Words Worth Noting - November 24, 2022

“Over the centuries, historians and philosophers have put together a certain idea about how Western civilization developed. It began in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Arabs developed our numbers, the Phoenicians the first phonetic alphabet, the Greeks democracy, the Romans large-scale government, the Hebrews a single god and a system of morals, and the Christians a spirituality based on redemption and grounded in a vast international church. The Roman Empire fell and the Dark Ages descended, until the arrival of the Renaissance, then the Age if Science and the Enlightenment, colonialism, the romantic era, modernity, and perhaps something we now call the postmodern age. In this sketchy account, humanity passes civilization down the centuries like a baton in a relay race…. This account remains, up the present, the essential background to all discussions of western culture, even for those who dispute it. Critics may argue with this or that part of it, or rewrite bits of it: still, the master narrative remains, because we have not concocted a credible substitute.”

Robert Fulford The Triumph of Narrative