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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Whiteness really isn’t vague at all. Europeans had a shared culture that was deeper and longer than any other race category. Look at the bio of some composers or monks, for instance, and you’ll find Poles copying British composers, Italian composers in Spanish courts, German composers in Hungarian courts, Irish monks in Italy, French leaders reading Scottish writers influenced by old Greek epics, and so on. This stretches at least 400 years. We don’t even have to bring up religion.

This seems an absurd overstatement on its face to me, and suggests an abject ignorance of world history. India and China both have cultural works/institutions (and in the case of China, actual records) that stretch farther than the Mycenaean collapse, let alone Archaic and Classical Greece, and China is well known to have used the Four Books and Five Classics (texts written in centuries BC) right up to the collapse of imperial China, as well as for having an uncommonly stable cultural and civilizational lineage in general.

India was not so unified for a single composer to be well known across the region, with compositions proliferated from one end to the other. Without monotheism, you did not have one monk travel from one end to the other and obtaining immediate employ in the Hindu culture. So no, in India there is no equivalent for a Brit and a German both listening to the same composer, or for a Spanish monk immediately working in hierarchy of the Vatican. The polytheistic Indian subcontinent may be the same religion in category, but the differences in regional worship means it is much more varied than Europe under Catholicism or even with the split between Catholics and Protestants. An Indian on one end of the subcontinent and one on the other would not be following the same liturgical calendar, listening to the same compositions, taking about the same novels and philosophers, or anything like that.

Even granting that (which I am loath to do but I think others can pick on it better than I), you have rather forgotten the other example I gave.

Edit: and that isn’t even noting that this is moving the goalposts amazingly far from the original statement…

Europeans had a shared culture that was deeper and longer than any other race category.

… or that the arbitrary criteria of “composers and books” doesn’t even necessarily get your preferred racial category up there.

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