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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29312 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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The foundations that made western civilization able to innovate into building a nice society to live in, one in which we can enjoy the fruits of science, come from having spent 1,000 years under a catholic theocracy. Before the Middle Ages learning was a hobby for rich idiots with no day job in their parents’ basements; by the end universities were a thing as a more or less organic development from cathedral schools intended to teach boys how to sing religious hymns(and in fact a Gregorian chant choir is still to this day called a schola). The use of the church calendar brought Europeans to more punctuality and allowed waged labor to take a bigger role in the economy by allowing it to be tracked and measured against a trusted third party. More or less free marriage to non relatives broke the power of clans and improved treatment for women(and societies with powerful clans are still like that)- a direct result of the dictates of the Catholic Church. I could go on and on, but non western societies that have built nice, livable communities for the majority of their population have done so by copying western habits, although usually not the original worldview.

Sure, and you can argue that alchemy deserves more credit for being the primitive precursor to chemistry, but I'm still not going to be terribly sympathetic when someone tells me I'm being close-minded about the existence of the philosopher's stone.

This is an excellent reply if you take the view of religion as a social technology. But it says nothing about the epistemological and empirical claims of said religions. Yes, Catholicism had a (debatable) pro-social effect on European, but the question remains: "Is it true?". The fact that this questions is even being posed means that the materialist point of view won: materialism is the new standard against which any other claim must be measured to. The reason that it won is, in my opinion, that it just works: since the Scientific Revolution we need less and less epicycles. What we can condemn and criticize is the modern institutional Science(TM): sociology, psychology, anything gender and race, certain parts of genetics, anything slightly political. But this is a failure that is not imputable to materialism or science as a method since these "soft sciences" (a.k.a. pseudo-sciences at worst, proto-sciences at best) are more akin to theology than science: they often work backwards from acceptable result (Revelations), their claims are often metaphysical - the dualist concepts of sex/gender are basically gnostic -, they have heresies and schisms (different psychotherapeutical schools) that generally result in the same outcomes: none. The hard sciences, the materialistic ones, somehow do not have the same problem, or better, they do not have it to the same degree, the metaphysical claims are generally done at the fringe: Loop Quantum Gravity, Big Bang, Quantum Determinism and so on, and these are the branches that more divert from materialism and empiricism into mathematical metaphysical amusements.

Yes, Catholicism had a (debatable) pro-social effect on European, but the question remains: "Is it true?". The fact that this questions is even being posed means that the materialist point of view won: materialism is the new standard against which any other claim must be measured to.

And the Catholic Church does have an answer to that question, and reasons for why, and those reasons and that position predate materialism. Hardly evidence that materialism won so much as evidence that the Catholic Church believes its own claims.

Thanks for articulating the point I was trying to make more coherently.

I’d even add that our entire system of logic and philosophy comes directly from the Church Fathers, notably Augustine and Aquinas. While I think the Catholics were flawed in their approach to understanding divinity, you can’t deny that the Catholic Church was an extremely crucial part of the foundation of the scientific worldview - if not THE most central piece the rest of the world missed.

Do you mean from Plato, Aristotle, and their successors?

I saw it put once as- the weird thing about the collapse of the Roman Empire isn’t that Rome collapsed and there was a dark age. The weird thing is how big a corpus of classical literature survived.

That survival is largely down to medieval monks.

That survival is largely down to medieval monks.

If you ignore the Eastern Roman Empire and the Arabs who cannibalized most of it.

China also preserved it's classical corpus despite similar collapses. India the same.

It isn't something unique.

Even the Parsis preserved most of the Avesta, despite their small number. The Samaritans number in the triple digits; and, still, preserved their version of the Torah.

That survival is largely down to medieval monks.

If you ignore the Eastern Roman Empire

...that would be one of the institutions having medieval monks who maintained the information, yes.

The had monks, yes, but they also had secular scholars who preserved these things. I assumed you were talking about monks like those in Irish monasteries and other monasteries throughout the Western Europe who preserved some of the ancient corpus despite being assaulted by pagan Germans.

That survival is largely down to medieval monks.

I always find this argument interesting because it is a just-so-story. Did medieval monks save classical literature because they were a scholastic order associated with Christianity or because they were a scholastic order and scholastic orders like to write things down and record literature. How much of the "Christian" element is important in their operation and why did Christianity in particular lead to the creation of these scholastic orders in a way that Greco-Roman paganism did not?

This led to a following thought. If these were Hindu brahmins/Buddhist monks would they too have recorded the literature, transcribing it so that it could be passed on? What about an Egyptian Pagan order dedicated to Thoth?

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