Values? What values?

[ddstory]

Since we're about political populism this month, let's talk about values a little bit. This term which is most often used in the plural, and is being so overused in recent times for all sorts of occasions and purposes: from political debates to the regular Sunday sermon, from TV talk-shows to newspaper headlines. Some prefer to put some adjectives

Comments

[dexeron]

When touting our modern day values, it's always interesting how we seem to forget that humankind has existed for a million years or more, even if we only have records of what we'd call "civilization" existing for several thousand. In all that time, are we really going to claim that no one ever dared to suggest that freedom, self-determination, freedom of thought or speech, of conscience, were good things? I mean, the practice of philosophical thought didn't just pop into existence fully-formed in 1650. We are so quick to forget the complex and advanced civilizations of the American continents that existed before the coming of Europeans, which we are only now realizing derived many of the same "western" values all on their own. (And to hear some of the arguments insisting that such advances must have been the work of heretofore undiscovered earlier European or Asian contacts, or even alien visitation, shows just how uncomfortable some folks are at the idea that non-white people might have been every bit as qualified to come up with the vaunted "WESTERN VALUES" that we hold up to be the highest achievement of civilization.)

I'd argue that even the representative democracy we hold so dear isn't really a Western Value, since it was practiced (in its own way) back during the Roman Republic (and while that region might nowadays be called part of "The West," so-called "western values" always seems to be a code-word for "Enlightenment Values," and the Romans were a bit before the Enlightenment, after all. ;)

[abomvubuso]

Well, what's being called Western civilisation did not suddenly pop out of a vacuum. There's a continuum that includes the ancient Greek and Roman societies, from which Western civilisation claims to originate.

You're right about other civilisations preceding the Western one and actually being the first to invent some of the models and principles that it now has the audacity to consider its own creation.

[ddstory]

Plus, it didn't come from Japan, Peru, or even Egypt.

[garote]

One of these days, scientists will invent the one-way time-viewing lens Arthur C Clarke wrote about, and scholars will scan back through time, and discover to their chagrin that democracy has been "invented" at least ten thousand separate times in ten thousand different places all over the globe...

[htpcl]

DailyQuoted.