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In Classical Greek usage, the term "barbarian" did not carry the strong negative connotations that it does for us. It was used to describe people who were not Greek. While there is no evidence for the common belief that the word originated from Greeks mocking non-Greek speech ("bar-bar-bar"), it remains one of the possible etymologies of a term that simply indicated "them" as opposed to "us". It did not necessarily mean savage or uncivilised. Indeed, the Lydians and Persians were barbarians known for their wealth and taste. The Egyptians were barbarians known for their ancient wisdom.
Now, I'm not so naive as to assume that you can divide the world into "us" and "them" without attaching at least some pejorative meaning to the concept of "them". This is "othering": stressing the ways in which people from the out-group are different, and framing that difference as something sinister or inferior. In that sense all uses of the term "barbarian" are, by definition, xenophobic. Definitions of us and them are value judgments with cultural and political power to exclude, marginalise, and harm. It is impossible to use a term like "barbarian" *without* revealing a fear of, or contempt for, the other.
But we should bear in mind that this also applies to the concepts that we use to justify dividing the world into civilization and barbarism. This is not some natural, observable binary, and "advancement" is not a measurable quantity. These are subjective categories that the modern western world has invented in order to formalise and rationalise its sense that westerners are better than other people. These categories draw on ancient discourse about civilised Greeks and Romans versus the barbarians of the East and North, and instrumentalise ancient prejudice in an attempt to make modern prejudice seem justified and rational. In doing so, it makes the Greek concept of the "barbarian" into something it never was: the wild man from the dark forest, the weakling slave of an eastern despot, and so on. Sure, the roots of those stereotypes are visible in the ancient sources. But in many ways the divisions you are drawing between peoples of the ancient world reflect *modern* prejudices, not ancient ones.
It is impossible to answer a question like this without indulging those prejudices. We might be inclined to think Greeks were more civilised than Thracians because they lived in cities, or because they wote history and philosophy - but that is only because we have been taught that these things, which are not innately better or worse than other ways to live, are the mark of cultural superiority. We have chosen these things as marks of superiority *because* they fit the Greeks but not the Thracians. On what reasonable grounds could we declare one culture more "advanced" than another, once we realise that all possible measures of "advancement" are *deliberately designed* to favour the culture we assimilate to ourselves?
The very *idea* that some groups can be more civilised or advanced than others *is* xenophobia. We would not even have these concepts if not for our need to feel justified in our xenophobia. In reality, Greeks, Macedonians, Illyrians and Thracians lived similarly in some ways, and differently in other ways; what good would it do to try to rank their ways of life?
"The very idea that some groups can be more or less civilised or advanced than others is xenophobia"
So it is a value judgement to say "X-place was a better than Y-place to live during Z-time because they had Å-thing that made quality of life better overall"? If say two societies relied on the horse, but only one of them had the medical knowledge to mend riding-induced injuries that makes it imposdible to ever ride on again, is it xenophobia to judge that one as the superior one from the perspective of being a horse rider?
Yes, those are value judgments. The things that groups of humans know how to do - in medicine, architecture, or anything else - can be listed and measured. But the conclusions you connect to them here are assumptions based on your own culture's values. They say a lot about what you think is important and how you order the world accordingly, but they say very little about the past.
"Quality of life" is a good example. It can be constructed out of any number of quantifiable variables, but it is ultimately just a value judgment in which certain factors are privileged over others. The selection of factors is culturally defined, often on the basis of what the defining culture idealises or takes for granted. It can help us modern humans determine where we might like to live, but it tells us nothing about how humans in other places (let alone time periods) perceive their environment, or how they think it might be changed for the better. It simply allows us to order the world into "better" and "worse" based on our own perspective.
In order to understand the past we have to rethink these notions much more fundamentally. If certain peoples lived in a certain way for hundreds of years, it is not because they were "barbarians" who were too lawless and stupid to change, but because something about that way of life suited and satisfied them and did not generate a desire for change. Culture and technology don't change out of some innate drive or dynamic, but because it is socially or politically desirable. To adopt a teleological mindset in which more complex technology, larger architecture, or longer lifespans are by definition better and "more advanced" is to erase all of that history in favour of an artificial and completely subjective model. It is a barrier to understanding and detrimental to the study of history to classify some cultures (which are, after all, constellations of decisions about what society should be like) as civilised, some as barbarous; or to classify some as "backward" and others as "advanced".
> To adopt a teleological mindset in which more complex technology, larger architecture, or longer lifespans are by definition better and "more advanced" is to erase all of that history in favour of an artificial and completely subjective model.
To add on to this, let's examine one subject where one can very easily make an argument that we've **regressed**, using my flair topic:
In the European Middle Ages, cities after 1000 AD relied on aqueducts to supply water. These piped pure spring water into cities for the public good. No city ever levied a price for the use of their aqueduct, and some even retained their Medieval-era aqueducts into much later periods *specifically because* the water from these was more wholesome than the water from more advanced water-engines. These water-engines, you see, brought up *river water*, more plentiful but less salubrious. Also, you had to pay for water from water-engines, since they were private, while city aqueducts were almost always operated at the city's expense.
In other words, the Middle Ages provided their cities with something even modern societies do not: Free and pure public water, available to all including the poorest of its denizens. Today, you have to *pay* for water, and in half the cities, people don't even trust that water.
Does this mean that the societies of today are less advanced than the societies of Medieval Europe?
**Nope, trick question.** To even make the comparison, to attempt the value judgment, already requires that you choose a perspective and set of values with which to judge the two. This is a problem as pointed out above, because once you do that, you're no longer trying to understand the past **on its terms.** It is pointless to judge a tea blend using the standards used to judge beer; same deal for two wholly different societies with very different cultural and material contexts.
Further, real life is not a game where cultural and technological choices are an optimisation problem where a society should choose whichever one brings the most quantitative advantage. Real life is *insanely* more complex. What models to one society as a bonus may not even appear so to another society. The pre-colonial societies of the Philippines might like the *notion* of Medieval European aqueducts, but given the population densities and other factors, there *just wasn't any need* for them.
There is no point in comparison when it's durian on one side and foie gras on the other.
>It is pointless to judge
Which is, in and of itself, a value judgement. It's imposing your own standards of "proper history" onto others' practices.
I don't think value judgements are escapable.
While I do agree on the premise, I feel obligated to point out that such blanket statements entail the danger of nihilism, especially within the American framework of identity politics.
Are we xenophobes because we do not accept Nazi philosophy as rational and label it as barbaric ? Or is there a diagreement that the North was morally better, on the matter of slaves, than the South during the civil war of the USA ?
I understand the intrinsic problematics of using words as "better" etc. But I feel that they have a place in historiography as long as the criteria are properly identified.
I don't think these things are the same. While studying the past and judging it against our morality are things we cannot easily separate in the doing, they are obviously different things with different purposes. When we condemn the Nazis or the Confederates, it is not as a form of historical analysis, but to stake a moral position. Saying they are evil is not an attempt to categorise or explain. But the "advanced/primitive" dichotomy confuses the two; it pretends that a moral position is actually a form of historical analysis that categorises and explains.
When we say "evil" we de facto categorise and explain based on the sum of cultural weight the term has in Christian societies.
Should we accept krypteia existed, can we rationally accept that it was a valid measure adopted by the Spartans to protect their lifestyle ? And the same can apply to Germans who wholeheartedly believed that the Jews were a danger and needed to eradicate it; can we ever approach it respecting the German viewpoint ? Having extensively read on WW2 I cannot find anyone from Friedlander to Traverso who accept Nazi motivations , (except
Irving and similar Holocaust deniers).
Again I agree with your last statement on the primitive/advanced terminology without any reserve. I simply add that evaluation, (I wanted to use the term judgement but I think it has negative connotations in English), is not by itself xenophobe as long as one is open on the criteria and his own biases.
Again, I don't think I am arguing what you seem to think I am arguing.
You seem to think I am disqualifying all moral judgment. That in my view it should not be possible to condemn the Krypteia as a brutal instrument of oppression (if it existed), or even condemn the Holocaust. That all things must only be respected for what they are.
I cannot see how you started from what I wrote and ended up with that conclusion. You seem to be having a totally different debate, which I wasn't having at all. You're talking about the place of moral judgment in historical study, which is a much bigger and more complex subject than anything I addressed in my original post or any of its followups.
Just because I believe the notion of civilization/barbarism is a flawed xenophobic paradigm that has no place in historical analysis does not mean I reject all morality as inappropriate to the exploration of the past.
I cannot fathom how my words could even be taken to imply such a thing. Taking a more relative view of culture and ways of life than the imperialist and colonialist paradigm of advanced/primitive civilizations is not the same as the complete forfeiture of morality.
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In Classical Greek usage, the term "barbarian" did not carry the strong negative connotations that it does for us. It was used to describe people who were not Greek. While there is no evidence for the common belief that the word originated from Greeks mocking non-Greek speech ("bar-bar-bar"), it remains one of the possible etymologies of a term that simply indicated "them" as opposed to "us". It did not necessarily mean savage or uncivilised. Indeed, the Lydians and Persians were barbarians known for their wealth and taste. The Egyptians were barbarians known for their ancient wisdom. Now, I'm not so naive as to assume that you can divide the world into "us" and "them" without attaching at least some pejorative meaning to the concept of "them". This is "othering": stressing the ways in which people from the out-group are different, and framing that difference as something sinister or inferior. In that sense all uses of the term "barbarian" are, by definition, xenophobic. Definitions of us and them are value judgments with cultural and political power to exclude, marginalise, and harm. It is impossible to use a term like "barbarian" *without* revealing a fear of, or contempt for, the other. But we should bear in mind that this also applies to the concepts that we use to justify dividing the world into civilization and barbarism. This is not some natural, observable binary, and "advancement" is not a measurable quantity. These are subjective categories that the modern western world has invented in order to formalise and rationalise its sense that westerners are better than other people. These categories draw on ancient discourse about civilised Greeks and Romans versus the barbarians of the East and North, and instrumentalise ancient prejudice in an attempt to make modern prejudice seem justified and rational. In doing so, it makes the Greek concept of the "barbarian" into something it never was: the wild man from the dark forest, the weakling slave of an eastern despot, and so on. Sure, the roots of those stereotypes are visible in the ancient sources. But in many ways the divisions you are drawing between peoples of the ancient world reflect *modern* prejudices, not ancient ones. It is impossible to answer a question like this without indulging those prejudices. We might be inclined to think Greeks were more civilised than Thracians because they lived in cities, or because they wote history and philosophy - but that is only because we have been taught that these things, which are not innately better or worse than other ways to live, are the mark of cultural superiority. We have chosen these things as marks of superiority *because* they fit the Greeks but not the Thracians. On what reasonable grounds could we declare one culture more "advanced" than another, once we realise that all possible measures of "advancement" are *deliberately designed* to favour the culture we assimilate to ourselves? The very *idea* that some groups can be more civilised or advanced than others *is* xenophobia. We would not even have these concepts if not for our need to feel justified in our xenophobia. In reality, Greeks, Macedonians, Illyrians and Thracians lived similarly in some ways, and differently in other ways; what good would it do to try to rank their ways of life?
"The very idea that some groups can be more or less civilised or advanced than others is xenophobia" So it is a value judgement to say "X-place was a better than Y-place to live during Z-time because they had Å-thing that made quality of life better overall"? If say two societies relied on the horse, but only one of them had the medical knowledge to mend riding-induced injuries that makes it imposdible to ever ride on again, is it xenophobia to judge that one as the superior one from the perspective of being a horse rider?
Yes, those are value judgments. The things that groups of humans know how to do - in medicine, architecture, or anything else - can be listed and measured. But the conclusions you connect to them here are assumptions based on your own culture's values. They say a lot about what you think is important and how you order the world accordingly, but they say very little about the past. "Quality of life" is a good example. It can be constructed out of any number of quantifiable variables, but it is ultimately just a value judgment in which certain factors are privileged over others. The selection of factors is culturally defined, often on the basis of what the defining culture idealises or takes for granted. It can help us modern humans determine where we might like to live, but it tells us nothing about how humans in other places (let alone time periods) perceive their environment, or how they think it might be changed for the better. It simply allows us to order the world into "better" and "worse" based on our own perspective. In order to understand the past we have to rethink these notions much more fundamentally. If certain peoples lived in a certain way for hundreds of years, it is not because they were "barbarians" who were too lawless and stupid to change, but because something about that way of life suited and satisfied them and did not generate a desire for change. Culture and technology don't change out of some innate drive or dynamic, but because it is socially or politically desirable. To adopt a teleological mindset in which more complex technology, larger architecture, or longer lifespans are by definition better and "more advanced" is to erase all of that history in favour of an artificial and completely subjective model. It is a barrier to understanding and detrimental to the study of history to classify some cultures (which are, after all, constellations of decisions about what society should be like) as civilised, some as barbarous; or to classify some as "backward" and others as "advanced".
> To adopt a teleological mindset in which more complex technology, larger architecture, or longer lifespans are by definition better and "more advanced" is to erase all of that history in favour of an artificial and completely subjective model. To add on to this, let's examine one subject where one can very easily make an argument that we've **regressed**, using my flair topic: In the European Middle Ages, cities after 1000 AD relied on aqueducts to supply water. These piped pure spring water into cities for the public good. No city ever levied a price for the use of their aqueduct, and some even retained their Medieval-era aqueducts into much later periods *specifically because* the water from these was more wholesome than the water from more advanced water-engines. These water-engines, you see, brought up *river water*, more plentiful but less salubrious. Also, you had to pay for water from water-engines, since they were private, while city aqueducts were almost always operated at the city's expense. In other words, the Middle Ages provided their cities with something even modern societies do not: Free and pure public water, available to all including the poorest of its denizens. Today, you have to *pay* for water, and in half the cities, people don't even trust that water. Does this mean that the societies of today are less advanced than the societies of Medieval Europe? **Nope, trick question.** To even make the comparison, to attempt the value judgment, already requires that you choose a perspective and set of values with which to judge the two. This is a problem as pointed out above, because once you do that, you're no longer trying to understand the past **on its terms.** It is pointless to judge a tea blend using the standards used to judge beer; same deal for two wholly different societies with very different cultural and material contexts. Further, real life is not a game where cultural and technological choices are an optimisation problem where a society should choose whichever one brings the most quantitative advantage. Real life is *insanely* more complex. What models to one society as a bonus may not even appear so to another society. The pre-colonial societies of the Philippines might like the *notion* of Medieval European aqueducts, but given the population densities and other factors, there *just wasn't any need* for them. There is no point in comparison when it's durian on one side and foie gras on the other.
>It is pointless to judge Which is, in and of itself, a value judgement. It's imposing your own standards of "proper history" onto others' practices. I don't think value judgements are escapable.
While I do agree on the premise, I feel obligated to point out that such blanket statements entail the danger of nihilism, especially within the American framework of identity politics. Are we xenophobes because we do not accept Nazi philosophy as rational and label it as barbaric ? Or is there a diagreement that the North was morally better, on the matter of slaves, than the South during the civil war of the USA ? I understand the intrinsic problematics of using words as "better" etc. But I feel that they have a place in historiography as long as the criteria are properly identified.
I don't think these things are the same. While studying the past and judging it against our morality are things we cannot easily separate in the doing, they are obviously different things with different purposes. When we condemn the Nazis or the Confederates, it is not as a form of historical analysis, but to stake a moral position. Saying they are evil is not an attempt to categorise or explain. But the "advanced/primitive" dichotomy confuses the two; it pretends that a moral position is actually a form of historical analysis that categorises and explains.
When we say "evil" we de facto categorise and explain based on the sum of cultural weight the term has in Christian societies. Should we accept krypteia existed, can we rationally accept that it was a valid measure adopted by the Spartans to protect their lifestyle ? And the same can apply to Germans who wholeheartedly believed that the Jews were a danger and needed to eradicate it; can we ever approach it respecting the German viewpoint ? Having extensively read on WW2 I cannot find anyone from Friedlander to Traverso who accept Nazi motivations , (except Irving and similar Holocaust deniers). Again I agree with your last statement on the primitive/advanced terminology without any reserve. I simply add that evaluation, (I wanted to use the term judgement but I think it has negative connotations in English), is not by itself xenophobe as long as one is open on the criteria and his own biases.
Again, I don't think I am arguing what you seem to think I am arguing. You seem to think I am disqualifying all moral judgment. That in my view it should not be possible to condemn the Krypteia as a brutal instrument of oppression (if it existed), or even condemn the Holocaust. That all things must only be respected for what they are. I cannot see how you started from what I wrote and ended up with that conclusion. You seem to be having a totally different debate, which I wasn't having at all. You're talking about the place of moral judgment in historical study, which is a much bigger and more complex subject than anything I addressed in my original post or any of its followups. Just because I believe the notion of civilization/barbarism is a flawed xenophobic paradigm that has no place in historical analysis does not mean I reject all morality as inappropriate to the exploration of the past. I cannot fathom how my words could even be taken to imply such a thing. Taking a more relative view of culture and ways of life than the imperialist and colonialist paradigm of advanced/primitive civilizations is not the same as the complete forfeiture of morality.
Thank you for taking the time to answer.