PEDERASTY ISN’T GREEK TO POST-TALIBAN AFGHANS, 2002
Edmund Marlowe, 14 January 2022
Truly the modern Afghans and ancient Greeks are cultural kin in important respects. This article ought to be food for thought for the millions fond of using the almost meaningless term "western", especially English-speaking peoples who use it to foster a myth that they belong to an “us” that includes the Greeks, versus a “them”, in which Near Eastern and Central Asian peoples are often seen as the prime opponent. Most startlingly, we see here the Afghans attached (probably without interruption since before Alexander founded their second city) to a socio-cultural practice accorded great importance by the Greeks and reviled more than anything under the sun by the whole anglosphere. That of course has much broader implications concerning beliefs about the social roles of sex and of men and boys. But it is not only that. Behold the Afghan and Greek boys in these images. They look similar, faces, haircuts and (colour aside) dress (which of course has broader cultural implications). Certainly, they look more like each other than most anglo boys.
I only say “almost” meaningless, because I have to concede that belief in the myth of being “western”, despite its inherent self-contradictions, has generated for now a certain pernicious reality we would be better off without.
The "west" is a very woolly term, but can't it usefully refer to societies who have self-consciously aligned themselves with the combined Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions?
Surely it's meaningful to talk about a "western" canon of art and literature. Harold Bloom read every damn word ever written on planet earth, and he certainly found the concept useful.
In the sixties there was, briefly, a genuine and exciting desire to open the "west" up to the "east", particularly in matters spiritual, ie Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism etc. It referred to something meaningful, and one of the great tragedies of our time is that the movement foundered while politics swallowed all.
The Greeks, the Romans, the French, the British, the Americans -- they've all had a shot at being the engine room of the "west", this amorphous rough beast, this "myth". The now-widespread violent hatred of pederasty you rightly attribute to the Anglosphere is a product of the British-American dominance of the "west" and the world over the past two centuries. That puritanical homophobia is, I would say, a very western cultural product. One can trace its origins all the way back to Plato.
Still, perhaps it's impolite to talk of the dead like this.
Edmund Marlowe, 16 January 2022
You make a good point about Plato, but it’s also very revealing. I think it is rather typical of believers in the “west” to have Greek philosophy and, above all, Plato in mind when they think of themselves up as cultural heirs of the Greeks. And yet Plato was an oddball in no way representative of ancient Greece, not least because of his peculiar and unhellenic hostility to sex. There was a great deal more to being Greek than the writings of some Athenian philosophers. Shouldn’t we also remember that for several centuries after the fall of Rome, it was Arabic scholars who were preserving and absorbing Greek writings of every description, centuries when the English were totally illiterate apart from the odd priest and (so far as is known) not a single man in England could read Greek?
If only your definition of the “west” as societies combining “Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions” held up in practice, I would have to admit it had validity as a term (while still lamenting its overuse), but it simply doesn’t. To give one stark example, how can Russians be logically excluded from a west thus defined, as they invariably are? Compared with, say, the English, they are much more Greek (their script was a huge gateway to a flood of Greek ideas), much more Roman (they practise Roman law, by far the most important legacy of Rome) and more Christian too.
The real reason the Anglosphere excludes the Russians from their idea of the west is also very revealing: it is purely political and thus has nothing to do with your proposed definition. It has suited the United States and its principal political cronies very well to popularise a term that makes a supposed cultural "us" of their alliance, and a "them" of its opponents. It is therefore a propagandist lie. With the anglosphere responsible, as you say, for the violent hatred of pederasty over the past two centuries, I contend it is also a malign one.
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"There is a boy across the river with a rectum like peach, but alas I cannot swim."
Nice quote -- sums up the work of gay historians and social commentators perfectly.
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