Fireside this week! Apologies for having two of these in a row, but as I noted last week, I’ve had some unexpected (but good) travel, which has made a bit of havoc in my schedule and I am still trying to catch back up. Nevertheless, I wanted to use this week’s fireside to muse a bit on a topic I think I may give a fuller treatment to later this year, which is the disconnect between what it seems many ‘radical traditionalists’ imagine traditional Roman values to be and actual Roman cultural values.
Now, of course it isn’t surprising to see Roman exemplars mobilized in support of this or that value system, as people have been doing that since the Romans. But I think the disconnect between how the Romans actually thought and the way they are imagined to have thought by some of their boosters is revealing, both of the roman worldview and often the intellectual and moral poverty of their would-be-imitators.
In particular, the Romans are sometimes adduced by the ‘RETVRN’ traditionalist crowd as fundamentally masculine, ‘manly men’ – ‘high testosterone’ fellows for whom ‘manliness’ was the chief virtue. Romans (and Greeks) are supposed to be super-buff, great big fellows who most of all value strength. One fellow on Twitter even insisted that the chief Roman value was VIRILITAS, which was quite funny, because virilitas (‘manhood, manliness’) is an uncommon word in Latin, but when it appears it is mostly as a polite euphemism for ‘penis.’ Simply put, this vision bears little relation to actual Roman values. Roman encomia or laudationes (speeches in praise of something or someone) don’t usually highlight physical strength, ‘high testosterone’ (a concept the Romans, of course, did not have) or even general ‘manliness.’ Roman statues of emperors and politicians may show them as reasonably fit, but they are not ultra-ripped body-builders or Hollywood hearththrobs.
So what were the core Roman values?
The most important quality for a Roman man to have was virtus. Virtus derives from the Latin vir (‘man’ as distinct from a mere male)1 and so in the narrow sense means ‘manliness,’ although by the time we have Roman literature (around 200BC) the meaning has drifted enough so that women can have virtus too (e.g. Cic Ad Fam. 14.1.1, 14.11; Juv. 6.166-9). Instead, virtus stands for a constellation of values that were desirable in a man (and often in women too!). At its core, virtus is the animating force of personality that impels one to great deeds: it is ambition, drive and a nearly reckless courage, combined with the obstinacy and determination to persevere through difficulties, through fear. The best translation is often not ‘virtue’ but rather something closer to ‘valor’ as virtus is what makes someone good in battle (and other endeavors), but it’s more about courage than skill.2
This resounds from our sources: virtus is this forward-pushing, animating intense thing; it is bright and burning (as honor can be as well). It is the courage to charge at the enemy and the courage to withstand the terror of an enemy’s attack, but it is also the drive that leads one to run for office, to write a poem, to design a building. Military valor is the clearest, surest, truest test (a certamen, ‘test’ or discremen, ‘separating point’) of one’s virtus, but virtus can be shown in other fields of human endeavor, including intellectual fields. The key that connects them is courage and drive.
And goodness do the Romans value virtus. My go-to quote to make this point to students is always Alcmena’s declaration from Plautus’ Amphitryon (2.2.18-23), “virtus is the best prize, virtus assuredly surpasses all things: it protects and preserves liberty, safety, life, property and parents, country and children. Virtus has everything in itself, all good things come to him who has virtus.” Importantly, virtus is a product if the soul (the animus), a part of the inner-most person, cultivated but not necessarily learned: it is a thing proved as much as developed.
Of course this kind of impulsive force could be potentially destructive. Sallust has a good line (Sall. Cat. 11.1) that “ambition (ambitio) […] while a vice is nearer to virtus. For the good and the indolent both long for glory, honor and power; but the former advance by the true path, while those who who lack good arts [bonae artes, ‘good education’ ‘the liberal arts’], rely on craft and deceit.” It’s those bonae artes that keep virtus from becoming mere ambitio, which confine it, channel it, direct it in productive, laudable ways.
And indeed, most of the rest of the Roman virtues take the form of constraints on virtus, focusing it. Cicero has a neat passage in the Second Catilinarian where he lists off what he feels are the greatest virtues, contrasted with their matching vices. The first he pulls out is pudor, followed quickly by pudicitia; both words (the later derives from the first) have the core idea of a sense of shame: that fear and a sense of shame keeps one from doing inappropriate things. It often gets translated as ‘modesty’ or ‘chastity’ and it includes those ideas, but extends to non-sexual shame as well. You may wish to do great deeds, but that sense of shame should keep you from doing terrible deeds for fear of the accusing glances of your peers (Rome is a horizontal-honor-culture).
Naturally, Cicero also breaks out pietas, which is the due respect one owes family, elders and the gods (and gives us the word ‘piety’). To be pius is to be dutiful towards parents, country, elders, and the gods, putting their needs before your own (thus Aeneas, saving his father from burning Troy is famously pius Aeneas). Fides also makes Cicero’s list: this is ‘faith, trustworthiness.’ Fundamentally it is the quality of keeping one’s word and bargains – important in a Roman culture that runs on the reciprocal obligations of patrons and clients. The Romans talked so much about fides in their diplomacy that it sometimes annoyed the Greeks (Diod. Sic. 23.1.2), but this was a core value too which restrained virtus: sometimes the rush to action must be restrained by the need to keep one’s word.
Cicero doesn’t list another common Roman word in this context, sapientia, but he ends up assembling it instead out of its component parts. Sapientia is ‘wisdom’ and general good sense, the prudence that comes with age. Cicero gives us a bunch components of it, though: constantia (‘restraint, self-control’), aequitas (‘justice, fairness, calmness’), temperantia (‘temperance, sobriety, moderation’), and prudentia (‘prudence, foresight’). These are things we tend to learn as we grow older and it is not an accident that the Romans thought that generally speaking that older men should lead, to temper the virtus of the young. These traits that Cicero is breaking out are also the standard ones that do appear in Roman eulogies and encomiastic literature: men (and women) get praised not for their ‘manliness,’ but more frequently for aequitas, prudentia, constantia, pietas or good fides, for being diligens (diligent, careful) and so on.
Notice also how these ‘constraining virtues’ which channel virtus are things which can be learned or trained – they are products of discipline (Latin: disciplina), both self-discipline and discipline imposed from without. Indeed, in a military context, the Romans understand virtus and disciplina (‘courage’ and then ‘military discipline’) to be forever in tension in the good soldier: the fiery desire to be at the enemy restrained by the need to follow orders. The best Roman soldier is like an attack dog, straining at the edge of his leash – that disciplina – waiting for the general (the older man with that sapientia) to let go at the right moment. In civilian life, these qualities – fairness, justice, prudence, temperance, self-restraint – are precisely what the bonae artes are supposed to teach, while in military life, they’re taught by (and also become) disciplina.3
A person with virtus – that drive, courage and perseverance – in turn is going to do deeds (facta or gesta), which is to say accomplishments. Of course the highest accomplishments for the Romans were generally military accomplishments, but all sorts of other achievements could be facta or gesta too; the process of producing a facta was labor (lah-bor rather than lay-bor) and being eager for and patient with labor – either physical or mental – was an indicator of virtus.
So virtus, channeled by the other virtues, leads to admirable deeds. I’m avoiding saying ‘good deeds,’ because greatness rather than goodness is emphasized here, though the deeds must not be crimes, facta (‘deeds’) not facinora (‘outrages, misdeeds’) or scelera (‘crimes’); they ought to serve the community. That record of deeds in turn produces brief things, like flashes of light: gloria (‘glory’), fama (‘fame’), and laus (‘praise’) and a more important, longer term quality: honos or honor (same word, different forms; it means honor). Honor was a thing the Romans felt they could almost see or feel, an emotional force around a person of great worth (great dignus). In Roman society, the social demand to defer to an individual understood to have greater honor was strong (and so, of course, everyone wants to prove themselves to be that sort of person).
A person with honor had an expectation of a certain inviolability, a sort of social force-field around them which was their dignitas (literally: ‘worthiness’) – that their achievements had put them above, for instance, petty insults or injuries. An exceptional concentration of honor, so much that it could cow almost anyone into deference, was termed auctoritas (‘authority’), a quality in the Republic wielded collectively by the Senate (the auctoritas Senatus) and in the imperial period by well-regarded emperors (like Augustus). We might view Augustus’ claim that he ruled more by auctoritas than by force somewhat cynically, but I suspect it was often actually true: Augustus had achieved exceptional facta through his virtus (winning the civil wars, expanding Rome’s borders, reorganizing the Roman government, then presiding over a long period of peace and prosperity) and so most Romans would have felt the tremendous pressure of his intense honor to defer to him. And of course recognizing that a person is possessed of honor, dignitas and auctoritas, that itself is a quality of the constraining virtues.
And just to stress one more time: the Romans understood all of these quality to be active in men and women. Certainly some were considered more important for men (strength, courage) and others for women (modesty, chastity), because Roman society was very much a patriarchy (in a very literal sense: rule by fathers). But Roman women absolutely could demonstrate virtus and sapientia and in doing so accumulate honor and some Roman women (Cornelia4 and Livia come to mind immediately) came to wield so much honor as to demand praise or deference from even elite men.
The good Roman man isn’t full of machismo, but rather is a bubbling cauldron of energy and drive (that virtus), bound tightly by all of those other virtues so as to accomplish great deeds (rather than great times) and in the process to create honor. The sense of intense self-restraint, self-control is central to understanding how the Romans thought about good men (and, again, good women too).
I may come back to this topic later this year for a fuller discussion, but I hope you can see the values-and-worldview landscape here is a lot more complex. If you want to read more about this, the books to grab are: C. Barton, Roman Honor: the Fire in the Bones (2001), and two books by J.E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts (2006) – already recommended in this space – and Empire of Honor (1997).
On to recommendations!
I don’t have many new recommendations for this week since we just did another Fireside last week. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that Drachinifel had a two hour long life-stream from the dry-docking (for repairs) of museum ship USS New Jersey (BB-62).
For this week’s book recommendation, I’m excited to recommend friend and fellow-UNC-alum R.K.D. Colby, An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South (2024). While there is a lot of scholarship on slavery and slave-trading in the United States, Colby’s temporal focus here on the slave-trade in the South during the Civil War is a fascinating one, looking at the trade in enslaved people that is taking place as the Confederacy and the institution of slavery it was created to defend crumbles all around.
Colby uses a mix of official records, letters and narratives to build a sense of the trade: the motivations that led people to trade in human beings even on the very edge of ruin, the economic concerns that dominated their thinking, the (cruel) conditions that prevailed and finally the human cost of the trade (especially the scattering of families) that continued right up to the end of the Civil War. Fundamentally, Colby’s enslaver-subjects treat the slave trade both as a business venture where their primary motive is profit and little, if any, concern is given to the suffering it causes, but also as a barometer of their faith in the Confederate slaver’s-republic’s cause: when confederate armies are winning, the price of human beings rise. As they lose, prices fall and slaveholders scramble to move their captive humans to ‘safer’ regions, further away from armies bearing the Flag that Makes You Free.
Colby adroitly uses narrative, telling the stories of individual slave-traders and enslaved people to explain how the system worked, which serves to put a human face on the narrative, rather than merely treating it as numbers. Of course this is crucial with any treatment of slavery: the effort to humanize the people that slavery seeks to commodify. And of course that narrative is peppered with quotes from letters and diaries, so Colby doesn’t have to tell you what the slave-traders thought they were doing or why: they tell you, in their own words.
Colby writes very well; the book is both approachable for the lay-reader and also just frankly interesting and readable (though it is hardly an uplifting read; the grotesqueness of the ‘peculiar institution’ in its final days is very much on display here). I tore through this book’s 344 pages (bibliography, index and all) over the course of one plane trip; it wasn’t fun reading, but it was gripping. The book has some black-and-white illustrations (of people involved and of places, the latter very useful to get a sense of the spaces the trade takes place in) as well as a number of really helpful maps showing the key routes being used. Most importantly, this is a story that (as Colby himself notes) needs to be told and so well worth a read.
- Think of it as ‘man’ in the sense that ‘mensch’ is sometimes used, a mix of ‘he’s a real man’ and ‘he’s a gentleman.’
- Contrast Greek arete (ἀρετή), ‘excellence,’ which is much more about skill, strength and cunning than it is about bravery or purity of purpose.
- Note that disciplina is not a purely military idea either, but can also mean civilian teaching or training, self-study or a course of self-improvement as well as self-regulation
- Mother of the Gracchi
I rarely know what to say when it comes to Firesides; so I’ll leave in with an etymological note. The word ‘mensch’ comes from the Yiddish מענטש, (transliterates to the same mensch) which is derived from German. At least if we want to go back to Biblical Hebrew, you do have a similar construction of גִּבֹּרִ֛ים. Modern Hebrew translates it as ‘Gentlemen’, but the root is גבר, man, but used in a similar sort of way to mean a strong/dependable/honorable man, whereas you’d use the word איש to say if someone is biologically a man. Probably the most prominent use of the term in Biblical Hebrew comes from David’s “הַגִּבֹּרִ֛ים” (Usually translated as mighty ones) and seem to be some kind of picked company of champions.
Note also the etymologically related concept of גבורה, “valor”(-ish), a virtue word roughly analogous to Roman virtus. (Though AFAIU much more focused on martial skill and bravery).
I disagree about the meaning of גִּבֹּרִ֛ים in modern Hebrew. The main meaning of גיבורים (the modern way to write this word) is “heroes”, with some related meaninga in specific contexts (e.g. protagonists). I do not believe modern Hebrew has an equivalent of “gentelmen”, and usually the word is borrowed directly where needed (apart from a few phrases, where a translation of the phrase exist that does not make sense, such as the translation of “ladies and gentelmen” in addressing an audience – גבירותי ורבותי, where the word used to address the men means, literally, “my rabbis”).
Of course, this all refers to the Israeli dialect of Hebrew. Maybe those words have other meanings in other dialects, though I don’t think any other dialect is actually the main language of any group.
I understand that Romans don’t mention it explicitly, but would there be an implicitly needed physical aptitude in order to be considered virtuous ?
I mean, it later literature (starting in middle age literature, I guess, though I’m not that knowledgeable on the topic) the idea that physical traits embodies moral ones is so prevalent that it’s legit to ask what was the attitude of a society as prejudiced as the roman one on these aspects…
Considering that Roman citizens would have been, almost to a rounding error, military veterans and small-holding farmers, I imagine their physique would be a fair bit better than your average office worker/computer drone. And one can easily imagine how extreme physical disabilities — anything from severe seizures to immunodeficiency conditions to conditions like gastroparesis — could lead to someone dying too young to achieve much of anything in the ancient world. However, there are still figures like Emperor Claudius, who spoke with a stutter and had a limp but was extremely honored in his day (even if his rise to power was arguably an accident of timing). I don’t think it would be impossible for a Roman with a physical handicap to have virtus or achieve honor, merely a tougher road for them.
> I imagine their physique would be a fair bit better than your average office worker/computer drone
Exercise is great but what’s even better is reliable childhood nutrition, sanitation and vaccines.
Those give you greater potential strength, but if you spend all day sitting down you aren’t going to actualise your potential very much.
Hence, virtus!
It is explicitly stated that virtus is not about skill; the footnote contrasting it with arete even mentions strength. It is repeatedly emphasized that women can have virtus and achieve honor. Not said in so many words, but the description of how “eagerness for and patience with” the work of producing facta/gesta indicates virtus — that in my reading implies that craftsmanship in all its forms (ranging from literature and performance arts to metalworking) was recognized.
Classical mythology also includes figures like Hephaestus (a god with a physical disability) and Teiresias (blind prophet a.k.a. “cannot see the present but can see the future”).
“Contrast Greek arete (ἀρετή), ‘excellence,’ which is much more about skill, strength and cunning than it is about bravery or purity of purpose.”
Interesting how the army that we know drilled (the Romans) idealise the courage that the amateur militia of the Greeks were built off, whereas the Greeks idealise the skill that the Romans train.
both societies trying to use their culture to make up for what their army might not encourage?
As I understand it a soldier with arete should be multi faceted in the sense that he should not be a full time warrior; he should also be a poet and a philosopher and a musician (maybe even dabble in farming) in addition to being fierce when the battle comes. Whereas a soldier with virtus should be multi faceted in the sense that war requires multi faceted skills. Roman soldiers aren’t just expected to be fierce, they are expected to be restrained, to remember their job, to endure hard marches, to dig trenches and to go home and farm to feed the next generation of soldiers. I’m no expert so I might be misunderstanding the terms but I believe that in both cases they were idealizing what their own cultures produced, not each other.
To what degree does Nietzsche’s “master morality” accurately describe Roman virtues, in your reading?
Nietzsche, at least when writing Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals, isn’t very interested in the Romans (other than as dummies who let Christianity take over their Empire). The Nietzschean view of “master morality” is from the classical (ie pre Roman conquest) Greeks and from Dark Age/medieval northern European aristocracy.
He does find a match between some Roman values and his “master morality”, but the same applies to a lot of other cultures.
Given the overall quality of 19th century historiography, I wouldn’t be surprised if (but cannot prove whether) Nietzsche was misinterpreting his sources.
While 19th century classicists, philosophers, and historians had access to almost all the same classical texts we have today, and familiarity with them was more widespread, they sometimes missed important facts because of the way they approached the text. See for example how many people took Tacitus’ writings on the Germanic tribes for solemn fact, without pausing to consider that Tacitus spent no time in Germany himself and was to a large extent writing as a commentary on his view of Rome itself.
Brief interjection, this is precisely the type of rejoinder I use when people say that the Internet is bad for knowledge as a prior. The amount of context, fact checking, skepticism, and inquiry that an author is subject to is astounding.
If the RETVRN types had any intellectual basis, they’d be complaining not about how society is no longer dominated by Manly Men, but how it’s so stingy now with opportunities: such that ambition rarely ever results in deeds of honor any more.
I can’t help but come back to the academic job market–all the great intellectual achievements of a generation scattered over stony ground, and the intellectual virtus resulting in no great deeds, all because our society’s collective lack of civic-mindedness refuses to respect or support anything but the miserly and exploitative accumulation of wealth.
(Although, is this really so different from Rome-in-practice?)
“all the great intellectual achievements of a generation scattered over stony ground, and the intellectual virtus resulting in no great deeds, all because our society’s collective lack of civic-mindedness refuses to respect or support anything but the miserly and exploitative accumulation of wealth.”
I feel like “My job isn’t appreciated enough because society values money instead of my important work” is the sort of complaint nearly every profession makes in nearly every time period. Who doesn’t feel that way? Celebrities and data scientists I guess but I can’t think of anyone else.
Who else doesn’t feel that way? Hm. Maybe investment bankers? Copyright lawyers? Anyone who’s making a killing on the housing market these days? Anyone else whose job involves making a lot of money, either personally or on behalf of the people who have most of the money, I guess.
…
And yes, you can truthfully point out that “my job isn’t appreciated enough because society values money instead of my important work” is something a lot of people would say.
Tiercelet might reasonably reply to this by saying “yes, that’s the point.” When your society starts mono-focusing everything on “how much money can you make,” everyone else will start to feel cheated. The common laborers will feel overworked and exploited because they are. The specialist tradesmen and scholarly classes will feel as though they aren’t receiving enough respect or comfort in exchange for their hard and skilled work because they aren’t. They’ll all be complaining about this because, to mangle a phrase, “a falling meteor shower sinks all boats.” Everyone or nearly everyone is being affected at the same time and in much the same way.
Precisely. And because the quiet part should be obvious, this is the reason why economic systems other than capitalism, such as socialism , will never, ever, lose it’s appeal. The fact that capitalism explicitly rewards profits unevenly with respect to contributions, labor, and virtue, instead quite often favoring inherited wealth or anti social behavior, leads to *hatred*.
And to fully editorialize, this hatred can be focused to valid means, turned into a righteous drive to reform the system itself, resolving the discontinuity that drives the anger. That’s progressivism, or liberal socialism. Or it can be misplaced onto minorities, outcasts, individuals, “deviants”, without trying to change the system. that’s reactionism (?) or fascism.
While the economic system that’s supposed to replace capitalism is highly variable, in a core emotive sense the same discontinuity between the virtues of society and the qualities it rewards that leads to socialism also leads to fascism. The real distinction is if the person has values, beliefs, and knowledge that let them reject the system completely, or if they can’t and instead slowly or quickly slide into looking for people to blame for why things don’t work now, rather than accepting that our society is foundationally flawed.
And to fully editorialize, this hatred can be focused to valid means, turned into a righteous drive to reform the system itself, resolving the discontinuity that drives the anger. That’s progressivism, or liberal socialism. Or it can be misplaced onto minorities, outcasts, individuals, “deviants”, without trying to change the system. that’s reactionism (?) or fascism.
I think you make some good points elsewhere in this thread, but I have to disagree with this. I think one’s views about cultural deviance, ethnic minorities, etc., are more or less orthogonal and unrelated to one’s views about economics- it’s perfectly possible to support state ownership of the means of production, an economy geared to the interests of workers, a high measuring of state planning, etc., and also to support a conservative sexual morality, an ethnically homogeneous nation state, or a draconian criminal justice system.
Stated differently, not all socialism is liberal or progressive (historically, most of it isn’t). And if someone rejects “liberal socialism”, maybe it’s because they’re happy with the socialism, but reject the liberal/progressive bit. (this would more or less be me, although I don’t self identify as a conservative either- i’m more a ‘nationalist’ than a liberal or a conservative).
You might find this piece interesting- the take home message is that on a global level, there is no correlation between economic socialist views and culturally liberal-progressive views. The closest you see to a positive correlation is among educated people in western countries, but in many places there’s no correlation and in post-communist countries there’s actually a negative correlation.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/are-cultural-and-economic-conservatism-positively-correlated-a-largescale-crossnational-test/83AFEDEA5E004CF23631C5388E7C9F67
Hector, to be completely frank, if someone isn’t a libertarian socialist then they aren’t a socialist. The foundational values are antithetical. You also aren’t using terms precisely enough to instill confidence you know what you’re talking about; state ownership of the means of production *cannot be socialism as defined by Marx*.
It’s absolutely true that there is an ideology that purports to lead people to socialism through a vanguard of elites which will lead the people to a glorious, stateless future by using the state, but here’s the key-they’re liars. Vanguardists in practice have almost universally been three things. One, Authoritarian. Two, Reactionary. Three, quite literally just pedophiles.
The Soviet and Chinese communist parties were *infested* with child abusers on the highest levels, with some allegations clearly confirmed and acknowledged (Beria) others being more speculative (Stalin and Mao themselves are alleged to have underaged partners). Authoritarianism in general has a non-trivial association with open pedophilia, and Vanguards are no different.
I’m not reiterating this as poisoning the well, but to bring to focus that the Vanguardists are literally not even trying. It’s all just a deceptive veneer; no one who commits those types of crimes can be trusted to actually hold real beliefs. They’re just reactionary authoritarians who *say socialist things* so they can better exploit people.
Hence there are no authoritarian socialists. The ideology doesn’t actually exist. It appears to because economic and social statists can *lie*. In practice it’s just hierarchical exploitation by a state defined owning class, which isn’t socialism.
There’s other supporting evidence here. Authoritarian socialists primarily target libertarian socialists in their purges. Libertarian Socialists predate the authoritarian movement. Vanguardist populations are often *less* educated on socialist theory or historical facts then capitalists. The vanguardist movement came about during war and seized power via revolutions and coups, which trends towards hierarchy. The movement was rife with ethnic and religious violence, particularly under Stalin and Mao. It was obsessed with sexual purity, particularly the Maoist version. Maoism also idealized an ethno-cultural version of the traditional farmer. And almost all Vanguardist states have been strongly recidivist.
Where does that leave us? We’re looking at a jingoist populism that supports draconian social control mixed with state control and oversight of the economy, but which maintains a strong ruling class of chosen elites. It has othering of ethnic minorities and allowance of state violence against individuals. It idealizes a traditional regressive human state, embodied by a “folk” romanticism.
Vanguardist communism is Fascism with better PR. It embodies every definitional characteristic in practice and is solely distinguished by a different form of disconnect between state propaganda and ruler action regarding the economic conditions of the middle and upper classes. Neither ideology is actually honest with its economic goals, but fascism is more open about preserving hierarchical systems and vanguardism more revolutionary in how it replaces those systems with new party hierarchies.
This neatly explains all the data. Eastern Europe isn’t embracing a different socialism, they’re just deluded fascists. Marxist-Leninist Vanguardism isn’t a form of Socialism at all. The western correlations between socialism and progressivism isn’t a regional difference, it’s just some people actually believing in socialist theory and others being fascists.
There are counter arguments. Peronism is an Authoritarian semi-socialist “third way” ideology (or has been, particularly during Peron’s second…or was it third? term) but actually manifestly improved the living conditions of the population and was socially liberal. Venezuela instituted a state socialist system of reform that, while it eventually self-destructed, had spectacular returns for a time. Cuba has actually achieved a significant amount of social good, but Castro was a dictator and repression was real and rampant. Vietnam, for all it’s issues, still has some meaningful socialist reforms, as does/did China after Mao was ousted. And Glasnost was a thing that almost happened and almost worked.
But most of these systems have involved *reductions* in state control over time or had strong socially liberal elements. Increases in state control and repression are brought about by and result in states that do not meaningfully distinguish themselves from fascism, and trends towards increasing authoritarianism does not lead to socialism.
> “my job isn’t appreciated enough because society values money instead of my important work”
This doesn’t really make sense. Money is a measure. How much money society pays you in exchange for your important work is a measure of how much it values that work. It’s like saying “railroads aren’t appreciated enough because society values miles instead”. The version of this that sentiment that has meaning is basically “I don’t get paid enough for my work” which as AiryW points out is pretty darn universal.
For the same reason the idea that focusing on how much money you can make leads to feeling cheated doesn’t follow from being overworked and exploited. It’s a result of a discord between personal values and social values. Money measures economic contribution. But maybe you feel cheated when a society respects economic contribution more than contributions you care about like, say, religious devotion, or friendships. I imagine it would be the same for an individual Roman who didn’t care much about virtus but who did value something Roman society apparently didn’t, like biggus virilitas.
How much society values your work is certainly a factor in how much you get paid, but it’s rather more intimately tied to how easy it is for the capitalist class to exploit your labour surplus value.
As Prof. Devereux has noted, Marxism has fallen out of favor among historians because it simply doesn’t provide plausible explanations of historical events.
Any attempt to explain individual compensation by reference to “capitalists” and “surplus value” will experience similar catastrophic and embarrassing failure, which is why actual students of the labor market (even those on the left) do not rely on such concepts.
It references how much capital owners believe they have to pay you to get you to work as a matter of first principles. It’s not a measure of how much your work is worth to anyone, how much value it generates, or how much you need to receive to support yourself, it’s entirely a power dynamic.
This can be trivially shown by comparing what the value of certain labor should be if workers had more political power, compared to other jobs have massively bloated incomes based on their political convenience.
A great example is in farm labor-the work that farmworkers do is valuable in that it must be done but also easily replaceable and highly, highly politically disenfranchised. If marginal theories of value were right then farmworkers might demand higher compensation, and not only aren’t there that many farm worker jobs but there actually are some real skills and capabilities associated with valuable farm workers. They should be able to levy that into some compensation package. In fact we can see this in some other countries, there are places where farm workers have decent compensation.
However because farm workers are replaceable and also massively, massively politically disenfranchised in America, both because cheap *produce* is politically valuable and because of ethnographic and social biases, they are paid basically nothing. This persists throughout history, incidentally.
Meanwhile *farmers*, i.e. farm owners, get government subsidies to own their farms and produce or not produce because of their political position, quite literally.
Hence while a simple surplus value predictions might fail, the greater message, that political power is intimately tied with compensation and that surplus value is one significant portion of that, is absolutely true and valuable.
@ey81 I responded to most of your point here as well, but to speedrun the rebuttals to that…
A. Marxism is absolutely used in economic and history analysis, and maintains relevance even if it’s been expanded on.
B. Those circles also aren’t separate from political concerns, esp. economics, as evidenced by quacks who say supply side things getting political compensation despite being intellectually bankrupt, so that’s not evidence of validity. Marxism is the most politically repressed ideology in history, and it’s been repressed in western academic and social circles as well as throughout the world for more than a century now.
C. Many alternative value theories barely make predictions, and hence the surplus labor theory was at least scientifically falsifiable, even if it is false like all scientific theories. It’s also not more wrong than theories which explicitly and directly validate modern capitalist economies. It’s just easier to rebut because it’s actually got enough teeth to be engaged with academically; many economic valuation theories are not even wrong.
@ey81 I’ve somehow missed OGH dismissing Marxism wholesale! The only thing I could find was this:
> Marx’s definitions [of manorial ownership as capitalism] have been functionally abandoned by economic historians as unworkable in basically any pre-modern period. The Marxist model of economic development doesn’t have many defenders left – none of prominence that I know of in English, to be sure – in the medieval or ancient fields.
But of course I’m not talking about a) economic history or b) pre-modernity or any kind of c) development, so you can’t have meant that. Would you be so kind as to prove a quote or a link?
Quickly, if you please, before someone comes along to embarrassingly and catastrophically rebut my argument that a) some people own useful stuff, b) some people don’t, c) the people who do own it, like to make money from it – surely as abstract and unworkable set of assumptions as I’ve ever seen.
why do people believe that money reflects how much society values work? sounds like the golden rule. those that have the gold make the rules to reward themselves.
@James;
one needs to distinguish between *dismissing* Marxism wholesale and heavily adapting it. It’s not my field, so I’m not aware of any data (surveys or anecdotal) on how many self-styled Marxists are in history departments, and i suspect it would vary strongly by country, but it’s certainly possible to retain a general belief in some core elements of Marxist thought, to call oneself a Marxist, and/or to side with the historical Marxist thinkers and societies against their opponents, while adapting or rejecting a lot of the specific beliefs held by Marx and his immediate followers.
I remember taking a history class in college taught by a *very* esteemed historian of Latin America, for example. He said on the first day of the class that his approach to history was derived from Karl Marx, the first lecture talked about ‘modes of production’, and though he did a very good job of keeping his own politics out of class, it wasn’t hard to look him up and find that he was a strong supporter of Cuba, for example. That said, his thought ran in some directions that were quite different than anything Karl Marx had come up with, and that some Marxists (and maybe Marx himself) would have viewed as heretical.
He talked, for example, about the ‘proprietary mode of production’ (peasants and small self-employed producers working for themselves) as something separate and distinct from capitalism, feudalism, socialism etc., with its own distinct forms of class conflict. He talked about lots of types of class conflict that were totally unrelated to capitalist vs. worker (rural vs. urban workers, agricultural landlord vs. urban factory owner, unionized workers vs. the informal-sector sub-working-class, etc.). He talked about the important role that the Catholic Church and other institutions of, broadly speaking, the right, played in trying to reach out to workers and compete with socialists and communists for workers’ allegiance in the mid-20th c. He talked about factors that tended to reduce or diminish class conflict, like the institutions of godparentship and ‘patronage’ and the rise of mass media culture. And maybe most importantly at all, he said on the last lecture of the class (one of the last classes i attended in college, and a very memorable one) that he actually didn’t think that most political struggles, historically, had been about economic justice at all, or that most political conflict in the future would be about economic justice either (and it was clear that he viewed that as a historical tragedy).
Any or all of those views might have been viewed as heretical by Marx, or by some twentieth century Marxist thinkers and governments, but it was still clear that this guy considered himself a Marxist, that he saw himself as working in the Marxist tradition, and that in the last analysis, if he’d had to choose between East and West in the cold war, he would have chosen the East. So, i think it’s important to distinguish between disagreeing with a lot of specific views held by Marx and his followers (everyone, including all the twentieth century Marxists i can think of, rejects a lot of specific views Marx had) and dismissing Marxism as a whole.
Another way of stating that is that a capitalist economy doesn’t reward hard work, it rewards ownership of capital, so *most* people (with some exceptions) are going to feel that their labour isn’t socially valued to the degree it should be.
American culture does value work, of course, at least some kinds of work (if not as much as i think they should) but that’s because capitalism isn’t the only force shaping American culture, it’s moderated by some lingering pre-capitalist values as well as by some level of social-democratic values.
If the RETVRN types had any intellectual basis, they’d be complaining not about how society is no longer dominated by Manly Men, but how it’s so stingy now with opportunities: such that ambition rarely ever results in deeds of honor any more.
Lots of them do in fact complain about that.
Remember that many of the original European immigrants were Calvinist.
> is this really so different from Rome-in-practice?
Yes, very different – there is far more social mobility in modern developed countries than there was in any premodern one. A Roman politician was expected to come from a line of politicians; Cicero did not and this played into his own story of greatness but also made the optimates sneer at him and not include him in their coalition against Caesar. Compare this with today, when most politicians in rich democracies are not dynasts (the US is atypically dynastic and, since 1990, has elected one dynast as president in Bush and another as vice-president in Gore).
Though there’s a catch. America has many kinds of power other than holding political office, and it is something of a cynical truism that the man who inherited a multi-billion dollar fortune and the will to use it can buy or sell politicians on a whim.
Even so, we have more social mobility than the Romans, but the difference gets a little narrower when you consider the power elite more broadly. I rather imagine that no Roman with real aspirations to Be Someone at the top of the power structure would pass up an opportunity to join the Senate, but there are plenty of wealthy and influential Americans who would pass up the opportunity to join our legislature.
I actually wonder if that’s true anymore. While Rome was hardly a paragon throughout all of history the broad freeholding farmer base were actually relatively equal, and while it eventually devolved they only truly went away when Diocletian removed freedom of transit. While the elites may have been fantastically unequal particularly in the late Republic and early Empire, even they had peers and we have attested cases of Plebs moving all the way to Consul.
That’s not really manifestly different from American social mobility at most points in time, if we’re going just by public figures. The founding fathers were well off, a few settlers like Lincoln, Polk, or Johnson got in during the westward expansion, and some army guys. Otherwise most presidents have been at least upper middle class from birth.
A better analysis may be statistical analysis, but while I can say strong things about the American economy in regards to mobility, namely that it’s a stagnant cesspit after Reagan broke everything, I don’t know enough to talk intelligently about how the Roman economy on that level of detail. I actually don’t know that it was any worse than what we’re living with now.
American society was very stagnant from the 1930s through 1980, as witness the fact that the great fortunes as of 1980 (Rockefeller, Mellon, etc.) were all more than 50 years old. Subsequently, there has been a dynamic burst, and the great fortunes now (Gates, Ellison, Musk) are all in their first generation.
It is also true that income inequality has increased over the past 50 years, but that is not at all the same thing as less social mobility. Only someone with a pre-existing belief that everything is terrible and it’s all Reagan’s fault (not Trump?) could fail to appreciate the distinction.
Er…The American economy grew massively throughout 1930 to 1980 and social mobility was great. The movement of individuals to the top of the social order isn’t evidence for 99.9% of people’s lived in experiences; there are so few Billionaires that membership can be modeled as a lottery system without losing explanatory power.
And social mobility as a separate variable has manifestly decreased. You can track this independently of inequality and find that the social class you’re born into is highly deterministic of the class you end up in. Income inequality absolutely pertains here as it widens the gulf between classes, which is self evident, but is also not entirely explanatory itself.
The fact that there are so many massive billionaires after the 80’s is merely evidence of Reagans policies failing. The goal of public policy cannot be to create billionaires, because billionaires are a huge problem for everyone. That so many billionaires were created from Reagan era policies isn’t evidence of society working, it’s precisely the opposite. The only way you can think otherwise is if you unironically fetishize billionaires success, which is actually a massive, common, and intellectually void pre-existing bias.
The fact that from 1930 to 1960 there weren’t as many billionaires, and instead *the middle class existed*, is precisely my point as a glowing, burning exhibit A written in lances of fire.
American social mobility is an “America was never great” story. There’s a lot of comparative research on this; the term in economics is intergenerational income elasticity (or coefficient, or persistence), with higher values denoting more parent-child income correlation, so lower mobility. To ey81’s point, the US has seen a small decrease in the elasticity, that is an increase in income mobility, since 1980 (Google “Intergenerational mobility in the US: One size doesn’t fit all” for the VoxEU writeup), but the overall level of the elasticity is higher than in Europe and lower than in high-inequality middle-income countries like South Africa, China, India, and Latin American countries.
There’s no economic data at that level of detail that I know of for premodern societies, but everything we know for such societies suggests very low income mobility by modern standards. Hence my point about persistence of lineages in Rome; this is not just political lineages, but also persistence of patrician families in general, centuries after plebeians not only became equal citizens to the patricians but also benefited from affirmative action like the plebeian aediles and the tribunes of the plebs.
It’s worth noting that even the relatively small elasticity decrease in the 1980’s has been more than undone by now. Plus basically every major review in the past few decades has shown that elasticity is both growing faster and has always been higher, to the point where a few decades ago the best estimate was 0.4 (on par with nations like Germany, which incidentally has gone *down*) and I’ve seen estimates of around 0.6 by now (starting to reach the developing economies) and it seems to have been about 0.5 historically.
Of course IGE isn’t the only estimate, but simply looking at the percentage of children who earn more than their parents directly shows an even more terrifying graph through time.
Basically, no matter how you slice it, the traditional American Dream seems to largely be a myth. It’s a bit of a question as to when this failed, but it did.
Of course homosexual relations are responsible for spreading AIDS, but the fact you think that has anything to do with what I was talking about indicates you’re misunderstanding me.
AIDS is a disease that affects gay men, but there are numerous diseases that target different demographics. The important part isn’t the way it spreads, but how individuals respond and why.
The fact is that Reagan and his administration were repeatedly on record telling administrators to do nothing-“Do nothing and look as pretty as possible” which delayed treatment. Look up William Bennett and Gary Bauer, and both their motives and advice to Reagan.
These people delayed research to AIDS for half a decade, resulting in cases increasing by a factor of around 40 by the time Reagan even got around to addressing the pandemic. It took him five years. Their motives and rhetoric were explicit, and Reagan was either willing to go along with them for political capital, didn’t care, or actively agreed.
This is the simplest example of how American political purity culture has been sliding into fascism for decades, as dehumanization of sexual “degenerates” and tolerance of their deaths for political capital becoming a normal part of Republican policy. It’s hardly the only one.
Another easily verifiable one is the complex links between the concept of welfare queens, single motherhood, black poverty, and sexual morality. If you go trolling through opinion columns on conservative newspapers you can rapidly find explicitly racist reasons for disapproving of welfare, but also clear statements that it’s impossible to pay for “promiscuous” women who don’t deserve welfare.
These opinion pieces can be traced, often directly by the authorship, to major political think tanks and lobbyists in Washington who wield considerable political and actual capital for the Republican party.
This combination of opposition to social programs, racism, and sexual morality is a clear indicator of fascist thought, and combined with other cultural movements unrelated to the current discussion clearly indicates fascist ideology.
Of course, the changes in the American economy in that period had nothing to do with the fact that between 1939 and 1945 every major industrialized country except the United States was devastated by a little thing called WWII and the US ended up having half the world’s industrial output, or the decline in America’s relative share of the world’s industrial output as the rest of the world either recovered from said war and or began to industrialize.
“It is also true that income inequality has increased over the past 50 years, but that is not at all the same thing as less social mobility.’
it’s true these are different phenomena, but America isn’t great on either one, and personally I care much more about income inequality than about social mobility per se. i don’t want a society in which children from foster care in the inner city can become billionaries, i don’t want billionaries to exist.
@Hector_St_Clare
” i don’t want a society in which children from foster care in the inner city can become billionaries, i don’t want billionaries to exist.”
And?
Why is what you want dispositive? All the more in that people who don’t want billionaires to exist — do not have a good track record.
@Mary Catelli Because we don’t like hierarchy. We don’t like societies where some people have astounding power and others don’t. Obviously if everyone could be a Billionaire-in some meaningful sense-then no one would care about them, but the fact is that if someone is a Billionaire they have power over everyone else. It warps the social order. Money is a representation of social power and ownership, and it’s *finite*; there is only so much to own.
And the vague allusion to the soviets when saying “And this is why disliking billionaires is bad” is just pathetically weak. Libertarian socialism-that system of values which grew out of classic liberalism when it encountered the industrial revolution-existed long before Soviet style statism and has long outlived it. We don’t live in the cold war anymore, and even during the cold war gesturing vaguely to the soviets and saying “therefore no socialism!” was intellectually bankrupt, the kind of thing you saw out of far-right demagogues not intellectuals, which is why the far-right demagogues killed the intellectuals.
@dcmorinmorinmorin
Because we don’t like hierarchy. We don’t like societies where some people have astounding power and others don’t.
Even leaving aside that I asked why we should care what you like — Hector St. Clare has openly stated in this very blog that he wants the power to jail people for disagreeing with him. That dwarfs the power of any billionaire. It is also “libertarian” in no way or form.
And the vague allusion to the soviets
That’s on you. YOU are bringing up the Soviets, not me. Therefore the charge of “intellectual bankrupt” falls on you, not me.
Mary, you should care because people who don’t value liberty and equality don’t survive. I don’t mean that as a threat, I mean that as a literal result of not believing that. Hierarchical systems are extremely dangerous for the people in them, unless you’re the spectacularly privileged elite, and even then there’s no real evidence they’re *happier*. Ask a 1950’s German how the whole Nazism thing worked out.
And billionaires can absolutely jail people they don’t like. They just typically hide their crimes through proxies, but history is rife with examples of the rich literally just hiring private armies or purchasing the allegiance of state forces. Police officers have accepted bribes to arrest tenants in American cities and laws aimed at people inconvenient to the rich are extremely common. For example, the recent Florida laws making camping in public illegal directly oppress the homeless, at the behest and for the rich who own stores in Florida cities. The systems of power just aren’t grossly obvious because they’re legitimized by government.
The assertion that Hector wants more power than Billionaires isn’t true. If your assertion is even accurate, they want *precisely the same power as Billionaires*. You’re right that’s not Libertarian, and I have zero interest in defending that if those are their true beliefs.
The assertion that Hector wants more power than Billionaires isn’t true. If your assertion is even accurate, they want *precisely the same power as Billionaires*
I use traditional male pronouns, no need for “they”.
I’m also not sure where the claim that “people who don’t value liberty and equality don’t thrive” comes from- lots of hierarchical civilizations have lasted for millennia. Before that, our hunter gatherer / primitive horticulturalist ancestors were certainly fairly egalitarian, but they weren’t big on ‘liberty’. Most societies historically, whether they’re more egalitarian or more hierarchical, have been characterized by a fair degree of regimentation.
I think the “RETVRN” types actually do complain a certain amount about that, but they blame it on the Manly Men not being in positions of unilateral control.
The trick with RETVRN types, as someone who has been fairly close to that crowd, is that whether they know it or not they’re more or less pulling on a tradition transcendent from medieval warrior-aristocrats, as imbibed through literature. When they point to “Rome” or “Greece” they are really pointing to how this tradition used/uses them for proof-texting, rather than the realities of those cultures. Hence the all consuming focus on being Hot and Violent and those categories are the only deeds they recognize as valuable.
As a complaint, it would be more impressive if it weren’t commonplace to regard only money as support. Those who want to avoid promoting miserly and exploitative accumulation of wealth need to value things other than wealth.
And goodness do the Romans value virtus. My go-to quote to make this point to students is always Alcmena’s declaration from Plautus’ Amphitryon (2.2.18-23), “virtus is the best prize, virtus assuredly surpasses all things: it protects and preserves liberty, safety, life, property and parents, country and children. Virtus has everything in itself, all good things come to him who has virtus.”
Isn’t there a risk here of cherry-picking a text and saying “The Romans value X most of all” when you actually mean “This particular author (or group of authors) values X most of all”? You could equally point to the Aeneid (far more culturally influential than Plautus’ Amphitryon even in Roman times) and say that the Romans valued pietas most of all. That’s without getting into the question of how stable the meaning of “virtus” is over time — you point out that it changed from something like “manliness” to something like “valour”, but already by Cicero’s time it’s being used in a sense more like “virtue” in general (e.g., in De Inventione 1.59 Cicero lists the four “parts” of virtus as prudence (prudentia), justice (justitia), courage (fortitudo) and temperance (temperantia), and it seems quite a stretch to summarise these as “ambition, drive and a nearly reckless courage, combined with the obstinacy and determination to persevere through difficulties, through fear”).
If you want that kind of thoroughness, you can go read the three books put at the end of the blog-post sized summary or trust that the guy who had to do PhD comps in this stuff has read enough of the sources to summarize them effectively.
I, too, have studied ancient Rome to postgraduate level, and I’ve read enough primary sources to form my own opinion on the matter, thank you very much. This post commits the mistake — which you’ve pointed out in other instances when other people were doing it — of taking a few people (mid- and late-republican aristocratic males) and treating their views* as representative of the whole of society.
* Of course, I say “their views”, but these views aren’t about how people in general are supposed to act, but specifically about how other aristocratic Roman males are supposed to act. Women and slaves certainly weren’t supposed to show “ambition, drive and a nearly reckless courage”, for example.
No, women and slaves were definitely supposed to show drive, ambition, and reckless courage. It’s just that their virtus was constrained by a different sort of disciplina. A wife’s ambition should (in their opinion) be the best wife ever, to make the best clothes for her family, etc. A slave should aspire to do the best job they can in whatever their owner sets them to do. As for nearly reckless courage, I think both the wife and the slave would be praised if they fought off a burglar when their husband/owner wasn’t home. You seem to think that because different people’s ambitions were curtailed at different levels, their ambition within the “allowed” levels wasn’t respected and/or deemed a desirable trait.
No, women and slaves were definitely supposed to show drive, ambition, and reckless courage.
No they were not. Women were expected (at least in theory) to be modest, chaste, demure, hard-working, and obedient. As for slaves, “drive, ambition, and reckless courage” are generally the last qualities you want them to have, at least unless you enjoy dealing with regular slave uprisings.
As for nearly reckless courage, I think both the wife and the slave would be praised if they fought off a burglar when their husband/owner wasn’t home.
There’s a difference between being willing to defend yourself if attacked and being a barely-restrained cocktail of seething ambition.
Pudicitia, in fact. The Temple of Pudicitia Patricia and the Temple of Pudicitia Plebeia were both for women. (Patricians and plebians)
I didn’t get the impression that he was doing that thing which you rightly classify as a mistake. Instead, I think he is doing the thing where he looks over a lot of sources, absorbs their views, synthesizes those views into a pattern, describes the pattern to us, and picks out sources which illustrate the pattern the best.
It’s a subtle difference, I suppose. And it’s not like he couldn’t have made mistakes, by not absorbing a wide enough variety of sources, or ignoring some of them, or failing to weight their evidence correctly, or coming up with a pattern that’s more about his own ideas (which is IMO the root flaw he’s arguing against), or picking misleading examples. But in those cases, I’d love to hear a more detailed examination of the problem?
I don’t have post-graduate education in ancient Rome, and my Latin has decayed enough that I doubt I could make it through Caesar. What he describes largely matches my own synthesis, and where it conflicts, it does so by providing the kind of corroborative detail that suggests that I should weight it more heavily than my own synthesis. (Which is far from how a proper historian should handle sources, but I’m definitely not a historian, and my brain doesn’t seem to work like that.)
It sounded like you had something to say about how usage changed over time; I’d be interested in hearing more about that.
Mr. X, would you care to enlighten us on which virtues Roman society as a whole prized, if they are not the values you have just listed?
What sources would we look for, exactly, that you think Dr. Devereaux has ignored?
Mr. X, would you care to enlighten us on which virtues Roman society as a whole prized, if they are not the values you have just listed?
It’s not that Roman society didn’t value ambition, drive, and courage, it’s that, by interpreting virtus as always (or nearly always) meaning this particular combination of qualities, the OP ends up overemphasising them relative to other things.
What sources would we look for, exactly, that you think Dr. Devereaux has ignored?
The obvious start would be philosophers like Musonius, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus (who was Greek, but since he learnt philosophy in Rome and taught a mainly Roman audience, we can probably count him). We could also look at poetry, such as that of Virgil (whose main hero, whilst obviously valiant, is distinguished mainly by his piety), Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Ovid (these last four seem generally more interested in hanging around Rome picking up chicks than going out and achieving great deeds) and Juvenal (been a while since I’ve read him, so I can’t remember very well what values he puts forward). We could also look at novels like the Satyricon of Petronius (a very weird man, at least judging by his surviving output) or Apuleius’ Golden Ass, to see what values they embody.
You’re not considering mos maiorum to be a value in this discussion? It was practice to aim for, in that sense of a value (it was valued). But I guess “value” here is an internal personal quality?
I do want to dump out a silly joke:
Mos maiorum. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
‘…This resounds from our sources: virtus is this forward-pushing, animating intense thing; it is bright and burning (as honor can be as well). It is the courage to charge at the enemy and the courage to withstand the terror of an enemy’s attack, but it is also the drive that leads one to run for office, to write a poem, to design a building. Military valor is the clearest, surest, truest test (a certamen, ‘test’ or discremen, ‘separating point’) of one’s virtus, but virtus can be shown in other fields of human endeavor, including intellectual fields. The key that connects them is courage and drive…’
I seem to remember reference a few weeks ago in a Phalanx vs Legion article on this blog about how the Romans massacred the surrendering Greek soldiers at the Battle of Cynoscephalae (if I have the spelling correct.) So apparently virtus involves bloody handed slaughter of enemies who have put up their weapons and placed themselves at your mercy too.
> So apparently virtus involves bloody handed slaughter of enemies who have put up their weapons and placed themselves at your mercy too.
Virtus apparently didn’t forbid it, so why not?
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
The past is not a foreign country, that phrase is always misleading at best. Humans always have massacred eachother, and continue to do so into the modern day.
Heh. I actually composed a long middle paragraph talking about how humans have always massacred each other, it’s natural and normal and expected, and only someone from some sort of bizarre, post-cult outlier society could hold a view like this without being able to back it up with a philosophical justification. But it seemed a bit harsh (even though it’s also describing myself), and making assumptions about the original commetner that weren’t fully justified, and liable to be taken the wrong way by the Christians here, so I deleted it. Apparently, without it, the surviving two lines of the comment gave the opposite impression. 🙂
As for the quote, the world may be flattening, but I still think if you can find a place where they don’t speak your language or take your credit cards, it’s possible to find some very different behavior.
All descriptions I’ve heard say that Roman soldiers didn’t know that was a surrender. So if you’ve seen ghost protocol, they are doing the same as those Russian security guys firing at a flare (Roman soldiers aren’t Rhodes scholars either): heat of combat, everyone riled up and on edge, enemy has opened themselves up for whatever reason, don’t think too hard and attack while you can. Makes sense, even if the result isn’t desirable, and it doesn’t sound like those same soldiers wouldn’t accept a surrender if done in a more familiar way.
See also several instances in the Hundred-Years’ War, where French knights who were confident they could afford to ransom themselves surrendered, only to discover that the soldiers they had surrendered to were commoners who the knights could not pay ransom to.
It also included the rape, slaughter, and pillage of villages that had been under siege (if they didn’t surrender quickly enough). And the slaughter of a randomly-chosen member of your own group if your group was decimated as a disciplinary action. And the theft of food from nearly-starved peasants as you foraged.
On the flip side, it drove oratory and poetry and beauty.
Turns out people are complicated. Judging them–as individuals or nations–by either the best or the worst that they’ve done is misleading. Further, the past is in fact a foreign country; they viewed things differently then. Sure, people have always slaughtered each other and continue to do so, but the ideology and reasoning and conceptual framework changes, which necessarily means that how, when, and how many people are slaughtered changes.
“So apparently virtus involves bloody handed slaughter of enemies who have put up their weapons and placed themselves at your mercy too.”
With a massive caveat, but: unironically yes. That caveat being disciplina. This incident was a failure of the latter, either in its physical instantiation (the general’s order not being transmitted fast enough) or in noncompliance.
> Cicero gives us a bunch components of it, though: constantia (‘restraint, self-control’), aequitas (‘justice, fairness, calmness’), temperantia (‘temperance, sobriety, moderation’), and prudentia (‘prudence, foresight’).
This sounds tantalizingly close to the “cardinal virtues” of fortitude, justice, temperance, and prudence, which I believe in Christian theology were sometimes known as the “pagan virtues”, not only for theological reasons, but also because they were derived from Roman-era philosophy. But Wikipedia traces a few of them to different Latin roots (fortitudo, iustitia), and to Greek sources before that. I am slightly dubious about Wikipedia’s reliability here, for similar sorts of reasons Prof. Devereaux went into regarding “virilitas” (plus ~2000 years of theology done in ever-evolving varieties of Latin).
Does anyone know whether a 4-part division of virtue (not virtus) was considered significant? Prof. Devereaux later mentioned 5 sub-virtues, which seem to cover the same territory. Is this one of those things where people had a general idea of what they were supposed to do, and the precise labels were not as important?
The same thought occurred to me, and I how these 4 cardinal virtues map the 4 virtues in stoicism (Marcus Aurelius’ stoicism, not our modern meaning of stoicism – look, another example of meaning drift across time!): wisdom (prudence), courage (fortitude), temperance or moderation, and justice.
There’s an ongoing tendency, and it’s at least as old as Pliny, to re-map numbered subdivisions of things into lists of four subdivisions. So that they can be aligned with the Four Humors.
But anytime you see an ancient list of five characteristics, or three, or whatnot, you can be certain that some other ancient text presented that list as a list of four characteristics even if that reworking doesn’t survive to today.
I always like hearing descriptions of what the actual components of a past culture were, their sense of values and how they perceived themselves.
“virilitas (‘manhood, manliness’) is an uncommon word in Latin, but when it appears it is mostly as a polite euphemism for ‘penis.”
Thank you for this, I will now never stop laughing at the RETVRN bros treating 1970s romance novel dick as their highest aim. Is “his throbbing virilitas” too off-colour for this blog’s comments?
And it sounds rather like American society values unconstrained virtus – ambition, drive, and reckless forward movement are absolutely rewarded and lauded in American society today, without any requirement of demonstrations of modesty, piety, justice, good faith, or discipline. Results are all that seem to matter, and the best result is the the most money for oneself, not great civic works.
Might seem funny, but, aiming your liquid waste might be useful for sanitation purposes, at least for an ancient army with less developed sanitation. And one does not want to lose one’s virilitas in combat or any other situation. So even with this meaning, Retvrn guys might be on to something. /s
As for the current day world and ambition….talking about vales is weird because they are vague, have a lot of exceptions, lots of different standards for different people, its hard to argue these things in a clean way.
The pattern I do notice, and will criticize with confidence, that is relevant to Retvrn guys: Too many people automatically see things as a zero sum competition, that you only win by beating someone else. And get resistant to doing things other ways, like cooperating, learning from others, improving yourself without worrying about other people. I noticed this when listening to some If books could Kill episodes: the dating advice assumed you need to compete and win against potential partners and other members of your own gender instead of basic “here’s where interested people meet, here’s what they like”, etc. Lots of them want to overcome/beat expertise instead of learning from it, like odd diet advice.
More generally, these are the people supporting Putin’s military even when the military turns out to be quite weak. Or just a general aversion/avoidance of left and/or competent politics, even when these produce measurably better results by what these people say they desire.
Quite a lot of these are related to other differences, which largely flow from “non-arbitrary” sources. Namely, we consider “providing civic works” to be the job of the government, not of individuals, which is largely a function of us having governments capable of that. (“Hey, billionaire, this year you get the liturgy of paying the upkeep of this aircraft carrier, but you also get to command it.”) Indeed, politicians personally providing such benefits to the public are frowned upon as a corruption of the political process.
Separately — and related to the others’ complaints that these are Roman military-aristocrat values — the is not a single set of “American society’s values”. In no particular order:
1) Extremely specific factors about industries can change their value systems. Surgeons and airline pilots have an attitude to checklists that anyone pre-1900 would probably describe as religious. Discipline and pietas in abundance. At advertisement agencies and in software, famously less so.
2) A partly aged claim that the working class treated skill at controlling big pieces of machinery as admirable — more or less as a natural extension of athletic ability — and thus work as potential “masculine display” (IIRC the phrase). With this being a constant source of tension with their middle-class managers, since office/desk (and particularly “clerical”) jobs involve no such display opportunity, and hence no such value judgment. (And at the other end, “elite” class mostly having the job to direct lots of people and having relative freedom about it, coincidentally also developed a form of “being good at your job is manly”, though with fewer (but more disastrous) “hold my beer” incidents.)
3) A quick and dirty rubric I have for types of jobs is by productivity:
– Low-variance, easy-entry = burger-flipper.
– Low-variance, difficult-entry = unionized.
– High-variance, observable = paid by commission.
– High-variance, non-observable = CV-oriented.
To the extent this classification makes any sense, the categories imply very different attitudes to virtus (and any number of other things). If it’s not feasible (or is indeed actively destructive) to work harder, naturally eagerness, ambition, recklessness &c will be directed elsewhere (though patience to cope with boredom is still welcome); especially so if it actively steps on the toes of an existing power structure. Whereas if there are facta/gesta to be had, these traits will naturally be encouraged and celebrated.
I find your number 2 point quite interesting, coming from a thoroughly middle class background but with a strong interest in engineering as a hobby. I really value skill at operating machinery (or just skill at making things) in a way that so many of my peers just don’t. The whole ‘just get a man in to do it’ attitude that I find so disappointing.
I assume that these comments operate on the same rule as Gibbon’s footnotes: you can say anything you want (even describing the exploits of the Empress Theodora) as long as you don’t say it English. So sensit ea virilitatem eius palpitantem is no problem.
At Uni I had a vague memory of reading a book about the evolution of ideals of masculinity in the 19th/20th century, and it contrasted basically the older ideas of (that they called “manliness”) with the (at the time) newer ones (“masculinity”)
Basically they chalked up an 18th/early n19th century idea of “manliness” that very much sounds like the roman one: Combining ambition, drive and courage with restraint. The “manly” man is both driven but can also when neccessary restrain himself (which is what separates him from lesser men, and of course, women, who are seen as largely uncontrollable and driven by their lusts and desires)
(This is contrast with the later “masculine” ideal, that values more directly physical aggression and has men’s inability to control themselves be more of a central piece of the idea of what a man is)
That’s largely a tangent, but my point was more *to what extent are these values just “aristocratic”* male values? There seems to be a general trends for socities with a somewhat martial upper-class to derive these kinds of ideals: Courage, but also restraint, refinement, and a more general sense of the ideal man being a generalist rather than a specialist. (and often something something the reason these societies value restraint is presumably because *lack* of restraint is such a major problem: While modern industrial society operates where restraint is to some extent the normal, and so the valorization shifts towards the manly-man who breaks that normality)
“just aristocratic male values?”
Shades of Jane Jacobs’ _Systems of Survival_.
There seems to be a certain amount of variance in exactly how cultures treat the details of the virtues, and which restraining traits are expected. Dr. Devereaux brushes against this topic here by mentioning differences between Roman virtus and Greek arete. Both of those are, in the respective languages, “the core good thing the ideal aristocratic man is supposed to have.” But they represent different (but overlapping) clusters of component positive traits.
I don’t know what the equivalent words would be in, say, Sanskrit or Arabic or Japanese or Chinese, but in each case I think you might see a similar pattern. “The thing a fine, respectable man ought to have” ends up being one or a few words that describe bundles of traits, with a certain amount of overlap with other cultures and a certain amount of non-overlap. Boasting a lot might be an accepted and even desired part of “a fine respectable man’s behavior” in one culture, but actively despised in another. One culture might idealize charging into the teeth of danger while another idealizes withstanding it like a wall. And so on.
Boasting I find to be an intriguing difference between the value systems of Britain and the USA (a fascinating case study in subtle values dissonance if ever there was one).
From a British perspective, broadly we expect people to be modest about their achievements to the point of not really talking about them. If our achievements are to be talked about, they are to be praised by someone else pointing out the great thing you’ve done and you standing bashfully there gracefully tolerating the embarrassment, saying things like ‘oh, it was nothing really’. Most of the time, we would expect people to just know about the things you have achieved without them having been spoken about at all. They should be evident. Having to talk about them yourself just suggests that your achievements aren’t notable enough for people to know by themselves, or have had them recommended by someone else*.
From our perspective, Americans’ relative freedom to talk about one’s own achievements appears self-aggrandising or insecure, though in reality it’s simply a subtly different set of values that allows for this. I’d love to hear an American’s perspective on this as I’ve only really talked about it from within a pretty British bubble…
*The one exception is if you’ve done something big, you’re allowed to stand back and look at it and say ‘you know what, I’m pretty proud of that’. Though this is more of a grudging self-acceptance that you’ve done something of worth than fishing for someone to validate your achievement.
“they are to be praised by someone else pointing out the great thing you’ve done and you standing bashfully there gracefully tolerating the embarrassment, saying things like ‘oh, it was nothing really”
The over the top humbleness is a thing in some social circles in America. Idealizing being praiseworthy without seeking praise is more common. I think the exaggerated humility is kinda an upper middle class but not too upper sort of thing.
You also have Minnesota where the regional identity is kinda doing this but as a community, as documented in this mockumentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiSzwoJr4-0
And Minnesota is kinda the “upper middle class but not too upper” identity as a state. Well educated, corporate jobs with deep roots but little flashyness, easily overlooked.
I think scale is part of the issue here. My achievements in one state may not be known six states over. I pretty much have to tell folks for them to have any clue that it happened.
Differences in culture are at play here as well. I’ve heard it said that an English pub is the community’s living room. In the USA, we don’t HAVE community living rooms. Our lives are more isolated, at least from what I’ve seen (a limited amount and likely horribly biased, to be honest). Asking about someone’s accomplishments when we see them is considered polite because we genuinely want to be happy for them.
For another, undue humility–like refusing to discuss one’s achievements–seems evasive, at least among the people I associate with. If what you did was honorable and good, why WOULDN’T you want to talk about it? Evasion is suspicious; there must be something wrong with what you did, or how you did it. It’s not considered modest, but rather somewhat suspicious and disreputable.
Compare “Snatched” or “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels” against “Super Troopers”. They’re all rather ridiculous comedies that take their own premises surprisingly serious, but (ignoring the fact that they focus on opposing sides of law enforcement), they derive their comedy from fundamentally different sources. Those different sources bear upon this question, I think. (And they’re all worth watching merely because they’re funny.)
Haha so you think we’re being evasive, and we think you’re inflating your self-worth! Either way, we’re each doubting what the other has done is actually up to snuff 😉
“If what you did was honorable and good, why WOULDN’T you want to talk about it?”
I can completely see the logic. From a British perspective, you wouldn’t want to talk about it because people might think you only did it to make you look good in front of other people (which would debase the value of the thing done by calling into question your motivations for doing it).
Fascinating stuff.
Also, Snatch and Lock Stock are stunning examples of how the concept of ‘you should just know if someone’s a bigshot’ works in an idealised way. Very few of the gangsters ever talk about themselves being a bigshot, it’s all described by people who know who they are to people who don’t.
This is where the comedy comes from, with people who think they’re bigshots coming up against people they don’t realise actually are bigshots. The onus is on people to keep themselves informed of who is around them, which comes back to bite people in a Brit-karmic way when they fail to do their research (Bricktop is a great example of this going both ways…).
“From a British perspective, you wouldn’t want to talk about it because people might think you only did it to make you look good in front of other people…”
I don’t think any of us Yankees would disagree with this–it’s just that we view this as a positive, not a negative. Whether you did it because you’re altruistic or because you wanted to look good in front of others, the fact remains that you did a good thing and deserve the rewards that stem from it.
To be clear, most of us don’t think of it in such explicate terms. But if you look at anyone from a local high school football star to a CEO, you’ll see that they very clearly are okay with taking actions merely to look good in front of others, even at potentially significant risk to themselves.
The more intellectual types I know tend to view this as one of the benefits of the system: It incentivizes the greedy, selfish people to help others, because that’s where the money is. If you can make everyone else’s life better and get rich in the process, well, that’s the system working as it should. And if you get powerful because of it, you’re someone with a track record and habit of helping people, and the resources to do so–the sort of person that we’d want in office anyway. (Obviously whether the USA’s system ever did that, much less is doing that now, is an open question; we’re discussing ideals, not how well we live up to them.)
For “Super Troopers” a lot of the drama is derived from the subversion of this concept (with the humor stemming from the team’s response to those subversions). The plot revolves around an attempt by the highway patrol to keep their jobs, which requires them to do some fantastic things. And each time they do, those rewards are snatched away from them.
American isolation is real. It’s the damn car culture. Americans dont have places to go inside their own neighborhoods.
“Boasting I find to be an intriguing difference between the value systems of Britain and the USA (a fascinating case study in subtle values dissonance if ever there was one).”
I believe the word “blowhard” is an Americanism.
More generally, the issue raised by boasting would appear to be the trustworthiness of the boaster. There are a couple of circumstances in which this would be less of an issue:
1) People who have never heard the boast before have reason to believe it true eg because the boaster has an honest reputation or the boast will soon be put to the test anyway. Circumstances would have to be such that it would be wise to tell the boast only if it were true.
2) People don’t actually care if the boast is true.
My somewhat vague impression was that these were **middle-class** Roman values. That is, the values for the people who made up the legions (as put forth by aristocrats in an attempt to create and influence middle-class culture).
There must have been some interesting triangulation going on, but I think the Romans had that thing where the upper class publicly adhered to the same ideal of virtue as the middle class, with the caveat of it being a situation where the distinction between upper and middle was that the upper class simply had more of it, in quantity and/or quality. That is, in contrast to societies where the leader is commonly understood to be playing by different rules, I’ve gotten the (very general) impression that Rome, even into the early imperial phase, simply worked better when ordinary people thought that the people on the top were playing by the same rules (or at least, a particular set of different rules). As also seen in the narrowing of the practical differences between plebian and patrician.
Although who knows, maybe Julius whispered the true secret of aristocratic virtue to Octavian? 🙂
> A person with honor had an expectation of a certain inviolability, a sort of social force-field around them which was their dignitas (literally: ‘worthiness’) – that their achievements had put them above, for instance, petty insults or injuries. An exceptional concentration of honor, so much that it could cow almost anyone into deference, was termed auctoritas (‘authority’), a quality in the Republic wielded collectively by the Senate (the auctoritas Senatus) and in the imperial period by well-regarded emperors (like Augustus).
I had not previously thought of things this way. I had thought of dignitas and auctoritas as two separate but related phenomenon, and had not connected them in this linear way with honor. Also, I had been perceiving a tension between auctoritas as a personal quality, and auctoritas as bestowed on officials (which derived from a slightly more abstract source such as the”senate and people of Rome”). (Game of Thrones: “Any man who must say ‘I am the king’ is no true king.”)
If anyone would like to go into more detail about this, I’d be interested in reading! 🙂
Possibly related: the different ways societies expect someone to respond to an offence against their ‘dignitas’ ? As I understand it (and no doubt over-simplify) a culture that values honour will expect a gentleman to fight a duel over petty insults, while the Romans as valuing dignity would expect a gentleman to ignore it. See for example
https://scholars-stage.org/honor-dignity-and-victimhood-a-tour-through-three-centuries-of-american-political-culture/
That’s how we conceive of these things, yes. But how did the Romans? Our words “honor”, “dignity”, and “authority” derive from the Latin words “honor”, “dignitas”, and “auctoritas”, but the concepts behind them are going to be different, perhaps subtly but perhaps significantly. Compare our “virtue” with Latin “virtus”, as explained in the post.
In particular, “auctoritas” is fundamentally connected with the operation of Roman government, but is it a quality that can be inherent in a person? Does the operation of government have “dignitas” the way a person might? Did the Romans see these things building up in a linear fashion? Does anything lie further along that path, such as godhood?
Alas, they’re all long dead, and we can’t ask them. But maybe someone who delved deeply enough into their surviving cultural remnants can come up with a guess at how they thought about the world.
excudent alii spirantia mollius aera
(credo equidem), vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.
Others, I have no doubt, with a more delicate touch
Will beat bronze into breathing likenesses,
Conjure living features out of marble,
Argue cases more effectively, and with their compass
Plot the heavens’ orbit and predict
The rising of the constellations. But you, Roman,
Remember: to you will fall the exercise of power
Over the nations, and these will be your gifts—
To impose peace and justify your sway,
Spare those you conquer, crush those who overbear.”
(Vergil via Heaney)
This article was interesting until it started going on “old man shouts at clouds” rants about cancel culture. It’s a pity because a clear eyed take on the hypothetical third step in the evolution would be interesting. But it’s just ridiculous how the author is blinded by hating on those kids and their snowflake status.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle are both what he calls “victim culture” hammered into the shape of novels. Both were highly influential and predate the civil right’s era. Trump explicitly describes himself as a victim at every opportunity. Ceremonial calls for mercy are recorded in pretty much every ancient honor culture. So his thesis is on factually shaky ground simply because his antipathy has blinded him.
A different comment on this page lays out a completely different set of behaviors which could be seen as the antithesis of honor culture: https://acoup.blog/2024/03/29/fireside-friday-march-29-2024-on-roman-values/#comment-64701
“If our achievements are to be talked about, they are to be praised by someone else pointing out the great thing you’ve done and you standing bashfully there gracefully tolerating the embarrassment, saying things like ‘oh, it was nothing really’. ”
Hardly lines up with the victim narrative yet it is strongly correlated to the atomic family and a culture without the need to defend culture. It’s not really dignity either, dignity is almost uncouth. The binary trend that the author laid out is leaving away a lot of interesting concepts to explore like this.
As a general word, anyone who uses King to argue against modern black activism-particularly when denying structural oppression-is tap dancing on his grave. The only reason they can get away with it is because he was murdered.
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle are both what he calls “victim culture” hammered into the shape of novels”
Nope. You have been led astray by assuming that all victims fall under victim culture.
For one thing, “victim” in it does not mean “asserting a claim to be the victim of injustice,” which is frequently made in all three cultures.
For the other, and more important, there have always been *supplicants*, who can not tap into either honor or dignity for protection and must apply to the more powerful. The thing is that where honor culture is bound by the necessity to back up your claims, and dignity by the necessity of not showing one’s self troubled by trifles in the most undignified manner, supplicants are by the necessity of not making the powerful angry. Indeed in some cultures, by the necessity of tempering your petitions to be worth the punishment; in imperial China, peasants who petitioned the emperor would be punished for it even if the imperial government redressed the grievance they petitioned about.
In honor culture and dignity culture alike, all people, including the supplicants, would stare in disbelief if you told them that a well-to-do student at a college posed as a supplicant because a blue-collar worker told her that part of the college was off-limits for a program. The general verdict would be “spoiled brat.”
” One fellow on Twitter even insisted that the chief Roman value was VIRILITAS, which was quite funny, because virilitas (‘manhood, manliness’) is an uncommon word in Latin, but when it appears it is mostly as a polite euphemism for ‘penis.’ ”
Thank you for that – this fellow’s mistake is quite amusing in its accidental reveal of the true sentiment behind all of this talk of “manly men”.
I have yet to encounter a group of men obsessed with “high testosterone” or “manliness” whose true purpose and ultimate goal isn’t to enslave women in service of those men’s penises.
(And indeed, if their goals were anything else, one imagines they would talk of virtus, not virilitas.)
How would you summarise the RETVRN view of Roman virtue? Or the broader popular view of what Romans thought virtuous or what we think is virtuous of the Roman mindset?
>How would you summarise the RETVRN view of Roman Virtue?
To quote the article:
“In particular, the Romans are sometimes adduced by the ‘RETVRN’ traditionalist crowd as fundamentally masculine, ‘manly men’ – ‘high testosterone’ fellows for whom ‘manliness’ was the chief virtue.”
I take it this would be an insufficiently detailed answer for you?
Yes, I think I’m asking for their view of ‘manliness’ to be expanded on.
Typing ‘RETVRN values’ into Google just now gave over 41 thousand hits. (After clarifying that I wasn’t a programmer looking for ‘return values’.) I didn’t go any further, but the first page included various “what are” links and more formal looking essays / blog posts.
The RETVRN proponents don’t appear to be writing in Latin, so why not just read the primary documents yourself? Post a comment here with more info for the rest of us.
(I tried the same experiment in Google France and only got 391 hits. Not so fond of ye olde Romans?)
This sort of comment comes off as unreasonably hostile and is detrimental to discussion and understanding. While I’ve no doubt you do not intend it to be taken as such, it comes across very much as “Sit down and shut up, the grownups are talking.” Which is fine in certain contexts–if this were an academic forum discussing peer-reviewed literature, it would be perfectly reasonable to expect any participant to have read the background material and be reasonably familiar with it.
This is a blog post. Of someone who routinely attempts to reach out to the public.
I strongly recommend Brandon F.’s video “The Stupidest Questions Reenactors get Asked (and their value!)” for a discussion of this topic as it relates to historical outreach.
The fact of the matter is we’re in something of a golden age of interest in history. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, this means that a lot of people are going to do history badly (when everyone’s doing it at Bret’s level, it means only professionals are doing it). They’re going to stumble a lot, and make errors, and confuse good and bad sources, and look for advice. If the answer they get to get blown off with a brusque “Do your research”, they’re going to lose interest.
I did a Google search on “Retvrn Rome” and the first hit I got was a thread on Reddit, asking more or ” what you just did (found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/16jp6rf/what_does_the_word_retvrn_mean/). Reading through some of the responses, the most informative one (to me-I recommend you go there and read it) was the following:
“It’s pretty much just another iteration of “Reject Modernity (degeneracy), Embrace Tradition.” RETVRN to the glory of (a romanticized fictional version of) the past before the degeneracy of modernity began to rot Western Civilization and “inevitably lead to another collapse of society like it totally did in Rome”. The rhetoric is typically employed to endorse and prescribe socially conservative, ethnonationalist, and, frankly, fascist ideological positions (see Umberto Eco’s section on Cult of Tradition in his Characteristics of Fascism list). They want to ‘retvrn’ to the social hierarchies of gender, race, religion, etc of whichever imagined past they subscribe to. Usually male, white supremacist, and some denomination of Christian, but most likely Catholic (also often a Catholic convert). There’s actually a comment on the thread above that is trying to obscure the meaning of the dogwhistle with the usual 4channer “haha it’s just a meme bro and these normie losers just don’t get it bro haha (Pepe wink)” bullshit.”
My personal entry in to Roman history is as a 1st year under grad in Scots Law; discover that you could just about get away with quoting the Institutes of Justinian in a 21st century Scottish Court.
Romans certainly loved the Law. They did a lot of it.
“The chief Roman virtue is virilitas” probably caught on because “The chief Roman virtue is virtus,” while less wrong and not far from their desired rhetorical outcome, sounds silly. If you’re not familiar enough with Roman culture, it sounds like the “the floor is made of floor” of philosophy.
Percy gives his wayward human servant a dirty look.
And here is my recommendation of a book related to this post: Robert Kaster’s “Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome”. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/emotion-restraint-and-community-in-ancient-rome-9780195140781?cc=us&lang=en&
Which of the ancient Roman values manifest in Bret’s cats?
I’m sorry, but cats as a general rule are too busy with their own important business to pay any attention to mere human values, Roman or otherwise.
Rub my tummy.
I don’t think it’s emphasized as much here, but I recall the last time Bret listed a set of Roman virtues there was a point to the effect of how honour and gravitas were the sort of thing that meant that when an accomplished Roman spoke on a subject, you ought to listen to them respectfully even if you disagreed with them. That, in combination with the network of obligations of deference, seems like it might have had relevance to how the Republic in its more functional form entailed a lot of systems of compromise.
I have a hard time imagining that this is the sort of thing that would be valued by people who present themselves as promoting their particular conception of ancient Roman virtues.
(Also, Roman men had standards for displaying affection for other men that were peers by kissing on the mouth, and engaged in the kind of correspondence that makes it difficult to tell if it was actually romantic or not, which I expect a lot of the modern types would recoil from and is far from their idea of how men are supposed to be friends with one another.)
The evolution of male friendships over time and across cultures would be an interesting (and intensive) study by itself. I’ve read a limited amount on the subject, but the primary sources I’ve read (Roman, Medieval, 1800s, and a few others) all include a variety of physical and verbal expressions of affection that we more typically think of as romantic. There are extant pictures of some fairly rough characters from the Old West where guys were sitting on each other’s laps and touching each other affectionately, to give but one example.
The conclusion I’ve come to is that today’s society is emotionally castrated (I use that term because it’s something these people are terrified of). In the interest of a pseudo-stoicism and false masculinity (really a juvenile fear of anything seen as feminine) we’ve lobotomized ourselves and removed our ability to feel several entire spectra of emotions.
It’s not “pseudo-stoicism and false masculinity” (in fact, displays of masculine affection died out at pretty much the same time as stoicism and masculinity became seen as negative), it’s the sexual revolution. Two men in the 1800s could hug and engage in soppy dialogue about how much they loved each other, and everybody would just assume they were good friends. Once society normalised both (a) homosexuality and (b) the notion that men always want to have sex, any such displays would inevitably be seen as sexual, and since it’s generally very awkward and uncomfortable having platonic feelings misinterpreted as sexual, the natural outcome was that men stopped showing affection to each other.
Men always wanting sex was normalized since before humans had writing and cultures accepting of homosexuality have had detailed and clear social standards of male platonic love.
Plus, to a small but meaningful degree, the sexual revolution was only a change in how social structure and the upper classes engaged with sex; it’s clear that while normalization of nontraditional sex has changed society those undercurrents were absolutely still present before then.
Plus men and women have had wildly different standards of appropriate behaviors in their social engagement, at times including platonic gestures being accepted, and the assumption that men and women want to have sex with each other is pretty universal.
The truth is just that there is a deep sexual malformity in our culture founded on a deep wellspring of sexual insecurity masquerading as a purity and morality cult. There’s no mistake that fascists are deeply sexually insecure and fanatically violent towards queerness. This right wing regressive movements primary base is not incidentally male, and their rhetoric is *violently* hateful towards unmarried women as a group.
In other words it’s not that people fear accidentally coming off as interested in someone they aren’t attracted to. It’s that Conservatives are *terrified* of appearing anything less than purely masculine because it challenges their sexual impotence.
Men always wanting sex was normalized since before humans had writing
Not true. For most of western history, men were considered the less highly-sexed gender.
and cultures accepting of homosexuality have had detailed and clear social standards of male platonic love.
That’s why I specified that “both” (a) and (b) needed to happen. A society where homosexuality is normalised but men aren’t considered to always want sex can still have close male friendships, as can a society where men are considered to always want sex with women but where homosexuality isn’t normalised.
The truth is just that there is a deep sexual malformity in our culture founded on a deep wellspring of sexual insecurity masquerading as a purity and morality cult. There’s no mistake that fascists are deeply sexually insecure and fanatically violent towards queerness. This right wing regressive movements primary base is not incidentally male, and their rhetoric is *violently* hateful towards unmarried women as a group.
In the real world, meanwhile, sexual purity as a concept has been overwhelmingly denigrated in mainstream culture since the 1960s, and fascists have never been in a position to shape sexual relations in the English-speaking world.
In other words it’s not that people fear accidentally coming off as interested in someone they aren’t attracted to. It’s that Conservatives are *terrified* of appearing anything less than purely masculine because it challenges their sexual impotence.
If that were true, we should expect conservatives to have few and low-quality male friendships compared to non-conservatives, but I’ve never seen anything to suggest that this is the case.
[i]”Not true. For most of western history, men were considered the less highly-sexed gender.”[/i]
No. Oh, in the strictest sense what you’re saying is true, I suppose, but that’s also completely irrelevant. Men being less highly sexed does not change that throughout history everyone with a brain knew that *people* were highly sexed. Plus in a purity culture it’s advantageous to claim to be less sexed than others, in a misogynistic culture it’s advantageous for men to claim to be less sexed then women, and historical western culture is both of these things *and also* most writers were male.
[i]”That’s why I specified that “both” (a) and (b) needed to happen. A society where homosexuality is normalised but men aren’t considered to always want sex can still have close male friendships, as can a society where men are considered to always want sex with women but where homosexuality isn’t normalised.”[/i]
Except B isn’t new.
[i]”In the real world, meanwhile, sexual purity as a concept has been overwhelmingly denigrated in mainstream culture since the 1960s, and fascists have never been in a position to shape sexual relations in the English-speaking world.”[/i]
…What? I….What? Fascists and conservatives have had tremendous political influence. Miscegenation laws, abortion restrictions, sex education bans, gay panic, ‘the problem with black culture’, welfare queens, the aids epidemic….All of these are reactions against a perceived lack of sexual purity, and perceived degeneracy.
It’s completely incomprehensible to argue that fascist reactionaries haven’t heavily and significantly influenced American sexual morality for decades to impose sexual purity culture and create a fear of degeneracy throughout the conservative population. Unless you think the social movement that empowers a political party which controls most state legislatures isn’t mainstream and that’s your avenue here, I can only conclude you’re just screwing with me. Or you think fascism is only a thing that happens to other people, which means you have no knowledge to convey about history or politics.
I am slightly less familiar with how British conservativism functioned historically, but I know enough about modern British politics to know that they certainly have regressive sexual moralizing via trans panic, and enough to know their sodomy laws were obviously and directly regressive for decades.
[i]”If that were true, we should expect conservatives to have few and low-quality male friendships compared to non-conservatives, but I’ve never seen anything to suggest that this is the case.”[/i]
That doesn’t follow. It’s only required that conservatives have less expressions of open affection. Which is true. But because most conservatives are men, most people like being agreed with, and quality of relationships is subjective, we can’t say that conservative men should have some demonstably lower quality of male friendship than liberal men. We both can’t assess that and have confounding variables.
“welfare queens, the aids epidemic….All of these are reactions against a perceived lack of sexual purity, and perceived degeneracy. ”
Uhhh … what?
I hope I misunderstand you – surely you are not saying that the aids epidemic was engineered by conservatives?
(With welfare queens, well, I am hoping you mean the stereotype of the welfare queens, not the mere existence of people who take unfair advantage of the welfare system, but with AIDS, I really don’t know what you could possibly mean, because the HI virus is real, and it is inconveniently spread by anal sex, no matter how politically inopportune one might find that; and I cannot think of any way in which conservatives calling for more sexual purity could have caused it or even contributed to it. )
I sometimes enjoy a good conspiracy theory, but this would be just a tad bit too weird.
As to why men don’t show affection for each other anymore, I think it is a mixture of the British fashion of not showing feelings in general (a fashion that arose among the men of the upper classes and was thus taken up by everyone wanting to climb the social ladder) and men getting insecure about their masculinity. Not because of conservativism, but just because of women fighting against patriarchal oppression.
Purely anecdotal, but the man most hilariously insecure about his masculinity that I’ve ever met was one who had a reputation for having lots of sex with various women he was not in relationships with. So, concern about sexual purity can not be the problem in his case.
Now, to any modern women, it is plainly obvious that a man is a man if he is male and adult, because that is the definition, but that does not stop men from being endlessly worried about not being “real men”.
The men of ancient Rome, of course, were not any less insecure in and of themselves, their extreme oppression of women shows how anxious they were to create artificial differences between women and men. (Almost all cultures on earth have some degree of patriarchy, because men want to exploit women’s reproductive capacity, but I think it is fair to say that Roman men went far beyond what was “necessary” for that goal.)
But having shoved the burden of proving their manliness onto women, they could engage in all the displays of affection towards other men they wanted, and also admit that self-control is perhaps a good idea.
In times and places where men cannot offload their insecurity on women to deal with, they turn their aggressions inward, inventing ever more ridiculous social norms that they adhere to in their pursuit of “manliness”. (Though the idea that regular showering is somehow unmanly can be seen as an desperate attempt to make women suffer with the stench …)
The fact that breaking social norms has come to be deemed masculine is, I think, a symptom of men being angry that women now have a say in what social norms are.
(The men who complain the loudest about women and feminism unfairly dictating their lifestyle via having a vote in democracy are, it turns out, quite happy to obey every word of a single man who promises to teach them how to be manly men. )
@ dcmorinmorinmorin:
No. Oh, in the strictest sense what you’re saying is true, I suppose, but that’s also completely irrelevant. Men being less highly sexed does not change that throughout history everyone with a brain knew that *people* were highly sexed. Plus in a purity culture it’s advantageous to claim to be less sexed than others, in a misogynistic culture it’s advantageous for men to claim to be less sexed then women, and historical western culture is both of these things *and also* most writers were male.
People knew that people wanted sex, but the idea that sexual desire is the fundamental drive behind a load of ostensibly non-sexual behaviour didn’t become popularised until Freud.
…What? I….What? Fascists and conservatives have had tremendous political influence.
No fascist party has ever come anywhere close to wielding political power in any English-speaking country. That you think otherwise suggests that you know very little about politics outside your own ideological bubble.
I do love the Internet. It’s impossible to tell if I’m saying something crazy or not.
To ruin the fun, no, aids wasn’t invented by conservatives. I suppose I could argue they intentionally made it an epidemic, but what I meant was the rhetoric blaming gay men for it and the active sabotage of health ministries by conservative politicians which prevented awareness and suppressed activists was part of an active campaign to promote a fascist view of sexuality and culture.
This is a key tactic in both traditional and neo fascism. The initial stages must maintain deniability while welding their political movement to traditional purity culture and manufacturing an obsession with deviance, but they also need to radicalize their base towards violence. This tends to manifest in first inaction, via paralyzing law enforcement investigating fascists, repealing civil protections for minorities, cutting government programs aimed at minorities, before gradually morphing into active dehumanization.
Aids was perfect for them because they could effectively purge the gay community through inaction; they can’t be accused of mass murder, and it’s notoriously hard to prove inaction is intentional. Even today some people defend Reagens policies as merely being incompetence, or caution, or beaucracy, despite the clear evidence his advisors just wanted gay men to die and that he was at least willing to indulge them.
Also, for the welfare queen narrative it is worth noting that there were several aspects which are key. While welfare fraud happens it is vanishingly rare. Reagan almost fully manufactured a group of people out of a few cases. Further the depiction of welfare fraud offenders is almost universally single mothers with multiple children, which is not accurate to the demographics of actual fraudsters.
This ties into a larger resentment of single women as a group, and viewing conservative opinion pieces on single mothers makes this a abundantly clear. Part of this resentment is explicitly sexual in nature, and also implicitly designed to manufacture and sustain reactionary beliefs and policies.
This is also intentionally manufactured, as the modern right sees young single men as a key demographic. In particular basically all major inroads that conservatives make into black demographics are helmed by “mens rights” activists turned right wing commentators. By presenting single mothers as the problem and blaming them for failing to adhere to traditional feminity, they give black men whom resent the system and their lack of sexual validation an out for their rage that in no way threatens the mechanisms of power.
Mr. X, the modern Republican party fits every single definition of fascism ever written. Donald Trump is campaigning on openly purging his rivals, they platform on anti immigrant rhetoric, they engage in state suppression of media, they conflate sexual deviance and their political opposition, they dehumanize minorities, and stand for expansion of state power.
The idealogically underpinnings of this are clearly traced all the way back the 1910’s to 1930’s when American racial ‘scientists’ were actively writing law for Woodrow Wilson and collaborating with Nazi Germany to come to a shared understanding of ethno-nationalist policy. The movement of people directly educated by these individuals into the Republican party during the 70’s and 80’s and the subsequent mainstreaming of openly fascist rhetoric into the Republican party during the 2000’s is a documented fact of history and politics. Even before then the red scares are clearly fascistic in undertone, being political purges.
The history of conservatism in America is just the history of fascism in America. You’re assertion that fascist parties aren’t powerful in English speaking countries suggests you don’t know what fascism is and cannot meaningfully contribute to political or historical discussions post 1900. Please educate yourself before continuing to engage with topics you don’t understand.
Mr. X, the modern Republican party fits every single definition of fascism ever written… The history of conservatism in America is just the history of fascism in America.
Looks like I was right.
lol man, if you don’t think MAGA Republicans are fascist you need to go an elementary textbook. Maybe a picture book, actually.
Good to see you lied to Bret when you claimed to have a university education though.
@dcmorinmorinmorin:
Do you have any evidence whatsoever for any of the claims you’ve made?
I will also note, by the way, that if one looks these matters up, according to the notoriously homophobic fascists at the CDC, approximately 60% of all HIV infections in the US are the result of male-to-male sexual contact, with heterosexual contact being a very distant second, followed by injection drug use.
Donald Trump is campaigning on openly purging his rivals, they platform on anti immigrant rhetoric, they engage in state suppression of media, they conflate sexual deviance and their political opposition, they dehumanize minorities, and stand for expansion of state power.
I’m no fan of the republican party, but none of this seems particularly “fascist” to me, and in fact all of them seem pretty common to many different kinds of regimes, historically and across the world.
I think you could make a decent case that Donald Trump or, maybe, more accurately, Vladimir Putin is a fascist, but it would have to be along very different lines then what you provide here.
My in depth reply to guilders got nuked, maybe by a glitch, and I’m not going to repeat it. Just…look up the evangelical advisors to Reagan and how they influenced the aids response. They explicitly said that they didn’t want to challenge purity culture and that’s why they advised Reagan not to talk about or fund research into aids. It was politically useful to scapegoat gay men instead.
Hector, fascism is foundationally a set of relatively distinct and related political movements. There’s a lot of text in the 14 points of ur fascism, but the core social movements have four attributes I think are key. I’m ommiting and combining some because they’re less important, objective, and obvious.
1. Anti empiricism. Not only are intellectuals wrong, the very systems of knowledge are attacked. Data driven analysis is disparaged, counter information is encouraged, conspiratorial thinking made policy. Disagreement is treason, debate is purely a tactical endeavor, consensus is of prime importance.
Put more simply, fascist countries practice media totalitarianism and fascist parties try to blur the lines between state, political, and private media to their benefit at any given time.
2. Cultural purism. Fascists are obsessed with a concept of purity, nostalgia, and traditionalism. The driving motive for it is a desire to separate our those who deserve success and those who don’t. To this end they other immigrants, minorities, and opponents. “They’re coming for our children” is a passable translation of Nazi headlines. Propaganda about sexual assault and immigrants, pedophilia and queerness, and “women stealing” by minorities are all *crimson* flags.
In truth this is the ideological heart of the movement; some people are deviants who deserve to die, we’re pure and deserve power. It’s the methods that make up the other characteristics that separate it from other far right movements.
3. Economic false populism and hierarchical third wayism. Fascists want to use the othering of groups to enforce a new economic social order, one that is purer than before while returning to a “better” capitalism. Hierarchy and meritocracy are fetishized, competition is good, but society needs an adjustment because of the deviant corruption.
The conflation of economic success and moral, political, and sexual righteousness is a key component here that lets them freely change rhetorical positions. They can freely move from corruption cases to immigrants being sex criminals to church attendance to single mothers to welfare fraud as each position becomes untenable, because the actual message is-“we’re better, we deserve their stuff”.
Incidentally it’s why you don’t debate fascists, you find something to make them look stupid and punch it home until they give up. Their words don’t have any actual meaning because their actual message is impossible to define, just vibes. Anything else is platforming them.
4. A paradoxical doublethink regarding opponents. The enemy must be both strong so extreme methods are necessary and weak so that violence is safe enough for victory to be expected. This leads to fascists making conspiracies where their enemies are hidden, public, influential, and weak all at once.
MAGA Republicans believe degenerate wokism, helmed by transgender perverts trying to spread a social contagion to kids, are manipulating society and markets alongside big government donors (optionally Jewish and pedophiles), while controlling the vast powers of the American criminal justice system which is primed to arrest all the effeminate liberals are purge the swamp any day now.
They’re Fascists.
Note that before wokism became a rallying cry and degeneracy a key platform they *weren’t*, Trump went from a very stupid Conservative to a fascist in the last four years. Certain components of his party-think Q-were fascist the entire time, but the party itself changed more recently.
But the groundwork of a century of fascist advisors went into priming the Republican party to change in a decade from conservatism to open fascism; all those characteristics are core to conservative ideology but combing them all at once and taking them seriously is the change.
I don’t think you’re disagreeing with me, so much as providing a mechanism. The reason pseudo-stoicism and false masculinity came to the forefront is because of fears of being seen as homosexual. Both have always been around (the Stoics discussed pseudo-stoicism, and the discussion of what constitutes masculinity is practically as old as written records), but the current cultural disdain for expressing certain emotions gained a lot of momentum from that fear of being seen as homosexual. Straight men felt a need to show they weren’t gay, and it’s pretty well demonstrated that when a group is attacked they rally around a fairly radical core.
To be clear: I disagree that this is the full explanation. The seeds for this were sewn far earlier than the Sexual Revolution (they pretty much had to be in order for your explanation to work), and Stoicism and masculinity weren’t generally viewed as negative until after the Sexual Revolution had time to take root (John Wayne was still considered an icon, to give one example). In my opinion (for what little it’s worth) our culture is undergoing a significant shift, including a shift not merely in what it means to be a man (or woman), but the more fundamental question of if we even need a unifying concept of it. Rome did; each Greek polis did; Europe of the 1800s thought they did. But the USA may be able to tolerate a significant variety of definitions, just as we can tolerate a significant variety of family styles, religious systems, and sexual orientations. THAT, in my experience, is what has people scared–because it means you need to choose how to live, rather than having a standard that you merely need to fit into. And it means that you are necessarily going to encounter people who live lifestyles wildly different from your own. Liberty is the political philosophy of adults, and part of that is accepting that things you find offensive are going to happen, and you need to tolerate it.
As an aside, it’s interesting to look at the timing of the Sexual Revolution and the fall of the domestic service industry.
Yep. For an example of this dynamic in action, see the interpretations of Frodo and Sam’s relationship in LOTR.
Tolkien, who almost personified traditional conservatism, and wrote LOTR before the Sexual Revolution, wrote said relationship as a non-sexual one between two male characters who showed considerable affection between each other.
Meanwhile, it is those portions of the LOTR fandom that are most in-tune with the Sexual Revolution and are the least conservative that interpret their relationship as being a homosexual one and write fanfic about it.
Anyone who refuses to admit that what you’re talking at least plays a role has an ideological axe to grind and should not be taken seriously.
There are a few problems with your argument.
First, it’s not a complete argument. You’ve proven that at least some people will confuse platonic intimacy with romantic. However, the other part of Mr. X’s mechanism is that men will act in ways to mitigate this. That part isn’t demonstrated with the Sam/Frodo dynamic. Without that, the argument is necessarily incomplete.
Second, people who commit this error (and let’s be clear, it’s an error as a matter of verifiable fact) are generally dismissed within the Tolkien community. In my experience at least they have less influence than the people who think the Arkenstone was a Silmaril. Either they aren’t terribly good at understanding what Tolkien was driving at (nearly a mortal sin in the community), or they’re behaving in a silly and frivolous manner (and thus not something anyone need take seriously). This undermines your point, as these behaviors drastically limit their influence on the community, far below the level where the community would respond in the ways Mr. X and you are proposing it should. This presents a social mechanism that would necessarily reduce the tendency to become hyper-masculine in the face of wide acceptance of homosexuality. If we use this as a model, we should expect to see precisely the same sorts of mechanisms at play in society at large.
Please note that I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m saying that this example does not support your argument.
“Full Metal Jacket” presents a superior argument for your conclusions, in as much as at least one character in the movie clearly used homosexual slurs as an insult to drive men towards a particular set of behaviors and a particular view of masculinity. Of course, that’s in a fairly limited sphere of public life, and it’s an open question as to whether this influenced the general public sufficiently to produce the effects we’re discussing.
You have a point regarding the reactions to Sam and Frodo in Tolkien’s time and day (iirc, there were quite a few who speculated about a gay relationship there) but I think you are reading too much into slash fanfic.
Those characters are not written as gay couples because women are deeply convinced that a man who shows affection towards another man must be gay, the writers just want to see those characters as romantic couples and come up with justifications for it.
Fanfiction is not an intellectual, academic pursuit, but an emotional, wish-fullfillment one.
Women do not ship two male characters because they analyzed the original and came to the scientific conclusion that those men must be gay, nor because they loathe the idea of to men having a deeply emotional friendship, but because they like the idea of a romantic relationship featuring that kind of deep emotional connection.
Of course, the fact that those men show each other the deep love and affection that men rarely show to women plays a role, but as far as physical displays of affection go … you can write two men as never touching each other and fanfic writers will still ship it. (Holmes and Watson come to mind. And while I don’t know that series, Spock is not known for being very emotional, I think? Still gets shipped with Kirk.)
What causes slash fanfic is not disdain for men’s affection towards each other, but their lack of true love and respect shown to women, causing women to fantasize about how wonderful it must be to be a gay man and be truly loved by a man.
(I have an hypothesis that, the more a male character proves that he loves and respects women, the less gay fanfic is written about him. If anyone knows a way to count fanfic by pairing, I might be able to prove it.)
@ Dinwar:
Second, people who commit this error (and let’s be clear, it’s an error as a matter of verifiable fact) are generally dismissed within the Tolkien community.
The Tolkien community has a higher-than-average proportion of reactionaries who think that pre-1960s norms were better in every respect, and even those who don’t fit this description mostly know enough about Tolkien and the era he grew up in to know that Frodo and Sam’s relationship isn’t meant to be romantic or sexual. But 60guilders is right that mores have changed since then. For example, I distinctly remember reading LOTR in high school, and thinking that, if I acted towards my friends like Frodo and Sam acted towards each other, everyone would think I was coming onto them.
Especially given that most men wish to have relationships with women, and giving off signals that you aren’t interested in women is very unwise in that respect.
Although I think that these attitudes might finally be receding. I have a teen son who displays no rejection of gay or trans boys at his school, despite being fairly conservative otherwise. I have quietly encouraged this behavior. Just one case proves little, of course.