Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Give me a list of Greco- Roman values!~

Ancient Greek culture achieved conformity to social values
through shame, not through consciousness of guilt.  Thus honor, which is inextricably
linked to shame, was a value of ancient Greece.  I believe conscious as a way to direct
individual behavior is an invention of the English and American Puritains, or maybe of
Protestantism, or maybe of Christainity.  At any rate, shame is capable of influencing
the behavior of everyone, while feelings of guilt are capable of influencing only those
who have a conscious; most people do have a conscious, but sociopaths do not and cannot
be controlled but by shame or by brute force.


Classical
education is said to be about the Greek love of truth and beauty and the Roman genius
for government, so this suggests some of the things that they
valued.


Carl C. Zimmerman in Family and
Civilization
, described the trustee family of ancient Greece, then the
atomistic family which evolved and helped to precipitate the conquest of Greece by
Rome.


In Greek times, again in Roman times, and again in
modern times, the predominant type of family evolved from trustee to domestic to
atomistic.


Whenever and wherever neither the state nor the
church ruled the family, the family ruled itself; this was trustee familism (582). In
the trustee family, the family embraces many households. One man is head of the family
but he is subject to a family counsel and occasionally to the entire family if nearly
all members feel so strongly about an issue that they are willing to oppose
him.


Family mores include: men do not openly engage in
premarital or extramarital sex. Women do not engage in premarital or extramarital sex at
all, except for the ever present few blacksliders. Women who are not virgins cannot
marry and are kicked out of the family. Adulteresses also are kicked out, or killed if
caught in the act.


Property is held in common, is received
from previous generations and is held in trust for future generations. The family takes
care of its own. It is responsible for seeking revenge or compensation for injury to a
family member by an outsider; it is responsible for paying compensation if a member
injures an outsider; costly feuds can result.


Trustee and
domestic family members have strong bonds to their families and to the nation of which
their family is a part.  Atomistic family members are very individualistic, me, me, me,
and not very strongly bonded to family or anything else.  They make poor soldiers
because they have no love of family or country.  They have loose morals, have sexually
deviant practices, have no or few children, or allow their children to grow up without
much parental control.  You can see how this type of culture might have been easy for
the Romans to conquor.  and after the Romans evolved such a culture, they were easy for
the barbarians to conquer.

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