The Western historical tradition, because of its materialist fetish, sees continuity in material, institutional or even ethnic terms. ... The real continuity, however, is in the Social Myth, whatever manifestation that may take - and in the ability to work in that context, no matter how the externals of the Myth may change over time. Antiquity can be found today alive and well in a Greek village church far more than in some stuffy English university Classics department.
What has been said above was not meant to "revise" the historical record, but to ask the vital question of what the historical record actually is, given that we can talk in terms of "alternatives" that are at times diametrically opposed. Does this mean that we should revert to relativism? This is certainly an attractive solution to the problem. But relativism, far from being politically correct, becomes the tool of an exclusive Western historical tradition whereby everything can be accepted, simply because that supposedly superior tradition tells us that it can be. So should we instead be searching for Truth within the context of an "open" system of objective or fallibilistic speculation? Once again, however, we encounter a problem: is there any such thing as an "open" system? While the Western speculative tradition rejects "closed" speculative systems such as theology, it proclaims its superiority by "opening" the system, only to have created a new illusive god, objective Truth, that must essentially close the system again.
