Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

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As long as there have been distinct human cultures, there has been cultural syncretism.

What a lot of people imagine as separable cultures along borders were really cultural gradients or mixtures (this village here is mostly X, the villages north and south of here are Y, but the village even further south is also X, and we all speak each others’ language).

A lot of our discourse and views on culture are still poisoned by jingoistic nationalism from the 19th and 20th centuries (a cover for othering political foes and motivating the masses to fight and die for political goals), as well as concepts like imperialism and the couple centuries of European political hegemony, plus the elimination of non-prestige dialects/local languages and cultures via mass media.

It’s hard for us to imagine, but in a time before modern concepts of race/organized religion/nationalism the world was quite a dynamic cultural melting pot that wasn’t organized along these more recent distinctions. Greeks traded from Britain to India, pagan religions often saw other cultures’ pantheons as the same religion with different names and traditions, people noticed physical differences between groups of people but weren’t applying racist concepts to them. In a way, people of antiquity were often more tolerant and accepting than many contemporary people. But they could also just decide to kill and invade their neighbors with no pretext beyond wanting their stuff.

I think it’s the Abrahamic religions that ended all of this.

The proselytization that is central to Christianity and Islam doesn’t exist in any religion.

Those are the only historic cultures that insist that they are right and everyone else is very wrong. Most historic cultures believed in stuff but didn’t fight and kill for it, primarily because they knew they could learn shit from other cultures.

Interesting you said Abrahamic religions, While impact of chrisianity on Europe, Middle East, Americas has been well documented.

There hasn't been much of discussion or writing about the extinction of cultures, syncretism, open border civs at the hands of Islam.

Greek / Roman / Indian influence in Eurasia to Indonesia is probably another tragedy that the world forgot.

Only pockets like Bali remain from that era now.

Buddhism was the original missionary religion that inspired Islam and Christianity towards proselytization.

The OG Abrahamic religion does not proselytize, quite the contrary. They say it isn't ok to tell another tribe what to think unless they are cannibals in which case saving lives supersedes nonintervention. :)

The sequels however cleverly mixed in a dose of politics and empire building, it isn't part of the religions per-se.

  In hoc signo vinces

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_hoc_signo_vinces

Zoroastrians also tried to convert, imagine the wololo move in Age of Empires.

At the same time to handwave away all attempts at classification because the lines are blurry does no help for our understanding of history.

And in the case of the Greek kingdom at topic, it was founded by a Macedonian, populated by Greeks and Macedonian veterans of Alexander's campaigns (who, yes, took local brides and so whose children are that gradient), with a polity modeled in Greek tradition, speaking Greek and Macedonian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom

Are you forgetting the part where Alexander and successors deliberately tried to incorporate Persian and Indian culture into their own? Yeah the conquerors were Greek and Macedonian, my point is they weren’t chauvinistic about their culture like we might expect, Alexander in particular loved some of the cultures his conquests brought him into contact with.

> people noticed physical differences between groups of people but weren’t applying racist concepts to them.

There are enough counter examples, I don't even know where to begin. Of course it is useless (as I heared a historian claim only recently) to apply the modern concepts of racism and nationalism before the 20th century.

FWIW, there could be no b-but my genepool because they had no concept of genetics. Their idea of genus is however much more detailed and often times entirely made up.

Ancient Greeks called all non-Greeks barbarians, which was always a pejorative term. Racism is just one of those things people tend to discover independently as they become more organized and civilized, just like slavery and tyranny.

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