Eric Field on Metaschools (from elsewhere) Broadly speaking there are three meta

Eric Field on Metaschools

(from elsewhere)

Broadly speaking there are three metaschools of historiography for defining “Western” civilization.

1. Classical, which takes the classical Mediterranean from the Greco-Roman civilization as being the origin and nucleus of what has become Anglo-American civilization.

2. Medievalist, which views the rise of Christianity, usually the rise of the Church after the fall of Rome as the foundation of our current civilization.

3. Or the sort of Nordic model that Oswald Spengler advocated that asserts that the northern Indo-Europeans (Germanic and Celtic tribes, but later Balts and Slavs as well) came south, smashed into Rome, destroying Classical civilization, but ultimately absorbing the remnants into their own culture.

Academic elites in the West tended to use a mixture of theories 1 and 2. The United States is semi-unique amongst westerners for relying on a much bastardized version of theory two, which places Christianity as the defining role. I’m partial to the third model, but I am an ethnic German, and I think it does a great job reconciling Anglo-American frontier experience with a larger Northern European pattern of migration that goes back to at least the Völkerwanderung.

The Point I’m trying to make with this really autistic unsolicited history lecture is of the three historiographical schools of western civ, Americans (especially the rightwing) tend to be shaped by a version that considers Christianity the central defining feature of this civilization.