Posted on 06/13/2004 2:30:31 PM PDT by blam
Ireland's first town in 900 AD? I know those people, they are my own ancestors. But even they wouldn't claim to have the first town in Ireland.
Politics and prejudices shape even the way we look at history, if we're not careful.I wholeheartedly agree.
"Politics and prejudices shape even the way we look at history, if we're not careful."
"I wholeheartedly agree."
As an example, someone earnestly wrote on a different thread that monogamous marriage originated from the Jews. That is utterly untrue. The historical Jews were not monogamous, and monogamy is to this day not a strict requirement of all Jews in the world (notably, Yemenite Jews, the few that remain, are permitted to remain polygamous). By contrast, many cultures, notably the American woodland Indians, were monogamous in their marriage practices. (It is fair to say that NO culture of people has ever been completely FAITHFULLY monogamous at the individual level, although a large number of people in all cultures (including those that allow polygamy) are faithfully monogamous all their lives.)
So, where would that idea come from?
It would come from an earnest desire that all good moral order in the world should have come from the Jews, because of the religious belief that Judaism was the one true religion of God (or the one true religion before Christ, depending on one's religious preference).
While the motivation for the belief and its earnestness are very sincere, they do not jibe, at all, with the facts.
A comparable assertion is that monotheism originated with the Jews, which is not true either. Some other cultures also spontaneously developed monotheism, although not Judaism.
Historians are by nature always looking for firsts. They're also usually quite partisan about particular cultures and nations they favor (people don't study history in the abstract, but are generally passionately moved by things cultural or political to be that interested in history in the first place).
Think of how much ink was spilt in the late 19th Century on racial theories of language and culture. Now, the very worst expression of that, in Germany, discredited the concept generally, but we still see the overhangs of it.
Nothing proves that to me more than when I see a chart of Europe that shows "Latin" Europe in, say, orange, and "Germanic" Europe in, say, blue based upon linguistic lines of division.
This continues to exert a powerful force on the modern mind, shaping perceptions - especially in America, but also in Europe - that become truisms, but which are highly suspect.
Two examples:
What is it that makes English a "Germanic" language? That the Anglo-Saxons came from Scandinavia, Frisia and the German coastlands (far away from modern Saxony)? That doesn't work. For, just like the Vikings who settled in Normandy, the invaders were largely men, many (most?) of whose children in Britain were by Romano-British women, which is to say Celtic. The second generation of "Anglo-Saxons" were better styled "Anglo-Celtic" by a proportion of nearly 50/50, and that proportion got worse and worse with time. The British, like the French, are primarily a CELTIC people. Trace out their genes, and the English of Wessex are more cousins of the Irish than of the Germans or Danes.
Linguistically, of course, Anglo-Saxon replaced the Celtic tongues, largely, but not completely. Anglo-Saxon, by Alfred's time, was distinct and not mutually intelligible with Frisian or High German. These inflections didn't just HAPPEN, as is often pretended. They HAPPENED because Anglo-Saxon (Celtic) boys and girls grew up listening to their low Germanic fathers speaking low German, and their Celtic mothers stammering through low German with a Celtic accent and imperfect grammar.
Now step forward to the conquest and inject French atop all of that. So much English vocabulary comes straight from French. So, what is it that makes English, nevertheless, a "Blue", Germanic country on those maps?
The often-cited reason is that English is "grammatically" Germanic.
To which I respond, politely, really?
Linguists say so, of course - or rather, the 19th Century linguists who derived these classifications said so (in the context of the generally Darwinistic racial theories of the time) - but I am very dubious.
Word order in French and English more closely resemble than English and German do. Half of English vocabulary is French. English, like French (and quite unlike German) does not inflect its nouns. English and French are closer than French and Dutch. English sits in about equipoise in its actual spoken relationship with French and Dutch. My point is not to challenge the whole field of linguistics. It is, rather, to suggest that had linguistics emerged in a different political place and time, that English might have been classified as a hybrid language, or a Latin language as a Germanic one.
Hitler, of course, (and many Germans and English too) took the idea of "Teutonic ethnic links" so seriously that he did not perceive England to be the same degree of threat as France or Russia, and sincerely believed that some sort of agreement could be reached with his "Teutonic cousins", who were, in fact, more genetically Celtic and linguistically French than German. Suppose the linguists had called English a Latin language, and ethnologists had frankly admitted that English people are predominantly Celts, query the whole course of German diplomacy and attitudes in World War II. Query the course of British ideology of the late-19th and early 20th Century.
But that was not the zeitgeist of the great age of linguistics and Darwin.
The second example concerns Latin itself. Latin and Greek are quite different. And Latin and German are very different. However, Caesar wrote in his Gallic commentaries that the language of the Romans and that of the Gauls were so close, that they were mutually comprehensible. He also took the expedient of writing to his officers in Greek, because Latin and Gaulish were so close that the Gauls could read intercepted messages.
What that tells is is that Latin is a Celtic language, and the Romans were, in essence, the civilized "Yugo-Celts", the Southern Celts.
And indeed, if we look at the map of the Roman Empire across Europe, we discover that it came to embrace every Celtic land except Ireland and part of Scotland, and practically nothing else. Even South Germany, Bavaria and Swabia, was occupied by Celts, not Teutons.
There are some pretty daring concepts in that.
Now, quite obviously the Romans did not consider themselves to be ANYTHING LIKE the wild Gauls. And we today buy their prejudice, and we paint France and Spain "Latinate orange" on those old linguistic maps, and claim that the Romans were greatly successful at transferring their language and culture there.
But it's probably not true.
Probably what is true is that the Romans were the southern Celts, and the REASON that the Celtic areas of Europe all fell into the Roman lap after short, sharp struggles but quickly assimilated thereafter, while the Teutons and Slavs never did, was precisely because of the lines of cultural affinity. We should recall that the Greeks snubbed their nose at the Macedonians and said they were barbarians and not Greek, but that the Macedonians actually were culturally as Greek as the Athenians, so the recorded prejudices of the people of a time do not conclusively demonstrate anything.
I could go one step further and observe that the only completely peaceful, spontaneous conversion to the Roman religion in European history was the quick and practically spontaneous conversion of the ONE substantial piece of Celtic Europe that was outside of the Roman Empire. Ireland became Roman Christian without being conquered, indeed, without any marked battles. The affinity was there. The Irish and the Gauls and the Latins were very probably the same ethnic strand, and there are really only TWO Western Cultures: Celtic and Germanic, with the "Latin" culture being merely the ascendance of the southernmost and most civilized branch of the Celts.
Linguistically, certainly, Latin and Gaulish were the closest of cousins: mutually comprehensible when spoken and in writing. This OUGHT to tell us that Gaulish and Latin were, in fact, in the same linguistic family, like, say, Danish and Swedish.
That is DOESN'T, and that our minds obstinately divide the Celt from the Latin very sharply, is a product of two overlapping prejudices: Roman, circa 400 BC, and social Darwinism, circa 1900.
It would have been a horrifying thought to the Victorians that their linguistic, ethnic and biological first cousins were the IRISH and the FRENCH, and that the closest living cultural cousins of the great Roman Empire, which the English Imperialists so admired and emulated, were to be found living in Connaught.
But that is probably a bridge too far.
I have done too great violence to popular prejudices, conceptions, and far too many high school and college history texts to go unchallenged on this.
I would just return to my original statement: politics and prejudices very deeply shape the way we look at history. After all, history is just OLD politics, and people were willing to KILL over these distinctions back then. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that people prefer the templates of the ages. Even if they're wrong.
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