re: #171 Sol Berdinowitz

Tacitus, in his famous work describing the Germans to his fellow Romans, tried to state that the so-called Germanic “barbarians” had managed to maintain those very virtues that he bemoaned had disappeared in his contemporary Rome, and whose disappearance ultimately led to its downfall.

I am trying to agree with you here.

my point is that one of the things that makes Germas so German was that period of isolation from the currents of society, mostly dominated and dictated by Rome, in the last centuries BC.

I think we honestly disagree: You seem to think that there’s some remnant of German culture from pre-Roman times that is significant in some way in modern German culture. I am saying it is not, and, moreover, I generally disagree with the entire idea of a national characteristic that is in any way separable from their ‘society’; your claim that they have a certain society because it restrains their culture is, to me, just creating an arbitrary taxonomy whereby one thing is society and the other culture.

I don’t disagree totally with the idea of national characteristics, but I think that they are non-monolith, transferable, and selective. I also think that a lot of the folk wisdom, like Germans being efficient, is demonstrably untrue; German workers have a middling value-added per worker hour, beaten out by the US. A lot of German rules, like those governing building, are very conservative and inefficient. That’s why I keep comparing these things to horoscopes, they tend to fall apart if you pick at them and you can generally apply them to a totally different country with ease.