Culture and Law Part One

One of the fundamental conceptions most Westerners have of their civilisation is its unified continuity, married together by the Renaissance, with the Greco-Roman age thus beginning Western Civilisation with the war against Troy rather than against the growing Islamic caliphate; by manor of many Christian scholars in the springtime learning, and with the dawn of Faustian civilisation adding to, the philosophy, the poetry and culture of the now dead Classical age, the impression of a much longer becoming of Europe evolved into the consensus of a three-staged course of history which has many a time been criticised so far in the Decline of the West as the Ancient-Medieval-Modern scheme. Noticing that ideas remain when peoples come and go, and spread by popularity or violence and a variety of other means, historians entertain a progressive direction of history where every technical law is compounded upon in a borderline religious pilgrimage through time for knowledge, the end of which, for Hegel, was the absolute, where all knowledge becomes consistent in a unified theory of reality.

It can be pointed out that Christianity, a Magian religion, found its way to the colds of northern Europe and endured as the only religion of significance in the West up until today, with no Odin or Freyr capable of better serving the Faustian ideal than Christ or Mary. For many throughout history, this evidenced a divine plan working itself out, but Spengler considered otherwise: rather than Christianity spreading its ideals by the Bible into the Faustian pre-culture, accepted wholly and literally, it was instead absorbed by that pre-culture; for Christianity to be parsed by northern Europe it had to express itself through forms that we could understand, and this required a fundamental change of the meaning of Christianity to suit our understanding. Consider the two Socrates’ of Plato and Xenophon, both followers initially were alien to the ideas Socrates believed in and worked upon, they could only receive these ideas by the light world of sound and symbolism, thus they took into themselves a relative meaning to one another, both different and unrelated to the impression Socrates himself had, but resonated with themselves foremost. Even if Socrates wrote his own scrolls, he would still be subject to reinterpretation over time as different peoples took his words differently, so the Bible suffers the same fate and the classical world, submerged in Christendom, appears to the historical culture as a past rendition of itself as it impresses its values where it doesn’t belong.

When we think about the continuity of human knowledge, we see a sort of survivorship bias for ideas. A new culture that is looking to expand its knowledge of the world around may or may not absorb older ideas from different time periods, such as Christianity into Faustian Civilisation, but it in turn ignores those ideas that don’t resonate with it, that aren’t consistent with its own worldview. The Renaissance took on the Greek pillar, but rejected the Greek temple, Michelangelo embraced the statue but incorporated all the learned parts of the inner body such as veins and facial expressions that are vacant on the statues of Rome and Athens, which may at a glance look to add to an existing tradition but only if we assume the Greeks were incapable of mastering statue in the millennium they worked on the art. This is the reality of cultural relations, Europe and Arabia may be relatively proximate to each other, and may at sometimes exchange products and ideas, but those ideas became of a different meaning when they passed into the minds of the separate populations. What we teach as Algebra, for the most part, became the function; Khwarizmi throughout his works refrained from depicting specific numbers because the point of Algebra was to deal in the unknowns, but when Algebra parsed into the West it became an act of finding the definite value of x or filling y with a value to be transmuted by f(x). When Buddhism arrived in China, its meaning will have been received closer to the rites of the Chinese gods than that of Hinduism.

What can look like two peoples exchanging ideas is in actual fact, down to the problem of relativism, a long game of Chinese whispers where two peoples will accept an idea only on the terms that they see what they wish to see, giving an impression, especially in the sciences, that there is a hand down of ideas between cultures in turn giving structure to the three-part historical struggle. Understanding this, we can take another very robust form of system, seen as unchanging, and deconstruct the cultural differences within it, by analysing the forms in which Law takes in the different higher cultures.