“Our Democracy is better than yours. Our Freedom is Freer than yours. ‘Cos we started it. We thought of it first. NAH NAH NAH.”

That is the attitude that we seem to bring to many otherwise sensible and ‘grown-up‘ discussions.

Playing the game of “we did it first“, it gets tiresome and very old very quickly. We seem to forget, on an awe inspiringly regular basis, that ideas, wherever they originated, become public property once they hit the public arena. Yet, still we persist in using this vapidly childish argument as a means of shutting down argument.

This, sadly is a classic method used by many blog invaders. It takes many forms, if it is not about politics, it’s about civilisation, or art, or philosophy, or literature or ice cream (need I go on?). It doesn’t matter much what the subject of the argument is, the form remains the same annoying, finger-pointing piece of utter nonsense.

I remember an interesting discussion, some twenty years ago now, between an Italian friend, a Greek friend and myself. Already it sounds like one of those dubious jokes. The Italian friend, let’s call him Umberto, was waxing lyrical about the achievements of the Roman Empire, while Alex, the Greek friend, was shouting him down with the Glories of Ancient Greece. The discussion deteriorated to the point that Alex told Umberto that basically all positive things in civilisation are the products of Greek culture, while all the negative stuff is the legacy of the bastard Romans. At this point, having kept my mouth comprehensively shut so far, I put in that we mustn’t forget the contribution of say the Phoenicians, or the great and ancient cultures of the Chinese, the kingdoms of Benin, Ur, Assyria, Egypt…to name but a few. Whereupon Alex turned to me angrily and told me I shouldn’t speak since ‘my lot’ were roundly smashed at Marathon and Salamina.

Great argument, don’t you think? I just laughed and told him my lot, as such weren’t there at the time, and even if they were, it would be no skin off my nose. And as you’ll notice I didn’t even include the Persians in my examples of other great cultures.

This form of argument would be harmless banter, though annoying, were it not for the tragic fact that we conduct our global politics in the same way. As if all history has to teach us is who was the highest scorer in a game of sports.

Oh the fun we have.