off being ruled by someone else. Christians can be a ugly bunch, even where modern secular governments do not permit their traditional responses to difference (torture and mass murder).
I was actually a little stunned to see that about 34% of Canadians are still opposed to gay marriage. If you live in downtown Toronto that sounds completely implausible, but Canada still has a fair bit of old-people-dying to do before we can be called accepting as a whole.
(To be fair, though, I bet the majority of those people who don’t like gay marriage also don’t want to have debates about it or change anything about it at this point - many probably would rather just leave things as they are and drop it. Canadians are like that.)
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Harper first.
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He’s still young-ish to be dropping dead. It’s more the people who are voting for him. Check page 8.
To borrow from another now-old man: “Your old road is rapidly* aging. Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand.”
* Not rapidly enough
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For the times, they are a-gentrifying.
These are the same sorts of folks who think that an all-loving god inflicts natural disasters that kill or dispossess thousands because somebody, somewhere is doing something that he doesn’t approve of… but for some reason they never decide it has anything to do with murder, rape or the like. Nope, for some reason he inflicts arbitrary mass-suffering only for consensual sexual activity.
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There, by the grace of God, goes some other sap.
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