Wow, talking about changing the goal posts! Let me quote you again:
“It’s always nicer to think of democracy and political rhetoric rather than violence and a militaristic state, but certainly the West today is more the heir of the latter than the former.”
Your comment was about the West “today”. Yet above you talk about Athenian democracy - what does that have to do with your statement about Western democracy. Then you talk about the history of the West from Alexander through the Enlightenment, which has nothing to do with the state of Western liberal democracy today except through what has inherited.
You want to talk about the history of the West, good and bad, great, but that’s not what your initial statement said - it talked about “today”, not the entire history of the West.
I don’t think that that particular period was especially liberal or democratic, but after a long study of history at this point the contribution of Western European traditions was simply politics as a thing.
The main handicap of Islam was that it was a political religion without bothering or even being interested in how its ideal religion should be implemented politically. It was a social construct that simply assumed it was overlain with existing political systems. Ibn Khaldun looks quite carefully at how Muslim empires rise and fall - it never occurs to him however that government isn’t anything but an extension and expansion of tribal affiliation. Most nations and cultures developed concepts like “justice” but never grappled with the political ways in which justice should be implemented. It was always just something those in charge - however they got there - should do.
So I think western contributions to modern societies was decisive but it wasn’t necessarily in being always right but simply in grappling with the concept of politics and polities at all.
They weren’t all from Athens but I don’t think many (any?) from Sparta have survived, so there’s perhaps some automatic “othering” and reliance on stereotype in ancient descriptions of them that have come down to us.
Well, I wasn’t even aware there were any classical Greek historians apart from Herodotus and Thucydides. But Athens’s literary legacy is also present in other genres, e.g. philosophy and drama. My point was not to say “every writer was Athenian” as much as to say “Spartans didn’t write anything (?) that survived, so if they have come down to us misrepresented, it’s hardly a surprise.”
I started over with a new game with new CPU and it feels like a er whole new game. So much more enjoyable at steady 50-60fps instead of 30. Same video card.
I have a question about Mastery Levels that I have not been able to find the answer to. Do you have to have the specific engraving on a weapon/armor for the Mastery level to have an effect. For example, I don’t have an engraving on weapons/armor that give me health back on each hit. However, can I put points into that Mastery level to give me that effect even without the engraving on weapons/armor?
EDIT - went back and checked myself after saving the game, then choosing health restoration upon hit. It works even though I don’t have that particular engraving.
My point is that I think that, today, we are more the heirs to Athens in its degeneracy and failure than to anything from its golden age, I suppose. On the other hand, we certainly seem to have embraced some of the seedier sides of Spartan practice. Again, though, YMMV.
This is far more appealing and supportable than most generalizations, for sure. We still have to grapple with how we define “the West,” of course, given that what we call “the West” in ancient times became a backwater of undesirables and inferiors according to the 19th century colonialists and imperialists, who somehow managed to transform “the West” from a broad category to a very narrow category centered on the upper classes in a small segment of northwestern European societies.
Sidebar: the way to ‘read’ Atlantis in ‘real life’ was: Plato wanted to critique Athens, a naval power, but didn’t want to get ostracized and/or murdered. So he thinly disguised Athenian society as a tale of another, fictional naval power.
True. What I’m questioning is one, how we define “Western,” and two, the way we often use liberalism in a very vague way to position most every positive attribute of political society in the world as the sole property of that very general yet all too specific group of people.
As counter example we are far beyond Athens in democracy and representative government for example - all citizen men/women can vote over the age of 18 (unlike Athens where women could not vote), no requirements of military service, both parents don’t have to be citizens (unlike Athens), and we have ways of awarding citizenship to foreigners (unlike Athens). No slaves to exclude from citizenship - we fought a civil war over giving freedom to our slave, though it did take 100 years before that was more fully realized (US only).
As for being more Spartan like, the West today is extremely reluctant to go to war and very sensitive to casualties, It has volunteer armies (unlike Sparta where all male citizens had to serve in the military), defense budgets outside of the US are fairly low. Military things are so foreign to the average citizen unlike Sparta.
I’m not sure where you are getting the idea that “the West” was ever limited in thought to just “the upper classes from a small segment of NE European societies”. Instead of the narrowing you describe, if anything the definition of “the West” has expanded to include Eastern Europe as it threw off Soviet shackles. According to some definitions Japan and South Korea would also be included.
The West is reluctant to go to war? We (the USA, often taken as the epitome of “the West”) have been at war for the entire lives of the students I teach in college. While “the West” hasn’t necessarily mobilized in massive numbers for declared wars since 1945, it certainly did so often before then, and has not shied away from warfare as a primary tool of policy either. In addition, in many parts of what we might call the West, notably the USA, the glorification of the military, war, and violence has become more, not less, apparent. Even the social democracies of Europe–places that I really admire–seem to have been able to reach the sorts of levels of democratic and humane policy they did in the post-WWII era due to an unrepeatable confluence of events, including homogeneous populations, booming economies, and an artificial security bubble created by the Cold War and the superpower showdown.
Don’t get me wrong, I love much of what we have traditionally called “Western values.” I just don’t think they are one, all that specifically Western if you look at what they are trying to do, rather than the exact specific ways in which they accomplish what they are trying to do, and two, I think the supposed dichotomy between Western and non-Western is bogus and a creation of Western apologists, by and large.
In terms of effective citizenship it’s still largely dependent on wealth or control of economic resources. The poorer you are, the farther you are from the levers of power, the less “Western” you become. Absolutely, more and more types of people have access to the political system, no doubt about that. That access in general is ineffective in making fundamental changes or changing who is really in charge, though. Even leaving aside the aspects of Social Darwinism baked into Western, much of what we tout as shining examples of liberalism and freedom are only relevant to people who have a certain level of economic security. Indeed, I’d argue that the foundations of Western economies rest on exploitation, and always have–from the peasantry, to the indigenous peoples of various colonized areas, to the slaves imported to work the fields, to the masses of industrial workers, to today’s gig economies.
And yes, I’m simply offering some opinions. I’m not really interested in footnoting my posts on a gaming forum. In fact, this conversation is probably derailing in the extreme, so I’ll shut up :).
I do think that Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is a bit inconsistent about its treatment of both Athens and Greece–it makes you hate both!
So last night I found out who the head of the Cult is, and… what? Is this one of those things where they are hoping the shock and surprise would wallpaper over any thoughts of how little sense it makes? This person’s assistance is basically vital in sending you after MULTIPLE members of the cult, AND finding your mother - both making you a much bigger threat!
I’ve not gone any further yet, but I was just struck by how ridiculous it was.
It through me for a loop, too (hell, I thought it was going to be Socrates, well, sorta). If you listen to the speech from that person, it does explain the convoluted (yet still totally unconvincing) logic of the weird plan they had.
Then again, the least logical or really interesting parts of these games is anything associated with the Order or its variants, the Isu, Abstergo, etc. I’m working through Origins now (another great game) and it’s sort of similar, with bad Romans joining bad Greeks this time.
