Hacker News Reader

> catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years

You have a very flexible definition of "unchanged" then. The Catholic Church pre-Charlemagne is going to be very different from Saeculum Obscurum-era, itself different from Investiture Crisis-era, itself different from the one familiar in the Late Medieval, different from Counter Reformation-era one. It's absurd to me that you think the first time it changes significantly is Vatican II!

> Ancient Egypt was already thousands of years old when Socrates harassed aristocrats in Athens.

My knowledge of Ancient Egyptian history is extremely poor, but what little I do know strongly suggests that considering it as a single stable form of government for thousands of years is even worse an error than claiming the Catholic Church was so stable and unchanging. Perhaps akin to saying that the Holy Roman Empire, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and modern Germany are all one single country that has lasted for 1200 years (because they're all called Germany).

It's not 100% undisputed but most historians would agree that until conquered by the Persians in 525 BC, Egyptian history consists of 26 dynastic changes and 8 major distinct periods. Each dynasty of course usually had more than one ruler. Since we're talking about Socrates, then the slightly extended timeline of 33 dynastic changes (including 2 Persian, and 2 Greek), across 9 major and distinct periods, would represent pretty much the mainstream view that is supported by the available evidence, ending in its incorporation into the Roman Republic in 30 BC.

If anything, Egypt is one hell of a counter example of institutional stability. I would also make the pedantic quibble that the HRE never called itself "Germany" until the term was incorporated into part of its much longer official title in the late 1400s. English usage started in the 1500s. It's not to say that the concept of "Germany" or "Deutschland" didn't exist, but pre-Westphalia it's difficult to make truly apt comparisons to conceptualizations of states today, and the term equivalent to Germany was used, intermittently at that, from Charlemagne's death for the next 700 years somewhat like the status of Scotland or Wales within the UK today, as in, it coexisted with the HRE as an part but not considered to have referred to the whole until the HRE lost its non-German territories an that was pretty much all that was left.

>The catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years

That's a bit of a myth, thrown around a lot but not quite true. It has existed in some form, but by no means remained changeless. The doctrine is substantially similar but then we can say the same thing about Judaism. Here, we're really talking about the organization, which has many issues:

-The East-West schism in 1054 tore the Catholic Church in half.

-Then there was another schism about 500 years later when Martin Luther & subsequent Reformation really splintered things, sparking many violent conflicts over the centuries. I'm sure many Catholics felt like things were falling apart then.

In lesser events that still made people feel things were falling apart:

-Rome was taken & Pope Pius was imprisoned in the Vatican during the Italian Reunification in 1870 there was probably a similar feeling.

-After Vatican II from 1962-1965 I know from my own relatives that they felt (and still feel) that the catholic church began to fall apart.

-The last few decades with countless child abuse scandals.

I did stipulate until Vatican II, and my point is rather how little the preceding millenium of reformations and Avignon popes and so on actually changed the church. It undeniably had some impact, like the reformation created a need for educating priests to be able to actually argue their case. But the shape of the organization was largely the same through all of this.

> I did stipulate until Vatican II, and my point is rather how little the preceding millenium of reformations and Avignon popes and so on actually changed the church

Clearly, that was your point. It's just completely wrong given things like the Gregorian Reform.

You'd have a better argument that the Catholic Church has been largely unchanged in the nearly 1000 years since the Gregorian reform (or, even better, the 700+ years after the series of reforms starting there and running through the 13th century councils) than the 1600 years between Constantine and Vatican II. It’d still be making the qualifier “largely” do an unreasonable amount of work, though.

The reformation didn't just change the educational needs for priests, it split off a significant portion of it's population out of the church.

I don't think we can cite 1600 years of stability for the organization at all. We may do so, somewhat, for doctrine, which is an achievement, but it's also equalled or exceeded by a few other religions.

Vatican II was a trivial change compared to vast numbers of other changes in the Church - the Church of the 3rd-7th c. and its hierarchy were dramatically different than the Church once they'd broken from Constantinople and Eastern Rome had lost Ravenna and it's control over the Vatican. The Papacy and institutions that formed after the 700s/800s once Italy was independent of the Byzantines are where the pope transitions to a king lording over the Papal States which was a massive change. Those Papal States are gone now, another dramatic change that fundamentally redefined the Church. There were other revolutionary changes throughout the church's history like the Avignon Papacy which changed not only where the Church was centered but reformed the Papacy dramatically to put it under the thumb of the French kings. The schisms after that changed the Church brought the relatively late invention of the College of Cardinals and significant reforms and changes in hierarchy. The developments of various monastic orders and knightly orders also brought major changes and reforms. The Church after the Protestants sacked Rome and Pope Clement VII fled into hiding and was reduced to a figurehead controlled the Holy Roman Emperor was a massive break as well. The reforms of the Counter-Reformation were dramatic as well. The church has always claimed to be a stable perpetuation of tradition, while the reality has been a dynamic institution that's changed significantly not only in hierarchy and structure but doctrine. There always were popes, cardinals, and bishops, but their roles, powers, and relations changed constantly.

The other thing to remember is that even those long-standing institutions had internal change that was a huge deal at the time but is now hardly remembered at all, or considered minor.

You can even see this right now, where countries do not consider themselves to be as old as the current government's age, but much older. For example, most Italians will not consider Italy to be "started" at the Republic in '46, or even the Unification in 1861, but that the country is much, much older.

Italy as a polity, regardless of how real the polity actually existed as a coherent and cohesive governing state, pretty much existed continuously from Rome until entirely left out by the Congress of Vienna in 1805 though. By the time 1848 rolled around most people alive were perfectly aware of the concept of Italy in living memory, and even those who didn't actually live in what was considered Italy - in particular those living in the south from Naples down to Calabria and Sicily, if they were educated and literate, were still aware of the notion of Italy as a distinct political entity. There might not have been much of a centralized government based in Italian territories that represented the polity for long periods of history, but ruling regimes/dynasties come and go but political entities tend to last longer.

Sorry, I'm not entirely convinced.

Egypt, even though it was still intact by the times of Socrates, has had a number of changes and shake-ups, rises, falls, attempts to change the ancient state religion, etc.

Britain had the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the Magna Carta which amounts to a major revolution was enacted in 1215, and the Norman conquest happened in 1066. All these major events hardly occurred "a few generations ago".

I'm afraid that the idea of things largely unchanging in the past comes from our poor knowledge of history, compared to recent events.

The British revolution, which is the first revolution, is still fairly recent on a historical timescale (and the later revolutions would arguably reshape Britain more than the British one ever did). My point is exactly that 2-300 years is not a particularly long time.

> Egypt, even though it was still intact by the times of Socrates, has had a number of changes and shake-ups, rises, falls, attempts to change the ancient state religion, etc.

There were some dynastic changes and bumps along the road, absolutely, but my point is the overall shape of Egypt was remarkably stable even through the Persian conquest.

Nothing comparable to modernity.

Ancient Egypt's "bumps along the road" were several periods of almost total anarchy and state disintegration that each lasted for many decades.

You're right that there's nothing comparable to the modern era: the modern era hasn't existed long enough to have collapses that total. I think you are not applying the same level of scrutiny to ancient societies as you are to modern ones.

> It's a huge political experiment

Perhaps with regards to "scale" this may be true, but in most ways I disagree. There were hundreds of democracies in the ancient world - particularly in Greece - and they all tended to break down along similar lines. The Greeks even had a term for this - stasis - which there's a body of literature about. In stasis, the norms of democratic government are slowly eroded through an escalating series of power plays (each justified by previous excesses). This in turn erodes the public trust in institutions required for society to function. Which usually ends in violence. So I think it's a mistake to assume our situation is unique.

> The catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years between Constantine and Vatican II.

No, it really didn't.

> Looking back we've had republics with longevity, we've had autocratic dynasties with longevity. But democracy? Besides Athens, which had a very different shape of political system, this is really a first.

Modern democracies are almost entirely representative democracies, more like historical republics (and in fact, many of them are explicitly republics, though some are technically limited monarchies) than classical democracies.

What historical examples of long-lived, stable republics do we have?

Based on this study https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi... I would say our “Democracy” is a farce/sham.

The republic has enemies and their battle cry is “Democracy!”