The modernism of the Renaissance, and especially of the Reformation and its
successors, was also increasingly euro-chauvinist (note the conflict with
Islam), and in the versions of history that we inherit, written by German,
French, and British scholars of the 19th century for the most part, there
is a lot of, to me, not very credible propaganda about how the classical
Greeks and Romans were so different from the decadent Asiatics (read
Catholics and Moslems, I think, and heathens generally) but so much more
like decent European gentlemen. Note also of course the critical role of
European imperialism toward these parts of the world in this period. These
histories and interpretations exaggerate correspondingly those classical
texts and authors which were biggest on the 'Hellenes, good; Asiatics, bad'
party line. Even more recent liberals have kept these
imperialism-legitimating views because the primary justification for global
Western paternalism today is still that we are the inheritors of Athenian
democracy, while all those beknighted and child-like Iraqis, Iranians,
Egyptians, Afghans, Chinese, etc. have never known anything but the
totalitarianism of Asiatic cultures.
Someday historians are going to have a really good laugh about this
orthodoxy, when they no longer care about our political issues. Most
Hellenes regarded Athenian democracy as little short of madness (and as a
defining instance of hybris), while most of what went on in most of the
history of Hellenic and Roman hegemony was as 'morally decadent, god-king
worshipping, slave-economy based, and socially hierarchical' (to use the
customary pejoratives toward Asiatics) as anything going on in Asia. (I
don't want to particularly insult Jews, but the tug-of-war over whether
both ancient and modern Israel count as European or Asiatic, is almost a
microcosm of the madness of historical scholarship cut loose from all its
own standards of rational assessment in order to serve the critical and
shifting ideological needs of peoples in difficult political positions.)
If you want to break out of the historical orthodoxy we're all taught in
school, try on for size a few of the following heresies:
= the long Hellenistic period (Alexander to Caesar, about 300 years) is
more significant historically than the 'classical' micro-moment
of Athens (about 100 years, in one small town); Hellenic culture was
mediated by the Hellenistic period insofar as its subsequent influence; we
inherit Hellenistic, not Athenian culture, which was atypical even in its
own day.
= the long Byzantine period (more than a thousand years) is far more
significant historically, in general and for European cultural development,
than the 'classical' moment of Rome (about 200 years)
= Greek and Roman culture throughout most of their history and in most of
their territory were far more akin to Asiatic/Middle-eastern cultures of
the time than to any European culture from the Renaissance onwards
= Jewish culture was first Asiatic, much later Hellenistic-Asiatic, and
only very recently developed a minority off-shoot which was europeanized,
and came to dominate world Jewish culture as a sideshow of european
imperialism; except for its most europeanized late features, Judaism has
more in common culturally with Islam than it does with post-Reformation
Christianity.
I am not saying all these propositions are 'true', only that they would
reflect extremely reasonable claims, were it not for the identifiable
political and ideological interests of most modern european historiography.
I personally think it nothing more than a grand cultural myth that two
periods of less than a century each (Periclean Athens, Republican-Augustan
Rome) should be taken as foundational for European (including dominant
American) culture, ignoring most of what happened to most of the educated
(i.e. record-leaving) people of the day for centuries in between and
subsequently. What did you learn in school, or college, what courses does
your university offer undergraduates about the centuries between Alexander
and Caesar? the millenium between the arrival of Christianity in
Constantinople and the arrival of Islam in Byzantium? why is all this
excluded from canonical 'Western' history? Are we really supposed to
believe that until the Italian Renaissance nobody in 'western' Europe had
any cultural contact with their own/our own predominant cultural centers
for the previous 2000 years a short boat ride away? and that modern
European culture arises miraculously from the arrival of a copy of
Aristotle in Florence in 1400? (i.e. just about the time the Moslems took
Byzantium)
I have a lot of respect for Afrocentrists who feel that eurocentric views
of history don't have much to say to them because they are so incredibly
and extremely biased by the Anglo-Franco-German-Italian perspective, not
just geographically, but religiously, culturally, politically,
ideologically. My own ancestry, though I have relatively little inheritance
of these cultures personally, passes through diaspora Jewry and back
presumably to Asiatic Israel by semitic endogamy, and also through
Scandinavian cultures (which traded with Byzantium down the rivers of
Russia, a somewhat longer boatride away). The roots of my cultural
heritage, the roots of 'the West', are Asiatic predominantly until the
recent modern period (say from the Reformation), and then only for
Western-most parts of Europe. Since I may have insulted the faiths of
others already, I may as well say that this heretical view also seems to
suggest that the Catholic church may well have been a more culturally
'Asiatic' institution than the standard accounts can allow, and this
hypothesis would seem to explain quite a bit that has otherwise always
rather mystified me. (I should note that I am neither Jewish nor Protestant
by faith, have always had mildly positive if mixed feelings towards
Catholicism as a culture, and have never been able to even imagine how
anti-Catholic prejudice in the US justifies itself, though I have heard
plenty of it.)
History may not be 'bunk', but historiography tends to show that the real
value of historians' writing in any period is not what it tells us about
the past, but what it tells us about the society for which they wrote. I
realize this is an inescapable paradox, but at least it's a critically
self-reflexive one.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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