Comments by "Andy Jarman" (@AndyJarman) on "The Rise of Western Art u0026 Culture by David Starkey" video.

  1. I'm reading Larry Siedentip's book "The Investion of the Individual". It tells a barrative at odds with Mr Starky's. Siedentop tells the take of the historical development of the manner in which people regard themselves. The ancient Greeks and Romans were esconced in a cultural mesh and were honourbound by a fielty to their family. The nuclear family, the extended family, then the City. These institutions made sense of the world. People were not moral agents but components of a web of private relationships. Mutual protection and mutual regard for the reputation of a family. Siedentop gows on to make the arguement that Christianity intones people to see themselves as individuals with a direct relationship with a single 'meta' father - God. This act of Liberation from the family is a hijacking of the mammalian need to establish independance from its family and its need to establish its own den. Without the birth if this message, that it is God personified who you owe fieldty to, NOT your family patriach, As this idea took hold then a supea national sense of moral agency or Christendom took hold. The gens or family still pwrsists as a power base, but it no longer controls entire city states. The state has stepped in and assumed that die to the brwakdown of family rhen it should adopt the respinsibilities the family once stood for. This transfer of agency to the undividual and the establishment of a pseudo parental status by the government is what enabled heretival ideas to flourish.
    1