Re:The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Ow...
by Funes- on Friday September 04, 2020 @01:14PM
(#24376854)
>cultural/ethnic mixing
Those two, as far as I know, are the same thing. I know biological "race" has some negative connotations, but I guess you could also say "ecotype" to refer to roughly the same thing, which I reckon was what you were trying to do--correct me if I'm wrong.
Re:The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Ow...
by leetcrew on Friday September 04, 2020 @02:04PM
(#24377393)
I think culture and ethnicity are not exactly the same, but I couldn't tell you specifically what the difference is. I don't mean anything terribly specific here, just looking for a convenient way to express the set of things that are different between one group of people and another, aside from the political borders they happen to live within. as a weird example, if china conquered half of france, we would still consider the people that lived there to be french, not chinese. if a single chinese family moved to france, we would probably consider them to be french after a certain number of generations. but if many chinese families moved to france and integrated with the existing society, we would consider that society to be not entirely french or chinese, but something new.
AFAIK, the argument over when the western empire fell is not so much about the facts, so much as the meaning of the word "fall". it's inherently arbitrary to point to the "end" of a civilization with routine violent regime changes, varying degrees of centralized control, continuous contraction/expansion of borders, and cultural/ethnic mixing from the territories. everything we think of as "roman" was constantly in flux. if you look solely at centralized political/military power, the western empire clearly fell in the late 400s AD. if you look at cultural influence, you might argue it lives on today in the catholic church.