Hey folks, Fireside this week! Hopefully everyone enjoyed our series on the running debate over hoplites! As a social media note, I am going to attempt to start setting up a presence on Threads (with my own name, bretdevereaux, as my handle as always). I’m not leaving Bluesky by any means, just diversifying a bit; my presence on Twitter is likely to remain very limited as the quality of the discourse on that site has been…very poor. Which actually leads neatly into this week’s musing.
For this week’s musing, I wanted to just lay out some relatively scattered thoughts on where formal historical training and autodidacticism (being self-taught) meet. These thoughts were occasioned by some contretemps on the App Formerly Known As Twitter over the role of diversity and inclusion in the Roman Empire. The Banner of Formal Training was born forth capably and tirelessly in particular by Theo Nash (PhD student at the University of Michigan’s Interdepartmental Program in Mediterranean Art and Archaeology), while the autodidacts were a motley collection of enthusiast accounts without formal training (but many with a history of bigoted or white supremacist statements, because this is Musk-Era Twitter) huddled around the ‘Roman Helmet Guy.’1 The usual term for this crowd, collective are ‘statute profile pictures’ (or ‘statue Pfps’) though of course they do not all have marble statue profile pictures (but many do).
Now Classics is in an odd spot here because as a field that is under substantial pressure – we’ve talked about the history crisis but the classics crisis is much worse because where history departments shrink, Classics departments close – Classics is pretty damn eager for just about any supply of enthusiastic members of the public it can get. And yet it is difficult to recommend much dialogue with this crowd beyond debunking, in part because the Roman Helmet crowd is just aggressively hostile to actual training or expertise. They’ll insist they’re not hostile to knowledge – but only when that knowledge comes in the form of primary texts wholly uncontextualized by any other form of learning so that nothing gets in the way of them applying their preferred – often quite embarrassingly wrong – reading. Also, it is worth noting at the outset, many of them are quite appalling bigots, a facet which comes through in the ever more frequent unguarded moments and which contributes greatly to their inability to understand antiquity.
One of the motifs that this crowd appeals to frequently is the idea that academics and other professional historians and classicists are at least blinded by our training and ideology to the reality of antiquity, if not actively engaged in a conspiracy to conceal the past. Now on one level, this argument is fairly obviously self-serving and offered in bad faith, as a way to de-legitimize anyone who disagrees with their deeply ideologically inflected (oh irony!) view of antiquity. In the case of the current contretemps, they wanted to argue against the idea that Roman strength came from the unusual willingness and ability of the Romans to incorporate and include a wide range of peoples and cultures (an observation in such ample evidence that it has been commonplace among academics for many decades – to the point that even the hoary old racists of yestercentury had to admit it was true and were stuck arguing that it contributed to decline even though that chronology does not really work out). But the idea that academia is strongly ideologically inflected is culturally ubiquitous and worth addressing.
The thing is, it is simply true that there is a strong political ‘lean’ in most academic fields (although the insistence that this lean is universal is invariably wrong; there are conservative classicists and historians).2 And that lean does have a shaping impact on scholarship, particularly on the volume of scholarship directed towards some topics over others. But I think enthusiasts who imagine that this leaves entire ideologies wholly ‘frozen out’ have misunderstood how academic scholarship works in the humanities and the way that arguments get ‘pressure tested.’
And at least in history, it simply doesn’t. Journals and book publishers want to publish arguments that are going to spark a lot of debate and discussion, which means they want to publish provocative arguments, so long as those arguments are well made enough (in terms of evidence) to actually cause a serious discussion. In most journals, if you make an argument that makes the peer reviewers mad but they can’t disprove, the journal is going to ask you to revise to answer their specific complaints and then publish it because clearly that argument is on fire (in a good-for-the-journal way). A book publisher is going to be even more interested because controversy moves books. If everyone is writing articles about how you are a very great fool, well that’s a lot of people who need to get their libraries to buy copies of your book so they can make that argument.
Thus, Victor Davis Hanson does not struggle to get published even if he does tend to prefer publishers (The Free Press, Basic Books) which won’t edit him very much or push back much during peer review (but Warfare and Agriculture (1983) was University of California Press, Hoplites (1991) was a Routledge collection and the broadly pro-orthodoxy Men of Bronze (2013) in which he has a chapter was Princeton University Press; Western Way of War (1989) was picked up by Oxford University Press when it was a hit). Likewise, even a brief glance at the ‘Fall of Rome‘ debates will show that the often very conservative coded decline-and-fall scholars have no problem getting published. Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005) broadside, with a title (“The End of Civilization”) that pretty clearly puts it on a side in the broader cultural debates about the place of Rome for modern western societies, was published by Oxford University Press!
There is an ideological lean in academia and it can produce a kind of ‘chilling effect’ on certain forms of speech but it does not lock out ‘right-coded’ arguments from publication. I say this, of course, as someone whose book project on military materiel in the third and second century – ‘how stuff for fighting made the Romans the best at fighting and winning’ being a generally pretty ‘right-coded’ book topic! – is under contract with a very prestigious publisher! I got a book contract from the first press I approached. I can’t go into details, but I also have interest from another very prestigious press for writing about the Gracchi in which I was clear my take was a lot more negative (again, a ‘right-coded’ position) and the press seems – at this early stage where nothing is certain – very interested! No one is stopping me!3
What I find striking is that these (largely extreme right-wing) autodidacts are unwilling to put themselves into the arena and actually publish. Oh, they’ll write long posts on social media or on their substack, but submit to peer review? Never.
And it is simply not the case that peer reviewed scholarship is closed to autodidacts or those without degrees. The late, great Peter Connolly was not ‘Dr.’ Peter Connolly, he had a degree in art and started as an author-illustrator. But working alongside H. Russel Robinson for years, he achieved a very high degree of expertise on Roman military equipment and by the 1990s and 2000s, in addition to his for-the-public illustrated books, he was publishing original scholarship in peer-reviewed venues. Several of his articles (particularly his reconstruction of the sarisa) remain important in military equipment studies today and many of his books, although marketed to the public, are well regarded by scholars. No one kept him out!
Likewise and more recently, Janet Stephens was trained and worked as a hair-dresser, but got interested in the hair styles appearing on Roman sculpture that scholars had long concluded had to be wigs. She did her research, demonstrated that the hair-styles could be achieved through the use of natural hair and pins and published an article in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, one of the premier journals in the field. No one kept her out! Indeed, quite the contrary, she was widely lauded and made lots of appearances at academic conferences; I attended a talk she gave a number of years ago. My sense is that, in Roman sculpture studies, her conclusions have been largely accepted and the field has shifted its understanding as a result.
No one is stopping you trying to take your novel arguments about antiquity to a peer-reviewed journal and get them published. It doesn’t even cost anything to go through peer review in history or classics. Our journals do not charge!4 Apart from your time, it’s free.
But you have to be willing to leave your comfort zone, to leave your cozy little huddle of supporters who all think what you think and submit to criticism – potentially very harsh criticism. Peer review is double-blind and while it isn’t supposed to include personal attacks or vulgarity (and usually doesn’t), no punches are pulled: if the reviewer thinks your argument is flawed and idiotic they will say that, usually quite bluntly.
So I find it striking that these fellows are unwilling to step into the arena, as it were, to attempt to develop their arguments with real rigor beyond 280 characters or to defend them against real criticism. Instead it is the supposedly soft, duplicitous academics who engage in good faith, under our real names, with our work exposed to criticism and passing through the testing of peer review. Meanwhile the fellows who complain that we are ‘woke’ and ‘weak’ hide behind nom de plumes and write only in their sheltered walled gardens online, surrounded by an audience that knows as little about antiquity as they do and shares their viewpoints and so is equally both unprepared and unwilling to challenge them.
Cowards. I’m saying they’re all cowards. And if they disagree, they are welcome to ‘come at me bro’ in the pages of a peer-reviewed history or classics publication.
On to Recommendations!
First off, if you missed it, I had another piece at War on the Rocks, this time for their ‘Cogs of War’ series, a written interview on ‘What Thucydides Thought About Technology and War.‘ I am actually quite pleased that the editors let this one go, because on some level I was writing in answer to their questions that they had asked the wrong questions – that Thucydides is not, in fact, very focused on technology or production. But I think that is, in this case, the more interesting (and also accurate) observation: our focus on technology and production is itself historically contingent and not a universal view, which ought to give us pause and a bit of perspective.
We also have a new Pasts Imperfect, this time opening with an excellent essay by Inger N.I. Kuin on Diogenes and the remarkable range of ideas in ancient philosophy. It is an important point to make, especially at a time when it feels like every fellow who has half-read the Meditations is prepared to hold up that reading as the single, unified ‘wisdom of the ancients.’ In practice, the Greeks and the Romans thought many things and part of what made ancient philosophers interesting and controversial was that they often espoused viewpoints that went against prevailing cultural attitudes (there was a reason no one liked Socrates!).
Also, via that Pasts Imperfect, I wanted to highlight a recent episode of Anthony Kaldellis’ Byzantium and Friends podcast where he talked about the survival of small and endangered academic fields like Sumerology, Hittitology (that is, the study of the Sumerians and Hittites) and Byzantine studies with Sumerologist Jana Matuszak and Hittitologist Petra Goedegebuure. It’s striking to hear the discussion coming from fields even more endangered than Classics writ-large, but I think it is a really useful discussion, touching on how fragile small fields can be in an environment where higher education is shrinking where it isn’t collapsing. Critically, it is important to recognize that these fields are passing down key skills – like language skills in dead languages – which only a very small number of people have, that have to be continuously trained and preserved, or we’ll largely lose them (again). As a result, disruptions to these small fields can threaten to sever that thread of knowledge, leaving a poorer, less knowledgeable world.
Meanwhile in ancient military equipment news, archaeologists in Sunderland in England have found a deposit of some eight hundred Roman whetstones. The site has a large formation of sandstone, a good stone to use for whetstones and seems to have been a local production center, quarried on the north bank and then processed on the south bank. The 800 or so stones we have are likely production ‘rejects’ – not quite the right size, shape or consistency – and so were dumped. Discussions on the site have focused on the potential use of whetstones by the Roman army – Roman soldiers will have needed to sharpen their swords – but I think underplay the potential of whetstones as a ‘consumer good’ in an agrarian society where every farming household would need to keep plows, knives and sickles sharp too.
For this week’s book recommendation, I have a real gem of a recent book, O. Rees, The Far Edges of the Known World: Life Beyond the Borders of Ancient Civilization (2025).5 The book’s theme is there in the title: it takes as its focus not the usual centers of our perspectives on antiquity (mainland Greece and Roman Italy) but rather the ‘peripheries.’ But the delight of the book is in part that it centers these peripheries, treats them as the ‘main characters’ in their own stories, as they must have felt to the people who lived there at that time. These places exist on the edges of imperial power or cultural hegemony but that doesn’t mean they were ‘rough’ places – most of the places Rees takes us are urban, even cosmopolitan in nature, existing as they often did at the intersection of different cultures and empires. And of course these places at the ‘edge of the world’ (but the center of their own) are every bit as much a part of antiquity as the streets of Rome or the acropolis of Athens.
The book is structured into four sections each with a slightly different defined ‘core’ to which we shall find a periphery: the first section focused on the peripheries of Egypt (from pre-history through the bronze age), the second on the edges of the Greek world, the third on the edges of the Roman world and the fourth finally reaching far beyond the broader Mediterranean to the very edges of the world that our classical cultures even knew existed. Each section is then broken into three or four chapters, with each chapter picking a single place well beyond that ‘core.’ Rees takes us to a wide variety of places, some of which (Hadrian’s Wall, for instance) may feel familiar but many of which (Lake Turkana, Olbia, Naucratis, Volubilis, Aksum) will come as a delightful surprise to most readers.
What I like so much about this approach is that it treats each of these sites as the main characters of their own stories, through the evidence we have for them. That is often mediated through the great empires or hegemonic cultures (because that’s where our evidence is from) but it never becomes a story about the hegemons – it is a story about these places. And the reader quickly realizes that while to the Egyptians or Greeks or Romans these places must have seemed distant and ‘out of the way,’ they were at the centers of their own interconnected worlds. And Rees succeeds in writing carefully but evocatively about these places, with wonderful anecdotes grounded in archaeology or source testimony, like the long-distance trade contacts of Megiddo coming through from the banana proteins found in the remains of someone’s teeth or the striking moment where the Greek colony of Olbia – today in Ukraine – under siege saves itself by expanding citizenship to its resident foreigners and slaves to have the strength to resist attack.
The book is clearly written for a public audience, but is carefully footnoted for those who want more depth, so while it is a well-written and often pleasantly breezy read, it is also a serious work of scholarship. It also have a number of wonderful full-color plates that add some – you’ll have to pardon me – color to its descriptions. Alongside this, the book has some of the most consistently useful and helpful maps I’ve encountered in such a work, with each chapter featuring at least one (some several!) maps helping the reader situate where they are in relation to the rest of the ancient world. And I do want to stress, even I knew relatively little of many of these places prior to reading. So this is a book that is going to delight anyone interested in the ancient world but even if you know quite a lot about antiquity, you will find things here to expand your horizons.
- Most of actual Classics Twitter has left the platform, mostly for Bluesky, with the result that the crowd of experts there would have been in this exchange in, say, 2020 or 2021 was whittled down to just a handful, though Nash had little trouble embarrassing the Roman Helmet Guy on his own.
- Though I will note that as the definition of ‘conservative’ has shifted, it has shifted folks out of this column in American academia without anyone changing positions. A lot of conservative academics were Reagan-Bush-Bush-McCain-Romney sort of conservatives (pro-trade, pro-NATO, etc) who have now ended up as NeverTrump conservatives. They have not become progressives or liberals, but they are not MAGA. This is, among other places, pretty readily apparent in Military History, probably the most conservative subfield of history: there are a lot of conservative military historians, but relatively few MAGA military historians.
- Of course readers will note that while that collection of research interests has not in any way limited my ability to publish, it has made it a lot harder for me to find a permanent academic position. And that – not getting published – is the ‘filter problem’ in our fields. But of course for the enthusiast who has no intention of becoming a professor, that ‘filter problem’ is of no consequence.
- None of us have any money to pay them if they did. There is often, however, a quite stiff fee if you want an article to be open access, which few humanities academics can afford unless they have a major research sponsor paying it for them.
- Full disclosure, I was sent a copy.
“Percy (far) and Ollie (near) both suddenly confused as to why I am in my own hallway.”
I can virtually guarantee that this is not how they see things.
Much as dog ownership is a great insight into ancient and even modern religious ritual practices, cat ownership is an excellent reminder that everyone is the center of their own world.
Isn’t cat ownership a great insight into the experience of worshipping deities, too?
Yes, but only cats are right in their opinion. They ARE the center of the universe, the guide star around which we humble human servants circle. As is right and proper.
I was going to say “What do you mean “your” hallway?”
The tell for autodidacts is when they mispronounce difficult foreign words/names. Just sayin’
Heck, I mispronounce English words and names, much less diffiuclt foreign ones. Probably a solid majority of my vocabulary was encountered in reading prior to hearing the word spoken, and that’s assuming that I’ve ever heard it spoken.
Nah, that’s fairly common even among professors (gods bless them, they do try)
“Never mock people for mispronouncing a word. It means they learned it by reading.”
–apparently unknown origin
Besides, to use just one example, getting the pronunciation of French “u” or German “ü” right seems to be almost physically impossible for some people whose first language is English.
While there are a finite number of speech sounds, no language uses them all.
As we grow and develop we lose the ability to distinguish sounds not used in our native language. While I think a child who learns multiple languages while young would be different, it’s not something I remember being discussed in the classes I took that mentioned it.
I wouldn’t say we “lose” the ability, but it’s much more difficult and no longer intuitive- as an adult you actually have to train yourself to hear and pronounce the sound, whereas as a child you just sort of absorb it.
Yes. An adult in this situation (or, relatedly, encountering their first tonal language) would do well to hit themselves on the head with the International Phonetic Alphabet a little. Usually it helps.
@BasilMarte,
+1000 on the tonal language thing.
I think I have a pretty good ear for the “sounds” of different languages, and I make heavy use of the IPA (linguistics is sort of a hobby interest of mine), but I’m not even going to *attempt* trying my hand at the different tones in a tonal language. That’s well above my abilities.
Interestingly, Punjabi is a language that apparently seems to be in the process of becoming tonal (on the internet you can see heated debates between native speakers about whether it’s a tonal language or not), within the early modern period (after a script was developed), so you can sort of see how tones develop in real time.
@Hector
> Interestingly, Punjabi is a language that apparently seems to be in the process of becoming tonal (on the internet you can see heated debates between native speakers about whether it’s a tonal language or not), within the early modern period (after a script was developed), so you can sort of see how tones develop in real time.
Punjabi speaker here.
Punjabi is *already* a tonal language (except for maybe the far-southwestern dialects), and has been that way for nearly 200 years now. Makes it very unique among not just the languages of modern Hindustan (the existence of tones is a good retort against Hindi chauvinists), but also virtually the *entire Indo-European family* which is otherwise almost bereft of tonal languages. However, neither of the primary writing systems used for Punjabi (Gurmukhi, and Arabic script in diagonal nastalik style) are adapted to writing tones in Punjabi, though, since both of them predate the Punjabi tonogenesis period.
To give you an example of what that would look like in the Gurmukhi script (used for Eastern Punjabi):
The word ਪੁਹਪੁ (puhapu), nominative inflection of ਪੁਹਪ (puhap), means flower, cognate with the Sanskrit word “pushpa”. (It’s also an extremely archaic inherited Prakritism which no one says anymore; the common word for flower is ਫੁੱਲ or phull.) In much older Punjabi, ie. in SGGS Ji, this word would be pronounced similarly to the transliteration given: puh-hah-puh. Simple. In modern Punjabi however, the final short vowel is deleted, whence ਪੁਹਪ (puhap) = ਪੁਹਪੁ. The non-initial ਹ (h) serves as a tonal marker instead (although there are a few words like Sanskrit borrowings where this rule is ignored). Thus ਪੁਹਪ sounds like “pope” but with a rising tone on the “o” vowel. Exact same word, written (almost) the exact same way, but very different pronunciations based on the era.
The recency of tonogenesis actually presents a bit of a problem for Eastern Punjabi philologists (well, it feels like there are like five of us in the whole world, and I guess I am one of them). It seems that the older Punjabi scriptures have to be read in the former/older pronunciation to preserve poetic meter, but the vast majority of readings and recitations done nowadays are in the latter/newer pronunciation with tones, final short vowel deletions, etc. or at least much closer to the newer pronunciation style. In my opinion, the older pronunciation makes the subtle fusional grammar of the older language (largely lost in the newer one, and poorly understood nowadays unfortunately) much more apparent, while the newer pronunciation obfuscates the older grammar and makes listening more confusing.
The “heated debates” you see between Punjabi speakers over its tonal nature are a byproduct of two things: first, that tonogenesis in Punjabi is so recent that its speakers and its writing systems have still yet to adjust to that; and second, that the majority of Punjabi speakers are extremely bad at linguistics. Even the language enthusiasts who crow on about “theth (pure) Punjabi” (basically descriptivist purism) are not that good at it.
There’s a lot more to unpack here but the point I want to make is that Punjabi is already tonal (and Punjabis are generally bad at linguistics, so don’t take their “heated debates” and other linguistic musings at face value).
No, we definitely lose the ability to distinguish sounds that don’t exist in our maternal languages. For example, monolingual English speakers can’t hear the difference between aspirated and unaspirated “p” because the distinction isn’t important in English. I know this personally because I spent a decent amount of time trying to distinguish the sounds in my intro to linguistics class. I do speak more than one language but in none of them does this distinction exist.
Or take the classic L vs R distinction which doesn’t exist in Japanese. I’ve met adult Japanese learners of English who say they can’t actually hear the difference, they just memorized the tongue positions and trust they’re doing it right.
Basically cognition is an energy intensive task and our developing brains will edit out linguistic abilities that aren’t important in our childhood environments.
While these folk undoubtedly deserve the drubbing, I do find that Bret’s writing to be more enjoyable and informative when on a topic he really likes (I found the Rings of Power series to suffer similarly).
I agree with this, and with the similar comment left by @Matthew a little below. Venting rage like this might be cathartic (to both writer and reader), but it quickly descends into a self-congratulatory circle jerk of laughing at the worse examples of the out-group that can be inserted into the article. Do they deserve being laughed at? Absolutely, but does scoring easy vindictive points with a crowd that already agrees with you accomplish anything at all? There’s enough anger and hatred on the internet already.
I quickly realized there was a gell mann amnesia effect with his other writing. It’s all this bad, it’s just more obvious in posts like this.
You’re not wrong about the issues with the PfP guys, but while academia isn’t as ideologically exclusive as its detractors claim it is, the evidence for your point regarding the current state of academia would have been stronger if you could have cited some books or articles that were published less than a decade ago.
Why would we imagine that the publication environment has changed so profoundly since 2016?
If you want to demonstrate that something is not currently true, you are better off giving a recent counterexample than a distant one.
It does seem somewhat consistent with the time range of relevant publications to cite in general. It’s not his fault if his best examples aren’t putting books out frequently enough.
Well, he did cite his own book which is in the process of being published right now.
Its rare that someone without formal trailing works hard enough to publish formal research in a tiny field like ancient world studies, but eg. Paul Bardunias (entomologist, trade book that gets cited in academic publications, and invited to give a talk at the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard this decade)
Bret would also be more persuasive if he dealt with episodes like the unpublishing of Gilley’s article on colonialism. And I could find other examples without too much trouble. Unless Bret (or some other academic) has an explanation of why those episodes don’t amount to academic censorship of unpopular ideas, my general suspicion of and hostility toward the Academy will continue.
ey81, I had never heard of that paper, but on reading the introduction I see that it is policy advocacy not disinterested inquiry (“There are three ways to reclaim colonialism. … A second way is to recolonize some regions. Western countries should be encouraged to hold power in specific governance areas (public finances, say, or criminal justice) in order to jump-start enduring reforms in weak states. … in some instances, it may be possible to build new Western colonies from scratch.”)
“Countries that did not have a significant colonial history … Haiti … for instance” is quite a take to read in a peer-reviewed article and does not give me hope that the “is” part of the article would stand up any better than the “ought.”
Hmm… I’d follow up on this to make sure it’s a legit take rather than letting it confirm my biases on principle, but for the time being I find the source trustworthy.
I’m not gonna lie, I’d be relieved if the harping on at “academic repression of a nuanced argument about the benefits brought by colonialism” could be disregarded by something as easily repudiated as an article advocating to do more colonialism.
““Countries that did not have a significant colonial history … Haiti … for instance” is quite a take to read in a peer-reviewed article”
Frankly that makes me think that the academy’s failure was not in unpublishing the article but in letting it be published in the first place. “Haiti has no significant colonial history” is a real thirteenth-strike sentence (the thirteenth strike of the clock is not only wrong in itself but makes you doubt the accuracy of all that precedes it).
@ajay,
“Haiti has no significant colonial history” is a real thirteenth-strike sentence (the thirteenth strike of the clock is not only wrong in itself but makes you doubt the accuracy of all that precedes it).
Exactly, this is such a…..strange claim it really makes you wonder how it slipped through. Maybe the opposite of @ey81’s claim is correct and they were so excited to publish something “edgy” that they failed to do basic fact checking.
The actual sentence was ” Countries that did not have a significant colonial history – China, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Haiti and Guatemala, for instance –provide a measure of comparison to help identify what if anything were the distinctive effects of colonialism”. Some of those are fair enough, they were either not colonised/occupied at all, or only small parts of them were, or only briefly.
But what on earth are Haiti and Guatemala doing there?
There are some other gems here.
“Patrice Lumumba, who became an anti-colonial agitator only very late, praised Belgian colonial rule in his autobiography of 1962 for ‘restoring our human dignity and turning us into free, happy, vigorous, and civilized men’” – I haven’t read the autobiography but I can absolutely believe that Lumumba thought that Belgian colonial rule was an improvement on what came before, because what came before was the horrific Congo Free State, but it is lunatic, or more likely deliberately deceptive, to cite this as evidence of Lumumba being a fervent pro-colonialist. Primo Levi was delighted to see the invading Red Army in 1945, but that was not because he was a committed Stalinist; it was because he was in Auschwitz.
There are some other gems here.
“Patrice Lumumba, who became an anti-colonial agitator only very late, praised Belgian colonial rule in his autobiography of 1962 for ‘restoring our human dignity and turning us into free, happy, vigorous, and civilized men’”
Seriously?
I’m no expert on the DRC / Congo-Kinshasa / Zaire and its history, but even I know that Lumumba devoted his inaugural speech, on the country’s independence day, to a highly controversial speech criticizing Belgian colonialism. At considerable cost to both his country and eventually to himself personally, so clearly he meant it. (It’s not clear to me why it was so controversial, since reading it today, it seems fairly well balanced). You can see that he calls out “eighty years of colonial rule”, not “40-50 years of Congo Free State rule”.
The Wikipedia page does say he adopted a more conciliatory tone towards Belgian colonialism later on (the 1962 autobiography would have been written two years after the speech) but it also implies he did so in order to repair diplomatic relations with Belgium which was by then backing the opposition, so I think the 1960 speech is more likely to represent his true thoughts.
Anyone who doesn’t at least *mention* that context, which might certainly change the reader’s opinions, is as you say, either really ignorant or else trying to be deliberately deceptive. Especially since the 1960 speech is very famous, much more so than the autobiography.
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/06/independence.htm
Hector, thank you for the additional context on Lumumba, someone about whom I’m afraid I know almost nothing.
And, too, if I was compiling a list of countries that didn’t have a significant colonial history, that list is somewhat limited – it seems to be “a list of countries that weren’t significantly colonised but look like they ought to have been”. It doesn’t include, for example, Japan or Sweden.
The actual sentence was ” Countries that did not have a significant colonial history – China, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Haiti and Guatemala, for instance –provide a measure of comparison to help identify what if anything were the distinctive effects of colonialism”. Some of those are fair enough, they were either not colonised/occupied at all, or only small parts of them were, or only briefly.
Some of those countries (as well as, obviously, Japan), interestingly, seem to have made it through the era of Western colonialism partly by becoming expansionist powers in their own right, or by imitating Western colonialism in other ways (maybe because they felt that’s what they had to do to survive). Which is really one of the many evils of imperialism- not only does it affect the conquering power and the conquered, but it creates a race to the bottom where every other country feels strong pressure to do the same thing to avoid being conquered themselves.
Like you say, Japan is really the obvious “control” country here, as a non-Western and non-European country that was never colonized or even under heavy foreign influence, and it’s really strange it didn’t make it into that paragraph.
“Like you say, Japan is really the obvious “control” country here, as a non-Western and non-European country that was never colonized or even under heavy foreign influence, and it’s really strange it didn’t make it into that paragraph.”
It’s not strange at all if you assume that the author is dishonestly trying to make a case for colonialism being a Good Thing, rather than simply following the facts where they lead. He wants to be able to say “Singapore? Colonised, and it’s nice. Canada? Same. Ethiopia on the other hand? Not really colonised at all, and awful. There you go. Colonisation is great.”
Retractions are not censorship, the say way a rejection during peer review is not censorship – they are part of the scientific publishing process and should be read as a working self-correcting mechanism. There was an error that slipped through peer review, and instead of letting it stand, the academic community fixed it. In what way is that sinister?
The right wing keeps throwing out conspiracy theories about retractions in an effort to create a narrative of censorship, and I’d advise you not to fall for them. Somebody who argues for re-creating the countless documented horrors of colonialism does not need you to defend them.
“The right wing keeps throwing out conspiracy theories about retractions in an effort to create a narrative of censorship”
Agreed. Considering the actions of many right wing leaders when they do achieve power, I’m almost certain the issue is a failure of imagination. They are personally committed to censoring their opponents, and cannot fathom that their opponents actually care about freedom of speech enough not to do the same.
Maybe the article was withdrawn because on consideration, the editors decided that the arguments weren’t valid, the evidence wasn’t sound, the conclusions didn’t follow, etc.?
If academic publications welcomed controversy, as Bret claims, wouldn’t they publish counterarguments instead of unpublishing the article? In the true liberal world, the remedy for mistakes is supposed to be more speech, not cancellation. But that is not the current Academy.
@ey81,
Surely welcoming controversy and debate isn’t a good reason to publish an *actually not very good article*, is it?
By this logic, literally every article would get published and peer review would consist of publishing the elaborations on why it was found to be wrong. A thing that would probably require journals to have unlimited space per issue.
Although perhaps I’m mistaken, given that I do have a vague recollection that other cases of retracted articles do actually come with the contextualizing explanation. Given previous misrepresentation of this subject, I find I can’t discount the idea that your demand of “they didn’t sufficiently debate the bro” is also less than accurate.
Really loving the use of a scary capital letter to make out that the subject of your ire is some kind of all powerful monolith, by the way.
Given that I can now buy a book by Bruce Gilley called “The Case for Colonialism” (which was also the title of the paper, apparently), and others can access the paper itself, I don’t see how this is any sort of evidence for effective censorship. The paper saw extensive criticism; that’s just how debate happens, isn’t it?
There are plenty of neofascist and neonazi ‘historians’ publishing books, they just tend to publish them in small press outlets catering to a crowd already amenable to their ideology.
to argue against the idea that Roman strength came from the unusual willingness and ability of the Romans to incorporate and include a wide range of peoples and cultures
Surely the better way to push back on this idea is to *accept* the claim but then argue that ‘strength’ (the kind that the Romans had, and America has) is overrated anyway, and not particularly something to aspire to (normatively speaking)?
I would certainly feel more attached to a small and weak country that I feel is *mine* (or more precisely, “ours”) than a large and powerful country that I feel isn’t really anyone’s in the same sense. Especially in the modern era when wars of conquest are very much a negative sum proposition anyway, on top of being completely illegal under international law, so that you shouldn’t have to worry that much about being a small and weak country anyway.
The problem is, they want to have it both ways: They desperately need to be powerful, and they desperately need to do it in an exclusionary way. It’s the lording over that appeals to them, after all.
@RichardH,
I think that’s right, yes. It nicely sums up, in my opinion, what separates the kind of cultural pathology you see on the American right from what I see as, well, “normal” nationalism or proto-nationalism or ethnic interest politics, the kind that you see all over the world and through history. And it also nicely underscores what makes it really pernicious (to me, anyway), it is really all about power and strength for them.
Maybe some of this is because America, like Bret has pointed out in one of his July 4 essays, isn’t really a *nation*, so it has to create its cultural narrative from other raw materials, maybe some of it is a cultural pathology of really big super-states (that you might see in Russia, India, and elsewhere), maybe some of it is unique to America, but it’s certainly a feature of life here. Like I said, progressive cosmopolitanism generally leaves me cold, but the obsession with power, force and “greatness” leaves me even colder.
Because far-right ideology fundamentally cannot reject “might makes right” at any level because the entire social structure is formed up of “might makes right.” All the small-scale interactions involve determining who is mighty and therefore has the right to impose their will, and so do all the large-scale interactions.
As a far-righter, once one accepts the argument that being physically and socially able to force one’s will on someone isn’t the ultimate arbiter of whether one should force one’s will on them, it all starts to come unglued. If nations have a right to survive that isn’t contingent on pure naked force… well, individuals have a right not to be forced to live the way one has justified forcing them to live on the grounds that it makes the nation materially strong. And individuals will be seen as having rights too, which is of course anathema when the far-righter actually needs structural oppression to keep his own group on top of the strict racial and gender hierarchy he’s looking to impose.
“Because far-right ideology fundamentally cannot reject “might makes right” at any level because the entire social structure is formed up of “might makes right.””
Exactly. After all, if they rejected “strength” as the measure of the worth of a human being, they would have to admit that women are just as good as men, since brute strength (and structural power built through brute strength and ruthlessness) is the only thing they have more of than women.
And if they then decided, in their desire to prove their own superiority, to measure the worth of a human being any other way, they might even find that the average white man isn’t only not on top, but ends up somewhere in the middle.
So they can’t.
I wonder if they would argue differently, if they could choose misogyny over racism, seeing as misogyny is older than racism, and you would expect them to be more attached to it.
Hmmm, looking at this quote by Roman Helmet Guy:
“Tolkien doesn’t want you to know this, but if Boromir had just kept the ring we would all have hot elf wives right now.”
Yes. Yes, they would choose misogyny over racism. Getting to enslave and rape* female elves is more important to him than the purity of the human race. (I mean, arguably he doesn’t realize that elves are very much more different from humans than white and black humans differ from each other, but the desire to enslave women is very, very strong.)
* You cannot imagine an elf woman willingly marrying a man who thinks the One Ring should be used, now, can you? And mind, this is the kind of man who complain that human women don’t want them and blame feminism. He must be aware that elf women wouldn’t want him either.
“After all, if they rejected “strength” as the measure of the worth of a human being, they would have to admit that women are just as good as men, since brute strength (and structural power built through brute strength and ruthlessness) is the only thing they have more of than women.”
If only you think that they are reasonable enough to admit it.
Many misogynistic cultures already rejected “brute strength” as the measure of the worth of a human being. But they also argue that men have more emotional and intelligent strength than women do, that men are more hardworking, deep and far-thinking, braver, smarter, more honorable, more loyal or even less lustful, etc… than women.
I will note, in the early-90’s nerd culture of fighting game enthusiasts, a supposedly meritocratic scene about skill in the game, more than once, I’d put my quarter up on the machine to claim next, and a dude would hand it back to me, “You’ll just embarrass yourself, honey.” is the line I remember.
My brother, of course, had no problem at all. (and after I hit puberty and suddenly could manage hand-eye coordination, I was maybe 60% against him)
Taking some steps back from the “measure of worth” (and thus “better” &c), there are several differences, many with existing discourses around them.
1) Often (not always) different areas of interest. One example is that among medical specialties, the ones with more patient interaction (e.g. psychotherapist) lean more female than those specialties with less, such as radiology or pathology. I lead with this example exactly because there is no better/worse here, just a value-neutral difference.
2) Historically contingent material fact: until extremely recently, bringing new people into the world required their (biological) mother to carry the pregnancy. (Today, we have surrogacy as an individual but not societal-scale solution, and hopefully someday soon, artificial wombs will become available.) A large majority of women (though not all) want to have some children; it is extremely well discussed that squaring this with high-workload high-prestige careers is difficult, and thus often end up with fewer children than they (they, not their husbands!) wanted. I believe the common way to put it is that women sacrifice their firstborn to get that career success.
To reintroduce value judgments in a roundabout way: other than crossing our fingers and hoping for artificial wombs to become available sooner, until that happens, the above raises the question of whether it is beneficial to people for our culture to guide the aspirations of so many women toward these sorts of high-pressure careers; or whether people would flourish more, and be more satisfied with their lives, if more women could have the number of children they say they desire.
And reaching back to the OP (@Hector), this topic also keys into all the demographic questions. For one, people’s happiness depends not just on their “personal” situation, but also on something like economic liveliness/growth, that the future will be better than the present. It is (again) extremely well understood that a population pyramid that looks like, if not a pyramid, at least doesn’t look like a barrel, is in many ways causal to achieving this. While it is sometimes suggested/practiced that societies could make up for not (pro)creating enough future members locally by instead importing them, this runs squarely into the OP. (Where it may be reasonable to be of the opinion that “people want a wrong thing”, evidently many do, and at this time it’s not clear to me what a superior alternative would be. I suppose some would suggest that e.g. religion-taken-seriously can lift that load. Personally, I’d answer that that’s a bad solution; we know from historical experience that it leads to some point on the spectrum between bloody repression of heretics and other contrarians at one end, and multiple civil(+) wars at the other (with persecution of religious minorities thrown in as a bonus in both cases) — the post-30-YW “let’s agree to disagree” on religion was the seed from which the rest of liberalism grew. This would apply even if we found a replacement that doesn’t suffer from the problem that scientific/technological advancement made it hard to take seriously.)
Additionally, to the extent military strength comes up as a question in a world of the status quo alliance structure, the answers are a combination of “economy”, “population”, and “will”, so ceteris paribus a forward-looking country would again want the same instrumental goals as above, for yet another reason.
3) In addition to different average traits, in most traits males have a wider dispersion around that average, thus extreme selection tends to find a heavily male-leaning sample. The most successful people (though refer to 2) and the least successful (“homeless”/”incarcerated”) are both disproportionately male. This would be the case for many other value-judgment-laden traits, too.
————
Summary: there are many reasons why it would be stupid to assert that one sex is better than the other, but please notice that it’s only a little less stupid to assert that therefore (by elimination) they are the same. It is possible for them to be on average different, and thus commonly should aspire to somewhat different trajectories in life (what the typical sets of trajectories would be are technologically contingent, see the series on premodern peasant food/textile production), without this making one better than the other — and even without invalidating the “exceptions”, such as various historical queens regnant, or Joan d’Arc, or men professionally working in the textile industry, or in the food preparation industry (bakers and cooks).
Illustration with numbers: look not at “larger” but at “divides”. 1 divides both 2 and 3, 2 and 3 both divide 6, but neither 2 nor 3 divide the other. Thus they are both “ranked higher than” 1 and “below” 6, yet simultaneously they are neither equal nor have one ranked above the other.
@Basil Marte
Your comment made me wonder why that large extended families are so rare in developed countries. One could expect that they could help in solving that problem; for example, if two related couples live together in a household; their members could specialise, like one woman acts as the housewife* taking care of not only her own children but also those of her sister when she is working, so that both of them can avoid the ‘double shift’ of having to both work in a paid career and then do the house chores when they arrive back home.
With modern household appliances the hours needed for such chores have been reduced compared to the past so one would presume that a stay at home mother could take care of a larger household with the same effort.
Yes, I’d expect such a thing to be rare, excluding situations like grandparents taking care of the children, because large extended families often would be impractical or disliked for various reasons, from family members not getting along to disagreements about where they want to live. However, even after taking those into account I’d still expect more of such instances than I have encountered; though, maybe I underestimate how often such instances happen in practice in develeped countries.
* Though, I suppose it in such cases it would not only be women who stay home to do housework.
We wouldn’t have hot elf wives by now, we would all be dead, with Middle-Earth a depopulated hellscape ruled by Sauron.
Or by Aragorn – the point here is that Tolkien keeps open the possibility that you might overcome Sauron by using the One Ring, but it doesn’t matter, because the result would be no different.
On the other hand, the point here is sort of moot, as in the Silmarillion, the Great Music of Eru is described: the discords by Morgoth can never do lasting damage to the great harmony that incorporates and develops the theme and makes it part of the overall symphony. Whatever evil may happen, it is eventually set right. This Christian worldview shines through Tolkien’s work. We may lose a battle, but the overall war has been won from the beginning.
I’m reluctant to describe the entirety of the ‘far right’ as one single ‘they’ (them being every bit as factional and diverse in their views as other political groupings), but there’s hard evidence that they will choose misogyny over racism.
There have been numerous tweets from far right folks about the US’ proposed imperial venture in Venezuela claiming that there are ‘millions of breedable women’ in Venezuela, and stating that they could ‘create millions more Americans’. This being pitched simultaneously alongside the right wing persecution of minorities (including Venezuelans…).
Yes. Yes, they would choose misogyny over racism. Getting to enslave and rape* female elves is more important to him than the purity of the human race.
@Rose,
These are some really great points, and I think you’re exactly right. Even leaving aside the more hard and pernicious edges, it’s clear that, for the US right wing at least, conservative / traditionalist gender roles are much more important than the racial stuff.
“Because far-right ideology fundamentally cannot reject “might makes right” at any level because the entire social structure is formed up of “might makes right.””
It should be noted that far-left ideologies also insisted on the idea of the power of the oppressed to overthrow as crush the oppressors, and reject the idea of “faith makes right” or “morality makes right” found in religions.
I have no idea which far left ideologies you are referring to in the specific. Three of the dominant leftist ideologies of the industrial age – Liberalism, Marxism and (Left) Anarchism – are built on the explicitly moral argument that an egalitarian social order would be inherently more fair and just than a hierarchic one, and used that to justify their political activity and their attacks on the established social order.
That is the exact opposite argument from “might makes right”.
This. It’s the difference between ‘the ends justify the means’ and ‘the means are the ends’.
That’s not a judgement about which is correct (though I have my own position). It’s simply a refutation that ‘far left and far right are the same thing’.
Marxism clearly states that socialism is the mightier mode of society than capitalism, and will win the fight against capitalism because it is, indeed, stronger.
Marxism rejects socialism based on morality like Utopian socialism (where “moral” business owners would not ill-treat workers and everyone be happy).
Utopian socialism (where “moral” business owners would not ill-treat workers and everyone be happy).
Whatever you think of the morality of that, it’s not socialism, as long as “business owners” and “workers” exist as separate classes, so by his lights Marx and others were quite right to reject it.
Business managers will still exist in a socialist society, like any other form of society, but that’s a separate thing.
@Hector: Yes, “Utopian socialism” does not have class analysis. It’s just about a socially where people are moral and love each other.
Anyone who claims that Marxism is built on an explicitly moral argument (i) hasn’t read much Marx (not to mention Lenin, Lukacs et al) and (ii) doesn’t under Marxism.
@NVA,
I don’t think I’m expressing myself as clearly as I’d like, so I’ll just point you to @Ynneadwraith’s comment, which I generally agree with. It’s the difference between force as a means and as an end.
To be clear, i think “far right” is often a wildly overused and misapplied term (often applied to people who aren’t on the right at all in any conceivable sense, never mind near or far), and certainly it’s often misapplied to people who don’t particularly value power for its own sake. But, I think it’s pretty clear that this special reverence for strength and power *for their own sake* does characterize a particular strain of though, that we see a lot of on the American right wing at the moment.
Anyone who claims that Marxism is built on an explicitly moral argument (i) hasn’t read much Marx (not to mention Lenin, Lukacs et al) and (ii) doesn’t under Marxism.
@ey81,
I assume you missed a “lived” in clause ii, “doesn’t live under Marxism”.
I’d respond to both clauses.
1) The moral claims are not explicit, but they’re definitely there implicitly. That’s not just *my* claim, it’s been made by tons of scholars trained in a bunch of different disciplies- economists, anthropologists, philosophers, historians, political scientists etc.. I certainly wouldn’t call myself an expert, but i’ve read a fair bit of what Marxists though, both politicians and scholars, and it’s very clear that they though socialist and communist society would provide a normatively *better* way of running society- that work would be more meaningful, that planning would be more rational, that production would be devoted to use and need, that people’s natures would be more authentically expressed, that the necessities of life would be more fairly provided, that various forms of economic and social parasitism would go away, that people’s motivations would be directed towards the social good rather than individual profit, etc.. Those are all moral claims, implicitly if not explicitly. If you have missed those, or don’t think of them as moral claims, then something’s wrong with your reading comprehension.
2) *Lots* of people who lived in socialist states would disagree with you. Look at a public opinion survey sometime, or some decent work of ethnography. Talking to people you know who lived in former socialist countries isn’t a very good guide to, well, anything, for the same reason that you’re not going to get an accurate picture of what, say, the Lutheran Church teaches by talking with disgruntled people who left. The kind of people who emigrate to America and inhabit PMC-heavy circles, in particular, are almost always highly unrepresentative of the country they came from.
If Roosevelt and Stalin were left-wing, and Churchill and Hitler were right-wing, what is it that unites each of their factions against the other?
Was George Washington left-wing? What about Cromwell?
It should be noted that far-left ideologies also insisted on the idea of the power of the oppressed to overthrow as crush the oppressors, and reject the idea of “faith makes right” or “morality makes right” found in religions.
In a Christian context, at least, “faith” and “morality” are defined by the church structure that was the winner in factional power struggles, so it’s kind of difficult to wholly separate stuff like faith and morality from, you know, power. As it is for most ideologies, secular and religious, and yes, that certainly includes ideologies of the left. In situations of conflict, power actually does matter.
That said, I do think that there’s a different sense in which some ideologies really valorize strength and power and military aggression *for their own sakes*, as opposed to for their instrumental value in realizing other goods, and that really does make those ideologies and their followers unusual and different (and I’d say, a problem for the peace and stability of the world). But if you use that criterion, then I think Marxists (and medieval Christians, and liberal-conservative capitalists, and standard garden variety nationalists) would all fall on the “force is important but it’s instrumentally important” side of the line, as opposed to the “force is sacred and valuable for its own sake” side.
Christians are spiritualists. In their worldview, morality exists beyond humanity, and power comes from morality. A tortured and persecuted Christian martyr, weak and close to death, can still think God’s power is on his side.
Marxists are materialists. In their worldview, humans create morality, and in order to do it, they must first have power. The subjected class cannot win by being moral (especially by the morals created by the ruling class), but by doing the correct, practical, reasonable and scientific things that can grant them power.
How does the joke goes? f Nazis actually believed what they say about the Jews, and also what they say about Will to Power, then they’d all be in line for conversion?
Many things like that.
I don’t know why it has to be the debate. Whatever strength Rome had, it was still dominated by white, Italian-heritage elites. Is that the thing western right wingers aspire to anyway? The Romans clearly didn’t create an empire to spread democracy, progressiveness, and equality between people. The incorporation and inclusion of a wide range of peoples and cultures serves the ultimate purposes of conquest and domination.
I think the idea is to point out that right-wingers’ claims fall short even by their own standards.
I mean, that might be *an* idea, but it wasn’t really what I was trying to express (although as someone not particularly sympathetic to the Anglo-American ‘right’, it’s a nice side benefit). I was more or less just trying to express my personal opinion, that both sides in the debate kind of leave me cold. I think Bret is right on the facts about Roman multiculturalism contributing to their ‘greatness’, but that sort of ‘greatness’ isn’t something that appeals to me in the slightest. Like I said, I value my ethnic heritage and identity more than I value military aggression or a high GDP/capita or the ability to dominate other societies, so I’d much prefer (if I had to choose) one of the tribal societies that the Romans conquered, rather than Rome itself. Whether Rome was multicultural or not, and I’m sure it was, is kind of irrelevant to me.
That’s a funny set of values. Me, I like my “peeps,” i.e., people like me (what you call your heritage and ethnicity), but mostly I like having nice stuff and leisure to enjoy it, which requires money. I also wish for others to have the same things I like, which equates to high per capita GDP.
It’s kind of funny to think about how that relates to the way that a lot of argument in favour of immigration and multiculturalism needs to frame it in terms of the benefits it brings to capitalism (which it does). It’s not a great thing to make appeals to, but it’s the hand we’ve been dealt for the moment, so might as well.
Mind, it could be proposed that it’s not so much an argument for the expansionist strength and cohesion of the Roman Republic/Empire so much as against the narrative that incorporation of more people is innately corrosive to a society.
Immigration and multiculturalism do bring benefits to capitalism. Do they actually bring benefits to anything or anyone other than that, is up to debate.
Empires have different ways to rule over people, and they lead to different benefits and problems. For example Chinese empires seemed to favor Sinicization and assimilation, which lead to cultural erasure, but also things like loyal Han Chinese fought to protect the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty. On the other hand, Ottoman empire seemed to favor multiculturalism, so that the ruling class could enjoy oppressing the subjected people without fearing of being replaced by them, but also lead to all those subjected people abandoned the empire as soon as they could.
It’s not really up to debate, the scholarship on the societal benefits of migration and multiculturalism is fairly robust at this point. Of course, this doesn’t matter because people largely don’t care about statistical evidence when their experienced media reality tells them differently, and the focus on news media is almost entirely on negative incidents.
“Do they actually bring benefits to anything or anyone other than that.”
Categorically, yes.
I’m a Brit. You’ve heard the stereotypes about British food (they’re not actually all that true…but they’re not necessarily that wrong either). Without multiculturalism, I wouldn’t have 6 truly fantastic Indian restaurants in the nearest village to me. My favourite British dish, kedgeree, would not exist. Hell, fish and chips as we know it today is the creation of a Jewish immigrant based on a Portuguese method for battering and frying fish. I would not have the music of Bob Marley, Queen, or a thousand others to listen to. My Iranian-British best friend growing up would not exist. All of the children’s books I read growing up (published by Penguin Publishing) would likely not have been available to me. My primary hobby (classic cars) would be extremely different without people like Sir Alec Issigonis (designer of the Mini).
I feel people gloss over these things as unimportant compared to the grander narratives of ‘is it good for capitalism’ and the like, but my life and the lives of practically everyone around me has been immeasurably enriched by the actions of immigrants.
@Ynneadwraith well yes most things have both the bad and good sides. The bridges that the colonialists built in my countries have brought a lot of benefits to us, and some still work today, long after we kicked our conquerors out.
It’s kind of funny to think about how that relates to the way that a lot of argument in favour of immigration and multiculturalism needs to frame it in terms of the benefits it brings to capitalism (which it does).
I’m not sure that is really going to *broaden* the appeal of immigration and multiculturalism, since there are a lot of people who dislike both immigration/multiethnicity and also dislike capitalism.
Do they actually bring benefits to anything or anyone other than that, is up to debate.
I mean, that’s by definition a normative question, so it’s going to come down to what you value. I do think that a lot of people on both sides of the American political aisle (both the Roman helmet fans, and cosmopolitan progressives) are often either unwilling or unable to consider that there are costs and tradeoffs to however you answer the question.
Well, immigration does ‘benefit capitalism’ in the USA. However, on whether further migration also ‘benefits capitalism’ in countries where the current migrants, and the second generation of them, have highly elevated unemployment rates; that is something I am unsure of.
Not to mention that might lead to other conclusion than supporting ‘inclusive pro-migrant’-attitudes. For example, there is also the ‘Singapore-model’, in which countries import large amounts of guest workers which then get deported when their terms are up.
That actually makes me wonder why that people opposing migration for non-economic reasons don’t bring that up. It seems like something that could be used as an argument against the claim that ‘we need to bring immigrants to pay our pensions’; because temporary guest workers generate taxable economic activity in the present, yet we don’t later have to pay them pensions…
Though, attempting to copy the ‘Singapore-model’ in other countries would have all kinds of political and practical problems; to provide but one example, a significant fraction of US illegal immigrants became one by overstaying their visas. But when does the average politician and voter care about such details?
Minor point, but while Rome was certainly dominated by elites, they very much were not all white (this is actually discussed in a previous article, and essentially, Roman elites spanned the entire range of potential skin colours, and if anything tended to be biased towards being tan rather than completely white.)
Similarly, there tended to be something of a mix of heritages amongst the elites, particularly during the Empire.
And just over half of the Legions were from the Socii, for that matter.
And Socii is exclusively Italians.
This line of analysis, along with some of what Bret has written on this topic, is somewhat disingenuous. Obviously, contemporary American identities of “white” and “black” don’t map particularly well onto Roman values or concerns. But, on the other hand, nobody, neither the Roman helmet guys nor the filmmakers who cast African-Americans as Cleopatra and her court, cares about understanding “the past as it was.” To the extent that the values of either group were to be cast into contemporary terms, the operative question would be: Would James Blake (the bus driver) have told either Julius Caesar or Cleopatra to move to the back of the bus? To this, the answer is probably not. Which in turn tells us nothing about either the experiential reality of life in the third-century Roman empire or the best social policies for twenty-first century America.
I think that operative question is a bit arbitrary, and has been curated to select for a particular extreme of racism that overlooks some of the nuances of other forms of prejudice and discrimination as they would cross over with the appearances of people in parts of history.
Including the extent to which profiling kind of collapses various groups of people into characteristics that align with most closely felt prejudices. How many mid-twentieth century white Americans might mistake Greeks for, say, people originating below the southern border?
(This being on my mind from an incident of recently having anti-Semitic slurs tossed at my decidedly non-Jewish self because some people will mistake what a black hat and coat means)
“What on Earth do you mean by this bizarre term ‘white’? Ah, I get it… you must be a Persian trying to impugn the dignity of Roman civilization by lumping us together with blond-haired, blue-eyed, Germanic barbarians, right?”
— signed, an actual “Italian-heritage elite” of ancient Rome
“What on Earth are you playing at by calling Italians ‘white’? We don’t want no skinkin’ eye-talians!”
— signed, an Anglo-American “white” supremacist of a hundred or so years ago
aren’t we talking about the right wingers of today?
Do you think the Romans are not actually white?
“Our strength? That would be our Virtus, not that “multiculturalism” nonsense. Also, what is a “blog” and why you are pretending to be us?” — signed, an actual Roman manly man
> Do you think the Romans are not actually white?
Wait, you’re serious? No, as any remotely serious scholar (including our host) would immediately tell you, the ancient Romans were not “actually white”, because the racial concept of “whiteness” is a socially-constructed ideological fiction of the modern era.
Of course one could choose to anachronistically project the racial category of “whiteness” backward through history in such a way as to define the ancient Romans as “white”, yet this would be every bit as meaningless to an actual ancient Roman as doing the exact same thing with “magenta-ness”, a racial category I just made up in my head a couple seconds ago for purposes of this comment.
@Skinner_Was_Right:
As you see, I was talking about how modern right wingers view it, not about how the Romans viewed themselves. And for modern western right wingers (and maybe US police too), native Italians are “white”.
You know, the Nazi did not call themselves Nazi, or fascists either.
@NVA,
I posted on this blog, maybe last year or the year before, a link to a 2009 genetic study that found that Southern Italians and Greeks are genetically closer to Palestinians than to many Northern Europeans.
So, whether you consider e.g. Greeks to be “white” should really depend on whether you include Levantine Arabs as “white” (if you care about reality, at any rate).
For those who are curious, the U.S. government (pre-Trump) classified Levantine Arabs as white. So that’s the law.
For those who are curious, the U.S. government (pre-Trump) classified Levantine Arabs as white. So that’s the law.
Yes, and there were plans to have the 2020 Census reclassify them as a separate racial group (“MENA”). Supposedly the Trump administration nixed that idea, possibly because they thought it would be embarrassing to see the official “White” total be a little lower than it would otherwise. But, I suspect eventually the reclassification will go through. Which underscores my point, that how Middle Easterners should fit into US racial classifications is very much contested in America today.
(and don’t get me started on how little sense the US racial categorizations make in general, or how much difficulty these sorts of oversimplistic categorizations have had historically with classifying a number of different groups around the globe, including my own).
It would require a really heroic effort to describe those “oversimplistic” government classifications as products of the right. Personally, I have suspected that the reason for abandoning the MENA classification is that there is no politically palatable answer to how one classifies Israelis.
I suspect that this statement greatly overstates* the average differences in skin colour between Italo-Romans and Persians…
* That is unless the few persons of Iranian descent I had encountered in real life happened to be unusually white for Iranians…
Not to mention that Roman ‘inclusiveness’ was a lot more ‘conditional’ than modern day ‘inclusiveness’. For example, look at all those people who had to serve 25 years in the military as auxiliaries to get their citizenship…
Though, this discussion now makes me wonder why that there are no (or very few?) far-right Romeboos advocating for such policies as: “We should abolish birthright citizenship*; immigrants and their descendants should have to serve their new country in the military, or maybe do an equivalent civilian service, if they want citizenship, just like in the good old days of the Roman Republic!” That would be more historically accurate and still be a lot to the right of the median position on ‘inclusiveness’…
* Or other easy paths to citizenship existing in non-US countries.
I partly agree and partly disagree with you.
It is true that the idea that the most important thing in life is to be “strong” and the worst thing one can possibly be is “weak” is the single biggest source of horribleness in human life and human history. Really, a whole lot of people who have done or are doing extremely bad things but seem to have not much else in common with each other do have that attitude in common.
At the same time, as a simple practical matter, unfortunately a certain minimum amount of strength is necessary to survive. So to some extent, if we don’t want to just through away everything, we have to pay some attention to strength.
The unfortunate fact is that the people doing extremely bad things are mostly always STRONGER than the people having those extremely bad things done to them, which lead to that attitude – for the strong, but also for the weak as well.
I mean, Thucydides was mostly pointing out that Athens were being jerks, but he wasn’t wrong.
It should be noted that the Athenians *lost* (both the debate where they argued might makes right, and the subsequent war) so there is probably more to cultural evolution than merely being a strong bully, just saying
Yes — the “strong do as they will, weak suffer what they must” attitude was quite explicitly an attitude of hubris, leading the Athenians directly into the disastrous overreach of the Sicilian expedition that tore their empire to shreds like tissue paper.
Trying to use that line as a straightforward, knowing aphorism to describe How The World Works is a true textbook example of “irony” in the classical sense of the term — right up there with calling your condom brand “Trojan” or your smart home security startup “Sauron” (i.e. security systems named for two of the most notoriously unsuccessful security systems in all of literature).
@Skinner was Right,
+1000 to that.
@NVA,
The attitude isn’t a law of nature though- it’s a description of social behavior, which like other social behaviors is conditioned and constraned by cultural norms. If the relevant parties decide that the Melian Dialogue approach is not just a negative-sum proposition but also very much a lose lose one, and counterproductive for everyone, and if they’re willing and able to enforce those norms, then behavior can change. As it has done, at various points in the past.
“Especially in the modern era when wars of conquest are very much a negative sum proposition anyway, on top of being completely illegal under international law, so that you shouldn’t have to worry that much about being a small and weak country anyway.”
I appreciate the irony here but it does sort of undermine your first paragraph!
Norman Angell made some valid points, but I don’t know if he ever told us how to handle people who didn’t read him.
It was meant to be both serious and sarcastic, if that makes sense (that is to say, I think the opposition to wars of conquest is one of the aspects of the modern era that support without reservation, that among many other things makes it actually *workable* to have a small country (whether it’s diverse or homogeneous) exist in safety and security, and also that a handful of rogue leaders in the United States, Russia and Israel right now want to tear it up and flush it down the toilet, which should be exactly as alarming and infuriating to anyone of goodwill as it sounds).
I mean that’s basically how some Romans saw it: sure having “all the plunder of the world coming to one place” makes for pretty building, but if the cupido imperii that results from increasing the pot so much engenders continuous fratricidal wars (and reading between Tacitus’ lines: or the stultifying despotism that seems the only viable alternative), maybe it’s not really worth it.
Oc, one could wonder if the conquered people would have begged to differ. Regardless to what one things about the unintended consequences of victory, most people seem to prefer it to defeat for a reason.
On the problem of becoming a full professor, have you pointed out that with tenure you can use your knowledge of the ancient world, particularly ancient military stuff, to spend decades writing a series of fantasy novels which are enriched and made to feel real through your academic knowledge? If some institution were to invest 20-30 years of tenure they might see you write a series of books that sells a couple hundred million copies, then have you spend another couple decades writing notes for follow-up works that your children could organize and publish?
Why, whoever could you be referring to, sir? Ha!!
I know, M.A.R. Barker was awesome except for the secret life as a Neo-Nazi
This is perhaps tangential. but I think it’s close enough to be considered on topic: what are some good general histories of the Roman Republic (Romulus to Actium)?
I enjoyed Mary Beard’s “SPQR,” although it goes into the imperial period. There’s also The Partial Historians podcast which includes a “from the beginning” history in a more casual style (I listened to some of it and enjoyed it, keep meaning to listen to more and not getting around to it).
Thanks. Happy for other suggestions too.
You can also try Boatwright et al., The Romans. Intended more as a textbook, I think.
Thanks.
If you’re looking for more than general-public pop-history, then many publishers have series of books aimed at undergraduates that specialise a little more, but not to the extent that research material does. Essentially textbooks, but those that assume no more prior-knowledge than this blog typically does. For example, Edinburgh University Press has a three part series on the Roman Republic authored by Bradley, Rosenstein, and Steel respectively. Other publishing houses like Oxford, Routledge, or Blackwell generally have similar collections; though not all cover all topics.
Those are generally a great way to make the step from casual interest to keen amateur. The next step would to read book on a narrower topic that caught your attention written by a collection of authors each submitting different chapter. These often have “Companion” in the book or series title, but can be hard to get into if you’re not already broadly familiar with the context.
I have no problem with textbooks, and ey81 suggested Boatwright, et al. in addition to the ones you mention. I’ll give at least one of them a try.
You could seek out a good modern translation of Livy. You have to keep in mind that Livy wrote history as an excercise in moral instruction, but all the famous stories, Horatio, etc. are found therein. I think of Livy’s histories as akin to what a patriotic miniseries might look like today. I gather much of LIvy’s sourcing was with the private records and tales of various patrician families, who were naturally anxious to magnify exploits of their honored ancestors. Youthful reading of Livy has inspired a lifetime interest in classical history for centuries.
I’d strongly advised into jumping into the sources as a first proper dive into ancient history. We’ve spent literally centuries critically analysing them, comparing them, and seeing what inferences can be safely drawn from them and what cannot. There’s absolutely no need to redo all that work yourself! Critical analysis is hard and requires a firm grounding in all the available evidence to do well; if you try to do it all yourself you’ll make the same mistakes that 18th century scholars did, or even those that are statue pfps are making.
Stand on the shoulders of giants and have a good view, don’t peep about the huge legs of colossi.
*advise against jumping into. Don’t know what I wrote in that first sentence there…
I’ve actually read Livy, though quite a while ago. I was hoping for a history that might add more detail and discuss sections that don’t hold up.
I know peer review is supposed to be double blind but I have figured out who my reviewers were in the past. One objected until I referenced their book in my article. The comment made it very clear it was the author of the book.
In engineering there is now a group of “journals” that really are pay to publish. They will publish almost anything so long as the fee is paid.
“In engineering there is now a group of “journals” that really are pay to publish. They will publish almost anything so long as the fee is paid.”
There will be predatory journals in any field where publish-or-perish is a thing. In some fields you don’t even have to write the article, they will write it for you (i.e. make up the results and fabricate the evidence). You can just use part of your salary to keep extending your list of publications. It may not be a large part of the reproducibility crisis, but it is in there.
“In engineering there is now a group of “journals” that really are pay to publish. They will publish almost anything so long as the fee is paid.”
This is becoming more and more of a problem across the biological sciences, medicine and parts of psychology. There are also “factories” that will churn out all sorts of papers that are just “good” enough to sneak by peer review since most reviewers are not expecting outright fraud but when someone like Elizabeth Bik or Nick Brown start looking at it collapses into dust.
And then there are “researchers” who just commit straight fraud. Here is one such I was looking at today. If you read the PubPeer comments the published paper is quite a piece of work though there are more egregious cases.
An Open Letter to the BMJ Editorial Board
Most of the stories I’ve heard of people identifying referees are pretty much like this one. Now, I haven’t made any kind of study of the matter, just heard a few stories, but still: it does seem like peer review blinding is fairly effective for reviewers, it just doesn’t do much to anonymize citation-begging.
I had the opposite experience when we had a reviewer recommend publication with a review along the lines of “Now I need to go rewrite chapter one of my upcoming introductory textbook”
Afaik those journals exists only bc in some countries they weight publications procedurally (and chose the wrong procedure) when hiring for academia and the most technical roles in public service. Also to stroke some well paid professional’s ego (doctors are the main culprits here).
Goodhart’s Law apart, no academic would take publications in a pay-to-publish journal seriously, and it takes about 5 minutes of googling to find out what are considered reputable publications in any given field
Nietzsche proposed that the decline of the Roman Emmpire was due to the intermarriage of the ruling class with racial inferiors in the form of ancient Germans. (This may not have been his considered opinion, he loved to take jabs at Bismarck’s Germany.)
Well, that has certainly improved my opinion of Nietzsche, not to mention the width of my smile.
Agreed!
Ian, could you point to where Nietzsche makes that proposition?
I too would like to know. I thought he chiefly blamed Christianity.
Yeah, it’s always the ones going on about personal morality and manliness that are the most insecure and cowardly. Also, that book on the peripheries looks really interesting, I love works that bring areas into focus that are mere footnotes at best in the popular conception.
We might note that the argument for Roman greatness being at least partly dependent on their skill at bringing outsiders into the inner circle isn’t a 20th-century idea, or even a 19th-century one. Machiavelli noticed it. (I have sometimes thought of writing a short piece on “How Machiavelli Predicted the Failure of the Third Reich”)
Please do! Given how much some fascists seem to love claiming him, might be fun to use points he made against them.
I did think it odd, back when this blog discussed Roman values in the twitter discourse context, that ‘Virtus’ was ignored by the modern right wing discourse.
It certainly wasn’t ignored by 19th- and 20th century right wing authors (who I understand made up basically the entire field at the time). An unrepentant Nazi author I rather appreciate (if primarily for his brilliant style rather than his questionable substance) complained primarily about the Romans abandoning it in practice, using it on a ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ basis, more or less, but nevertheless acknowledged it as the theoretical ideal the Romans pretended to aspire to while walking all over their neighbours in search of loot (he didn’t like the Romans very much).
It also occurs to me that it takes some effort to be so right wing as to repel the author, considering that he has previously had cautiously positive things to say about Metatron (youtube), who is firmly in the MAGA range, and routinely references Lindybeige, who lest we forget, has a video about how global warming is nonsense (_ZHnjDJpkVc), which I do not believe is a left- or centrist talking point.
I very much enjoy that our gracious host, and usually most commenters, are pedants enough that OGH can just trust his readers to habitually and effortlessly distinguish between the qualities of a single source’s opinions on multiple different topics. It contrasts favorably with the occasional exceptions sticking out like a stray nail, such as footnote 10 in “why RoP feels flat”, where he feels the need to laboriously spell out the conversational norms pedants take for granted, that claims’ truth or falsity is evaluated independently of whether some policies related to them by mere convention of connotation would be good or bad or abominable. Speaking of, Lindybeige has one on this.
Relatedly, you can freely assume that anyone original enough to be worth mentioning or linking in a post will have some opinions scattered all over the usual political spectrum. Seriously, how boring (or at least conformist) would one have to be for all their opinions to match in political valence? I can scarcely imagine this happening by coincidence (the population of bloggers and tubers is not so vastly large for the math to work out), instead I would infer that such a person came about their opinions by picking them based on their political valence; which is hardly conducive to being interesting, or for that matter correct. (Caveat emptor. A pure conformist of this sort may well on average be more correct than the original thinker, but since he comes about received wisdom for reasons other than his own effort, he would certainly not be able to notice if it had flaws, and probably would not be able to present the reasoning behind it clearly, being unused to the activity.)
Conversely, one could also make the argument that, when somebody is wont to take up positions in a specific scientific or science-adjacent discourse that have been entirely disproven by academic research, then that does not reflect well on their ability to evaluate sources or discern the value of academic research in a different field.
Climate Change is, after all, a matter of whether one trusts the academic consensus in a field most of us are not experts in, much like ancient history is.
Oh, I am so glad you liked Rees’ “Far Edges!” I was given a free copy in exchange for a review on Amazon, and loved it! As you say, it introduced some places I had never heard of, and expanded my knowledge of places that I had formerly only known about from other sources (usually from the ‘main players’ such as the Greeks, who had nothing good to say about them). I have a history degree, with a focus on Ancient and Medieval, but am learning that it is quite limited. When I was a callow youth, I completely swallowed the prevailing Eurocentric attitude that civilization was handed down to us from the Greeks and Romans. I’m thoroughly enjoying having that belief shattered over and over again.
I don’t do anything with my history degree; it was my second degree and I pursued it solely for enjoyment. I was terrible at memorizing dates, but I loved stories. Writing papers was, to me, retelling the stories I’d learned, only with footnotes and citations. Nowadays I still love learning, even more now that I don’t have to worry about needing to regurgitate it well enough to get a passing grade. Thank you for your writing. I look forward to getting your updates and especially enjoy your take on Tolkien (you might guess from my email handle that I am a total geek).
Cheers,
Masterful article as always!
I know it’s just a Fireside, but I find these “there were people on Twitter I hate and they sure got dunked on, here’s why they’re bad” stories to be nothing but depressing. I mean… okay.
I’m sorry they’re bad. Hopefully they’re get some joy from history, even if they also say racist stuff on twitter and have bad ideas. May you learn to enjoy history without being jerks to others, my statue Pfps.
> There is an ideological lean in academia and it can produce a kind of ‘chilling effect’ on certain forms of speech but it does not lock out ‘right-coded’ arguments from publication. I say this, of course, as someone whose book project on military materiel in the third and second century – ‘how stuff for fighting made the Romans the best at fighting and winning’ being a generally pretty ‘right-coded’ book topic! – is under contract with a very prestigious publisher!
I have to say, the idea that a book merely being about military equipment is considered ‘right-coded’ left me more concerned about ideology in academia than I was before reading this post.
I would have thought that institutional bias would come in on the level of the politics of the conclusions proposed by someone, not frowning on entire categories of topics.
I believe that right or left coded in this context doesn’t mean “written by and for conservatives to further a political agenda” or vice versa. It means something more like “a topic that, on average, is studied by a community that leans a little one way or another”. Looking at recent submissions to Bryn Mawr classical reviews, we see titles like “Narratives at play in Aeschylus: perspectives on genre and poetics”. It’s not hard to guess the average political leanings of the author, or of the people reading it.
In other words, ideology (or world view point more broadly) unavoidably affects the type of questions that people want to ask, but (hopefully) not the methods they use to answer it, or the conclusions they reach.
Military history in particular has a bit of weird logics going on since part of the “customer base” of military history is well… militaries. I don’t think that dynamic *quite* works the same way in other fields (maybe economic/corporate history?)
I believe the contrary, because economic history is more or less the perfect field for materialism, and thus a soapbox for leftists. If someone believed economic forces drive history, of course they would study economic history, for the same reason why someone who credits great man theory would read biographies.
The military history is, at its best, an applied science which is used to widen the perspectives of the customer organisation using solid historiographical methods. As an example of this approach, I would take up the resesrch done at the Finnish National Defence University, where the research topics are dictated by the needs of the Defence Forces. Without going to particulars, for anyone who knows the field, many of the military questions and development themes that their public research work answers are quite transparent. And you can easily see what kind of mindset you want the military officers who study these topics to obtain.
On the other hand, these topics are somwhat hard to code politically. For example, “Finnish war experience on anti-personnel and anti-tank mining and its subsequent use in 1944-54”, a master’s thesis by Lieutenant Yrttiaho is “right-coded” mainly in the manner that the historiographical approach towards the topic is likely to be based on the tactical and technical utilisation of the mine weapon.
On the other hand, when you actually go and read the study, you’ll note that its major focus is on the organisational process of learning from the experiences of the war and turning them into a training doctrine, which is actually somewhat left-coded, “soft” approach. This shows, in my opinion, that a propery “applied” approach towards military history has such a “blue-and-orange” discourse that you can’t really code it politically any more than you can code an engineering report. (That is: the writer may have political opinions, and the organisation may use the work for politically motivated purpose, but the actual content of the work is unlikely to be affected by these concerns, if it properly serves its purpose.)
The type of academic military history, of the style our host practices, is something quite different, naturally. The lessons you draw from the study of Roman warfare are much more indirect.
In Econ “writing for the regulator” is usually the hallmark of bad-faith attacks, and also pretty dead wrong on the incentives. After all, republicans are going to be in power about half the time, and they’re not going to hire back Liza Khan’s team, that’s for sure.
But democrats have no problem hiring genuine talent from the Hoover Institute. So if one were to just careermax, being to the right of the academic consensus is clearly a strictly dominant strategy.
> “Narratives at play in Aeschylus: perspectives on genre and poetics”. It’s not hard to guess the average political leanings of the author, or of the people reading it.
Is it really that obvious? I mean, from context I assume you read this title as left-wing. But the Left certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on poetry — just ask Cecil Spring Rice, or Toby Keith.
It was more about “genre” than “poetics”, analysing and deconstructing genre is an archetypical post-modern approach, which in turns leans left. If you prefer an even tidier examples then there’s “Age, gender and status in Macedonian society, 550-300 BCE: intersectional approaches to mortuary archaeology”. No bonus point for guessing which side of the political spectrum uses “gender” and “intersectional” more (not counting attacks at those terms). I’ll note that I had to search for a title like that (though it’s still as recent as 2024), rather than stumbling upon it in recent submissions.
The left insists on attributing everything to social and economic forces, which makes everything else right-coded by default. John A. Lynn complains about this in the foreword to his book recommendation in 24 October’s Fireside Friday, that no one actually studies the military anymore because leftists insist that history is the result of social and economic forces, that war is merely the surface manifestation of the same, so anyone studying the military in its own sake must be wrong and a militarist.
https://acoup.blog/2025/10/24/fireside-friday-october-24-2025/
So what does this argument lead you to conclude about our host, or any other military historian?
I’m stating the opinion of a historian who claims that the left makes this argument, and that the argument is wrong. I am not, in fact, making the argument.
I have a question about those Gracchi, because I read with interest the posts here about them and their movement and their advocated reforms — and I’d like to know from the criticisms leveled at them, what was the alternative? Without the Gracchi, what might have happened, and without their legacy, where would Rome have been a century later?
It’s easy to focus on criticism, but consider the alternatives? I am genuinely interested, as an amateur enthusiast for Classical studies.
PS: (Since I can’t see a way to edit my post — Ollie and Percy are still absolutely adorable!
Agreed.
I generally have the impression that you can’t edit comments on WordPress blogs, ever, though I might be wrong on that.
That’s not really a question with an answer. There are a million alternatives to the Gracchi, and we don’t know what might have happened with any of those million alternatives. And it’s largely impossible to tell.
Maybe Tiberius does everything exactly the same but doesn’t try to occupy the Capitoline and things break just barely the other way and he lives. Or maybe Tiberius chokes on a dormouse two days before the election. Then what? Well, there’s no way to tell. What would Tiberius have done if he’d lived? The most you can say with any rigor is “Tiberius said he was going to do X and Y, and I think he would (or wouldn’t) have followed through and tried to do X and Y.” Even that is, of course, quite speculative (our sources don’t really give us unambigious information on Tiberius’s intentions) but at least it’s speculation from facts.
But then when you try to say “and he would have succeeded at X but not at Y,” you’re on very thin ice indeed: you’re speculating on speculation. Going on to say “his failure at Y would have motivated Gaius to attempt Z” is wholly in the realm of fiction: everything we know about Gaius’s political skills, intents, and actions is shaped by ten years of history that, in our counterfactual, never happened. So we can’t even take Gaius’s own words or actions as a reliable guide to counterfactual!Gaius.
Given that the reforms the Gracchis proposed didn’t actually get to the root of the manpower issue (through no fault of their own; no one at the time really had a handle on what was happening or why) I don’t think them failing utterly would have changed much. Perhaps if they hadn’t made such a spectacular break with tradition and mores the foundation of the Republic would have survived another generation, but that wouldn’t have made much difference. Caeser wasn’t the first to overthrow the Senate with military force, he was merely the one who lead it to be swept away into Imperium.
And in particular, more interesting to me than ‘were the Gracchi perfectly selfless moral paragons?’ is ‘for the plebians, was supporting the Gracchi a good political move?’ Effective politics often involves self-interested allies, but only as far as it helps. Obviously, no book can definitely answer that, but in my humble opinion, at least grappling with it, and in general making the plebians more central, would make a better book.
You’re right about whetstones, and there has been some work on them which I have somewhere. They were one of those industries that had complexities that we no longer realise existed.
Here in Devon (UK) they were extracted from the Blackdown Hills (a certain type of stone is needed) and used all over the south. In agriculture scythes had to sharpened very regularly, every half hour or so when harvesting, and the further back we go the softer the metal used, so even more sharpening.
In the building accounts for Exeter Cathedral they employed a person to sharpen the builder’s and carvers tools whose trade name I’ve forgotten, distinct from forgers.
Ouch.
Speaking as someone who’s to some extent an enthusiastic autodidact, but who’s very much not a fascist, that does hurt a bit. But of course your points are generally sound.
However, I still sometimes get the impression that some academics are well too ready to assume as a matter of course that “education” equals “formal education”, and that a person’s level of education can always be reliably measured by looking at their degrees or lack thereof.
I have learned really a lot from the academics of the world, and I appreciate that. But I’ve also come across academics who said or wrote incredibly stupid things.
And it would be easier to wholeheartedly support and defend the humanities without reservations if they wouldn’t be so heavily influenced by things like postmodernism or the various ideas occasionally fashionable in lit crit circles, such as reader reception theory or the death of the author.
Editing nitpick @Bret : You write “academics and other professional historians and classicists”. Are you sure that you didn’t mean to write it the other way around, as something like “professional historians and classicists and other academics”?
Kind of object to your reference to the “Citizenship in a Republic”-speech, though. Yes, it is very praiseworthy when people step into the arena, but the line “It is not the critic who counts” can be easily interpreted as saying that once people have stepped into the arena, they shouldn’t have to listen to critics anymore. Which, I think, is the opposite of the point you are making. In the process of discovering knowledge which you are dedicated to and which you want to support and encourage, critics do very much count.
I’m speaking as someone who has done the full historical education thing (all the way!) but has never had an academic job in history, who is generally ‘leftist’, who is interested in military history, and who has been published but not in peer-reviewed journals or by ‘serious’ publishers (whatever that means!). I’ve also never used Twitter and now certainly never will, unless the world changes.
My experience with autodidacts is that they vary as much as academics, or any other group of people. Yes there is, unfortunately, a certain brand of autodidacts with extreme right-wing views, with a deep sense of grievance that other people are writing history and they aren’t (which leads them to a sense of persecution and that the system or the Establishment is deliberately excluding them, the MAGA-ness of which is obvious), and with a deep commitment to the sanctity of the ‘sources’ (meaning those literary sources that are readily available in translation on the internet). If you spend time on Twitter or in similar sewers then yes, you will encounter many such people (which is one of the reasons I don’t).
There are also autodidacts who do genuinely great research, have a deep knowledge of their chosen period, and who have written things on ancient military topics that are superior to anything anyone in an academic post has ever written. These people are also distinguished from the other sort by their sense of humility and honest acceptance of the limitations of the evidence and their lack either of a personal grievance or a political axe to grind.
Both kinds exist, and many in between too. I think the best way to look at it is to paraphrase Anton Ego; not everyone can become a great historian, but a great historian can come from anywhere.
Thank you for posting that. A bit like a synthesis between Bret’s and my own view.
I think autodidacts often have particular *kinds* of blindspots that are different from academically trained people. (who can still be egregiously wrong, mind) often what is lacking is a general context: There’s a lack of “I know what I know and those guys know what they know and together we know *this* and more importantly, *don’t* know *this*” It often leads to a lot of time reconstructing stuff from first principles and then making the same mistakes as other people have already done.
It
Your comment ends with the word “It”. Were you intending to start a new sentence?
“No, I’m the villain from one of Stephen King’s best known novels, so that’s my signature.”
I object to calling those pfps “autodictacts”. They’re not self-taught, because they haven’t learnt any history: either on their own or from someone else. What they have is an ideology, and a willingness to go fishing for anecdotes that back up their ideology. Trying to understand the past, reconstruct what it was like, or make sense of the tangled mess of historical causation, is of literally no interest to them at all. Notice how they use exactly the same language whether pulling examples out of history or LotR; both are equally real to them.
Because history, to the pfps, is only a source of quotations to abuse in defence of their ideology, they assume that everyone else who is interested in history is doing the same thing, anyone claiming otherwise must be lying. It’s literally unthinkable to them to approach history in any other way. Because academia comes to conclusions different to them, they conclude that it must be because academics have an ideology opposed to them. It’s laughably wrong, but it is internally consistent.
You get the same thing with racists, who assume that everybody else is racist too; either hiding it because of social pressure and/or are racist in the other direction (so to speak). People who have subsumed their identity into an ideology are not only incapable of seeing things through another lens, they are also locked into believing that everyone else is equally blind.
Yes, very good points!
(trying to come up with some way to show my appreciation and approval without coming across as some kind of spammer or bot, despite the fact that I don’t really have anything to add.)
So, while I do not intend to deny your lived experience, I would like to object to the term “coward” here. Rather, they may know full well (at some level) that they will not measure up (yet). So, for example, if I were to take on chess grandmasters in chess, I would undoubtedly lose badly. However, I would do it in relative private, not with an audience (potentially) the size of the internet.
However, in order to hone your skills (at anything), you have to try, fail, and try again. But the right way for a beginning history student to do this is not to get severely thrashed by a pro, in public, and they know this is what is likely to happen if they engage with pros. We do not thrash freshmen history students in front of internet-sized audiences (I hope), and there are good reasons for this.
They suspect (strongly, with some evidence) that the established experts have strong institutional biases to a certain part of the political spectrum, and that the field has severe job market pressures on it that will encourage conformity to those biases by most “experts”. So, it is not unreasonable for them to believe that their arguments are not going to be received well, even in the cases where they are correct, and yet they do not have the depth of knowledge to defend their points even if they were correct (just as a veteran lawyer may best a novice even though the novice defends an innocent client).
Nonetheless, if you are interested in a subject you must engage with it, not just consume passively. You must state opinions. Some of them incorrect, almost certainly, perhaps even most of them. Those errors are likely to be in line with your political beliefs, no matter what those beliefs are, because that is how all humans are. It doesn’t mean that they have no actual interest in the subject.
Therefore, in order to engage with the subject matter that they have an often genuine interest in, they must find another forum. “Stepping into the arena” is not going to end well, because their opponents have decades more experience. It is not unnatural, or I think cowardly, for them to continue the conversation with their peers, because that is the only other alternative available to them.
I’m not sure how one could make an “arena” that is more constructive for an amateur enthusiast (whose financial or other life situation may not allow going to college to study the classics), but surely there is a vast gap between X and “publish in a peer-reviewed journal”. That they do not make the jump, does not make them cowards (necessarily).
But, if you could devise such a halfway house for them to move to, it might be that it could serve your field well? A field with a lot of amateur enthusiasts has at the very least more voices speaking in favor of continuing to study it.
Or, y’know, you could approach the subject you are interested in as a thing you want to learn about, rather than a game to be won. You respond to a criticism of the thing you believe, not by dismissing the expertise of the person who delivered that criticism, but by learning more about the subject to determine whose arguments are flawed.
You’re confusing trying to learn history, with shouting that your opinions about history are correct.
If you are genuinely aware that you are a beginner student lacking deep expertise, then the reasonable thing to do in active learning is to ask question, point out unsatisfactory gaps in others’ reasoning, and seek out clarification on areas that confuse you. You do not need to agree with the academic consensus (that would be a fallacious appeal to authority), but you should take it as the starting point from which you might diverge. Which means learning what the experts think, and why they think it. Radically rejecting other’s reasoned interpretation of evidence, and replacing it with your own guesses is simply not a necessary part of learning. Nobody who’s learning maths needs to take to Twitter and boldly declare that the square root of 2 is a rational number.
But this is categorically not the behaviour we see from far right ideologues who engage with history: they start with a wholesale rejection of the current expert consensus, not because they disagreed with their methodology for analysing evidence and inferring conclusions, but because they dislike those conclusions and assume that it’s entirely down to political bias. This is not coyish hesitation based on knowing one’s own relative ignorance, it’s brash arrogance that a book you once read makes you better informed than the accumulated wisdom of an entire field over centuries. If you’re confident enough to make unwavering bold claims in public, not making those claims in an arena where they will be seriously evaluated is cowardice.
As for places where amateurs can meaningfully discuss history in safety (or at, least, in anonymity) there are internet forums and subreddits for that. The good ones, with active but not heavy-handed moderation, tend to laugh pseudo-history out of the door: whether it’s “aliens did it”, far right nationalism (not just of the USA/European variety, also very prevalent in India and China), post-modern communists, and everything else. You can also seek out and asks the authors of books you’ve read; in my experience if you’re polite and have done your homework (so don’t ask questions that you could google yourself) you’ll generally get a good response. Most people who write books are flattered when someone has read it.
A goodly portion of the R.W. online commenters are in fact paid for their disruptive activities, and are repeating what they have been told to say. Notice how they often seem to pick up the same theme all at once? IDK if the statue guys are among the paid online armies, but it is surely possible.
There are also those of us non specialists for whom reading about history, among other subjects, is something one does for fun, as a hobby.
Speaking of which, it is us amateurs who kick up a fuss when public, if they can still be considered public, libraries do their wholesale discarding of good quality books, including history books. I would also point out that we in the non specialist readership, as distinct from ideologues looking for talking points, don’t pay much attention to academic fads and trends. For example, specialists might think that the works of the American classicist Tenney Frank have been superseded. I frankly don’t care, I find Frank’s works enjoyable to read, not least because he pays attention to details about land use and farming practices. I venture to recommend his article in CAH about South Italy after the 2nd Punic War as a noteworthy entry into what could be called studies of post war effects.
“As for places where amateurs can meaningfully discuss history in safety (or at, least, in anonymity) there are internet forums and subreddits for that” might we have a few recommendations? I don’t know where those are to be found. I would especially be interested in fora in which pieties of left (DIE, intersectionality, etc.) and right are both avoided.
There’s certainly something to be said about reading history for the quality of its writing rather than for the accuracy (or up-to-date-ness) of it’s content. But one should be aware that what you’re getting might be – by modern consensus – wrong. For example, the Marian Reforms have been rejected as being singular reforms rather than very gradual evolution. But you’ll never know that if you only read books published more than 20 years ago. While there are a great deal of fads and short term trends in academia that (as an amateur not looking for a job) you can safely ignore, the long term trends are valuable. Even if more modern works, full of caveats and uncertainties, are less enticing than the grandiose certitude of authors from a century ago. And this is coming from someone who stopped their formal history education at 16!
As for that last question: I can, tentatively, suggest historum as such a place. The core membership (and moderators) are non-ideological, if such a thing is possible, or at least non-partisan. Which maybe just means it overlaps with my own ideology, but I’d say it has the same (lack of) biases as wikipedia. However, a lot of discussions are driven by new members who do have a strong agenda, or downright strange, conspiratorial-adjacent views; these get rapidly and forcibly deconstructed by those who know the subject areas better, but it does get tiresome to read idiocies nonetheless. That, and the repetition of topics like “Who’s the better general X or Y?” is why I progressively stopped going there over the last couple of years. But maybe it has what you’re looking for. I hear some history sub-reddits are also very good, but I don’t know enough to recommend any.
I thank you for the suggestion about historum. I agree about 10 most unappreciated generals kinds of threads, which seem to be a place for folks to show off their erudition.
IDK about ‘grandiose’, but I am finding no lack of certitude in a book I am currently reading, “The Making of the Middle Sea”. For example, the author, Prof. Bloodbank has a fairly (I think) unorthodox view of the Hyksos episode in Egyptian history and is not at all tentative in advancing of his own interpretation. Which interpretation strikes me as yet another example of his Levantophilia.
I do wish to suggest that many of us who read history for enjoyment, as distinct from paid propagandists of any faction, are not necessarily lacking in the faculty of critical intelligence. In fact, for many of us who have to manage risk daily, development of said faculty is has become a necessity for survival.
I’d agree that cowardice isn’t quite the right word. It’s certainly adjacent to right word, but not quite right.
For me it boils down to personal insecurity, and the failure to grapple with that properly and constructively.
It seems to me that for the majority of the ‘wrong’ sort of autodidact (i.e the ones chronically lacking in humility), the aim of the game is not to learn about history so you can know about it. It’s to be viewed by the public as an authority on something. To gain the respect that they desire (as do most people, respect is a nice thing to have).
As people who appear to have constructed a significant proportion of their personal self-worth on their sense of expertise in their chosen area, challenge to that expertise feels like an existential threat. For some, that prompts a period of reflection and refinement of their methods and knowledge. For others, they stall at that first hurdle, balking at the affront to their person. Rather than having the courage to admit their flaws and work on them, they double down on their correctness. It’s a self-preservation mechanism.
This does present as cowardice. But for me cowardice isn’t something innate, it’s something instilled. Instilled by the failure to demonstrate the methods of personal growth to these people. To demonstrate that being ‘outed’ as not being a complete and total expert isn’t an existential threat, but an opportunity for improvement. To demonstrate that that process is more worthy of respect than being an expert itself.
I also note that this isn’t simply an issue with autodidacts. I’m sure people have met their fair share of academics who are so deeply entrenched in their now-overturned ideas that they cannot move past them. But I think the reason it appears more prevalent in autodidacts than academics is that to become an academic you need to have put yourself out there as a non-expert publicly first (i.e. be a student at some point). That would weed out at least some of those for whom the idea of being in a position of no respect (as they would see it) would be intolerable.
> I’d agree that cowardice isn’t quite the right word.
> This does present as cowardice. But for me cowardice isn’t something innate, it’s something instilled.
Sounds to me that you do think it’s cowardice, only that cowardice isn’t an internal morale failure. But, whatever it’s psychological origins, surely cowardice is cowardice.
Speaking of autodidacticism, I would like to ask this expert commentariate, what is your opinion of the book, The Making of the Middle Sea, by the extravagantly named Cyprian Bloodbank (2013, rev. 2024) Thames and Hudson. I understand it received a prestigious prize, is that right?
The tome is large and long, and covers what is known of human settlement in the Mediterranean basin from about 12000BC to “Emergence of the Classical World”. No part of the basin is left out, from Iberia to North African littoral to the more well known settlements in the Levant and Anatolia, and as near as I can tell, all of the famous sites are discussed and placed into what is now believed to be the proper chronological context. I doubt I know enough background to detect bias, if any, but I do notice that Bloodbank is very interested in trade and seems to have a special interest in the Levant.
It grieves me deeply to point out that his actual surname is Broodbank, not Bloodbank. “Cyprian Broodbank” is still pretty extravagant, though.
For further disappointment purposes, he is both the Disney Professor of Archaeology and the Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research – the former has nothing to do with Walt and the latter has nothing to do with hamburgers.
Granted, my mistake about the man’s name. What is your opinion, or what opinions have you heard, about his book? Do you think this book was intended for a public readership, that is, people like me who enjoy learning about history but are not professionals in the field, or for fellow scholars, or both?
Aspects of Middle Sea which I do appreciate are its’ comprehensiveness and the way Broodbank sets the geological context. However, at some points I found myself wondering if the author ought not to have titled his tome something like a study of Mediterranean trade and navigation?
Emphasis on trade as source of wealth and innovation does seem to be something of a fad among the intelligentsia these days. What I think that fad overlooks is the plain fact that someone has to mine, make, or grow and raise the products for trade. For that to happen, you need stable societies.
Then there is his Levantophilia; the prose becomes as purple as the famous dye whenever Levant as Crossroads of Civilization becomes the theme. I suppose we all have our faves. I confess to a not altogether reasonable fascination with the far sailing Phocaeans and their colonies.
The problem with most scholars is that while they produce output of higher quality, when they come out and try to draw conclusions from the history, they are all “left-coded”
To take the Romans and the reasons they succeeded as an example, you’d say “diversity” a lot but “universal draft”, “melting pot” or “no welfare” (we’re talking about the republic) much rarer if at all
Because scholars will say what distinguishes the Roman Republic with competing states. They all had universal draft (or as much as wealth limitations enabled it), and no welfare; so those aren’t worth mentioning. For the same reason that you’d hardly say “grew grain” or “breathed oxygen” as the reasons for its success, even though it would have certainly failed if they had not done so, because everyone else did that too.
Besides, lots of “right-coded” conclusions about the Republic’s success are frequently mentioned: the oligarchic (aka, Senatorial) component in its constitution, the imperialistic use of aggressive military forces abroad, and a strong social value on traditional male virtues.
I haven’t done a frequency analysis on how often those come up compared to diversity, but I doubt it’s particularly one sided. Maybe you just notice the “left-coded” ones more, maybe because they evoke a stronger emotional response in you?
You’re mostly right about welfare – other than Athens with its jury duty pay and the later Roman grain dole I can’t think of large-scale welfare arrangements in the antiquity.
But I disagree about the universal draft. Rome was unique in being able to mobilize a very large proportion of its population and it was also unique in offering a real stake to its subjects and former enemies – at least in Italy.
I haven’t done a frequency analysis either so it’s somewhat vibes-based. I think that diversity and immigration are mostly positive things if handled correctly, so I don’t think that the problem is with my own perception.
Yes, but Imperial Rome was hardly a state that Republican Rome was competing with, was it? Calling jury duty in Athens welfare is also questionable and, anyway, wasn’t being done at a time when Rome and Athens were in competition.
As for mobilising large numbers of men, yes, Rome did do that better than others, and that’s hugely talked about!! Including on this very blog!!! Claiming that it was neglected or not talked about by academia because it’s right-coded is absurd. But my point was that Rome wasn’t unique in the political desire for universal conscription (of those with enough wealth anyway), only in the social institutions that enabled it. The most important of which was the relative ease with which they handed out citizenships compared to other polis.
Probably I didn’t explain myself well.
Look at this tweet that sparked the discussion https://x.com/theo_nash/status/2011979297976668664
Diversity in the Roman state is a complex topic. Rome managed to successfully incorporate and assimilate its Italian neighbours but it had plenty of problems with diversity in the 4-5th centuries CE and it also tried to suppress diversity with varying level of success (Christiasns, then Pagans, the Slavs in the Balkans in the 6-10th centuries).
Theo Nash is of course aware of all that. But still he chose to respond to this specific tweet in this specific way.
@Alex:
Buddy, if you need to jump 500+ years to prove your point, it’s probably time to drop it. No need for you to embarrass yourself further.
And, no, the problems with the Roman state in the late Empire have nothing to do with its diversity. It’s far more to do with the weakness of the central government and the increasing reliance on subs-state power structures (eg, tribes subsumed as foederati that kept their tribal structures; but also very large aristocratic landowners who controlled the lion share of the workforce). That has nothing to do with the diversity of cultures, languages, religions within the ranks of the legions or the wider state.
As for Theo, his reply is perfectly valid criticism considering the original tweet is just so dumb. Yes, people of different cultures / ethnicities often fought each other. But so did people of the same culture and ethnicity! Just look at the Greek polis, or basically any civil war in history.
It really does look like you’re just whining that people are drawing the conclusions you’d like them to about immigration and diversity in antiquity. But guess what? Those people are right, and nobody cares that it hurts your feelings that you can’t rationalise your modern political stance by appeals to history. You are doing exactly what this blog mocks the statue pfps for doing, albeit in a less offensive way.
@holdthebreach,
Yes, people of different cultures / ethnicities often fought each other. But so did people of the same culture and ethnicity! Just look at the Greek polis, or basically any civil war in history.
While this is true, surely the take home message should be that diversity is neither a strength nor a weakness in general, and can be either one depending on the circumstances? It’s perfectly possible to hold both that diversity was a strength for the Romans and a weakness for the Habsburg Empire (and I’ve seen a lot of people who are not particularly sympathetic to nationalism or ethnic identity concede the second claim).
Of course that does get back to my original point that we should probably separate “strength” and “weakness” from normative judgments: I don’t think it’s a *bad* thing that the Habsburg Empire fell apart, quite the contrary. Some of the Roman Helmet guys on the internet do seem to admire them though (probably because of the conservative Catholicism, and because they were a strong and powerful state which project force and inspired fear for hundreds of years), which strengthens my feeling that they haven’t realy thought through the logic of their positions. You can have a great continent-spanning superstate, or you can have a small scale, ethnically homogeneous society with (something like) the modern equivalent of the cohesion of a primitive horticultural tribe, and either one might have its costs and benefits, but you can’t really have both. At least, not without massive bloodshed and permanent repression.
At least, not without massive bloodshed and permanent repression.
Let me correct that to permanent misery. Every society has some level of repression, and people will eventually get used to it, but the thing that would characterize a continental superstate dominated by a single ethnic group (whether it’s America or Austria or Russia or whoever) would be much worse.
This is actually a reply to your “Diversity in the Roman state is a complex topic. Rome managed to successfully incorporate and assimilate its Italian neighbours but it had plenty of problems with diversity in the 4-5th centuries CE and it also tried to suppress diversity with varying level of success” downthread.
The major problem of the western parts of the Roman Empire in the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries CE was civil wars. Count the years between each civil war/rebellion by a rival emperor, from the death of Alexander Severus to the final victory of Constantine I, then again starting at the death of Constantine I until the ascension of Honorius, then again from Honorius’ death until 476. Look at the estimated body counts for the battles at the Frigidus or Mons Veneris. They dwarf any losses to the barbarians in the West, and Roman writers were well aware of this themselves: they lamented that the Roman soldiers who fell in civil war could not combat invaders. The only time Romans lost so badly to Barbarians was maybe at Adrianople, but you will note that the East did not fall victim to the Goths.
The downfall of the Roman republic was civil war, too, not ethnic strife.
This is really funny considering our host has spent several blog posts elaborating how one key factor in the military success of the Roman Republic was its ability to muster a staggering number of well-armed, well-armored soldiers to conquer the Mediterranean with.
“To take the Romans and the reasons they succeeded as an example, you’d say “diversity” a lot but “universal draft”, “melting pot” or “no welfare” (we’re talking about the republic) much rarer if at all”
Because none of those are true about the Roman Republic.
It did not have a universal draft. (There is an entire series on how the Roman Republic raised its legions on this very blog; read it. That is not a description of a universal draft.)
It was not a melting pot – by which I mean that it was not the policy of the Republic to enforce or encourage cultural or linguistic uniformity across the area of its rule. The socii retained their own languages, laws and religions, even their own governments and currencies.
It had welfare – subsidised grain dole, for example (though that’s fairly late on in the republic), land redistribution with grants of tools, public bath-houses and so on.
The problem with most scholars is that while they produce output of higher quality, when they come out and try to draw conclusions from the history, they are all “left-coded”
So, when someone studies history for a long time, full-time, really thinks about it, learns about the period, reads the primary sources, and becomes a respected expert, they tend to reach left-wing conclusions.
You know, there are two possible reasons that could be.
One is that there is some sort of shadowy left-wing conspiracy that subtly warps the brains of anyone who wanders unwarily into their grasp.
The other is that they’re… correct.
You know, like the problem with most scientists is that while they produce output of higher quality, when they come out and try to draw conclusions from the evidence, they are all “atomic-theory-coded.
Let’s not quibble about the terms. No country has a truly universal draft and the Roman Republic mobilised a huge portion of its citizens and subjects.
You’re right that there was no explicit policy to encourage cultural or linguistic uniformity. But there was no policy to encourage or celebrate diversity either and the state was much less intrusive in general. The Roman culture and language were clearly dominant. By the end of the republic, most of other languages in Italy disappeared and were replaced by Latin.
As you acknowledge, the grain dole appeared much late and so it has no bearing on the success of the integration of other peoples by the republican Rome.
As to your last point, it’s certainly possible that somehow all the correct policies are “left-coded” and all “left-coded” are correct. But I doubt it.
“No country has a truly universal draft and the Roman Republic mobilised a huge portion of its citizens and subjects.”
No, it didn’t. Not by modern standards anyway. And I notice that you say “citizens and subjects” not “people” there.
“You’re right that there was no explicit policy to encourage cultural or linguistic uniformity. But there was no policy to encourage or celebrate diversity either”
First, this is shifting the goalposts. And, second… are you sure about that? No examples of Roman officials, for instance, offering sacrifices in the temples of allies?
“As you acknowledge, the grain dole appeared much late and so it has no bearing on the success of the integration of other peoples by the republican Rome.”
No, that is not what I said. It appeared late in the Republic. I never claimed that the grain dole was linked to integration of other peoples into the republic – you are wrong. I also mentioned several other welfare-type policies of the Republic, such as land redistribution, which you have ignored.
“it’s certainly possible that somehow all the correct policies are “left-coded” and all “left-coded” are correct. But I doubt it.”
Ah, the Argument from Personal Incredulity.
If Rome was into linguistic uniformity then it did not do a good job. Gallic was the language of the peasantry in northern Gaul until the 5th century and Brythonic the ordinary language of Britain, the east remained Greek or Aramaic or Egyptian speaking. Punic and Berber were spoken in North Africa. Outside Italy and Spain Latin remained the language of the elites.
Also, my recollection is that grain doles were quite common in larger urban areas in classical times. Rome was exceptional in its scale.
What Rome did do was foster a strong sense of being ‘Roman’, although the content of that varied considerably.
It is a very interesting question if the main language spoken in lowland Britannia in the 5th century was some form of Brythonic or Latin, and I have seen it argued both ways. Since the genetic and archaeological evidence points to <10% Anglo-Saxon immigrants, either way it is hard to explain why the language of lowland Britannia left so few marks on English.
It is also a very interesting question why Latin supplanted Gallic, most Iberian languages and Punic (though not Basque and Berber) right as the curtains were falling on the empire!
“universal draft”
Only among a very select portion of the population. It bears no resemblance to any modern use of the term. To make it comparable to a universal draft in the USA the Roman draft would have to include all slaves, freed people, and citizens making less than a certain (relatively high) amount (let’s be real about draft-dodging among the rich, shall we?). Rome systematically EXCLUDED many of these people from the military in the Republic, as I understand it.
“melting pot”
This idea has been abandoned by the Left in favor of a chunkier soup metaphor. The idea is that individual cultures remain present in enclaves, rather than creating a universal, homogenized culture. Which makes the culture stronger. Societies are not alloys after all; having a group of people who have a weird lifestyle can come in handy when that weird lifestyle becomes useful. Look at the example of Irish police, Chinese laundries, and the like for examples of this in the US culture. Rome was demonstrably similar–see Egypt, Judea, England, etc.
That said, the vast majority of people anywhere would be dirt-poor grain farmers (the metabolics of grain farming demand this), so there will be a broad swath of similarities between cultures that use wheat, barley, oats, and the like as staples. (Rice, maize, and potatoes would be different enough to cause some friction.)
Plus, isn’t the idea of a melting pot a Lefty idea anyway? The folks on the Right I talk to tend towards genetic determinism and the idea that any mixture of cultures is degrading to the culture of the country in question–to the point where people are currently being executed in American streets by a group ostensibly enforcing immigration law (the US immigration law has, as a simple matter of historical fact, always been built on racism, often naked, sometimes veiled, but always there).
“no welfare”
This rather drastically mischaracterizes Roman society. There may not be state-sponsored welfare, but there absolutely was welfare in terms of the rich providing for the poor in ways that absolutely would be called welfare today. The whole patronage system, for example, was a form of welfare–the rich definitely benefited more, but they were expected to provide benefits to their clients as well. There were also less formal forms, such as communities banding together to assist members at various times–the gift economy and other social norms that are largely absent from our culture.
On the whole I would argue that the average Roman citizen received as much, if not more, formal, semi-formal, and informal-but-socially-obligated assistance than the average American.
Overall I would argue that the good author of this blog foregoes these topics because they obfuscate the reality of the ancient world. They would confuse the reader by implying parallels that simply don’t exist–and simplistic understanding of terms that, when applicable at all to the past, are only applicable with careful and studious attention to the necessary changes due to the vastly different societies under discussion.
I don’t think even enclaves are necessary to retain aspects of a cultural identity in synthesis with newly acquired ones. It’s not necessary to have a protected bubble when you can do things like communicate to arrange for selective congregation to share in custom and ritual that is not otherwise a focal point of your life.
It’s like how extended families are still functional even if they don’t all live in the same household.
Agreed. I just don’t have a better word for it.
Basically, the modern thought (as of when I took my cultural studies classes anyway, so likely updated since then) is that instead of a large, homogenous culture, what you generally find is overarching culture with lots of bubbles of coherent sub-cultures within it. Some of those subcultures are due to immigration, some arising from within the main culture itself. The idea of a standard, generalized, homogeneous culture–a melting pot–is pure myth.
I suppose this leads into why the Right has adopted the melting pot analogy. The Right is strongly pushing for enforced cultural uniformity, and by forcing other cultures to “melt” into the main one they can make those other cultures disappear. Since the Right is openly calling for people like me to “disappear” (both due to my scientific studies and my religious views), I object quite strongly to this. It’s unsupportable factually, deeply erroneous morally, and lethal personally.
The only reason anyone outside of historians cares is that people view Rome as a road-map for the USA. They need to make Rome homogenous in order to support their notion that the USA needs to be homogenous to be “great”. If Rome’s diversity was an asset that would require accepting that it just might possibly be one for the USA as well–a notion antithetical to many of the Right-wing (and more than a few of the Left-wing, to be fair) ideologies.
“Societies are not alloys after all; having a group of people who have a weird lifestyle can come in handy when that weird lifestyle becomes useful. Look at the example of Irish police, Chinese laundries, and the like for examples of this in the US culture. ”
A minor point, but I am not sure these are very good examples. There is nothing in particular about Chinese culture that makes you good at running a nineteenth-century laundry. It’s not like Confucius was big into properly starched shirts or something.
The first wave of Chinese immigrants to the US were not laundrymen, they were labourers – famously, on the railways. But they were met with xenophobia, specifically a fear that they would steal jobs that ‘rightfully’ belonged to white men. Starting a laundry had two advantages; first, you didn’t need much in the way of equipment, just a tub, a washboard, and a source of hot water. (You also didn’t need much in the way of specific rare skills.) And second, doing laundry was not a white man’s job. It was women’s work, and so no one really cared if the Chinese did it.
Second, there is nothing in Irish culture (certainly not in the 19th century!) that would make an Irish immigrant to the US think to himself as he stepped off the boat “you know who are just brilliant? Policemen. I’d love to be a policeman. Those lads are fantastic.” You may not be aware that even today the Irish do not like to call their policemen policemen; they are guards, or garda. There are good historical reasons for this.
What you have to remember is that Irish immigrants to the US in the mid 1800 were a) poor, b) not generally literate, c) Catholic – and therefore unpopular, d) an overwhelmingly East Coast urban population and e) entitled to vote in elections. So they couldn’t start their own farms or businesses because of a), and they had difficulty finding private-sector work because of b) and c), but they were a new group of voters whom the party machines desperately wanted to court, and one good way to do that was to offer them jobs in the police forces that were just being founded in the large American cities on the East Coast.
“There is nothing in particular about Chinese culture that makes you good at running a nineteenth-century laundry.”
There actually is. Europeans were averse to working on Sundays, it being a holy day in their religion. Chinese immigrants did not have that cultural prohibition. Because of that they were able to have various shops–laundries, restaurants, and the like–at times when their competition was not able to remain open, to the benefit of everyone (except, maybe, the competition).
To be clear, this concept is not limited to Chinese people; that’s just the most dramatic example. The US merchant marine did something similar. In “Two Years Before the Mast” Dana discusses sailing on a Sunday. Europeans wouldn’t do it, because of religious taboos. Americans were willing to break those taboos in this case, so got a day’s head start on their European competition.
I tried something similar in my own line of work. A client wanted to close a site on Sundays for religious reasons. I pointed out that given my religion Wednesday would be more appropriate. Since we had to have two teams anyway, if we could find a team willing to take a day off in the middle of the week we could keep working 7 days a week and get the job done. In that case, diversity didn’t win the day; the client insisted that Sunday was the Sabbath and I wasn’t allowed to work (which, to be clear, was the client’s right; it’s their site). But it illustrates my main thesis, which is that diversity is strength: a plurality of cultural views allows members of one subculture to jump in when another considers something taboo. It lets us do things better/faster/cheaper.
” Europeans were averse to working on Sundays, it being a holy day in their religion. Chinese immigrants did not have that cultural prohibition. Because of that they were able to have various shops–laundries, restaurants, and the like–at times when their competition was not able to remain open, to the benefit of everyone (except, maybe, the competition).”
That’s plausible, but I’m not sure about it for three reasons.
First, some Europeans are not Christian – Jews take Saturday off, not Sunday, as a holy day. But there weren’t huge numbers of Jewish laundries.
Second, Christians are not supposed to work on the Sabbath – and that includes engaging in commerce as a customer, as well as paid employment.
Third, Sunday closing laws were widely enforced in the US right up to the late 20th century – these would have applied to Chinese laundries as well as their competitors.
All the sources I’ve read do not support the idea that the savvy Chinese were exploiting a market vacancy by opening laundries – rather that they were doing the only work that US society allowed them. But I’m open to being convinced by other sources if you have them.
Meanwhile, what’s your argument that Irish immigrants were unusually culturally suited to policing? Did their traditional dancing styles lead them to develop great strength and endurance in the legs, ideal for walking a beat?
“Jews take Saturday off, not Sunday, as a holy day. But there weren’t huge numbers of Jewish laundries.”
The argument “Europe wasn’t Christian, there were X, but not a lot of X so they don’t matter, but you’re still wrong” is rather….unconvincing. The reality is that Europe was defined by Christianity for a very long time. There were exceptions, of course–any group that large and that diverse will inevitably have exceptions–but those exceptions (Jews, Muslims in Iberia, and a few others) don’t change the fact that when discussing European history we must contend with Christianity.
As for the shipping story, I’ve cited my source, and Dana cites others in his book. There are complexities that I’m not addressing, sure–no man, much less a culture, is fully consistent, and this is a blog post comment section. I’m verbose enough without diving into a full analysis of the Baptist and Bootlegger phenomenon. That Americans prided themselves on a more pragmatic view than their European counterparts is a matter of ample historical record, however; see Franklin’s autobiography, particularly his time in the Army and in particular what he was reprimanded for. See also the history of military medals and awards, objections thereto, as well as things like the origin of the Pledge of Allegiance and much of what passes for performative patriotism in the USA.
As for Jews, you’re making my argument overly-specific. I did not say “Other cultures make good laundries”; I said that diversity allows sub-cultures to cover gaps in other sub-cultures, with Chinese laundries as an example.
Jews are perhaps a better example than the ones I provided. Two, actually. Christian usury laws made banking rather complicated throughout much of the Middle Ages. Jews, however, were a weird heathen group that wasn’t Saved anyway so if they want to damn themselves charging interest they can have at it (I am reporting, mind you, not condoning). So Jewish families became some of the more powerful banking groups. It also saw them violently oppressed at times, which obviously weakened Medieval finances (the history of Medieval banking is worth looking into, it’s a train wreck). A culture that valued, or even merely openly tolerated, Jews would have benefitted from the banking and the benefits which to us are obvious.
(I am fully aware of the role of banking in the history of the Templars, as well as some other players on the scene. Again, this is a blog comment, I do not have space to delve into these issues fully.)
Jewish delis are another area where diversity helped create a stronger culture. I can’t speak to the different Sabbath days contributing, but certainly kosher foods are not a major concern to use Gentiles. That said, the food was good, and what started out as a local butcher shop catering to a minority market soon became a cultural touchstone. You see the same thing in bodegas in Florida–what starts out as something for a local community can become a significant part of the culture.
“All the sources I’ve read do not support the idea that the savvy Chinese were exploiting a market vacancy by opening laundries….”
For the purposes of my arguments the reasons why these people occupied these economic niches are not relevant; their willingness to occupy them, based on not sharing certain cultural beliefs, is the factor in question. The fact is, Chinese people had an advantage in this area, and came to dominate the market–in a way that served to strengthen the culture. As with Jewish banking it would have been better had the culture allowed the Chinese more freedom, but even given a relatively oppressive cultural environment diversity allowed various groups to cover one another’s weak points.
I would be very happy indeed if you could cite a source for either of your two theses!
To remind you, these theses are:
a. “Irish people became overrepresented in US police forces because of aspects of Irish culture – their ‘weird lifestyle’ – that made them unusually well suited to police work, compared to the rest of the US population”
b. “The main reason for the large number of Chinese laundries in the US is that Chinese culture did not block them from working on Sundays, which gave their laundries a commercial advantage”.
If I’ve misrepresented them, my apologies, but I don’t think you have.
I don’t want to hear about US shipping lines, I don’t want to hear about Jewish delicatessens, I don’t want to hear vague references to the untitled autobiography of someone called Franklin or the dubious memoirs of someone called Dana. Just stick to the point. You’re arguing that 19th century Irish immigrants were natural policemen. Why?
Also, it is very odd to decide that “universal draft” is a right-wing policy, in the light of its history. The French Revolutionaries would have been startled to learn that the levee en masse was right-wing.
One thing I’ve noticed in econ is that the left is simply more likely to straight up ignore a discipline or build some epistemic alternative (you can guess my opinion of the results), while the right basically just demands existing fields bend to them.
When the economic consensus is say, against labor market regulations, the left just shrugs, don’t ya know that economists are all neoliberal shills, and goes back to Bodies and Spaces disciplines. When the economic consensus is against the (current incarnation of) the right, then you have swarms of idiots implying that Paul Krugman does not know about infant industries or that David Card (and also every other econometrician except for Borjas) don’t know how to estimate standard errors.
The results is that economists appear to be left-of-center, a pretty laughable notion to a leftist, because all their fights are with the right, because only the right picks fights with them.
I suspect a substantial reason that the people you’re discussing don’t attempt to publish in journals is that they think of what they’re saying as obvious. Publishing in journals is for people who believe themselves to have new insights. These people don’t think they’re having new insights — they likely don’t even think of history as a constantly developing field. They likely think of it more as a static body of knowledge with themselves just stating the obvious.
(On top of that there’s likely some element of not realizing you can publish in journals from outside the academic system, but if they really thought they were having original insights I expect some of them would pass that barrier. Similarly with learning to write in the appropriate style for a journal (idk how hard this is in history; in math I feel like it can be a big step).)
Speaking as someone who has assisted a friend who got successfully published in a peer-reviewed book a couple of years ago (a set of research items on the same theme that could have been in one/several journal(s), but was presented in book form instead)…
There is definitely bias in journal acceptance. However, it is a lot subtler than the left-wing/right-wing political broad-brush thing that a lot of people not in academics think it is. The primary ones I have encountered are bias against anyone not associated with a university (albeit that link can be light – “student in an irrelevant department” status is generally enough to clear that bar) and bias towards whatever opinions the editor of a given journal issue already believes (or at least, does not believe have been disproven yet). Given the number of articles that many journals get these days (many from paper mills or AI-generated, just to increase the hassle for the journal editors!) a paper from someone who has no university link and also carrying a hypothesis the editor believes was disproven in the 1980s won’t be looked at long enough for that editor to find out if that rejection was correct.
If the Statue PFP crowd tried to get a paper published, then it is unlikely any of them could succeed at it, even if the paper itself would have demonstrated their point to someone who read the whole document – because the editor has to use some method of sifting through the large piles of essays, and the likely rubric would prevent the essay from getting the reading.
Obviously, if the standard of argument is fairly reflected by the standard Bret encountered on Twitter, then the editor would be correct in dismissing the essay on its title and authorial connections. However, the Statue PFP brigade would be unlikely to see it that way. This is because of a combination of the reputation of academia within the alt-right community, and also how undergraduates often experience the academic research scene.
The alt-right position I have seen is that truth comes from a limited set of specific sources (they don’t all agree on what those sources are) and that conformance to those sources is necessary for a statement to be true. Those members of the alt-right who go to university see quite clearly in their undergraduate careers that university does not work this way. It may start from a limited set of sources, especially in the early undergraduate days when students are being taught how to do the basics, but a certain divergence is expected. Academic disciplines are instead defined by technique clusters that are used to establish what could be or is likely to be true (not “is true” except in fairly specific circumstances where there’s unlikely to ever be a better theory).
Journals by definition would struggle for novel material if the primary criterion was conformance to a set of pre-determined sources: it has to be possible to interact with those sources in more interesting ways and/or deem other sources more helpful to the question, if that’s where the research leads. This isn’t a very alt-right way of doing things.
For that matter, undergraduate study doesn’t always teach about how to contribute to journals in a clear manner. The way approvals and marking for final-year dissertations works is often mysterious to final-year students, even if they use the rubrics and instructions in the syllabus (not a given if the student thinks the course is too left-wing to use in a non-transactional manner and just wants the piece of paper at the end). The mystery rather hurts the likelihood of people who don’t have to submit things to journals from doing so – especially in an age where there are other places to publicly post writing with a lower bar to entry, that at least some people will regard as being a legitimate source of knowledge.
Man, that explains a hell of a lot of the bonkers criticisms I’ve seen for socialism by the alt-right folks. Usually some variety of ‘Marx didn’t predict X’. As if Marx is the single gospel upon which socialism rests.
I wonder whether that approach stems from Evangelical Christian approaches to canon, or whether people already thinking that way are drawn to Evangelical Christianity after the fact. Potentially both in a sort of feedback loop I suppose.
Just a suggestion; if you have to link to shitter consider using an alternative front-end like Nitter or any of its forks. It’s really just adding a couple characters but it will provide the least traffic data to awful people…
Your comments on self-taught “historians” reminds me of a sedimentology talk I went to a long time ago. It was in reference to the effects of dam removal on down-stream sediment load–sounds boring, but really it’s crucial for a lot of environmental work, given the age and condition of many dams in the US! Anyway, one of the talks was given by a Young Earth Creationist. He’d gotten involved in studying sedimentology in an attempt to prove that the entire geologic column could be explained by Noah’s flood (an absurd premise, to be clear), and while post-dam-removal downstream sediment load was tangential to his main interest, his work was solid enough that he was invited to give a talk at a geologic conference.
I stuck around (I was an obnoxious undergrad at the time) to hear the critique, because sedimentologists in my experience are not the most tolerant of people. But they actually praised his work. In the limited scope of observable sediment migration in the weeks before and after dam removal, this Creationist did work as good as any of the normal geologists.
To give another example from my field of study, I know two senior editors of paleontological journals were not PhDs. One was a police officer and one a fire fighter (both in Italy). They’d just done sufficient work in their spare time to master the subject of decapod paleontology as thoroughly as any of their peers in that field. Academic training (read: post-graduate studies) are a useful shortcut, but NOT necessary for one to be a researcher; consistent, applied zeal is sufficient.
On the flip side, I’ve made a number of Creationists and others angry by examining their arguments point by point. They seem to hold two contradictory beliefs. On the one hand, they believe that their work should be taken as seriously as anyone else’s work in their chosen field of study. On the other hand, when someone treats their work like they would any other publication they become offended, refusing to discuss any factual issues in favor of arguing, essentially, that thorough examination hurts their feelings.
The other issue is people tend to take peer review as a holy symbol, rendering the idea capital-T Truth, and no disagreement is allowed in their mind. Some people cite peer reviewed articles in the same way they cite Biblical verses, as a trump card that ends all discussion on a topic. Never mind the fact that there are publications of equal or greater validity contradicting the arguments they cite, or the fact that the article is 20 years old and new research, feeding new papers, has shown deep flaws in it, or the fact that published research can simply be wrong (humans being fallible)…. And ironically these are often the same people I discussed in my previous paragraph.
All that said–I would be very interested to see your opinions on how the internet changes academic publication. I believe most of us are aware of the issues, including the overwhelming number of papers coming out (largely due to publish-or-perish mentalities) and the costs associated with publishing. And there are real advantages of online publication, such as much faster back-and-forth discussion among knowledgeable people on any given topic. For example, I’ve heard an argument in favor of a wiki-style website where folks who have been vetted can edit articles to reflect the latest understanding of the field in question (Squamate evolution in this particular case, but the concept is potentially more broadly applicable). Where disagreements arise either the chief editors will determine what gets published, or the debate will and researchers would be allowed to draw their own conclusions. Given that the vetting process would be no less rigorous than that of a traditional journal, wouldn’t that be the equivalent of peer review?
I am reminded of the Substacker David Roman who has taken some rather personal shots at you, and he strikes me as someone who is way, way, way too close to his source material, where he seems less interested in actually understanding ancient Greece as a historical pattern than wishing he could live in a fantasy of ancient Greece as it appears to him in the texts.
And speaking of the texts, I get the impression that most of these sorts read 19th or early 20th century translations almost exclusively, or if they read the original languages, read it through 19th/early 20th century pedagogy. There is a real historical place period these people are resonating with in a deep way–but that happens to be England or Germany around the year 1890, the high noon of the European imperial system and Late Romanticism and also a moment where European elites were completely high on their own success and careening towards 40 years of war, mayhem, destruction, and genocide that would unmake their whole civilization. A lot of marble statue Twitter seems to be desperately trying to conjure a fantasy world where the World Wars never happened, never had to happen, and would never happen, and they could live in a gauzy late Victorian world forever with all the nasty bits tucked out of sight like Elves living in Valinor during the Years of the Trees. All the paintings are glossy and academic, all the music sounds like Brahms, and nothing ever happens.
>conjure a fantasy world where the World Wars never happened, never had to happen, and would never happen,
I’m not a marble statue pfp, but I am right wing.
I agree it’s a fantasy, and actually building a world where the influence of the World Wars has been erased from history would require some “Higher Magic”, but the desire to overcome the long shadow of the two World Wars is a pretty understandable and sympathetic desire.
I’d also say that (a particular POV of) the World Wars has definitely been used as a legitimizing myth of modern liberalism to no small degree of distortion and it really does seem to be crumbling now (it was always going to decay when the generation that remembers them firsthand dies and the generation that remembers them secondhand advances in age.)
(Of course, overcoming the French Revolution and the Protestant Reformation is where it’s really at.)
I’d also say that (a particular POV of) the World Wars has definitely been used as a legitimizing myth of modern liberalism to no small degree of distortion and it really does seem to be crumbling now
I think (a particular POV of) the World Wars helped to form legitimizing myths for lots of modern ideologies besides liberalism, too- communism, nationalism, social democracy, decolonization etc.. They represent such a massive societal and moral failure, and such a collapse of the existing pre-1914 order, that they’re very useful raw material for everyone to make ideological use of.
“(Of course, overcoming the French Revolution and the Protestant Reformation is where it’s really at.)”
You see, this is why so few people take you seriously, and why you keep losing.
I don’t really get the reasoning. The “myth” of modern liberalism has resulted in an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity almost everywhere on Earth, whereas the authoritarian and imperialistic regimes of the late 19th/early 20th century have in fact resulted in the most devastating conflicts of human history. What is there to be legitimizing or delegitimizing beyond the actual historical facts? Do you wish authoritarianism and imperialism to come back but without the world war part? Has “true traditionalism” never been tried?
The “myth” of modern liberalism has resulted in an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity almost everywhere on Earth, whereas the authoritarian and imperialistic regimes of the late 19th/early 20th century have in fact resulted in the most devastating conflicts of human history
While I completely disagree with @Hoffnung, I don’t really think you can credit liberalism for the age of peace and prosperity (“modernity” would be a better thing to credit). The big sea change in how often wars are fought, by whom, for what reasons etc., happened in 1945, not in 1990, and between 1945 and 1990 most of the world wasn’t politically or economically “liberal”. The strong cultural and legal norm against wars of aggression (which some people are trying to tear up right now) was built through collaborative efforts involving both the United States and the very much non-liberal Soviet Union, after all.
If you want to include the norm against aggression and conquest as part of the value complex of liberalism, then fine, but it’s surely not a sufficient condition for liberalism, is my point. You can be a thoroughly non-liberal society and not invade or threaten to invade anyone.
“between 1945 and 1990 most of the world wasn’t politically or economically “liberal”.”
Between 1945 and 1990 most of the world was politically and economically liberal, measured by share of world output (and since we’re talking about prosperity, that’s the right measure to use). The liberal powers – US, Germany, Japan, France, the UK, Italy, India and Canada – made up 59.4% of world GDP in 1970, when the USSR was at its height in terms of world GDP share (a mere 12.7%; China was at 2.7%).
@ajay,
That’s right, but even the non-liberal portions of the world were much more peaceful between 1945-1990 than most societies were in the pre-1945 age, so I think any explanation of the decline in warfare over time is going to have to appeal to other explanations beyond, or in addition to, liberalism.
(As Bret himself has done, drawing on Azar Gat and probably other people too).
Also I’m going to strongly disagree that India belongs in the “liberal’ category- while they were politically a liberal democracy (along with restraints on certain forms of political expression- America also had those, as did plenty of other liberal democracies) they certainly weren’t geopolitically aligned with the liberal First World. They were neutral, at times leaning somewhat to the Soviet side of neutral, but still neutral.
There a few things I thought to note in this discussion on ‘liberalism’ and ‘cultural and legal norm against wars of aggression’. I am only replying to Hector because his post was the last I could reply to from this webpage.
1: Whilst it is indeed correct that modern liberalism is opposed to such things as wars of conquest; this was not always the case.
You had plenty of self-described liberals promoting colonialism ‘in order civilise the barbarians’ in the 19th century and even some in the early 20th century. Whilst such attitudes would currently be (near?) universally rejected by liberals it does lead to questions of how innate ‘cultural and legal norm against wars of aggression’ are to liberalism.
(Curiously, I had been told the conservative anti-French Revolution Edmund Burke, by contrast, was an anti-colonialist, at least for his time.)
2: I also had the impression that the post World War II relative lack of wars had, at least for the Soviet Union not much to do with such factors as ‘anti-imperialist ideology’, just look at Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or Afghanistan, but fears of World War Three. The USSR’s leadership had gone through World War Two, which was even worse than the preceding war, and then the amount of nuclear weapons kept on increasing.
For example, Stalin apparently had been planing to invade the ‘heretical’ regime in Yugoslavia; however, he dropped that after witnessing the US intervention in Korea because: If America would commit two divisions at once, and eventually more than a half-dozen, to save South Korea, what might it do to rescue the strategically vital Tito?*
Though, admittedly that also was a factor, if a lesser one, for the USA. For example, without the thread of the PRC intervening like they had done in the Korean War, Washington might have decided to invade North-Vietnam to stop Hanoi from supporting Communist insurgents in South-Vietnam.
* Note, I got that was from ‘Dodging Armageddon: The Third World War That Almost Was, 1950’ an article from the NSA’s internal magazine the Cryptologic Quarterly declassified in 2010, which I only know of because it had been mentioned on a history forum somewhere: https://www.nsa.gov/Helpful-Links/NSA-FOIA/Declassification-Transparency-Initiatives/Internal-Periodicals-Publications/Legacy-Periodicals-Lists/igphoto/2002751616/
“Cowards. I’m saying they’re all cowards. And if they disagree, they are welcome to ‘come at me bro’ in the pages of a peer-reviewed history or classics publication.”
I wish you had a YouTube channel, because I’d love to see this line delivered in a video format. But you forgot “Surely you can be as brave as a hairdresser!”
Majestic onyx boys.
Cute cats!
Thank you for your recent book recommendation “The Far Edges Of The Known World.” I was able to find it through Amazon.
“these fields are passing down key skills – like language skills in dead languages – which only a very small number of people have, that have to be continuously trained and preserved, or we’ll largely lose them (again).”
Do the Sumerologists and Hittitologists really commit to their ancient societies’ values as to refuse to write anything else than legal documents and royal inscriptions ?
And absolutely never a complete grammar book of their studied language, and also a record of what we know about their phonetics and epigraphy (or whatever else we know about them, so that, you know, we keep the knowledge in written form, as books are more or less designed to do) ?
I don’t want to minimize the loss that the disappearing of an academic field could be, but I’m puzzled by your presentation of a knowledge impossible to preserve except in oral form (though it is certainly a very Lovecraftian concept, so if you want to write a novel or short story based on it, I’d certainly like to read it).
There’s a very big difference between self-taught and untaught.
Right.
People called you names on twitter, and now you’re very mad. Which is the goal of twitter.
So instead of namecalling on twitter, they should 1:1 you on final destination, no items, Fox only.
Because… they’re too scared to face honest academic criticism when publishing peer reviewed articles. Which is what they should be doing instead of public engagement, which is a big ol’ hugbox. As evidenced by you doing public engagement. Except on twitter, which you mostly quit due to all the people calling you names.
??