Maybe we should spend more time thinking about how the ancient Romans dealt with the problem of globalization. As I understand it one of the key objections to globalization is that it tends to increase wealth and homogenize societies. The result is that older ways of life are trampled under foot by the newer and less authentic cultures. This is a problem that the ancient Romans dealt with. In the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Ancient Near East (and long before that) Greek culture spread around the Mediterranean world. In the wake of the Punic Wars the Roman Republic found itself at the center of this Hellenized world. New ideas and new wealth rolled in to Rome.<\/p>\n
The Romans dealt with the pressure that the global culture placed upon it with ritual. If you look at the various rituals of the Roman Republic, what one finds is that they consist of re-enactments of cultural practices from the earliest days of the Republic. Some examples: carrying a new wife across the threshold re-enacted the practice of carrying off the women of neighboring settlements as captive wives, marriage ceremonies involved the symbolic eating a very plain and ancient kind of bread, certain contracts required the presence of scales long after coinage made scales commercially irrelevant, certain priests of the state religion were hedged about with taboos that in effect required that they live as the Romans of a much earlier time lived, parades and festivals involved the images of Roman heroes from the pristine Roman past, and so on and so on. To be sure, some of the public rituals and spectacles of the Roman Republic also celebrated the new global culture, such as the triumphs of victorious generals, which involved long parades of spoils from foreign lands. Still, Romans used ritual as a way of preserving their ancient cultural ways in the face of an attractive, homogenized, Hellenistic global culture.<\/p>\n
The Roman example suggests that ritual is about preserving ancient cultural identity in the face of innovation. In a sense, Mormons have engaged in these sorts of rituals as well, the most dramatic examples being various pioneer-related activities like 24th of July Parades and pioneer trek outings for the youth. What is interesting, however, is the extent to which these sorts of history-affirming rituals have increasingly been abandoned, or at least deemphasized as the Church has grown globally. Rather, we prefer the rituals of religious ordinances. Of course our ordinances also consist in the re-enactment of ancient stories: the baptism of Christ, the last supper, the fall and redemption of Adam and Eve, etc. These stories, however, are ultimately about placing Latter-day Saints in cosmic rather than civic history. In that sense, they surf along the crest of globalization offering universal relevance, rather than standing as islands of cultural integrity against its corrosive force.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maybe we should spend more time thinking about how the ancient Romans dealt with the problem of globalization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}