The Seba library treats Inherited Conglomerate in 8 passages, across 1 author (including E.R. Dodds).
We too have witnessed the slow disintegration of an inherited conglomerate, starting among the educated class but now affecting the masses almost everywhere, yet still very far from complete.
Dodds explicitly universalizes the concept beyond antiquity, arguing that modern Western civilization is undergoing an identical process of inherited-belief disintegration, thereby giving the term contemporary diagnostic urgency.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951thesis
In a material sense the Inherited Conglomerate did not in the end perish by disintegration; large portions of it were left standing through the centuries, a familiar, shabby, rather lovable façade, until one day the Christians pushed the facade over.
Dodds argues that the Inherited Conglomerate survived not through vital belief but through structural inertia, persisting as cultural facade until Christianity displaced it, revealing the vacuity beneath.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951thesis
In discarding the Inherited Conglomerate, many people discarded with it the religious restraints that had held human egotism on the leash.
Dodds identifies the social cost of rationalist critique: the Inherited Conglomerate, however intellectually discredited, had served as the moral container for collective egotism, and its dissolution unleashed antinomian individualism.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951thesis
That these men nevertheless accepted the idea of inherited guilt and deferred punishment is due to that belief in family solidarity which Archaic Greece shared with other early societies and with many primitive cultures to-day.
Dodds traces the archaic doctrine of inherited guilt — a core constituent of the Conglomerate — to cross-cultural beliefs in family solidarity, showing its roots in collective rather than individual moral identity.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
“character is destiny,” similarly dismisses by implication the whole set of archaic beliefs about inborn luck and divine temptation.
Heraclitus’s rationalist maxims are shown to constitute a direct assault on the belief-structures of the Inherited Conglomerate, particularly its archaic doctrines of fate and inherited moral liability.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
it implies the archaic belief in inherited guilt, which in the Hellenistic Age had begun to be a discredited superstition.
Dodds situates the belief in inherited guilt as an archaic stratum within the Conglomerate whose intellectual discrediting in the Hellenistic period marks a key phase in the Conglomerate’s dissolution.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
the faith in ritual catharsis was far too deeply rooted in the popular mind for Plato to propose its complete elimination.
Plato’s tactical conservatism toward ritual catharsis illustrates how even critical philosophers were constrained by the Conglomerate’s hold on popular psychology and could only seek to regulate rather than abolish it.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
There was a comparable gap in the nineteenth century between the breakdown of the belief in Christianity among intellectuals and the rise of spiritualism and similar movements in the semi-educated classes.
Dodds observes a recurrent historical pattern in which intellectual disenchantment with an inherited conglomerate is followed by compensatory irrationalist movements in the semi-educated population.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951aside