Australian Politics Forum - Western Culture

thegreatdivide

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Re: Western Culture
Reply #120 - Dec 31^st, 2021 at 11:19am

Frank wrote on Dec 31^st, 2021 at 9:28am:

Western civilisation explained

Zemmour proves himself to be little better than a weak-minded ideologue: "Christians have to be prepared to go to war, to fight evil". What kind of "Christians"?

Biden and Putin, both Christians, threatening one-another in a dispute with global consequences.

And what happened to "equality" and common prosperity?

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Frank

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Re: Western Culture
Reply #121 - Jan 8^th, 2022 at 2:26pm

So many of the problems which bedevil our society are the consequence of us suddenly deciding, in about 1963, to take young people seriously. The most obvious is in the dumbing down of our culture, from the various bastard offspring of rock and roll to films almost entirely devoid of dialogue; a culture from which difficulty — and therefore depth and resonance — has been excised.

Then there is cancel culture, where we are enjoined to bow down before the legion of acute sensitivities demonstrated by the young, terrified that they might be triggered into a breakdown. The post-Marxist idiocies which infest so many of our institutions devolve directly from the youth-driven upheavals of 1968, which seemed then as now simply expressions of adolescent petulance.
...
Until teenagers were invented in about 1955, the UK had virtually no drug problem whatsoever, nor any of the crimes which now accompany drugs: then, it was a handful of middle-class addicts who got their morphine from the local doctor. The enormous growth in illegal drug use from the end of the 1950s was almost exclusively among young people (and had been initiated in jazz and later rock and roll clubs). Over the following decade it increased almost exponentially, at every single juncture being attendant on one or another youth subsect usually associated with music: cannabis, heroin and cocaine from jazz; amphetamines for the Mods; LSD for the hippies. Today, drug use costs us £20 billion per year, an estimated 20 per cent of people between 16 and 24 have taken drugs, and there are 330,000 opiate or crack addicts in England alone. The figure in 1959 was 454, for the whole of the UK.
...
Much as rock music was now being lionised by supposed intellectuals as an art form not merely worthy of comparison to classical music but actually superior to it — and the ludicrous doggerel lyrics subjected to the kind of critical examination which was once afforded to T.S. Eliot — so the appurtenances of this new ‘vibrant’ culture also came to be accepted by a clique which, in later years, would begin to dominate our institutions. Dangerous drugs were no longer the preserve of a few sad and lonely men, to be a little despised and pitied. They were not merely no longer taboo, but central to an ‘edgy’ and oppositional counter-culture which later became the culture.

Marx was wrong, as ever. The base of the drugs trade is not the economics: that’s only the superstructure. The base is a culture which suddenly became amenable to drugs.

Rod Liddle

Taking spoiled brats serioysly, No 4,978

Spoiled Rotten

Students at the United Nations International School launch an anonymous social media campaign denouncing their teachers as “racists” and “oppressors.”
Christopher F. Rufo
Last year, students at New York’s elite United Nations International School launched an anonymous social media campaign denouncing the school’s teachers and administrators for their “vast history of systemic racism,” “white liberal racist thinking,” and “direct, intentional, repeated racial trauma.” The students threatened to “cancel” their “oppressors” through social media shaming. Administrators immediately caved to their demands.

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Jasin Gold Member Offline Posts: 47572 Gender:	Re: Western Culture Reply #122 - Jan 8^th, 2022 at 2:32pm Western society culture - the Fall, the End of the World, Yesterday's people.
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Frank

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Re: Western Culture
Reply #123 - Jan 8^th, 2022 at 2:48pm

Keep in mind that UNIS is the school of choice for the world’s elites, teaching the children of diplomats and leading figures in international banking, finance, technology, and business at a cost of up to $44,000 a year. The school’s political climate was already thoroughly liberal and progressive. According to one source, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the school held “three days of counseling” and “a series of emergency assemblies where tearful students ranted about being deported.” When then-UN Ambassador Nikki Haley enrolled her children at the UN School, the source said, faculty and staff “roundly despised” her as a “Trump enabler.”

The dynamics at this bastion of elite progressivism reveal something important about the American political environment. The children of the most privileged people on the planet have donned the mantle of oppression to satisfy their moral narcissism and to exercise power over their elders. The adults, crippled with anxiety about any threat to their status, immediately bow to anonymous teenagers leading an online mob.

This is the same basic pattern now spreading through most major institutions in the country, from federal agencies to state boards of education to Fortune 500 companies. More than anything, what’s needed in America today is moral courage—precisely the virtue that has vanished from those who administer our institutions.
https://www.city-journal.org/black-at-unis-campaign

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thegreatdivide

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Re: Western Culture
Reply #124 - Jan 8^th, 2022 at 6:05pm

Frank wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 2:26pm:

So many of the problems which bedevil our society are the consequence of us suddenly deciding, in about 1963, to take young people seriously. The most obvious is in the dumbing down of our culture, from the various bastard offspring of rock and roll to films almost entirely devoid of dialogue; a culture from which difficulty — and therefore depth and resonance — has been excised.

Then there is cancel culture, where we are enjoined to bow down before the legion of acute sensitivities demonstrated by the young, terrified that they might be triggered into a breakdown. The post-Marxist idiocies which infest so many of our institutions devolve directly from the youth-driven upheavals of 1968, which seemed then as now simply expressions of adolescent petulance.
...
Until teenagers were invented in about 1955, the UK had virtually no drug problem whatsoever, nor any of the crimes which now accompany drugs: then, it was a handful of middle-class addicts who got their morphine from the local doctor. The enormous growth in illegal drug use from the end of the 1950s was almost exclusively among young people (and had been initiated in jazz and later rock and roll clubs). Over the following decade it increased almost exponentially, at every single juncture being attendant on one or another youth subsect usually associated with music: cannabis, heroin and cocaine from jazz; amphetamines for the Mods; LSD for the hippies. Today, drug use costs us £20 billion per year, an estimated 20 per cent of people between 16 and 24 have taken drugs, and there are 330,000 opiate or crack addicts in England alone. The figure in 1959 was 454, for the whole of the UK.
...
Much as rock music was now being lionised by supposed intellectuals as an art form not merely worthy of comparison to classical music but actually superior to it — and the ludicrous doggerel lyrics subjected to the kind of critical examination which was once afforded to T.S. Eliot — so the appurtenances of this new ‘vibrant’ culture also came to be accepted by a clique which, in later years, would begin to dominate our institutions. Dangerous drugs were no longer the preserve of a few sad and lonely men, to be a little despised and pitied. They were not merely no longer taboo, but central to an ‘edgy’ and oppositional counter-culture which later became the culture.

Marx was wrong, as ever. The base of the drugs trade is not the economics: that’s only the superstructure. The base is a culture which suddenly became amenable to drugs.
Rod Liddle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Liddle

Well, thanks at least for acquainting us with one of the more 'colorful' characters in British journalism, but it turns out he is mainly in it for the notoriety, rather than any examination of 'truth', eg, as one observer noted, a "wind-up merchant".
(And a particularly obnoxious human being in his private life, running off with a younger woman while married, and apparently abusing both of them...).

So he thinks the BBC spent too long covering Mandela's funeral (couldn't he just have changed the channel?) ...and later "suggested the trial of two men accused (and later convicted) of murdering Stephen Lawrence would not be fair".
[Lawrence, a young black man, had been randomly attacked at a bus-stop and murdered by a group of white youths. Why on earth would anyone be motivated to defend such vermin?]

So your choice of a "defender of Western Culture' leaves something to be desired, to say the least.

And his concluding paragraph sums up his general ignorance nicely (apart from his assertion that "Marx was wrong as always"):
"(Drugs) were not merely no longer taboo, but central to an ‘edgy’ and oppositional counter-culture which later became the culture."

..an oppositional counter-culture born out of opposition to the Vietnam war and its horrors("make love not war"), conducted by our "Western civilization" on a colonized (originally by France) Asian state, a reality completely ignored by Riddle, who has no understanding of WHY the culture "suddenly became amenable to drugs".

........

Quote:

Taking spoiled brats serioysly, No 4,978

[quote]

Spoiled Rotten

Students at the United Nations International School launch an anonymous social media campaign denouncing their teachers as “racists” and “oppressors.”
Christopher F. Rufo
Last year, students at New York’s elite United Nations International School launched an anonymous social media campaign denouncing the school’s teachers and administrators for their “vast history of systemic racism,” “white liberal racist thinking,” and “direct, intentional, repeated racial trauma.” The students threatened to “cancel” their “oppressors” through social media shaming. Administrators immediately caved to their demands.

"According to the student activists, to disagree with any part of their agenda is to admit to racism".

Yes, a bit like disagreeing with the illegal occupation of the West bank and being labelled an anti-Semite....

Race politics is certainly fraught, but we need to examine 'why is it so'....

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« Last Edit: Jan 8^th, 2022 at 6:13pm by thegreatdivide »

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Frank

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Re: Western Culture
Reply #125 - Jan 8^th, 2022 at 8:32pm

thegreatdivide wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 6:05pm:

Frank wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 2:26pm:

So many of the problems which bedevil our society are the consequence of us suddenly deciding, in about 1963, to take young people seriously. The most obvious is in the dumbing down of our culture, from the various bastard offspring of rock and roll to films almost entirely devoid of dialogue; a culture from which difficulty — and therefore depth and resonance — has been excised.

Then there is cancel culture, where we are enjoined to bow down before the legion of acute sensitivities demonstrated by the young, terrified that they might be triggered into a breakdown. The post-Marxist idiocies which infest so many of our institutions devolve directly from the youth-driven upheavals of 1968, which seemed then as now simply expressions of adolescent petulance.
...
Until teenagers were invented in about 1955, the UK had virtually no drug problem whatsoever, nor any of the crimes which now accompany drugs: then, it was a handful of middle-class addicts who got their morphine from the local doctor. The enormous growth in illegal drug use from the end of the 1950s was almost exclusively among young people (and had been initiated in jazz and later rock and roll clubs). Over the following decade it increased almost exponentially, at every single juncture being attendant on one or another youth subsect usually associated with music: cannabis, heroin and cocaine from jazz; amphetamines for the Mods; LSD for the hippies. Today, drug use costs us £20 billion per year, an estimated 20 per cent of people between 16 and 24 have taken drugs, and there are 330,000 opiate or crack addicts in England alone. The figure in 1959 was 454, for the whole of the UK.
...
Much as rock music was now being lionised by supposed intellectuals as an art form not merely worthy of comparison to classical music but actually superior to it — and the ludicrous doggerel lyrics subjected to the kind of critical examination which was once afforded to T.S. Eliot — so the appurtenances of this new ‘vibrant’ culture also came to be accepted by a clique which, in later years, would begin to dominate our institutions. Dangerous drugs were no longer the preserve of a few sad and lonely men, to be a little despised and pitied. They were not merely no longer taboo, but central to an ‘edgy’ and oppositional counter-culture which later became the culture.

Marx was wrong, as ever. The base of the drugs trade is not the economics: that’s only the superstructure. The base is a culture which suddenly became amenable to drugs.
Rod Liddle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Liddle

Well, thanks at least for acquainting us with one of the more 'colorful' characters in British journalism, but it turns out he is mainly in it for the notoriety, rather than any examination of 'truth', eg, as one observer noted, a "wind-up merchant".
(And a particularly obnoxious human being in his private life, running off with a younger woman while married, and apparently abusing both of them...).

So he thinks the BBC spent too long covering Mandela's funeral (couldn't he just have changed the channel?) ...and later "suggested the trial of two men accused (and later convicted) of murdering Stephen Lawrence would not be fair".
[Lawrence, a young black man, had been randomly attacked at a bus-stop and murdered by a group of white youths. Why on earth would anyone be motivated to defend such vermin?]

So your choice of a "defender of Western Culture' leaves something to be desired, to say the least.

And his concluding paragraph sums up his general ignorance nicely (apart from his assertion that "Marx was wrong as always"):
"(Drugs) were not merely no longer taboo, but central to an ‘edgy’ and oppositional counter-culture which later became the culture."

..an oppositional counter-culture born out of opposition to the Vietnam war and its horrors("make love not war"), conducted by our "Western civilization" on a colonized (originally by France) Asian state, a reality completely ignored by Riddle, who has no understanding of WHY the culture "suddenly became amenable to drugs".

........

Quote:

Taking spoiled brats serioysly, No 4,978

[quote]

Spoiled Rotten

Students at the United Nations International School launch an anonymous social media campaign denouncing their teachers as “racists” and “oppressors.”
Christopher F. Rufo
Last year, students at New York’s elite United Nations International School launched an anonymous social media campaign denouncing the school’s teachers and administrators for their “vast history of systemic racism,” “white liberal racist thinking,” and “direct, intentional, repeated racial trauma.” The students threatened to “cancel” their “oppressors” through social media shaming. Administrators immediately caved to their demands.

"According to the student activists, to disagree with any part of their agenda is to admit to racism".

Yes, a bit like disagreeing with the illegal occupation of the West bank and being labelled an anti-Semite....

Race politics is certainly fraught, but we need to examine 'why is it so'....

You are predictably stupid in your response - wiki, quick quotes, pc slogans - all to quickly get you to mindless 'im so clever, i can google' posturing.

Pathetic. Stupid.

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Frank

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Re: Western Culture
Reply #126 - Jan 8^th, 2022 at 8:35pm

thegreatdivide wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 6:05pm:

Frank wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 2:26pm:

So many of the problems which bedevil our society are the consequence of us suddenly deciding, in about 1963, to take young people seriously. The most obvious is in the dumbing down of our culture, from the various bastard offspring of rock and roll to films almost entirely devoid of dialogue; a culture from which difficulty — and therefore depth and resonance — has been excised.

Then there is cancel culture, where we are enjoined to bow down before the legion of acute sensitivities demonstrated by the young, terrified that they might be triggered into a breakdown. The post-Marxist idiocies which infest so many of our institutions devolve directly from the youth-driven upheavals of 1968, which seemed then as now simply expressions of adolescent petulance.
...
Until teenagers were invented in about 1955, the UK had virtually no drug problem whatsoever, nor any of the crimes which now accompany drugs: then, it was a handful of middle-class addicts who got their morphine from the local doctor. The enormous growth in illegal drug use from the end of the 1950s was almost exclusively among young people (and had been initiated in jazz and later rock and roll clubs). Over the following decade it increased almost exponentially, at every single juncture being attendant on one or another youth subsect usually associated with music: cannabis, heroin and cocaine from jazz; amphetamines for the Mods; LSD for the hippies. Today, drug use costs us £20 billion per year, an estimated 20 per cent of people between 16 and 24 have taken drugs, and there are 330,000 opiate or crack addicts in England alone. The figure in 1959 was 454, for the whole of the UK.
...
Much as rock music was now being lionised by supposed intellectuals as an art form not merely worthy of comparison to classical music but actually superior to it — and the ludicrous doggerel lyrics subjected to the kind of critical examination which was once afforded to T.S. Eliot — so the appurtenances of this new ‘vibrant’ culture also came to be accepted by a clique which, in later years, would begin to dominate our institutions. Dangerous drugs were no longer the preserve of a few sad and lonely men, to be a little despised and pitied. They were not merely no longer taboo, but central to an ‘edgy’ and oppositional counter-culture which later became the culture.

Marx was wrong, as ever. The base of the drugs trade is not the economics: that’s only the superstructure. The base is a culture which suddenly became amenable to drugs.
Rod Liddle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Liddle

Well, thanks at least for acquainting us with one of the more 'colorful' characters in British journalism, but it turns out he is mainly in it for the notoriety, rather than any examination of 'truth', eg, as one observer noted, a "wind-up merchant".
(And a particularly obnoxious human being in his private life, running off with a younger woman while married, and apparently abusing both of them...).

So he thinks the BBC spent too long covering Mandela's funeral (couldn't he just have changed the channel?) ...and later "suggested the trial of two men accused (and later convicted) of murdering Stephen Lawrence would not be fair".
[Lawrence, a young black man, had been randomly attacked at a bus-stop and murdered by a group of white youths. Why on earth would anyone be motivated to defend such vermin?]

So your choice of a "defender of Western Culture' leaves something to be desired, to say the least.

And his concluding paragraph sums up his general ignorance nicely (apart from his assertion that "Marx was wrong as always"):
"(Drugs) were not merely no longer taboo, but central to an ‘edgy’ and oppositional counter-culture which later became the culture."

..an oppositional counter-culture born out of opposition to the Vietnam war and its horrors("make love not war"), conducted by our "Western civilization" on a colonized (originally by France) Asian state, a reality completely ignored by Riddle, who has no understanding of WHY the culture "suddenly became amenable to drugs".

........

Quote:

Taking spoiled brats serioysly, No 4,978

[quote]

Spoiled Rotten

Students at the United Nations International School launch an anonymous social media campaign denouncing their teachers as “racists” and “oppressors.”
Christopher F. Rufo
Last year, students at New York’s elite United Nations International School launched an anonymous social media campaign denouncing the school’s teachers and administrators for their “vast history of systemic racism,” “white liberal racist thinking,” and “direct, intentional, repeated racial trauma.” The students threatened to “cancel” their “oppressors” through social media shaming. Administrators immediately caved to their demands.

"According to the student activists, to disagree with any part of their agenda is to admit to racism".

Yes, a bit like disagreeing with the illegal occupation of the West bank and being labelled an anti-Semite....

Race politics is certainly fraught, but we need to examine 'why is it so'....

Also pedictably - you want politically deranged bozos like you to be in charge of the world.

Pathetic, stupid.

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Jasin Gold Member Offline Posts: 47572 Gender:	Re: Western Culture Reply #127 - Jan 8^th, 2022 at 9:37pm Why did the Germans do to the Jews what they did? Was it because of something the Jews did 2000 years earlier? ...what goes around, comes around.
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Frank Gold Member Online Australian Politics Posts: 44994 Gender:	Re: Western Culture Reply #128 - Jan 8^th, 2022 at 9:53pm Jasin wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 9:37pm: Why did the Germans do to the Jews what they did? Was it because of something the Jews did 2000 years earlier? ...what goes around, comes around. What did they do 2000 years ago, under Roman rule? Made the Romans crucify a Jewish god, despite themselves?
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thegreatdivide Gold Member Offline Australian Politics<br /> Posts: 12582 Gender:	Re: Western Culture Reply #129 - Jan 8^th, 2022 at 10:16pm Frank wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 8:32pm: You are predictably stupid in your response - wiki, quick quotes, pc slogans - all to quickly get you to mindless 'im so clever' Here's the thing Frank: that's not debate.
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Frank

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Re: Western Culture
Reply #130 - Jan 8^th, 2022 at 10:34pm

thegreatdivide wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 10:16pm:

Frank wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 8:32pm:

You are predictably stupid in your response - wiki, quick quotes, pc slogans - all to quickly get you to mindless 'im so clever'

Here's the thing Frank: that's not debate.

My point exactly - wiki, quick quotes, pc slogans - all to quickly get you to mindless 'im so clever'.

Your are a lazy, Bbwianesque fool. You looked at the point Liddle made, you couldn't think of anything to counter his point - so you posted some wiki crap about Liddle, not what he said.

I cant take you seriously, pal, you are stupid the same way all the other googly, fb, social media illiterates are.

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Jasin

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Re: Western Culture
Reply #131 - Jan 9^th, 2022 at 4:12am

Frank wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 9:53pm:

Jasin wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 9:37pm:

Why did the Germans do to the Jews what they did?

Was it because of something the Jews did 2000 years earlier?

...what goes around, comes around.

What did they do 2000 years ago, under Roman rule? Made the Romans crucify a Jewish god, despite themselves?

...and Jesus said unto his Jewish people who had him crucified.
"Wait till me little brother Hitler gets yas - ya bastards!" Angry

Prophets and Messiahs - what goes around, comes around. Wink

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thegreatdivide

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Re: Western Culture
Reply #132 - Jan 10^th, 2022 at 1:50pm

Frank wrote on Jan 8^th, 2022 at 10:34pm:

My point exactly - wiki, quick quotes, pc slogans - all to quickly get you to mindless 'im so clever'.

Still no debate, let's read on....

Quote:

Your are a lazy, Bbwianesque fool. You looked at the point Liddle made, you couldn't think of anything to counter his point - so you posted some wiki crap about Liddle, not what he said.

Ah... now I understand: you were so enraged when I dared to criticize the character of your chosen defender of "Western civilization" that your brain lost any capacity for rational debate.

Actually I quite enjoyed reading the wiki article about Liddle, and decided to report my observations, as context for considering his argument.

Which was: the 60's oppositional counter-culture with its untutored unruly music led to acceptance of a drug culture even by so-called elites. Riddle said this was evidence Marx's linking of cultural decadence (eg drug-taking) with socioeconomic conditions, was wrong.

I pointed out the reasons which gave rise to the 60's oppositional counter-culture (long-hair, hippy "flower power", etc) in the first place were the horrors of the Vietnam war; the kids who were expected to fight in that war said "make love not war", while the Pentagon was defending killing Vietnamese babies, in the name of 'Western civilization'. Hence the escape to 'pot' and LSD by the kids who were expected to fight in that monstrous war.

Quote:

I cant take you seriously, pal, you are stupid the same way all the other googly, fb, social media illiterates are.

Well, here's your chance to show us how smart YOU and Liddle are, by showing how Marx and I are wrong in the above analysis of the '"oppositional counter-culture".

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« Last Edit: Jan 10^th, 2022 at 2:08pm by thegreatdivide »

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Frank

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Re: Western Culture
Reply #133 - Jan 17^th, 2022 at 9:07am

As American - and Western - universities reevaluate the role of Western classical education, Latin and Greek courses are proliferating in China, where students see the Classics as a wellspring of wisdom that remains relevant regardless of hemisphere.
https://supchina.com/2022/01/13/china-looks-to-the-western-classics/

We have gender, race, post-colonial studies proliferating.

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thegreatdivide

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Re: Western Culture
Reply #134 - Jan 17^th, 2022 at 1:00pm

Frank wrote on Jan 17^th, 2022 at 9:07am:

As American - and Western - universities reevaluate the role of Western classical education, Latin and Greek courses are proliferating in China, where students see the Classics as a wellspring of wisdom that remains relevant regardless of hemisphere.
https://supchina.com/2022/01/13/china-looks-to-the-western-classics/

Interesting article.

But note the final paragraph:

"One day, in 1996, Leeb sat down for tea at the house of his doctoral advisor, the renowned Confucian scholar Tāng Yījiè 汤一介. “You know,” Tang told him, “the views of people from the East and West can enlighten each other.” He described it using four Chinese characters: 互相发明 hùxiàng fāmíng — mutual illumination. Leeb never forgot it. “It’s stayed in my mind throughout the years,” he told me. “That is why I teach Latin.”

Quote:

We have gender, race, post-colonial studies proliferating.

Which is nothing to do with (lack of interest in) classical studies, but rather social problems arising from European colonialism since the 16th century, its impact on black cultures, and its blow-back in the present day.

[In my view, civilization moved more quickly westward from its source in Ur (in modern Iraq) than eastward across the Gobi desert to China. eg Homer in Greece was writing 300 years before Confucius in China...and the Parthenon (Athens) and Pantheon (Rome) have no engineering equivalent in China, from that period. So China has much to learn from a study of the classical (Western) world.

But China today is above all pragmatic in its approach to economic development. We live in interesting times, when we are likely to see China reclaim its position as the world's largest economy, in association with the miracle of common prosperity....].

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« Last Edit: Jan 17^th, 2022 at 1:19pm by thegreatdivide »

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