Friends, Readers, Countrymen, lend me your eyes! As sadly expected, the hiatus is going to continue through October. I am making good progress on my writing, but still need to keep focusing. I am currently, I believe, on track for us to go back to normally scheduled posts in November, but I don’t want to make any promises as I want to be sure that the book comes out as strong as it possible can.
In the meantime, last month I gave you all a list of recommendations from other blogs, channels and so on, so I though this month, I might highlight a few of my favorites from the archives for those of you who haven’t plumbed the back-catalog.
Of course the all-time fan favorites on the blog are the twin Lord of the Rings series: The Battle of Helm’s Deep and the Siege of Gondor. But in case you may have missed it, we’ve also looked in a lot more detail at some of the core elements of logistics, leadership and command that I could only touch on briefly in those series, namely:
- The series of Logistics and Foraging, Logistics, How Did They Do It in three parts: (I, II, III)
- A more detailed discussion of how fast armies move and why.
- A discussion on fortifications and sieges throughout the eras in five parts: (I, II, III, IV, V)
- And a discussion on the limitations of pre-industrial battlefield command in three-ish parts: (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc)
One of my favorite series to have written here was The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, a series looking at identity, diversity, bigotry and the roots of Roman success in five parts: (I, II, III, IV, V). This series has become, sadly, I think, more relevant in the three years since I wrote it, as skewed visions of Rome have been increasingly mobilized, especially on Twitter (including by the owner of Twitter) to defend exclusionary policies – a baffling error, given that Rome is, perhaps, the most obvious and clear case of ‘diversity is strength’ in the pre-modern world.
Some of the most interesting topics, to me at least, I’ve writetn on here are the How Did They Make It series, covering agriculture (I, II, III, IV, A), ironworking (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, A) and textile manufacture (I, II, III, IVa, IVb). It is worth remembering that prior to the industrial revolution, agriculture and textile manufacture would have made up between them the overwhelming majority of economic activity: if you want to understand ancient or medieval economies, understanding cereal agriculture (grain, rice, etc.) and textiles will get you to understanding probably close to three quarters of all economic activity.
Finally, let me pull together some of the source reading we’ve done:
- Thucydides on what we’d call foreign policy realism
- Cicero on Natural Law
- Dhuoda of Uzès on values in the medieval Carolingian court
- And both ‘Antarah Ibn Shaddad and Bertran de Born on visions of elite military masculinity.
I’ll also note that these are all exercises in ‘close reading’ and we did one more exercise in close reading here, on the themes of Dune.
So if you haven’t, check those out – or suggest your own favorites from the ACOUP back-catalog in the comments and hopefully we’ll be back in November. In the meantime, here is an absolutely fantastic model of a Fletcher-class destroyer that a former student of mine made for me:
Happy writing!
It’s very nice, but it looks uncannily like a Tootsie Roll to me.
Beware the Tootsie Roll Bomb!!!! 🙂
Not to toot my own horn, but that 4th bullet point is related to a side project I’ve been working on. Namely, what’s the simplest wargamey battle “simulator” that involves no player agency after deployment? Ie, something like what Paradox games have, but ideally with a bit more depth and less artificial rock-paper-scissoring, but far less involved than a Total War game. If you want to play around with what I’ve done so far it’s available to play with through any browser at olleus.pyscriptapps.com/simple-battles/v2/
NOTE: I’m not trying to sell anything, there are neither ads nor anything to buy. Just some rough code I put together recently.
Interesting work, I’ve enjoyed playing around with it for the last few minutes. So far, pikemen seem to dominate basically every matchup except all infantry vs any force with cavalry on river maps – and they only fail there because all-infantry forces start closer to the center of the map than forces with cavalry, so the pikemen get caught marching through the river while their enemies fight from the bank. Though, since this is a system where flanking only happens if your army is physically wider than the enemy’s, or you’ve driven off a part of their line already, that’s a pretty realistic outcome
Glad you enjoyed it! I’ve made some pretty big changes in a new version (replace v2 with v3 in the URL above) that rework how deployment works. Armies now also have a stance that determines how aggressive they are. Pikes are now still excellent at holding a river crossing, but really struggle at forcing their way across – especially against ranged units. Try archer + 3*spear + archer against 5 pikes and tell me what you think 🙂
Neat update! That combination you suggested absolutely devastated the all-pike matchup. The stance system is cool too – a good way to simulate how disciplined or organized the overall army is, and the combative stance in particular seems to result in a lot more opportunities for flanking – both for the army using the stance, and the one opposing them.
Periodically, after changing some parameters and trying to run the battle again, I would get this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 97, in do_battle
File “/home/pyodide/GraphicBattle.py”, line 323, in do_to_buffer
super().do(0)
File “/home/pyodide/Battle.py”, line 746, in do
self.do_turn(verbosity)
File “/home/pyodide/GraphicBattle.py”, line 311, in do_turn
self.battle_scene.draw_frame(self.army_1, self.army_2, self.curr_fights)
File “/home/pyodide/GraphicBattle.py”, line 155, in draw_frame
self.canvas = Image.new(mode=”RGBA”, size=self.croped_res, color=”White”)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File “/lib/python3.12/site-packages/PIL/Image.py”, line 2941, in new
return im._new(core.fill(mode, size, color))
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
MemoryError
It wasn’t a huge inconvenience, as reloading the page was all it took to get the map working again
Thanks! If you feel like playing some other, try having an army which is missing a unit at the flank but with an additional reserve. It leads to nice refused flanks / chevron advances which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.
Yeah, I occasionally get that too. It’s a memory leak I can’t track down, which I think comes from the platform I’m using to run python in browser. When / if I decide to take this from an experiment to a proper thing I’ll probably rewrite it all in Unity or something more robust.
Programmer’s advice: put errors to pastebin and post link to pastebin (not sure if links allowed here). Code in plaintext is tough to read and format even if it doesn’t conflict with markup, and you can even set up syntax highlighting.
Gratuitous Space Battles also has this base concept, though it’s set in space (obviously) with space opera-type units.
I’m definitely giving your project a try soon.
There was also a 1990 Roman Republic strategy game called “Centurion: Defender of Rome”. That one also had the battles only be interactable by initial deployment
There also is HISTORY Great Empires: Rome.
A Turn-based Strategy game where when that armies fight, player interaction is limited to placing units on your side of the map, giving them orders (from charge, through hold your ground, to wait for a bit and then advance), and formations (more organised units had more available). Once the battle starts you cannot give new orders to troops and are forced to merely watch and hope for the best until the battle is over. Poorly enough there was no ‘skip’ or ‘speed up’ button for those battles which sometimes could take a while.
There was more to the game (a simple city builder and recruitment system using three resources), but not that much.
I had once played it on the Nintendo DS Lite about a decade ago but have since lost it.
In case anyone is still reading this, there’s a much improved version (olleus.pyscriptapps.com/simple-battles/v3/) which allows armies to be more or less aggressive, as well as a general rebalancing. Any and all feedback, suggestions, criticism welcome!
Forgot to post here, but there are a couple newer versions in the last week. Remove the /v3/ above it will direct you to the latest version. Nothing drastic has changed, but more options to play around, try to recreated historical tactics or even specific ancient battles. None of it super realistically, but the aim is more to keep it simple and capture an abstract essence than the details.
Spear, archers and light cav crushed pike and irregulars.
On what map? In what numbers? And which stance? Pike and irregulars are pretty specialised units for smooth and very rough ground respectively. Spears and archers are more all rounders.
I had tried out v8 some days ago, I had played some scenario’s; it was interesting.
However, after a few battles I noticed something odd. I then made some new battles, on ‘smooth’ terrain and with both sides having a ‘balanced’ stance, just to check whether what I found was right.
It turns out that for most units* when one + variant of that unit goes up against two -‘s variants of that unit, the + wins. However, for pikes, spears, and Mixed Inf, when one + variant of that unit goes up against two -‘s variants of that unit, the -‘s win without losing a single unit. (For Swords the -‘s win at the cost losing one unit.)
* To be specifically, irregulars, javelins, archers, Shock Cav, and Light Cav.
I wonder why that is, both the discussion on the civfanatics forum and a comparison between unit stats does not suggest anything.
However, rereading the rules it turns out it had in them been mentioned that: the effect [of morale on power] is initially steeper for highly rigid units than for flexible one, but levels out to the same at very low morale., and pikes, spears, and Mixed Inf’s are the only units with positive ‘rigidity’.
Though, the effect of rigidity must then be very big if the +20% of spears allow two -‘s to defeat one + without losing a single unit, whereas the -20% of Shock Cav allows the + to win instead. And this for a 10% difference in morale at the start, thanks to the 2 -‘s receiving bonus morale from supported flanks.
Or could there be another possible cause for this I had missed?
Yes, you’re exactly right! It boils down rigidity, which is one of the key ideas of the simulation. The effect is important (about the same as being on advantageous terrain), but not overwhelming. What you’re seeing is compounded by a sort of “winner takes all” effect where a small advantage snowballs into a large advantage. This wasn’t something I deliberately add it, but I think it’s a pretty historic effect: it’s rare for one army to rout the enemy but itself have lost 50% of its own units.
I’m glad you found it interesting and that at least one person bothered to read my write up of the rules haha
Good job with this, as a web dev I’ve also been thinking about how I would make something like this. It was very instructive to look at your project and see how you’ve implemented it in Python.
With the box office bomb that is Megalopolis hitting theaters, I’d be curious to see your take on the themes of the movie, particularly the Cataline conspiracy.
“I’ve writetn ” -> “I’ve written”
Yes, but how are the cats doing?
Will there be more “A Trip Through …” in the future? Seems they haven’t been posted in a while
Your “How Did They Make It” series have been very useful to refer back to while looking at the Spice & Wolf remake, thank-you for writing them!
The Lonely Cities articles were also front-of-mind when I watched the remake (and rewatched the original). The original series shows Ruvenheigen with some agriculture on the periphery, but the remake tends to feature almost exclusively pastoral rolling hills as far as the eye can see.
On the one hand, yeah, I did feel that; on the other hand, it was something of an exception that proves the rule, as there were reasons in the story for it to be unusual and the other places we see mostly seemed to have more crop agriculture. Suggesting that you’re actually *supposed* to be thinking “huh, do they only have sheep and military action here?”
The issue I have with your theories is shoehorning, both in the Fremen Mirage and the Roman Empire of Diversity. The concepts you comprehensively explore don’t quite map onto the examples used.
In the case of the Fremen in the Dune novels, their backstory is being driven from one world to the next before settling in the desert of Arrakis. While FH is clear that the harsh environment molded them into effective warriors, they aren’t invincible super-soldiers either. The Fremen are a diaspora of tribes who are unable to mount an effective challenge to the settled societies around them, until they are united by a “religious prophet” wielding supernatural abilities, including prescient knowledge of future time-lines; even then it’s the control of spice that is the decisive power-play.
The other great military force, the Sardaukar, especially makes it clear that FH was much more concerned with humans being molded by their environment than with a derivative of the Noble Savage myth. This is because the Sardaukar are trained in the harsh ecosystem of Salusa Secundus, which conditions them into formidable elite soldiers, kind of like futuristic Immortals (or Spartans, but that would set you off, methinks)… yet, they serve the Padishah Emperor as the enforcers of the advanced, decadent society! So it’s not that simple.
In addition to the above, the Fremen had their own industries and advanced technology (with stillsuits as the most famous example, among others). To your credit, you touch on this, but you downplay how sophisticated they actually are, within the limitations of a diaspora living in an alien desert.
As for the Roman Empire of Diversity, again, modern notions of diversity and multiculturalism don’t quite fit into Classical Antiquity. Yes, the Romans assimilated conquered peoples, ruling through client kings, adding local gods to the pantheon, and gradually absorbing them, and this did indeed play a large role in their historic success. However, multiculturalism/diversity also depends on Equality. It’s not enough for different ethnic groups & cultures to live together in a society, they must also be peers, or near-peers. Otherwise, you’d have to accept the Jim Crow South or Apartheid South Africa as diverse/multicultural, which most anyone would balk at.
Which brings us to Rome, which was a profoundly unequal place. Until the Edict of Caracalla in the early 3rd century, Roman citizenship was highly exclusive — citizens were mainly from Italia, or born to the correct Roman families, or were co-opted nobility (some others had the Latin Right, a partial citizenship, but this too was limited). This means that full rights and participation in Roman society was heavily concentrated on the dominant ethnic/cultural group, with most people under their dominion as subjects and slaves. One could say this is problematic.
Thus, during the Roman Republic and early-to-mid Empire, Rome was thoroughly unequal and arguably supremacist, with one dominant group subjugating the rest. This changed with the aforementioned Edict of Caracalla, which opened up citizenship and rights to their subjects. However, this was followed by the Crisis of the Third Century, the massive Roman civil war (which you addressed), which I see as the beginning of the Decline and Fall phase, which ran through the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries AD.
Additionally, cultural assimilation varied across the Empire. If we use language as our metric, it’s clear that Italia was thoroughly assimilated, with Gaul and Hispania as runners-up, due to the dominance of Latin; Egypt was only partially assimilated, since the native language was partly submerged but never replaced, with its descendant, Coptic, surviving long after (even to the present as a liturgical language). Britannia, by contrast, was barely assimilated at all, since we don’t really see Latin influence on the Old English of Beowulf, with English being Latinized much later, post-1066. The larger point is that assimilation is a gradual, organic process taking generations, which also depends upon the degree of cultural dominance; you can’t just meld people together quickly and easily!
Of course, there is some truth in Rome relying on assimilation to their benefit, just as there is some truth in Fremen as noble savages. I don’t mean to say that your thesis is disproved, and the antithesis proven. However, the evidence in these examples doesn’t quite line up, and sometimes points the opposite way, which is my central assertion.
Finally, I hope you don’t mind the considerable length of this critique, it’s the inevitable result of taking on two different scholarly theories in one post. I just felt the need to express my thoughts on these matters, and offer constructive critique, which is significant to scholarship as anything else.
Old English is descended from the languages of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who only arrived in Britain after the Roman government left. The previous dominant language, Common Brittonic, was influenced by Latin.
As for your wider point, it is true that Rome was far from a perfect model of multiculturalism. However, it was far better as it than its contemporaries and this was responsible for much of its success.
Admittedly I was a bit unclear on Britannia, so thanks for the correction. That suggests that there was some assimilation, although I note that Brittonic seems to have had little influence on the Old English that displaced it, and the influence that is there seems to be a grammatical substrate rather than Latin vocabulary.
Really, the vast legacy of Latin is a very in-depth topic, and I’d have to dig in further to do a proper linguistic analysis. In the meantime, I can safely say that Italia was the most thoroughly assimilated, since Italian (along with Sardinian) adhere most closely to Latin; and the strong commonalities in Spanish, French and Romanian suggest reasonably thorough assimilation in those regions too.
Fun fact, while Gaulish was almost entirely displaced by Latin, it lives on in several dozen vocabulary words we still use, such as “goblet” and (ironically) “dune”: https://blogs.transparent.com/french/french-etymology-gaulish-edition/
Just when Latin derivatives became the everyday speech of the peasant classes of the empire is unclear. One 4th century bishop noted that the speech of Galatian peasants was close to that spoken in his own Gaul, Brittonic remained the ordinary language of Britain, Punic and Berber of North Africa, Coptic of Egypt and Aramaic of Syria, and Illyrian hung on in the Balkans. One suggestion is that outside Italy Latin was mostly urban and upper class until the late empire, when the upper classes left towns for the countryside.
In this sense Rome was pretty much like other ancient and classical empires, EXCEPT for offering several paths to citizenship (all of which required cultural assimilation). It was ‘you can join if you want; otherwise just pay your taxes’.
One of the things that’s really missing from modern understandings of ancient peoples is how deep into the underclass polylingualism went.
I think you will find that polylingualism extends pretty deep into the working class and even the poor in Europe today. It’s only in America that only the highly educated have even a rudimentary knowledge of any foreign language.
” It’s only in America that only the highly educated have even a rudimentary knowledge”
I’d guess UK and Anglo Canada too. Or all of Canada, if we take English and French as non-foreign for Canada.
When you already speak the world’s lingua franca, and geography means you don’t have a lot of casual mixing with other languages, it’s very easy to just stay monolingual.
Also, “even rudimentary” is vague. The public schools I went to required taking some foreign language class, though Latin qualified. Most Americans aren’t _usefully_ bilingual, but I dunno, they might have _some_ residual knowledge of some language.
The indigenous Brythonic people were so deeply Romanized that the the Saxon word for Romans, Walsch, remains in use as an ethnonym for them to this day.
That’s the term for “foreigner”. Obviously it would apply to both groups.
I looked it up and apparently the term is also related to Waals (or Walloon in English). Well, now I know why that in my language the terms for Walloon and Welsh look so very much like each other.
Some further searching suggests that the term also was copied by the Slavs, which is why that Vlach was used to refer to Eastern Romance speakers.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-West_Germanic/walhisk
Now this raises a really interesting linguistic point, which I can’t answer nor do I know anyone who can: to what extent exactly do the Celtic languages of Britain show a Latin influence from the Empire (as opposed to Latin influences via English in recent centuries). One would want to compare, say, Cornish to Cymric to Scottish Gaelic to Irish Gaelic (sometimes called just “Irish” by the woke), but I don’t know anyone equipped to do that comparison.
There is considerable known Latin loan-wording via Christianity, that makes it harder to parse out earlier introductions. There is research showing that there was a standard method for converting Latin names into local names in Britain in the Imperial days, and also loaning words into Gaelic languages can be quite transformative even today. There are probably cognates that are just not visible to non-scholars like me.
I’m not sure the high-tech reality of the Fremen undermines Bret’s point of the “Fremen Mirage”.
> Until the Edict of Caracalla in the early 3rd century, Roman citizenship was highly exclusive
You’re leaving out two sources:
1) since before Roman historians themselves had good records, freed slaves became Roman citizens. I don’t know the magnitude, but that’s at least a trickle of new citizens who weren’t noble or even Italic, a bit later on. And conceptually it’s rather extraordinary, if we compare to Greek poleis (though less exotic if we look at some tribal societies where war captive slaves could become assimilated.)
2) since I think Claudius? auxiliaries in the legions became citizens after 25 years of service. So that’s another source, maybe 5000 a year. (125,000, 25 years, 5000 a year — not counting children of the soldiers, who’d also get citizenship at the same time, according to Wiki “Imperial Roman army”.) 5000 might not seem like a lot, but after 100 years that would be 500,000+ citizens recently sourced from the non-citizen populations.
But for the key era of expansion, the real secret weapon was how they treated the socii in the Republic. Sure, Rome wasn’t handing out citizenship willy-nilly, but it was treating them as somewhat allies who got to share in the loot, rather than as simple subjects. Thus providing manpower and stability. And it could have had even more stability if it had been even more generous/multicultural (e.g. no Social War.)
“modern notions of diversity and multiculturalism don’t quite fit into Classical Antiquity”
I feel Bret’s main thesis is that Rome was unusually good at accepting diversity, compared to other societies of the time (especially republican societies), and that this was a key strength. Rome doesn’t have to have been perfect by modern standards (_we’re_ not perfect) for this to be true.
>I’m not sure the high-tech reality of the Fremen undermines Bret’s point of the “Fremen Mirage”.
If you review the original articles (as I did before posting), the first of the half-dozen metrics used for the Mirage is “unsophisticated and poor”, and further analysis downplays what the Fremen are capable of, particularly state-of-the-art stillsuits and other devices (especially for measuring/conserving water). So I think there is a bit of conflict with what’s in the text.
>Roman citizenship
Wasn’t it children of freedmen who became citizens? Anyway yes, I wasn’t being comprehensive by any means, but even with additional means to climb the ladder, citizenship remained mostly exclusive and centered on the dominant group throughout the prime of their society.
And yes, the Socii were able to share in the spoils, although as you said, they weren’t integrated further until the Social War forced Rome to make concessions. This doesn’t pose a significant contradiction, though.
>thesis
Certainly, Rome did much better than other empires at co-opting and assimilating other cultural/ethnic groups. However, they weren’t merely imperfect, but fell far short of the modern West. It seems to me that there was a conflation between recent Progressive ideals, and the Romans being more reasonable empire-builders than the Neo-Assyrians; there’s quite a bit of distance there.
> further analysis downplays what the Fremen are capable of, particularly state-of-the-art stillsuits and other devices
The question of sophistication isn’t about the quality of the products they make. It’s about the complexity of the manufacturing process, especially the scale of the operations and social structures that render it possible. That the freedmen working individually or in small groups in ad-hoc workshops in caves can make higher quality goods than entire factories in “Civilized” cities is, if anything, a reinforcement of the “Noble Savage” myth, not a repudiation of it. Because it’s an example of how they are superior despite (or, rather, because of) their rejection of the “civilized” way of doing things.
> Wasn’t it children of freedmen who became citizens?
No, freedmen themselves became citizens concomitantly with manumission.
> It seems to me that there was a conflation between recent Progressive ideals
Bringing modern ideology when trying to understand the past is almost always a mistake. It has a strong tendency to muddle an objective analysis of how things were with a subjective value judgements of how much we like them. This confusion is barely present in the original article, it’s something you’ve added.
Roman freedmen were a sort of second-class citizen. They had the right to vote (at what ever level their wealth got them), but were expected to be clients of the manumitting owner, and per Wikipedia:
“Libertini were not entitled to hold public office or state priesthoods, nor could they achieve legitimate senatorial rank. During the early Empire, however, freedmen held key positions in the government bureaucracy, so much so that Hadrian limited their participation by law.[4] Any future children of a freedman would be born free, with full rights of citizenship.”
Quibbles aside, the point remains: a steady source of Roman citizens who were not from the Roman or even Italian ethnicities.
Okay yea, that’s what I was remembering, thanks.
>Quibbles aside, the point remains: a steady source of Roman citizens who were not from the Roman or even Italian ethnicities.
Granted, Roman citizenship was not exclusive to the dominant minority, but it was heavily concentrated there.
And it was a non-trivial number. In any given there were probably tens of thousands of freedmen created; because the head tax on manumission was non-trivial; but so was the cost of keeping slaves, if the return on investment wasn’t showing up, and sale was difficult (old, disabled) it was cheaper to create a client (and increase status) then to maintain the slave.
And freeing them on death was no-cost, and created clients for one’s son.
As to the “citizenship was closely held until the universal grant”, that’s not really true. As time went on both the increase from grants of freedom, and from auxillia being discharged (which was also non-trivial; when one considers the auxillia were equal in number to the Legions proper) created islands, as did the planting of discharged legionary colonies; but, more importantly entire cities/ethnic groups were given grants of citizenship.
Paul, ~AD50 wasn’t some strange outlier, as evidenced by his being immediately unbound when he said, “I am a Citizen of Rome”. That he was an Hellenized Jew didn’t raise an eyebrow.
The reason for making it universal is that so many, by then, already it had it that it wasn’t such a big deal to extend it; which made administering the empire a lot easier.
What you’re saying is broadly true. But it’s not a rebuttal, refutal, or even critique of Bret’s actual arguments.
(1) Whether Frank Herbert was trying to promote the “Noble Savage” myth or it was the central theme of his novels is not the point. He ends up promoting it anyway. The intentionality of him doing so, and the centrality of it to he story, is moot.
(2) The point is not that Rome was a tolerant, equal, multicultural utopia. The point was that it was an ethnically and culturally diverse place. Whether that reduced inequality or otherwise made it a nicer place to live is a separate question.
In other words, it seems like you disagree with inferences you’ve made from Bret’s posts, not with the posts themselves.
1. As I said, elements of the Noble Savage can be seen in the Fremen, as well as the closely related pop history image of morally superior barbarians tearing down an effete, corrupt decadent civilization. The latter is most relevant, and Dr. Devereaux dubs this the “Fremen Mirage”. My point is that the Dune novels don’t really exemplify this phenomenon, considering that the Fremen are more civilized than they appear, and the other elite warrior faction, the Sardaukar, are in service to the decadent civilization! Additionally, they’re unable to confront settled societies directly until a series of transformative events, which further undercuts them being the representative of barbarians who usually win against civilization.
A better name for this might be the “Visigothic Mirage”, since overly-romanticized accounts of the Fall of Western Rome seem to be the basis of this idea (although certainly, other states have fallen to war-bands, another example being the collapse of the Ming dynasty, when Manchu invaders founded the Qing dynasty, but I digress).
2. As I said, diversity & multiculturalism go hand-in-hand with equality. A useful context is Dr. Devereaux’s twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1840957537631211680 from which I quote, “Far from being an example of how ‘cultural difference’ weakens societies, Rome is perhaps the greatest ‘diversity is our strength’ exemplar in human history…until the United States.” That phrase is quite bound up with modern, liberal ideals, which conflict with the unequal reality of Roman society. Not only that, but when Rome enfranchised its population, civil war and decline followed. Again, this doesn’t prove or disprove it exactly, but it does pose issues for the central idea.
In fact, so does the history of the US, considering that much of the American success story was built up when this country was openly racist, and many of our chronic problems (stagflation, urban blight, drugs, etc) really came in after the 60’s, when we became multicultural (with Civil Rights & immigration reform). But I didn’t get into that before, since that’s a whole ‘nother tangent.
“As I said, diversity & multiculturalism go hand-in-hand with equality.”
All empires are diverse. The whole point of an empire is to incorporate new people into your political coalition. These people will be different from the existing members. The Hellenistic Empires, for example, had much larger and more diverse armies than the Hellenistic City-states ever had.
Recruiting from a wider population increases your army’s numbers. It will probably also increase its diversity and reduce its cohesion (as its members now have less in common). So diversity is both a weakness and a side-effect and signal of successful recruiting. And successful recruiting is in itself a strength.
Keeping the numbers the same, a more diverse army is probably going to have less to hold it together and be less cohesive. But armies usually grow more diverse by widening their recruiting base and increasing the numbers. And there is a lot to be said for having a bigger army than the other fellow!
The fun, therefore, lies in maximising the recruiting base, while also trying to maximise its cohesion.
“when Rome enfranchised its population, civil war and decline followed. ”
Rome enfranchised its population (well, some of its population, and not very evenly) at the creation of the Republic in around 500 BC. Hence the term “Republic”. And while it’s true that the Republic did have more than one civil war, and did eventually decline, that decline took about seven hundred years to really get going, so I’m sceptical of any causal link.
The Republic has a lot of occasions where more of the power was shared out to more of the people. One suspects that one of these later occasions was the enfranchisement of the people referred to.
“when Rome enfranchised its population, civil war and decline followed”
Let’s examine that claim:
Enfranchisement of the Plebeians in 287 BC, next civil war is Sulla’s, 83 BC – 204 Years.
Full Enfranchisement of the last Socii in 87 BC, next civil war is Sulla’s 83 BC, 4 years. Except Sulla’s main opponents were Gaius Marius (family enfranchised 188BC, a century before) and Lucius Cornelius Cinna, a patrician like Sulla.
Enfranchisement of everyone living in the Roman Empire in 213 AD, next civil war is Year of the Six Emperors, 238 AD, 25 Years. Except the last previous civil war was Year of the Five Emperors, ending 197, 16 years previously.
In total, I’d hardly call that conclusive evidence. In fact, I’d like to see you produce evidence that actually proves your claim, for any era or any country.
Yes indeed, Mary!
Rome did indeed expand the franchise, in fits and starts, to plebieans, socii, and so on. However, there are differences in scale here — previous flare-ups do not compare to the Crisis of the Third Century, just as previous enfranchisements do not compare to the Edict of Caracalla. Earlier, moderate expansion of the franchise didn’t cause decline, quite the opposite; I never claimed that any and all enfranchisement is negative. But what’s notable is that, when the floodgates of citizenship were opened in 212 AD, this was followed by civil war and decline & fall.
If multiculturalism, diversity & equality were pillars of Roman success, then one would expect that reform in that direction (ie expanding the franchise) should bring increasing benefits. And we do see that in Republican times to an extent, but then the trend suddenly reverses after the Edict of Caracalla, despite this being a huge leap forward for multiculturalism & equality. Thus, real history doesn’t quite fit into the ideological framework being applied. If anything, Roman history makes a case for a limited franchise, similar to that outlined in Starship Troopers, but it’s not conclusive.
Again, this is not about Dr. Devereaux being wrongity-wrong, it’s a critique showing how there’s conflicting points here, and it doesn’t all quite fit together as presented.
“just as previous enfranchisements do not compare to the Edict of Caracalla”
I’m pretty sure that the ‘franchise’, e.g. meaningful voting over policy, had died over 200 years before, in the time of Augustus. I’m not sure what benefits Caracalla’s expansion of citizenship actually provided; I know it didn’t include the exemption from certain taxes that had previously been a benefit.
Therefore, blaming too wide expansion of voting privilege for the fall of the Empire is a dead letter: there’s a reason it’s called the _Empire_, and that reason doesn’t include voting. The “enfranchisement” of the Edict is in fact nothing like enlarging the voting population of a republic.
Your theory also has the minor flaws of the empire in the west still lasting another 260 years after Caracalla, and the Roman empire as such lasting another 1000 years after _that_. And then there’s the real possibility that the Edict was a response to various strains (plague, barbarians, the civil war endemic to emperors supported by the legions) rather than a cause of strains itself.
xcalibur, it seems to me that you are trying to prove that extending roman citizenship caused the fall of the Empire by pointing out the the fall occurred after the last extension of citizenship.
As I understand the nature of time, this was inevitable whether or not extending citizenship caused anything at all.
In order to show that extending citizenship causes trouble, you need to show a pattern in which extending citizenship was followed by more trouble on most occasions it was tried. Preferably you would show that this pattern extends to polities other than Rome.
If anything, Alien@system has demonstrated the absence of such a pattern.
ad9: that’s a strawman. I never argued that there’s an inverse relationship between extending citizenship and strength of the polity. Alien’s quote, “when Rome enfranchised its population, civil war and decline followed”, was referring specifically to the Edict of Caracalla.
The pattern we see is an increase of enfranchisement, concurrent with an increase of Roman power, which holds through the Republican era, as Alien helpfully showed us. Problem is, 212 AD represents a vast increase of the franchise, far greater than before, and that came just before a massive civil war and the decline & fall phase.
This is a rather dramatic divergence, contradicting the claim that multiculturalism/equality/etc was one of the pillars of Roman success. It’s not a total refutation, and doesn’t prove the far-right antithesis (diversity as a weakness), but it does pose problems for the thesis, that Rome is an exemplar of “diversity is our strength”. That’s my point, that it’s not cut & dry, and real history doesn’t fit neatly into modern conceptions.
@mindstalko
franchise: Admittedly I was using the term loosely, it usually refers to voting, which largely became a formality in the Empire (as did other Republican institutions). I have seen “enfranchisement” refer to citizenship and related rights, although I should’ve been more clear.
I never theorized that expanding citizenship/rights caused the Fall of Rome. Rather, I pointed out that Roman history partially contradicts our host’s claim, that diversity/multiculturalism was a cause of Roman success. This seems to hold true for the Republican era, but then there’s a sharp divergence after the Edict of Caracalla, as opening the floodgates of citizenship was concurrent with civil war, decline & fall. The Fall taking a few centuries doesn’t contradict my observation, nor does the survival of Eastern Rome as Byzantium.
First, let me point out the motte-and-bailey fallacy of going from stating a general rule (“when X, then Y”) to claiming it’s only about a single incident (The Edict of Caracalla).
Secondly, even the motte of the fallacy is spurious, for the two reasons already mentioned: Firstly at this point, citizenship was not actually enfranchisement because it wasn’t a republic any more and secondly, the Edict happens after what is clearly the first outburst of the systemic problem that caused the spiraling into the Third Century Crisis.
But it’s also pretty clear that you’re arguing in bad faith, since you’re also singling out just one of five enfranchisement events in the history of the US and claim it proves your point about decline. The US enfranchised population in the following years:
1868 to 1870 (13th and 14th amendment)
1920 (19th amentment)
1965 (Voting Rights Act)
1971 (26th amendment)
Oh, and in all of those cases, the next event that might be labeled anything close to civil war is January 6th, 2021.
Yes, the Sardukar were in service to the “decadent” peoples. That’s not too unusual historically. Caligula had an honor guard made up of Germanic warriors and the Byzantine empire reached out to the Vikings to make the elite Varangian Guard. So it’s not unusual for settled peoples to look to the “rougher, manlier barbarians” for military elites. Moreover in the novel it’s noted that the Sardukar are becoming more settled and losing their edge, which contributed to them being defeated by the “purer” Fremen.
Although the point of the Germanic and Norse warriors was to be imperial bodyguards. They were trustworthy to the extent that they were not involved in Roman politics.
It’s not “the [Ethnos Mirage] because (as was pretty carefully explained, mapping it to an actual group would defeat the purpose of discussing the archetype (as well as then confusing the facts; because what gets discussed as archetype runs the risk of being conflated with the actual ethnos; and the tendency, of both reader; and writer, will be to narrow the the concept to a specific group, outside the polity (in this case Rome) which is using it to show how they have become “decadent, and soft”, which would (ironically) reinforce the very mirage being described.
It’s interesting that you are doing some of that. The Fremen are a literary device; not a real social group. As such they can be anything Herbert needed them to be. That they echo large slices of Tacitus (and all the other “we have fallen away from our pure roots, and become Effetely Urban, rather than maintained our vigorous nature) is why they are useful in this; because the Mirage is so powerful it arises even where it doesn’t need to.
I would argue your “they are sent to the agoge” model for the Saedaukar is ALSO a perpetuation of the myth. Just as the Spartans felt they needed to remove their male children from the feminising environment of the home, so as to make them “strong and manly” so too Herbert felt he couldn’t just have the Emperor’s forces be any random folks who enlisted/were drafted, but they had to be like Mamelukes, and removed to become nothing but pure warriors (where again the Mirage, was used to create a, supposedly, better fighting force).
Is the metaphor/analogy perfect? No, of course not. It’s an analogy, using a fictive element; which uses the tropic aspects which soaked into the story, BECAUSE they are tropic.
The entire point of the Queen’s Latin series was showing Rome wasn’t a system of enduring inequality like Jim Crow south.
Jim Crow South lasted 100 years; a 100 year snapshot of the Roman Republic would show a static order, rather than the dynamism that we see through collapsing a multicentury period into a single Roman civilization.
I rather doubt that. Our sources are limited, the archaeology unhelpful on social trends. A century is a longish time in any culture, usually with plenty of change – even if the fashion is to portray things as unchanging.
I should’ve known this discussion would get hectic! Since I’ve had to respond to several critics, who often misconstrued what I said, I’d like to provide a summary of my Roman argument:
Dr. Devereaux argued that diversity/multiculturalism was a source of Roman success and vitality.
Diversity/multiculturalism is not merely a variety of peoples/cultures in a society, but it also depends on Equality among them to some degree, which in turn ties into how many people under Rome had rights & citizenship.
So, if the initial hypothesis is true, then Roman power should increase as a greater proportion of its people gain rights/citizenship.
The above seems to hold true for the Republican era, but then sharply diverges in the Imperial era with the Edict of Caracalla.
The aforementioned Edict vastly expanded rights/citizenship, far more than any previous motion, yet this was followed by civil war, gradual decline, and the Fall of Western Rome.
In conclusion, it is only partially true that diversity/multiculturalism was a pillar of Roman power. Some of its history, but not all, is consistent with this. This does not prove the reactionary antithesis (that diversity is a weakness), but it does mean that the historical record doesn’t fit quite as neatly as Dr. Devereaux’s selective reading would suggest.
Ultimately, this is just constructive criticism, since history is something I’ve always been into.
“The aforementioned Edict vastly expanded rights/citizenship”
Actually, I wonder if it did. For one thing, I’m not how how large a fraction of the population had their citizenship changed by this edict, in view of the enfranchisements of previous centuries.
More importantly: What rights did anyone gain?
Not the right to join the army: If you can gain citizenship by joining the army, then you can’t need to be a citizen to join it.
Not voting rights: the people enfranchised were outside Rome and couldn’t vote there. Nor would it have mattered if they could, since the Empire by this point was an absolute military autocracy.
So the edict might have made the legal system simpler and more uniform, but I don’t see how it significantly increased anyone’s rights.
Only citizens could join the legions; non-citizens could only join as auxiliaries and were paid less (although not much less).
Then the legal system privileged citizens over non-citizens; for example, citizens could not legally be crucified, and usually could not legally be tortured.
That said, the Edict of Caracalla led to a shift in which the honestiores-humiliores distinction, which was already well-established in 212, reified to the point that torture, corporal punishment, etc. of the supermajority of humiliores became normal.
AFAIK, we have no record of the reasons for Caracalla’s Edict. On suggestion is that it was a response to the Antonine Plague, enlarging the tax base and the pool for military service in the legions.
Roman citizenship is a complex subject, to be sure. It did come with various legal and civil rights, which shifted over time. A useful source for this is Paul the Apostle, who as a Jew and a Roman citizen used both of those statuses (statii?) to help build the foundations of the Church. Notably, his status as citizen allowed him to appeal to the Caesar and have his legal case heard in Rome; it also saved him from corporal punishment, since that would’ve been illegal (as stated in the NT).
Keep in mind, I’m using citizenship as a useful variable, since it ties into Equality; by no means am I arguing that it’s the only significant variable at work. Ideally, you would identify several key variables in Roman society, then create indexes of them to more accurately measure the rise & fall. However, that is far beyond the scope of my short critique, in which I’m not refuting the thesis or proving the antithesis, just pointing out that the facts don’t align as consistently as portrayed.
Also, pardon me for being delayed in responding back to this, was a bit distracted by irl.
“Diversity/multiculturalism is not merely a variety of peoples/cultures in a society, but it also depends on Equality among them to some degree, which in turn ties into how many people under Rome had rights & citizenship.”
No, and unclear.
Rome’s inequality of citizenship was immaterial to the ability of people to rise/fall, outside the political realm (esp. after Augustus). Lots of citizens were miserably poor; compared to many non-citizens who were well to do; even rich.
What makes a society stable isn’t relative equality, it’s that the status quo isn’t so onerous that the people rise up.
England, from shortly after the Normans took over, until the 19th century was chock full of revolts (e.g. Wat Tyler, Peterloo) because the status quo wasn’t comfortable for lots of people; and was so uncomfortable they were willing to risk death to change it.
And England in that time frame isn’t seen as a paragon of diversity. Oddly enough neither is it seen as a hotbed of instability; and no one is arguing for it’s having been chock full of social equality.
(I make this point about social unrest because you DID link the “decline and fall” of Rome to expansions of citizenship; i.e. “when Rome enfranchised its population, civil war and decline followed.”)
And those aren’t the only examples of Bret engaging in such things.
I recall that in his post on ‘the military failures of fascism’ he had mentioned something in the vein of fascism having a psychological source being the result of sexual insecurities.
Which made me wonder about those suffragists in Britain who later ended up joining the BUF*. Did those women also become fascists out of sexual insecurities?
* It is a phenomenon which existed; however, I don’t have enough numbers to know whether it had been significant or negligible.
Another example, was in his The Philosophy of Liberty – On Liberalism. He had claimed that:
Which is factually incorrect; most of their rapid economic growth had already occurred before 1987.
I myself believe that the idea that dictatorships have in general/on average a better economic/developmental performance than democratic regimes to be clearly false*. However, I am perfectly willing to admit that nonetheless there have been instances of dictatorships excelling in economic development and even doing a better job at it than a democratic regime would likely have done.
* Well, in reality things are more complicated than such a binary.
For example, there exist studies according to which dictatorships have a more variable economic/developmental performance than democratic regimes and are thus overrepresented in both the best and worst performing countries.
Or that whilst democratic regimes in general/on average have a better performance than dictatorships, so-called ‘hybrid regimes’ which are neither functional democracies nor complete dictatorships have, thanks to their tendency to political instability, in general/on average an even worse performance than dictatorships.
However, I take it most people in here are not very much interested in such things.
This is an interesting point. I suppose you’re generally referring to South Korea and Taiwan? Are there any other exemplars of this behavior, successful economically dictatorships?
I personally find it interesting to consider that dictators like Suharto (Indonesia) and Julius Nyerere (Tanzania) may have had a valuable role not in growing their country’s economy, but in unifying their ethnically, religiously and culturally split nations through an iron fist, explaining in part their much improved modern day situation relative to the comparable Nigeria and Kenya, where no such unifying force existed.
The book that made me consider this viewpoint is Political Order and Political Decay, which due to Fukuyama’s massive emphasis on rule of law (from what I’ve read at least) as the key to success, results in the book, in some cases being quite positive towards some of these guys. It quite surprised me honestly, considering his famous “The End of History” essay.
As for The Tigers, I was asking because I know nothing except the barebones surrounding their existence and rise. Just from an initial look though, it doesn’t appear that the undemocratic regimes were much less successful than democratic Japan, nor do I see the causal link between the two, considering Singapore has a higher per capita GDP than their democratic partners. Although that is extremely rudimentary commentary. I’m curious what evidence supports the view that democracy led to Taiwan and SK’s prosperity. Obviously it’s a good thing they transitioned, but that doesn’t have to mean they preformed much better economically because of it.
For me it makes me wonder: does such a thing as a “benevolent” or even “good” tyrant (in the Greek sense) exist? I think Bret would say no, but I’m not sure where I stand.
One complication is that economic growth isn’t all the same in its mechanisms and conditions. If a country is really poor in the modern world, then there’s likely lots of simple low-hanging fruit: give everyone an education, provide clean running water, build roads and mass transit, maybe some land reform or other removal of rich-family privileges, create well-defined and -recorded property rights, vaccinate and de-worm all the kids. A clear-minded dictator could probably push all that through, and maybe do better at it than an immature democracy dominated by squabbling elites defending their privileges. And you can get really fast growth rates because you’re just copying existing technology and industrial patterns. And you can probably still skim off a lot because hey, fast growth rates.
But then your society gets more complicated, more full of advanced markets and highly educated people, more dependent on actual innovation for continued growth, which is going to slow down anyway because inventing things is harder than copying them. This may be where democracy gets more necessary, bringing in more transparency and error correction (like “no, these policies you’re attached to aren’t working, we need to do something else, maybe with different people”) and anti-corruption. (Plus you have more people who think they have an informed opinion on how things should be done.)
So even if undemocratic South Korea grew faster in the early years (as did, supposedly, _North_ Korea up to a point), and the growth rates slowed down after democracy, that doesn’t mean democracy caused slow growth; quite possibly growth would have slowed *even more* if it had stayed autocratic despite an increasingly complex economy. Case in point: North Korea, which not so much slowed as utterly crashed.
A _very_ clear-minded autocrat who’s good at listening to people can maybe keep things doing, especially if he oversees a place with nice geographical advantages. But what happens when he dies? The replacement autocrat is very unlikely to be anywhere near as good. Enlightened despotism even at its best will suffer regression to the mean with the next generation.
“maybe some land reform or other removal of rich-family privileges,”
I recall Professor Brad DeLong mentioning that one of South Korea’s advantages was having this happen twice, once when the Japan conquered it, and again when Japan left.
Colonial Hong Kong comes to mind.
Having said that, these fast-growing dictatorships seem to be found in East Asia not elsewhere. Perhaps you need a few thousand years of Confucianism first?
At first glance that seems a bit odd to me as the Japanese had given land and privileges to the settlers they had brought in.
However, maybe possibly, he meant that this made the post-independence reforms easier as those happened after that those Japanese settlers had fled the country.
Considering that before their ‘economic miracles’ happened Confucianism had been blamed for China, Korea, and Taiwan to be poor in the first place, I do not think that theory to be very credible.
“Considering that before their ‘economic miracles’ happened Confucianism had been blamed for China, Korea, and Taiwan to be poor in the first place”
For most of the millennia since Confucius himself lived, East Asia has not had the reputation of being poor.
I had been referring to the first half of the 20th century. Then there had been people both outside the region and inside it which blamed ‘Confucianism’ for China and Korea being poor.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think that argument is about as plausible as the later claims that Confucianism was responsible for those countries’ ‘economic miracles’. Or as plausible as Weber’s claim that the ‘Protestant work ethic’ was one of the causes for the industrial revolution (that Catholic Belgium was the second country to industrialise says enough to me about how important Protestantism was for industrialization).
If fascism stems from sexual insecurity, it’s fascinating that Unity and Diana Mitford were sexually insecure, while their sisters Jessica and Nancy were apparently very secure (the former being an avowed Party member, the latter a fellow traveler). In general, I don’t think this explanation works at the individual level, and collective sexual insecurity is a hard concept to make sense of.
Indeed, Tus3. I also critiqued his claim of fascism being supposedly “bad at war” pointing out (among other issues) that you’re essentially working with a sample size of 1. For the record, I think that the fascists were a formidable military challenge, it’s just that the Allies rose to that challenge and did even better. Not only that, but I don’t see a clearly defined connection between forms of government and military/economic/overall effectiveness, except that Communism was fatally flawed, which is why it unraveled (present day China has morphed into something else, and North Korea is essentially a monarchy). Surely there’s a correlation, but I don’t think it’s been figured out yet.
But, for my critique, I wanted to keep my scope limited; two subjects were plenty as you see.
(again, pardon my delayed response).
” in the three years since I wrote it”
*looks at those words in horror*
Three years?!
Does Brett, or Herbert for that matter, ever point out that the Fremen are superior fighters as they are literally soaked in “Spice”? Any advanced breeding is more likely the mutation caused by generations of exposure to a psycho-active substance that has obviously physically changed them. The Blue Eyes merely being the clearest indicator. Yes this is arguably also an effect of their environment, but not anything to do with the purity of its primitive barbarism.
That’s an interesting point and the answer is, no, I don’t think this is ever brought up! Which is odd.
It’s made very clear that spice is potent as an anti-aging (“geriatric”) drug, as well as giving the habitual user powers of foresight (most notably Guild Navigators). And it’s explicit that the Fremen consume huge amounts of it. But it doesn’t ever seem to have any effect on them apart from turning their eyes blue. The Fremen are not unusually long-lived as far as we know, they don’t generally have prophetic abilities.
Did Herbert just forget about this bit of his world-building?
Within the rules created in the Dune universe, it’s not hard to rationalise the lack of visible effects spice has on the Fremen (beyond the blue eyes and the occasional orgy). We can postulate that the prophesising power of spice only works on those with a genetic predisposition to it, so that we don’t hear of Fremen might just mean that they don’t have such a predisposition. As for the geriatric effect of melange, it seems to be that it delays death by old age, but not death by accident / misadventure. It seems plausible that most Fremen die of such causes relatively young, so delaying old age is relatively unimportant to them. Maybe their reverent mothers die old? Don’t know if there’s any mention of that.
That said, it’s certainly plausible, within the rules set out by Frank Herbert, that the reason Fremen fight so well is because of the spice. But if he wanted us to think that, why didn’t he say so? That explanation has 0 explicit mentions in the text; while there are dozens of it being about their rugged, fearless, selfless, communal, unsophisticated (aka: “Noble Savage”) society created by their environment and generations of persecution. That makes it pretty clear what Herbert wanted us to think, even if we can chose to replace his intentions with our own interpretations.
OK, looking it up Alia apparently says in “Children of Dune”:
“The spice often called ‘the secret coinage’. Without melange, the Spacing Guild’s heighliners could not move… Without melange and its amplification of the human immunogenic system, life expectancy for the very rich degenerated by a factor of at least four. Even the vast middle class of the Imperium ate diluted melange in small sprinklings with at least one meal a day.”
So we’re supposed to believe that the nobility have life expectancies of around 300. This isn’t obvious from the setting and I don’t think we ever actually meet anyone who is super-old. Admittedly, pretty much all of the noble characters die violent deaths at a relatively young age: poison tooth side-effects, wandering tragically off into the desert, stabbed with poison needle by tiny creepy girl, stabbed with poisoned knife by tiny creepy girl’s big brother, poisoned by ambitious heir’s best mate the creepy eunuch, publicly impaled by half a ton of angry pot roast, that kind of thing. One wonders why they bother with the spice, given all that.
“Average life expectancy of galactic noble is 300” – this is wrong. Average galactic noble lives to 37 before being stabbed or poisoned, probably by creepy relative. His Longevitousness Georg the Twitchy, Duke of House Paranoia, who has been living alone in a cave for the last 8000 years, is an outlier and should be emitted.
Well, if you want to interpret the words in that context of violence, what she says is “amplification of the human immunogenic system”. So it’s not aging they’re worried about, it’s stuff that needs the human immune system to deal with. Like I dunno, poisons introduced into your system by various creepy relatives :þ. Without spice, people would not live long enough to die by impalement because they’d be dead from poison years earlier. [/joke]
“Without spice, people would not live long enough to die by impalement because they’d be dead from poison years earlier.”
Ah, of course! Honestly one wonders why there are any noble houses left alive at all. The average galactic noble house seems to have the survival instincts of a lemming and the durability of a chocolate teapot. I guess it does explain the complete lack of any collateral branches at all (see also A Song Of Ice And Fire) – there are no Atreides siblings, cousins, uncles etc at all. House Atreides at the start of the books consists of 3 people and one of them doesn’t make it to the end of volume 1 of book 1.
First, as a pedantic correction, the blue spice eyes are a physiological effect of enormous consumption of spice, rather than a mutation from long spice exposure. (Paul develops the effect before he fully unlocks his prescient abilities, for example.) Nobody ever seems to go off the substance, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it would wash out of your system after some amount of time.
Additionally, there is apparently both a genetic component and a pharmaceutical component to the spice foresight, and Navigators have long bred themselves towards maintaining that ability (to the point where they are nearly a different species) along with needing Spice to actually do their FTL piloting. Somewhere in either Heretics of Dune or Chapterhouse: Dune, someone makes a comment about the Atreides lineage also having a predisposition towards prescience, with a specific reference to a character in question. This has some implications, which include that even a relatively low dosage (like all the nobles consume for the purpose of increasing their odds of dying by violence rather than old age) will partially activate the genetic component. However, the statement that this character is an Atreides descendant is likely also a case of Frank Herbert forgetting his own lore, as I believe neither Leto nor Alia have children of their own, and the character in question is anyway actually a product of God Emperor Leto II’s millennia-long project to breed a human who cannot be seen by Spice Prescience! IIRC, the main contributors there were Duncan Idaho clones and whatever women he had to hand, although it’s possible that those people were distant cousins of Paul’s.
As for what Spice did to regular Fremen? I think it was mostly give them trips resembling those you could get from LSD and foster a strong sense of community belonging. (Frank Herbert was extremely obsessed with this, as I discovered the one time I read something else by him and it turned out to be about a colony of hive-minded humans in California eating special cheese that sent you on LSD trips and psychically connected you with everyone else who did it at a similar time.)
God Emperor Leto had a fraternal twin sister who was nominally married to him but had many children actually fathered by a Corrino prince he took into his service, a grandson of Shaddam IV, the last Corrino emperor. Presumably their descendants were used in the breeding program, making them all descendants of Duke Leto and Lady Jessica (who was secretly a Harkonnen.)
Ghanima did have children. With Farad’n. One of the descendants is told that the lore that says that is correct.
Alright, I had completely forgotten about Ghanima, probably because she wasn’t, y’know, created by the author to be insane, and therefore doesn’t figure prominently in the narrative. That would provide a reasonable continuation of the family line.
@xcalibur, reply to just the Fremen Mirage part.
I really can’t see what you are disagreeing with, because Prof Devereaux isn’t arguing that the Fremen are “Noble Savages” at all. As I read it, Bret is entirely agreeing with you: it is the environmental factors that make the Fremen and Sardarkaur such good fighters.
In Part 1:
“people from less settled or ‘civilized’ societies – what we would have once called ‘barbarians,’ but will, for the sake of simplicity and clarity generally call here the Fremen after the example of the trope found in Dune – are made inherently ‘tougher’ (or more morally ‘pure’ – we’ll come back to this in the third post) by those hard conditions.”
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
As for the Fremen being “sophisticated”, Bret is using this for their social and political values, not their technology. In Interlude: Ways of the Fremen:
“This is something that perhaps needed to be clearer: these societies are presented as unsophisticated, but not necessarily stupid.” … “What the Fremen do have is practical – they make paper, plastics and explosives …”
but
“Moving from wealth to sophistication, the Fremen – while not stupid – simply do not understand anything about the wider universe. They do not understand that their religion is a sham meant to manipulate them…”
https://acoup.blog/2020/02/21/collections-the-fremen-mirage-interlude-ways-of-the-fremen/
Saying that the Fremen Mirage is refuted within its own context by the Sardaukur is something I find fault in, because that’s still lending credence to the notion that harsh environments and deprivation produces superior military forces, which is a foundational element of the whole “noble savage” idea, and its relation with fascistic notions that stability and security create soft people vulnerable to being overwhelmed by rugged outsiders.
As for Rome, I think Bret was fairly consistent and clear on the point that Rome was not multicultural in a way that maps directly to modern societies (certainly he keeps reiterating that there was no positive ideological component to it, and where it occurred it was strictly pragmatic), but nor was the manner in which it cross-pollinated with conquered peoples and subjects the liability that it gets framed as by modern anti-immigrants.
Also has nothing to do with the absurd idea presented in the comments of one of those pages that it differs from modern multiculturalism because that consists of people maintaining impermeable boundaries between their heritage and customs while within the same society. I only read those recently, and I am so thankful for this opportunity to express my contempt for such obvious reactionary misrepresentation.
FH’s emphasis was on the environment shaping humans, so that harsher environments produced superior warriors. Yes, there is an element of the Noble Savage there, but it’s not quite consistent with the “mirage” idea of primitive barbarians having a decisive military advantage over decadent civilizations; one of the sticking points is that the Sardaukar are fielded by the advanced, decadent civilization! Moreover, they remain loyal to the Padishah Emperor, and don’t just tear it all down, as the “mirage” would suggest.
You make good points about Rome, and I appreciate your use of “cross-pollinated” to describe cultural interaction. Certainly, the far-right overstates the liabilities of a diverse population, and there are no “impermeable boundaries” of culture, which is rather absurd. But in my reply above, I explained how multiculturalism and Roman strength seem to strangely diverge in the Late Empire. My point is that the evidence doesn’t quite line up, and Dr. Devereaux’s reading is a bit selective.
You appear to draw a correlation. I think your argument requires more details of causation.
Correlation is a powerful counterargument to claims of causation and he’s been explaining himself quite extensively in these comments. You’re better off replying to the content of his posts than trying this basic “correlation is not causation!” dodge (not to mention the “you’re just reading what you want from it” dodge that someone used elsewhere in the comments).
This has an implicit causative element; ” I explained how multiculturalism and Roman strength seem to strangely diverge in the Late Empire,” esp so when combined with the “civil war and decline followed” (to say nothing of the comparison to the US getting “stagflation, drugs, etc. when the civil rights movement, and “multiculturalism” shifted in the ’60s).
The thrust of the argument is “diversity leads to weakness”, which is that The Queen’s Latin argues against; and which xcalbur is conflating into his defense of “the Fremen weren’t savages”.
TKarney: Again, my purpose is not to refute the thesis, or prove the antithesis, although it might be easy to read it that way. I’m trying to say the facts don’t line up as well as portrayed. Yes, you can find evidence for multiculturalism = strength, and Rome as an exemplar of multiculturalism; but you can also find conflicting evidence that points the other way. It’s really not that straightforward.
Certainly Frank Herbert believed in (or rather wrote as if he believed in and then told people he was just performing) a bunch of environmental-destiny and genetic-destiny claptrap, much of it polished up from nothing but the Noble Savage myth.
Bret’s ‘mirage’ is not a description of Herbert’s views or presentation, it is a description of a line of critical reception of Dune that finds a specific form of awesome virtue in the Fremen, and in turn projects to find that same virtue in historical peoples.
There is no conflict between the the depiction of the Sardukar and the Fremen, because people who valorize the Fremen as analogous to real ‘invading barbarians’ draw the parallel with the Sardukar as analogous to ‘mercenary barbarians’ which were often de facto permanent units like the Varangians, Mamluks, or the royal guards in the various Persian states.
As for the divergence of multiculturalism from strength in the late Roman Empire, the key factor here is not the extension of citizenship in the Edict, but rather the end of Roman multiculturalism that the creation of the Foederati system represents. Once people started coming to the Empire with the dream of becoming Roman and were instead pushed into a situation where they could be within the borders and die for the Empire but still had to stick in their own subject monoethnic polity, things got bad.
Dune: If it were just about reading the Noble Savage myth into history, it should’ve focused on that, rather than on Dune (although the Fremen share some characteristics); as I said, the Visigothic Mirage might’ve been a better title. As far as Varangians/Mamluks, is that addressed in the write-up? I don’t recall that.
In any case, if you review the central tenets, it’s clear that Dr. Devereaux is focused on primitive/less complex societies, as opposed to the environmental focus of Frank Herbert.
Rome: That’s one way of reading the Foederati. Another is that this extended participation in Roman society to tribes who were unassimilated, except of course for weapons, tactics, and other useful things barbarians tend to pick up; and that far from being an end to multiculturalism, this was the greatest extension of it, and played a direct role in Roman dissolution.
The whole point is that you can read Roman history different ways; depending on the lens applied, you can draw different conclusions, and it’s not simple & straightforward.
Once again, pardon the delay!
If your understanding of “multiculturalism” is expansive enough that it includes a scheme of restricting people’s lives into monoethnic communities in order to permanently deny their descendants citizenship, then your use of the term is so divergent from popular and scholarly use of it that you aren’t really able to engage with discussion of the concept. I’m sorry too.
I’m not sure if I would frame the Foederati that way! Also, to respond to a point further up, I realize there are pitfalls when extrapolating from one event, it’s just that the Edict of Caracalla was a very convenient variable to use; it’s not the only one by any means.
Anyway, I’ve made my case that Roman history does not inherently support diversity as a strength (the liberal thesis), or diversity as a weakness (the far-right antithesis). You can read various things into it, depending on your lens, but Roman history doesn’t prove either concept on its own merits. That’s been my point all along.
“How Fast Do Armies Move?” It’s stunning that the Staff of what was the best army in the world – Kaiser Bill’s – adopted the Schlieffen Plan which could not possibly work. And therefore didn’t work. And thereby cost Kaiser Bill his Empire and millions of people their lives. It seems you are right that logistics can be a tricky business.
Is the Search box at the top right of the page supposed to work? Is it supposed to find every instance of a particular word or phrase that Bret used in all the posts?
I think it works? It seems to work for me.
It’s a small thing, but I was happy to see I’d ID’d the boat properly.
I saw this game pop up on Steam yesterday and immediately had to think of this blog: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369690/Kings_Orders/
It’s a game that does away with the omniscient ruler and has you do war and diplomacy through letters. If anyone ever wanted to QWOP their way through the hundred years war, now they can.
I feel the need to say it’s kinda pathetic to disable comments on your new post…the topic is relevant to the blog but the comments would suddenly not be?
Whenever he gets political in a way that might be perceived as partisan he turns off the comments, I suspect because the commentariat here is politically diverse enough that he figures the comments would generate rather more heat than light. And he’s probably not wrong, as even some of his nonpartisan posts have ended up devolving into political name-calling.
I believe he does all his comment moderation himself. Perhaps if you were willing to pay him enough to hire an employee to run his comments section, he might turn the comments on?
I think it’s incredibly rude to call Bret pathetic over something like that. In any case, I think the new post was plenty clear and if you want to quibble over (very clear) definitions at this point, you’re a handmaiden to what comes next.
I’m not going to get into the merits of Bret’s piece about Trump and fascism- if he wanted people to discuss it, he would have opened up the comments- but let’s just say that I don’t think it’s going to persuade many people except ones who weren’t going to vote for Trump anyway.
I voted already (not for Trump, and not particularly happily, since my favored Presidential candidate, Rachele Fruit, wasn’t on the ballot in my state, and since I didn’t even get a choice for congress- my district was unopposed Republican). But, if I had been open to voting for Donald J. Trump, I doubt his piece would have changed my mind.
So, then what argument do you think Bret should have made instead that would have worked better?
Revealing to those people who only vote for Trump because he will give tax cuts to the rich that Trump opposes Central Bank Independence in the hope that fear of hyperinflation would drive them away from him?
Well, the reasons I voted against Trump are 1) global warming, which he’s said he thinks is actually a good thing, 2) his unquestioning support for Israel, 3) his aggressive rhetoric towards Cuba, Iran, China, North Korea, and a bunch of other countries, 4) his plans to get rid of the income tax and generally move the US in a much more right wing economic direction, 5) the fact that he’ll be more accepting towrds the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and 6) general, uh, moral character issues. None of that has much to do with democracy preservation. i don’t really think swing voters care that much about democracy as an abstract value, in general.