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this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Why are they so obvessed with this "history" narrative?
Just spitballing: the validation of imagining that someone, someday, will point to their picture in a classroom and say "and these people were actually right and smart all along, but all the brainwashed people on both sides just wouldn't listen to what they had to say."
It's always a matter of the civilised world vs the barbaric hordes to them.
They don't actually care about history. Tell them about the political philosopher Ibn Tufayl and how his works preceded the Enlightenment thinkers and was a direct influence on some of them. (I can't remember the specific details but there was an early copy of his Hayy Ibn Yaqzan the library of... maybe a mentor of Rousseau? who had definitely read the book and was a direct influence on Rousseau and then suddenly Rousseau produces Emile, which has astonishing parallels to Hayy Ibn Yaqzan although no conclusive, direct link has been established between Rousseau and Tufayl.)
Do you think they're going to be fascinated or excited to learn about this fact?
Nah, no thanks! Only Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, and maybe whatever European history they're connected to via their heritage or their last name.
They're just interested in historical justification for telling themselves that they are heirs to civilization.
hmmmm that sounds suspiciously like how Newton and Leibniz both invented calculus at the exact same time after Jesuits had made contact with the Kerala school of mathematics
Many such cases!
My favourite example of this in more recent times is this one:
Erich Fromm articulates the idea of negative liberties vs positive liberties (e.g. "the freedom from being slandered" vs "the freedom to say whatever you like") in his Escape From Freedom/The Fear of Freedom (depending on which part of the world you're in the title was different).
The only problem is that Fromm is a German and a Marxist (ick!)
A couple of decades later Isaiah Berlin, who is a Russian refugee that fled the USSR in childhood (he saw the October Revolution) and who is a liberal and a strident anti-Marxist and anti-communist political theorist, delivers a speech titled "Two Concepts of Liberty". You can guess what those two concepts happened to be. Berlin also happened to be fluent in German and he read a lot.
Is there direct evidence establishing the link between Erich Fromm's writing and Isaiah Berlin's speech? No.
But it's not like Berlin one day wrote "Dear diary, today I am giving a speech and I thought I might as well plagiarise Erich Fromm..."
Because they think it's ended
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