"Live Long and Prosper" - Meaning

[Christopher]

I am still not convinced that there was such a thing as a Spartan culture, aside from being suicidal maniacal warriors, like the Incas I think who once a year played a game of something that looked a bit like American football and the losers were executed. There were also altars for human sacrifices that according to European witnesses were covered with several inches of dried blood!!!! Some cultures!!!

You can't trust how a culture is portrayed by its conquerors, who have a vested interest in making it sound evil and worthless so that their conquest comes off as justified. And it's not like Europeans at the time didn't have a lot of cruel and bloody customs of their own, like the Inquisition.

The question is, where does our idea of Spartan culture come from? Is it from the Spartans' own writings, or is it Athenian propaganda meant to make the Spartans sound inferior?

 

[Swedish Borg]

You can't trust how a culture is portrayed by its conquerors, who have a vested interest in making it sound evil and worthless so that their conquest comes off as justified. And it's not like Europeans at the time didn't have a lot of cruel and bloody customs of their own, like the Inquisition.

The question is, where does our idea of Spartan culture come from? Is it from the Spartans' own writings, or is it Athenian propaganda meant to make the Spartans sound inferior?

Well, had the Spartans had their own (written) culture, we wouldn't have had to rely on other peoples' testimonies, they could have spoken for themselves.
The same thing happened with the Gauls, they didn't have much of a literature, so what we know about them comes mainly from other cultures.

 

[Christopher]

Well, had the Spartans had their own (written) culture, we wouldn't have had to rely on other peoples' testimonies, they could have spoken for themselves.

Why we lack information is not the question. We never have complete information on anything, which is why the first rule of studying history is not to blindly accept the truth of any single account. A historical document is not evidence of objective fact; it's only evidence of what the creator of the document believed, or what they wanted to convince others to believe. So any historical source needs to be interrogated and placed in context, not just uncritically swallowed. In short, don't believe everything you read.

It's a profoundly ugly thing to suggest that lack of written information about a culture is that culture's "fault," or is evidence of some inherent deficiency in a culture. There are many reasons why such records might not have been preserved, or might have been lost to history or deliberately destroyed by a people's enemies.

 

[1001001]

How did we get here?





Anything further to discuss regarding the Vulcan greeting?

 

[BK613]

It also does a disservice to historical inquiry to reduce Sparta's rise and fall over six centuries to a single sentence that seems to repeat more the pop culture idea of Sparta then any science.

 

[The Old Mixer]

How did we get here?

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[1001001]

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I was thinking more...

 

[The Old Mixer]

That works!

"This is not my beautiful forum!"

 

[Swedish Borg]

Sometimes it feels like we're a bunch of talking heads...

 

[Timewalker]

Sounds like "Live Long and Prosper" changed significantly between TOS and the Anti-Materialistic TNG.

You're assuming that Vulcan ideals were the same as Picard's ideals.

Apparently businesspeople on Earth/in Starfleet don't accept money in return for the work they do or the goods they produce. Picard interprets this as "we don't need money anymore" not long after Beverly decides she must acquire that hideous cloth on Farpoint Station and tells the Bandi merchant to "charge it to my account."

I've never seen any indication that Vulcans share Picard's notions. It just seems to be some of the Starfleet people in TNG and DS9 who think that permanently acquiring stuff is crass, disgusting, and downright uncivilized.

This is refuted by Beverly and her bolt of cloth and Ezri Tigan's family business.

So each culture has its own idea of what it means to prosper, and different subgroups of the larger culture have different ideas.

Don't forget that there is another one: "We come to serve."

To which the reply is, "Your service honors us."

So did Spartans, yet we still value Greek culture and philosophy.

Greece wasn't actually a country back then. It was a loose group of independent city-states that sometimes allied against outsiders, but more often tried to kill each other.

I am still not convinced that there was such a thing as a Spartan culture, aside from being suicidal maniacal warriors, like the Incas I think who once a year played a game of something that looked a bit like American football and the losers were executed. There were also altars for human sacrifices that according to European witnesses were covered with several inches of dried blood!!!! Some cultures!!!

Mayan. The Aztecs also did human sacrifices.

 

[Maurice]

I was taught a lot of BS when I was in high school...

To wit.

 

[Maurice]

I am still not convinced that there was such a thing as a Spartan culture, aside from being suicidal maniacal warriors, like the Incas I think who once a year played a game of something that looked a bit like American football and the losers were executed. There were also altars for human sacrifices that according to European witnesses were covered with several inches of dried blood!!!! Some cultures!!!

The customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group

Spartans had a culture all right. Even a reprehensible culture is still a culture.

 

[Christopher]

The customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group

Spartans had a culture all right. Even a reprehensible culture is still a culture.

Exactly. Culture is fundamental to any human population, and even many nonhuman species have demonstrated elements of culture, i.e. behavior that is taught from generation to generation rather than genetically inherited.

Saying that any group of humans "has no culture" is an assertion that they are subhuman, and that is an attitude that has no place in any legitimate discussion of history.

 

[Swedish Borg]

Exactly. Culture is fundamental to any human population, and even many nonhuman species have demonstrated elements of culture, i.e. behavior that is taught from generation to generation rather than genetically inherited.

Saying that any group of humans "has no culture" is an assertion that they are subhuman, and that is an attitude that has no place in any legitimate discussion of history.

So maybe it's the word "culture" that is inadequate then because when people say "culture" most of the time it's not something that just makes you sick.

 

[Christopher]

So maybe it's the word "culture" that is inadequate then because when people say "culture" most of the time it's not something that just makes you sick.

There is no such thing as a culture that has never done anything bad, and there is no such thing as a culture that has nothing good in it. American culture includes centuries of racism and genocide alongside all the good stuff like democracy and civil rights. Pretending that your own culture is faultless and pure is sheer hypocrisy, no matter what culture you're from.

History is not about picking winners and losers. It's not about convincing yourself you're better than other people. It's about understanding the factors that shape civilization, the good and bad alike. It's about understanding that our own history and heritage has as much bad in it as anyone else's, and about learning from it so we can try to do better. I believe I have ancestors on my mother's side who fought for the Confederacy; I may even have ancestors who owned slaves, though I don't know. I know my father's ancestors were in the US from the 1630s onward and thus I most likely have ancestors complicit in violence or genocide against Native Americans. There is a lot of bad in my own history, so I know I have no moral high ground to denounce anyone else's history or heritage. Everyone on Earth probably has ancestors who did evil things. So it's pointless to dwell on the evils and ugliness of the past. We should instead direct our energies toward avoiding their recurrence in the present and the future.

 

[BK613]

View attachment 22588
To wit.

I still have my copy from college.

edit: Only my cover looks like this one.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Even chimpanzee colonies have been shown to have some "culture," meaning some learned behaviors not found in other chimp colonies. It's inconceivable for humans not to have some kind of culture.

 

[BK613]

Even chimpanzee colonies have been shown to have some "culture," meaning some learned behaviors not found in other chimp colonies. It's inconceivable for humans not to have some kind of culture.

And don't get me started on orca and other dolphins...

 

[Swedish Borg]

Orcas are not dolphins, they're killer whales.

They seem benign but they're actually very dangerous.

 

[Christopher]

Orcas are not dolphins, they're killer whales.

They seem benign but they're actually very dangerous.

Orcas are dolphins, a subgenus of the family Delphinidae.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_dolphin

Oceanic dolphins or Delphinidae are a widely distributed family of dolphins that live in the sea. Thirty extant species are described. They include several big species whose common names contain "whale" rather than "dolphin", such as the Globicephalinae (round-headed whales, such as the orca and the pilot whales).

And all dolphins are very dangerous. Despite their differing reputations in human popular culture, orcas and other dolphins are behaviorally quite similar -- generally benign toward humans, but fierce predators prone to violence among themselves, as well as capable of kinder, gentler social behavior.

I've long found it interesting that humans and dolphins are much kinder to each other than they are to their own species. I figure it's because our environments and needs are so different that we don't see each other as rivals, and so our conflict instincts don't kick in. I think that bodes well for interaction with aliens (though less so in fictional universes where aliens are humanoid).