01-30-2019, 01:05 PM
(01-30-2019, 03:53 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: Objective naturalism in art and science both have roots in empirical interest in material reality, while non-Western cultures were more interested in intuitive cognition.
The ideal of athletic male beauty? I have yet to encounter a Chinese or Indian sculpture flexing biceps
Clearly also Greco-Roman, and a revival in the West under Michelangelo and others. The Marxist celebration of athleticism of the toiler is undoubtedly Western.
I have seen some Indian art of the second and first centuries BCE and I notice a Greek influence. Alexander got as far as the Indus Valley, and the realism is impressive.
Quote:Going back to politics, I think institutionalized competition is something typically Western. Other cultures had competition in form of war, obviously. But only Westerners could invent something like Jeffersonian democracy with its constant "cold war" between political parties. Parties should be banned because they divide society! Capitalism, the typically Western economic system, is also a form of institutionalized competition. But many Westerners oppose it. Those who do, like Marxists, seemingly believe that scientific planning is better, so they merely replace one Western idea with another.
Where Parties do not compete at the polling place, political parties are nothing more than tools of command and control. This is obvious enough with fascist, Nazi, Communist, and Ba'ath Parties. At the extreme the German Nazi Party was little more than a syndicate of organized crime once in power.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.