Hey folks, Fireside this week! I’ve been a bit behind because we had some family travel followed by an issue with a water leak in the basement which has pushed me out of my normal home office space (fortunately no books or computers were harmed and we’re working on water damage restoration now). All of which has a nasty habit of throwing off your work schedule. For patrons wondering where the latest research update is – it is in much the same place, ‘coming’ and for much the same reason.
That said, I’ve wanted to do a musing for a few weeks expanding on some of my thoughts on what I am going to call ‘the chuds’1 (often also referred to as the ‘statue pfps’)2 a group of online ancient and medieval history ‘fans’ (mostly, but not exclusively, on Twitter) whose interest in the pre-modern past is anchored in extremely reactionary political ideology (generally some mix of racism, sexism and authoritarianism). I wrote something of an anthropology of this group for The Bulwark a month back, occasioned by bit of culture-war nonsense around the upcoming Odyssey adaptation which spilled over into a discussion of Emily Wilson’s translations of Homer. So I want to muse a bit on the oddity of ‘history fans’ who don’t know any history and why they end up that way.
Now, I should state at the outset that the structure of ‘chud classics’ on Twitter is a radicalization pipeline: the algorithm channels users who like more mild, less openly fascist accounts (and sometimes just straight up non-fascist ones) towards more concentrated more openly fascist accounts. As a result, there are some accounts at the ‘clean’ end of the pipe that are unobjectionable (I’ve never seen anything ‘off’ from @culturaltutor, for instance), but they’re tied together in the eco-system where if you follow one, you get recommended the others and at least some of the accounts in the middle are quite aware of what they’re doing, actively promoting accounts on the ‘sludge end’ of the pipe. This post is largely about accounts, however, on the sludge-end of the pipeline – @romanhelmetguy, @updatingonrome, @latinedisce, @thehellenist and so on. But I want to be clear, I’m not saying, ‘everyone in this pipe is a fascist,’ but I am saying, ‘the water in this pipe flows inexorably towards fascism’ (because the guy who owned Twitter has decided it should) and at the very least the fellows at the ‘clean’ end up the pipe never quite seem to denounce the sludge end.
What I want to return to is the oddity I pointed out in that piece that the chuds are both really attached to classical antiquity and also don’t know very much about it. Because the inciting incident was a debate over translating Homer, that point got expressed mostly in terms of the fact that a lot of the largest chud accounts that purport to explain antiquity to others don’t know Greek (which makes it pretty hard to have a useful opinion on a translation)! But that is hardly to limit of it: right after the Homer debate, one of the larger chuds got into a second argument with some actual classicists, outraged, Outraged! that they consider the stories in the first couple of books of Livy as basically fables, evidently unaware that among the figures who think the first five books of Livy might be unreliable is…Livy himself! He says as much at the beginning of book 6! But of course the fellow had never read beyond the cool legends in the first two books and so had no sense that the character of Livy’s history of Rome changes quite significantly as Livy gets access to better sources.
And I initially found that lack of knowledge actually kind of puzzling, because the chuds don’t have deep knowledge about any part of ancient or medieval history. That was initially surprising. Working on pre-gunpowder arms and armor, I am used to history enthusiast spaces (like HEMA or historical dress YouTube and such), where you have a lot of passionate, often self-taught folks who are interested in history. And the thing is, there’s a pattern for those folks, which is that they tend to have odd gaps and assumptions in their knowledge, but they also tend to be a mile deep in the details of the specific things that interest them. It’s the classic, ‘guy who has at best a fuzzy sense of what Reconstruction was but can tell you the exact position of every Maine regiment at the Battle of Gettysburg, hour by hour’ sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong – that can have its own problems (especially for the American Civil War) – but there’s deep knowledge about something there.
To put it in a metaphor, when it comes to a topic, a trained professional historian’s knowledge is often like a swimming pool that smoothly slopes from the shallow end to the deep end, while the autodidact enthusiast is sometimes more like a shallow puddle with really deep potholes. As a history educator, engaging with that autodidact enthusiast can be really rewarding, because they are often really excited to let you basically ‘widen’ their potholes, to overstretch the metaphor.
But the chuds…it’s just a puddle. Not especially wide or deep.
This really started striking me when I got a bunch of them mad about ‘Great Man’ history (a topic we need to address at some length at some point), because they all had the same very short list of available ‘great men.’ For antiquity, it was Julius Caesar and Alexander III over and over again.
Put aside the problems with pure, uncut ‘Great Man’ history. Never Demosthenes or Iphikrates or Seleucus I Nicator. Or on the Roman side, always Julius Caesar, never Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (or Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus), Titus Quinctius Flamininus, or Lucius Aemilius Paullus, much less Appius Claudius Caecus or Marcus Tullius Cicero. Or, of course, our boy, the man, the legend, Publius Ventidius Bassus ::airhorn sounds::. Of for the guys who are really into the crusades (for really unfortunate reasons), it’s all vague AI images of ‘crusaders’ (invariably Templars), rather than anyone, like, pouring over the details of the Siege of Acre (1189-1191) during the Third Crusade. The pool of their knowledge is all puddle, no potholes – there’s no depth anywhere.3
Which is so strange if you approach the ‘chud community’ as a group of misguided ‘history buffs,’ but suddenly makes sense if you understand them effectively working backwards to their fascination with antiquity.
They mostly begin with the modern ideology, which as I document in The Bulwark piece, is generally a mix of authoritarian-inflected bigotry, with the core beliefs being a mix of white supremacist (often expressed as a hatred of non-white immigrants) and homophobia, often with a decent amount of misogyny and antisemitism thrown in. The precise elements are generally negotiable because the commitment is emotional and irrational, because – as Umberto Eco famously noted – that is the nature of fascism as an ideology: it is an emotional rejection of the universalizing principles of the Enlightenment and liberalism first which searches for rationalizations second.
I actually wrote this all last Monday and then, after I had written it all, Vice President Vance, of all people, provided a nearly perfect perfect example of this process of working backwards from ideology to the past. In a passage in his book (which I encountered via a New York Times article) about one of his favorite prayers, he declares the prayer “feels medieval” but was in fact written in the 19th century (in the rather specific context of the threat to the Pope’s temporal authority – that is, his power as an earthly, secular prince – against the newly created Kingdom of Italy) – and it feels medieval and mystical to him specifically because “you could almost see the angels and demons doing battle” fitting an ideological need for confrontation and heroism even though its origins are not medieval or mystical at all, but quite modern and also rather earthly. Vance acknowledges the actual date of the prayer (though not its political context), but it doesn’t bother him: what matters is that the prayer can be mobilized to fit his ideological needs, not that it actually fits any particular historical context.
So the emotion – the feeling of alienation and disgust from living in a liberal, multiethnic society – come first and the rationalization and search for a new anchors for identity come second. And if all you know about antiquity is what one might learn in an undergraduate course or in high school, it seems initially like a useful ‘anchor’ for that emotion. What they ‘know,’ after all, is that Greece and Rome are the origin point of something called ‘western civilization’ which is either the reason for or a demonstration of the essential ‘special-ness’ of white people (and thus makes them special boys, a necessary salve for their wounded egos) and that those ancient societies had ‘heroic’ leaders who serve to satisfy both the fascist quest for the cult of heroism but also provide archetypal ‘manly men’ who can serve as an anchor for their wounded masculinity because (as Eco notes!) masculinity-anxiety is at the heart of the emotional brew of fascism.
Of course almost all of that is sublimated. What is visible is that their interest in antiquity is focused on on using it as a ‘proof’ for their ideology, rather than for the sake of interest or curiosity. So they seize on individual elements that seem ‘manly’ or ‘heroic’ or which reinforce a white supremacist or male-dominant ideology because the purpose isn’t to understand the Romans but to provide a comforting salve to their wounded feelings.
Which also explains why they don’t ever go deep, develop those ‘potholes’ of knowledge: because while classical antiquity might look at a great distance like a comforting resting place for their ideology, up close it doesn’t fit at all. Instead, it offers quite a lot of challenges. Ancient stereotypes and bigotries do not map cleanly on to modern racism and in any event the clear tendency from classical antiquity is that diversity was a winning strategy – societies that more successfully and more fully incorporated culturally and ethnically different groups won. Societies that stayed small and homogeneous lost. And quite a few ancient writers – Livy, Polybius, even Philip V of Macedon, of all people – recognized this at the time!
Greek and Roman values map very poorly onto the strength-first ‘John Wayne’ style masculinism (‘strength’ or do-what-it-takes ruthlessness are both well down the list of core masculine virtues for either the Greeks or the Romans, but central for this strain of quite badly impoverished modern masculinity) these fellows generally favor and ancient authors, as I note in The Bulwark piece, regularly caveat and question even the value of a ‘heroic life’ of that sort. Instead, the ideal Roman leader is presented as a sober, prudent sort of fellow, with an inherent courage and drive (that’s virtus), but restrained by educated virtues (often captured in the word humanitas) which included clemency and mercy (clementia, mansuetudo).
And of course I imagine we all have no problem grasping the inherent risibility of these guys, nearly all of whom are quite open and aggressively homophobic, being very fond of ancient Greece.
Which in turn serves to explain why – whereas most enthusiast communities quite like it when academic experts engage with them – these fellows hate academic classicists. Because we insist on showing up with the more complex, more grounded, more accurate version of antiquity which does not fit their ideology and so does not comfort their wounded egos and fragile feelings. What they want is simply a recitation of the simplified high school level antiquity, blurred over enough to fit that ideology. Or as one of them put it, the problem with Classics is that, “Classicists chose to privilege the scientific study of the text…deliberately abandoned the prior noble emphasis of what the texts might be said to teach: Greatness!.”
(It is worth noting that while quite a few ancient authors describe the purpose of their writing as providing a knowledge of human affairs and human nature (Thucydides) or a corrective to conduct (Polybius, Plutarch), the idea that they were writing instruction manuals for achieving greatness (magnitudo, ‘greatness’ is not a core Roman value) is largely absent. Instead, the idea that the purpose of studying history is to emulate the habits of great men in order to achieve heroic greatness is a modern one, advanced by Thomas Carlyle, the original “Great Man Theory” historian, although it has precursors in the medieval and early modern genre of “mirrors for princes” (although these generally present themselves as training virtue rather than “greatness,” often focusing more – as Roman and Greek writing did – on restraint in rule than on the achievement of “greatness.” Again, real history is more complex and interesting than the chud’s ‘Boy’s history’ version of the past, to their considerable annoyance.)
Now I want to say two more things before we move on. First, I don’t want this analysis to be taken to mean I think it is impossible to do good, rigorous history from what we might understand as ‘conservative’ principles. Indeed, I think it quite clearly is – a scholar trying to understand why the Romans are so successful at obtaining and then maintaining an empire, for instance, might be seen as embarking upon a conservative project. Likewise, there’s an obvious “Burkean” conservative angle to the study of the collapse of the functioning norms of the Roman Republic. On the flipside, there are ideologies – generally extremist ideologies, like fascism – which simply cannot survive sustained contact with the historical evidence and it is thus not surprising that fascists thus reject the historical evidence even as they engaging in a ‘cult of traditionalism.’ They cannot let the real past get in the way of their imagined past, after all.
Secondly, I want to be clear as to what my project is when it comes to engaging in spaces that have ‘chud classicists’ in them. I am not trying to convince the chuds. Someone cannot be reasoned out of a position they did not reason themselves into and as I hope I’ve demonstrated the chuds do not believe what they do because of careful reason and study: they believe it because it coddles their wounded egos and fragile injured feelings. No amount of careful study will change the fact that these fellows have the emotional maturity of spoiled children.
However, what I do not want is for other folks coming into these spaces to assume that ‘chud history’ is the only kind, much less that the past corresponds to it. My goal in engaging, to the degree I do, is thus to make clear that a better, more rigorous, more sophisticated, more complex vision of the past exists, to put up a flare to signal, “if you want knowledge, facts and understanding, rather than coddled feelings, seek them in these other places.” It is then up to those folks to decide which they prefer: the comforting lie or the discomforting truth.
On to Recommendations:
First a few of my own things! As noted above, this week’s fireside topic was occasioned by a piece I wrote for The Bulwark, “Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong” about a month ago. I then also had a chance to stream a live conversation on the topic with archaeology Flint Dibble; you can watch the recording of the conversation, “The Rise of Chud Classics” on Youtube.
I’ve also had a number of unrelated podcast appearances; I can’t remember which recent ones I have linked here, so I’ll just roundup the bunch. I sat down with Ancient History 101 to talk about the First Punic War, with Frames of Space to talk about insurgencies, protest movements and pushing back against the state, and with The Prancing Pony Podcast to talk about some of the military aspects of Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales (for two hours because I had a lot to say).
On for things that are not me. First, I want to note again Ancient History 101, Alexandra Sills’ new ancient history podcast, which is steadily building up a really impressive back-catalog of episodes with experts on exciting topics. The episodes range from topic themed episodes (“Slavery in Roman Society” or “What is the Spartan Mirage”) to more historical-events coverage or biographical (like episodes on Domitian, Themistocles and Fulvia) and even some ‘inside baseball’ on Classics (“How Do Museums Work?” “What is ‘Classics’ Anyway?”). Absolutely something to throw into your podcast rotation if you are even a little interested in antiquity.
In modern military theory reading, the mononymous James had a good short essay on where drones fit into modern warfare, making the argument – which I think is correct – that right now drones are working as just another kind of fires, filling capabilities that other weapon-systems could already do, only more cheaply. That’s not nothing, mind you: providing a capability in greater quantity or at lower cost can have a huge effect, but I think it calibrates expectations more accurately to the kind of changes we should expect to see in war as a result of drones: a change, to be sure, but perhaps not (yet) a revolution.
For this week’s book recommendation, I am going to recommend a very new book, J. Parshall, 1942: Crux of War (2026). Longtime readers will doubtless recognize Parshall as half of the author team behind the fantastic Shattered Sword (2005), the very second book recommended on this blog back in 2020.
The topic of 1942 is right there in the title: the book is a history of the Second World War in 1942, taking that year – which it argues was the crucial year – month by month. This is a great case of a situation where the book’s argument is tightly intertwined with its structure. Parshall argues that no individual battle in 1942 was decisive but that the year, taken in its totality across all theaters, was decisive, so his month-by-month structure serves to let the reader take in all of the theaters together (as someone would have done at the time!), rather than having them split up (as is more normal). Parshall also does a great job here of keeping a truly global perspective, refusing to leave out fighting in China, on the Eastern Front, in the Atlantic and so on, which sometimes get left out of other accounts. That requires, of course, a lot of very good writing to keep a reader anchored in what is going on as they shift theaters, but fortunately, Parshall is a very good writer and makes heavy use of maps and diagrams that accomplish the task.
Equally valuable, Parshall keeps an eye on the overall strategic situation throughout. The book opens with a summary of all of the major powers’ situations at the war’s start and poses to each a few strategic questions – the things they must do or avoid in order to be victorious. That creates a sort of benchmark against which the monthly progress can be tracked and helps the reader follow the significance of what is happening. Combined with the occasional ‘thematic’ sections within a given month, tracking one aspect of the war over a longer time frame, the book does a remarkable job keeping the reader connected both to the events of the moment and also the broader picture.
This book honestly is a masterpiece, a remarkable achievement. It’s also a lot of book, in the best possible way. The book itself runs some 1200 pages; it has the months marked on the side of the page for easy navigation. It has dozens and dozens of maps, images and diagrams. It is exhaustively well-cited. And it is really effectively and clearly written. Absolutely give it a look.
- A term they sometimes use of themselves
- PFP for “ProFile Picture”
- That’s not quite complete: there are a few chud accounts (though they are not anywhere near the biggest) that do run deep, but with very strange interpretations of ancient political philosophy, which will make sense in a moment as to why that is the thing – not ancient political history – where they sometimes run deep.
With respect Brett, Emily Wilson herself has stated her political motivations behind the choices she made in her translation. And very confusing they are given that the Odyssey has been famous for millennia for it’s prominent and well rounded female characters.
In my readings – and I’ve read a lot of what she has written, so I am open to being surprised but I still feel confident in the context – I would say that what I see is her being very open about her translation choices and why and then willing to reflect on what the political valence of her choices or other choices might be.
I’ve not seen her say she made a translation choice solely because it fit her politics. It certainly might have happened but it would be a mischaracterization to say this is her method.
And, certainly, within that I have not been confused about any conflict between her choices and the female characters within the Odyssey.
And whatever interpretive decisions Wilson may make or what objections one might raise to those decisions, she is deeply knowledgeable about the material. Our host explicitly says he is not objecting to political readings of the ancient Mediterranean world, but to the kind of people who never engage deeply with that world and instead use Greece and Rome as mere totems of modern political identity.
One of her criticism of the Odyssey is the hero’s conflict with ‘witchy women’ an offensively minimalizing description of Circe and Calypso, and even worse calls Penelope a ‘trophy’ wife.
Have you read the rest of what she’s written on those characters?
She spends a lot of prose on Penelope and how to read her and explicitly (and critics agree she did this) keeps her an ambiguous character compared to a lot of critical and revisionist readings that make her either more villainous or heroic. Both in her writing explicitly bound up in the translation (the forward and her relevant translator blogs) and in other contexts (articles where she is asked to comment on the translator or mythical traditions themselves) she’s been really clear that it’s very easy to cast Penelope as one thing or another in ways that aren’t true to the text and that can limit the reception tradition unnecessarily.
She wrote an article for the New Yorker describing Circe and Calypso as ‘divine passionate models of female power.’ She’s done numerous events with Madeline Miller – who is certainly not going to tolerate pressing with someone who puts Circe in a box.
When you pull out ‘trophy wife’ and ‘witchy women’ you might be missing how Wilson is using that language to critique those readings (either within the text or from other translators and critics).
So the words mean something else when she uses them?
Words have context, so, yeah, if I use the phrase ‘that witchy woman’ in a farewell to a friend and follow it with ‘who stole my heart’ that means something different than if I am summing up an accusation for occult based theft from the university anatomy lab.
I’m not granting Wilson special privileges – and I can certainly get into the way English translations of Homer are received and critiqued more than I do here – just pointing out that the corpus of her discussion points in a very different direction.
> So the words mean something else when she uses them?
This is an extremely unjust and unkind response to what they said to you. It has little relation to their actual comment, and I think you really do understand that.
Rather than just alluding to some statement and hinting at the argument that you would make using it, it would be better to actually link or reference it so you can actually make that argument!
Agreed. I have no way of telling how selectively anyone is quoting who.
I’ve tried. So far Google has failed me.
As I recall, I heard a clip, she said the white male hero is victorious over indigenous people, monsters and witchy women before returning to his trophy wife.
So if google has failed you, do you think perhaps you are not remembering correctly?
I have an excellent verbal memory. I may get a word or so wrong but not the tone.
Generally speaking, this is an easy tell for when a person has been told how to feel about someone’s work, but hasn’t actually engaged with it.
In this case, confirmed by another comment where they claim to have excellent verbal memory after being unable to find anything on Google to support their characterization of Wilson. If both things are true, that can only mean they’re presenting a second-hand opinion.
Admiiedly.
All translations (and writing in general) is political. Some are simply explicitly so.
She has also done public readings, including the Odyssey-A-Day project, in which she exaggerates the characters as she sees them. These readings only reinforced my doubts that in her interpretation she is not trying to convey the author’s intentions.
I’m sympathetic to your argument that Wilson has some specific ideas she wants to get out of “The Odyssey” but come on, did you just seriously use the phrase “the author’s intentions”?
Which author would that be, exactly? It’s like chiding someone for not respecting the intentions of the “author” of story written in a reddit thread by a 100 rando contributors, then cleaned by and posted by Anon.
Also, the Odyssey is entirely about ambiguous characters. Odysseus lies, sweet talks and deceive people, Penelope is ambivalent about her husband returning, whole parts of the narration are straight up unreliable. The book’s whole deal is about the moral ambiguity and unreliability of the protagonists. That’s what makes it so interesting.
I’m starting to suspect that the people charging Wilson’s translation for being too ‘political’ did not actually read it, nor did they read the book in any translation whatsoever. I refuse to believe people would actually go through the effort and comically miss the themes of the book
Btw, the ‘suitors’ situation could be a veiled criticism of common greek inheritance law at the time where women could not most often not actually inherit property and have to find a valid male heir, or at the very least an exploration of the tensions underlying such customs. The book had political overtones that were recognized as such by its comtemporaries.
What? The Odyssey is a study of sacred hospitality and it’s abuse. When is Penelope ambivalent about Odysseus’ return? When she hesitates to accept him as her returned husband without proof?
I’ve always found midly intriguing that whenever Telemachus meets someone else, they always greet him saying “If you’re really Odysseus’ son”: Athena does it twice (I.207, II.274-5), Nestor does it (III.121-3), Odysseus himself does it (XVI.300), and Telemachus is uncertain on his own paternity (I.215-6). Somehow, the only one who declares her certainty as soon as she sees him is Helen.
I wonder if that’s what I heard?
That’s exactly the problem. Yes, by modern standards Odysseus does Bad Things. But he wasn’t a modern man, he was an Bronze Age Hero who lived by entirely different rules. Sacking cities was admirable, women were prizes of war, slavery was ordinary and accepted. ‘The past is another country’.
I thought the traditional complaints about Odysseus were about treachery, dishonesty and so on?
There are about three centuries between Homer and Sophocles: Sophocles’ negative view of Odysseus from within the polis of Athens as a treacherous backstabber is not necessarily the view implied by Homer’s text.
He does those things too. Usually when trying to escape from enemies
I think it is important to recognise that Odysseia is a sequel to much older Iliad. The character of Odysseus is established already when the Odysseia begins. He is a scheming, but well-spoken man: both reasonable and cunning. He is part of the Achean embassy to Troy and tries, almost with success, to get a peaceful solution. He is cunning as hell, but not actually treacherous; he remains true to Agamemnon throughout Iliad and never loses faith in the ultimate victory. (And of course, he is courageous in many fights, but just on the “normal” level expected of kings and heroes.)
Later stories give Odysseus Penelope as a reward for similar reasonable behaviour: he gives up Helena and helps Menelaos to get her, and in return, he gets to marry Menelaos’s niece, Penelope.
So, I wouldn’t say that Odysseus of Odysseia does actually anything that would be against this characterisation given in Iliad. He is a not an antithesis to heroism, but an antithesis to the style of heroism that Achilleus represents. Achilleus would not stab a sleeping cyclops in the eye, but would encounter him in a fair fight. Achilleus would not return home in beggar’s guise, and prepare for slaughter of suitors. He would come in openly. And most likely, Achilles would get killed. And considering that Athena, the goddess of sensibly waged war, is his patron, this is all good and well.
Of course, Romans, especially Virgilius, thought otherwise.
> I think it is important to recognise that Odysseia is a sequel to much older Iliad.
This is not exactly a universally accepted position in the scholarship, to put it mildly.
At the same time, our own present reveals that even within our own civilization there are wide moral gulfs of disagreement over what one might imagine to be fairly basic questions. When is it acceptable for a leader, or his spokesmen, to lie to that leader’s own subjects? When is it justified to initiate a war against a foreign nation, and on what grounds? How ought the soldiers fighting a war to comport themselves, and is it laudable or enervating if they take care to avoid harm to civilians in the zone of combat? What are our obligations to people we do not know and are different from ourselves?
All of these questions have considerable relevance in the Year of our Lord 2026, here in the country in which I write. And all of these questions are, in some way, touched upon in the story of the Trojan War. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that all these questions can arise organically from discussion the actions of the characters in that story, when the story is used as a tool for reflection on the good, and not just as idle entertainment.
So there is a very real and valid place for us to discuss “were these actions good or bad” separately from “would a Bronze Age king of Ithaca or Homer’s Iron Age audience have considered these actions good or bad?” Talking about philosophy and what our values are is a thing that has its place here. Literature that endures the generations is usually literature that inspires that sort of thought and conversation.
Speaking of Chud history…
Since you mentioned the AI slop/Crusader imagery, I think it may be underrated how much of the puddle-level enthusiasm for ancient and medieval history from this cohort was formed by video games. Not in a moral panic kind of way, but in the sense that these people never really grew beyond their initial interest and still think of the video game version of history as the real thing. Ettingermentum had a very good essay about this last year, specifically related to Paradox Games, if you’re interested: https://open.substack.com/pub/ettingermentum/p/how-a-swedish-video-game-company
Another, “I hate these guys so much,” post.
I think maybe the oddest thing is, if you want to promote an ideology that it’s actually great fun to mistreat, abuse, and murder anyone to your own benefit, history provides a lot of support! There’s loads of cheaters, liars, murderers, and rapists who have prospered and prospered greatly. Truthfully, I often feel real history just ends up eroding my morality.
Sure the Spartan policy of brutally enslaving their neighbors and sharply restricting membership in their citizen class got them “in the end”, but then what polity doesn’t fall apart “in the end”? Knowing true facts about history tells you there’s no virtue in virtue. Most of the worst villains receive no comeuppance.
Or am I just depressed, cynical, and on my first beer of the evening?
There are polities that haven’t yet fallen apart, despite not being anywhere near recent in origin. For an extremely well known example: do you want to date England from the Norman conquest, or from some later event (e.g. the Glorious Revolution)?
More importantly, since the late 19th century, we live in a strange era where — unlike all times before — conquest is no longer profitable. A band of hunter-gatherers can profitably turf out their neighbors from their hunting grounds. An agricultural society even has the option to subjugate their neighbors, force them to work, and tax them. The single most valuable thing — the fertility of the land — is undiminished by battles fought using spears or musketry. However, since the Industrial Revolution, most of the economy has come to consist of industry and services, with every individual element depending on not just its local conditions (such as rainfall, in an isolated village) but on transportation and telecommunication networks connecting it to the rest of the world. Thus not only does a modern, industrial war, fought with copious quantities of explosives, by itself demolish the physical equipment that generates wealth, even a coup-like lightning conquest would sever the necessary commercial links (and cause a sudden emigration of the experienced and already-organized people required to operate it — “human capital” and “social/organizational capital” are real phenomena).
Do you want an experiment with a control group? One has been running for 70+ years, in the form of the two Koreas.
Do you want an even more exaggerated case? Had the Cold War gone hot, its winner …the elegant answer is “would have been those states that stayed out of it”. The narrow answer is that as much as there would have been a winner at all, they would have won an ash-heap for their troubles.
Does this count as both an optimistic view, and as cynical?
“do you want to date England from the Norman conquest”
I don’t want to date England, we divorced 250 years ago.
🤣🤣🤣
One day I will encounter an American who knows the basic facts about his country’s revolution/war of independence, including “who was it against”. Today is not that day.
Oh no. Someone made a joke about a historical event that wasn’t up to academic standards of accuracy. This must mean that they are a dunderhead.
I know it was technically against Great Britain, but I used England for the sake of the joke.
“Someone made a joke about a historical event that wasn’t up to academic standards of accuracy. This must mean that they are a dunderhead.”
I already said they were an American. But thanks for making that explicit.
So, what’s it like to have your sense of humor removed?
I disagree. Most empires are killed by their vices; specifically their elitism weakens social cohesion by creating social divisions that cripple the host. Then a new group with a more rational or egalitarian social order moves in. Repeat.
The repeat is depressing, not the lack of consequences. Virtue is virtuous in effect, it grants power through its ability to inspire others, but power is the root of vice. No society escapes this. Even today elitism acts the same as always, it’s just that capital is international in nature so there’s not one host nation that the elitism poisons and kills, it’s the entire world, all at once.
“The repeat is depressing, not the lack of consequences.”
The depressing is that the consequences not always came immediately and more often a lot of innocent people had to suffer the consequences of a few elites’ actions. And many times those actions actually bring benefits to those elites. Who care power is the root of vice if you can enjoy the power right away?
Like, Mao died peacefully at the height of his power, and leaving the task of cleaning up his mess to others, while thousands of people suffered because of his actions. For him, he was actually successful at keeping his power.
I admit I don’t feel the same emotion there. Yes, bad people got away with things for their lifetimes, but they’re dead either way, it doesn’t affect me that there was an injustice in the past.
What does is what it suggests about injustices today, but I’m not depressed over that, I’m enraged. I am depressed by the feeling that we’ll never find a solution to this, but the injustice just motivates me to a state of righteous hatred.
It’s not just injustice exists, but the fact that people often choose short-term benefits over long-term consequences, particularly when they don’t live long enough to experience those consequences.
For example, nations would rather have more nukes in the world than they have less nukes than their enemies.
The fact remains that power is too an important thing for people to not pursue it. Because if they don’t, someone else will.
The key question here is not whether Sparta worked as a society. The correct question was made by Bertrand Russell: to what end? Sparta was a militaristic society that subordinated even its leading citizens under military discipline and treated its helots horribly. What did it get out of the deal? Essentially normal military performance, lots of corruption and no arts or literature to speak of. The tradeoff was quite bad. Giving up your personal freedom and focussing your political life on prevention of a slave uprising didn’t net anything remarkable. Most Greek peer states got a very similar level of military performance with much smaller sacrifice.
Sparta makes sense only if you think that the Spartan model of life is praiseworthy in itself.
Though it did get them a legacy. After all, that’s all the arts and literature of the rival Athenians is, them both being just as dead. Both lived a long time ago, both are dead, and both are remembered for their respective cultures, even if their cultures are wildly contrasting. A legacy is actually something most people want to have, after all – human desires aren’t entirely summed up in fleeting pleasures, and i imagine athenian art and literature would be very different if none of them had been concerned with making a lasting impact.
“the comforting lie or the discomforting truth”
There is absolutely a Matrix pill joke in there, but the opposite way round to how it’s usually used on twitter.
I lament that us(*) Chuds are now in the same category as Vandals, having their name repurposed as a pejorative.
*) technically “us”
Don’t forget the Thugs and the Assassins.
… okay, maybe not the most innocent of victims.
@Alien@System,
At least for the Thugs, the pejorative came first (it came from a word for “conceal” or “deceive” i think).
are you writing on behalf of a tribe of irradiated subterranean cannibals? as I’m pretty sure the name ‘cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers’ was always atleast somewhat pejoritive when not actually refering to tribes of cave dwelling long-pork connoisseurs.
They likely write on behalf of the Chud(e) people (i.e. pre-Christian Baltic and Finnish people)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chud
Do you belong to one of those early Medieval Baltic and Finno-Ugric peoples that lived in close proximity to East Slavs?
I am a Finno-Ugric living in close proximity of East Slavs, just a millenium later. Hence “technically”.
Ha, so I wasn’t just being a smart-ass for its own sake! xD
Funnily, the Italians (well, to be precise the Medici-paid people that created the idea of “Renaissance”) also did the same thing to the Goths as they did to the Vandals. Except later the Brits applied the word “Gothic” to certain literature and that repurposing stuck as well, letting the Goths escape that slur situation.
No weak men in the books at home
The strong men who have made the world
History lives on the books at home
The books at home
It’s not made by great men
It’s not made by great men
It’s not made by great men
It’s not made by great men
” Ancient stereotypes and bigotries do not map cleanly on to modern racism”
Well it would be surprising if it did, because *early modern* stereotypes and bigotries do not map cleanly onto modern racism either. In that connection, I quite liked David Wootton’s review of John Samuel Harpham’s book “The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery”: https://engelsbergideas.com/reviews/slavery-before-race/
“… English thought about slavery between 1550 and 1700 — no one saw it as a crime …”
This is untrue. Throughout history and religions, there have always been those who preached against slavery. As they didn’t have such terms yet, they didn’t couch it exactly as a “crime against humanity,” but certainly as a crime against god and decency and morality.
Slavery was seen as a necessary and unavoidable evil in the past. It was wrong to enslave your own but acceptable to enslave the Other from classical times down. Greeks enslaved Barbarians. Africans enslaved members of other tribes. Christians and Muslims weren’t supposed to enslave their co-religionists though in practice they did.
This comment commits the classic error of treating “the past” as a monolithic entity. There simply is no such thing as a singular “past” which you can talk about having a universal opinion on a topic as broad as slavery.
Yes, it is undoubtedly true that in many times and places, slavery was considered closer to acceptable than it tends to be considered now (although it’s not like modern views on this are universal either). But it is very much not true that _everyone_, _everywhere_, _always_ saw it as necessary or unavoidable or acceptable. Abolitionist positions go back a long time.
Also what was socially acceptable was often defined by what the local ruler thought, not the population writ large. It didn’t matter what you thought about slavery, if the Emir of Ifriqiya disagreed you shut up about it, or at best added it to your list of outrages if you tried to overthrow him. On that count good luck.
When economics favored slavery this had a self reinforcing effect. Even if you didn’t like that Ifriqiya was a slave state the only way to achieve the domestic political power needed to change it was through the glory and profit gained by raiding the Mediterranean, *taking slaves*. You wouldn’t convince soldiers to follow you otherwise and you couldn’t change things without soldiers.
What changed things was the development of alternative power systems brought on by social structures established by liberalism, mass literacy, and industrialization. But you’re not going to reform a state where slaves grant social power by climbing the slaver social ladder, so nothing changes for millennium.
Nobody ever wanted to be a slave but very few had a problem with owning them. Including ex-slaves.
I believe there were people thought gods didn’t exist or women should be equal to men back in ancient times too.
Maybe. But they don’t seem to have left much evidence.
Maybe. But they don’t seem to have left much evidence.
I mean, if societies with large-scale slavery were more efficient at “primitive accumulation” than societies without large-scale slavery, then you’d expect to see them outcompete their rivals and their perspectives would be the ones that survive.
This idea that there was a broad consensus of “it was wrong to enslave your own but acceptable to enslave the Other” breaks down immediately when we examine practices such as debt-slavery or the act of children being sold into slavery. Neither the slave-traders nor the slave-masters were considered in some cosmic sense to have sinned.
However, it is noteworthy that virtually every scrap of documentation from slaveholding societies comes from the upper classes of those societies. The people who were at little or no risk of being enslaved themselves. And their very comfortable lifestyles were in many cases supported in part or in the entirety by owning slaves themselves. So it’s no wonder that what we know from that period of history is mostly very comfortable with slavery and even philosophizes about it.
There may well have been a myriad of comparatively isolated and lower-status people who very much thought slavery was not “necessary and unavoidable.” And they may have had quite philosophical reasons for it and the sympathy of millions of other (lower-status) people. But it’s hard for us to even see that, from the distance of history.
TBH, we have a decent chunk of even upper-class people who clearly think slavery is at least *distasteful* and something to be avoided. Even if they don’t have a wholesale abolitionist view that it needs to be fixed right now.
Though isn’t ‘moral reprehensibility’ a different thing from ‘actually criminal in the sense of being considered to be against a specific law documented in the actual legal codes’. After all, people make a clear distinction between adultery being a truly reprehensible act and it not being criminal one, at least these days. Obviously with this example you also get it ‘being a crime against god (inside of the vows of marriage at least), decency and morality’, whilst still not being considered criminal behaviour, and largely not even open to civil litigation.
My general impression is that the boundaries between ‘immoral’ and ‘illegal’ tended to be squishier in antiquity, because these were generally societies with two traits:
1) They often believed that morality, or specific parts of morality, were enforced by the gods and that to allow things that were immoral could cause the gods to retaliate in ways that would hurt the whole community. If Zeus smites you with lightning, who else’s house burns down in the ensuing fire?
2) They did not have, or had only in very basic forms, the concept of enshrined “constitutional rights” which required the state to abstain from regulating certain forms of conduct. If whoever the duly legitimate law-making body of the community was chose to make a law against wearing excessively fancy clothes, or against insulting people, or other behaviors that we today would consider none of the state’s business, then by and large, they could.
So for instance, harsh criminal penalties for adultery were routine in antiquity.
Who in classical antiquity, before Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century AD, condemned slavery in general? The only other example I can think of is that referred to in Aristotle’s Politics 1254b: “Others affirm that the rule of a master over slaves is contrary to nature, and that the distinction between slave and freeman exists by law only, and not by nature; and being an interference with nature is therefore unjust.” But we don’t know what or who Aristotle is referring to, & it may be that he has exaggerated their views.
@silvicultor,
Who in classical antiquity, before Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century AD, condemned slavery in general?
A 4th century Christian council condemned as a heretic anyone who encouraged slaves to escape:
If any one shall teach a slave, under pretext of piety, to despise his master and to run away from his service, and not to serve his own master with good-will and all honour, let him be anathema.
The council was directed against a radical Christian cleric “Eustatius of Sebaste”, and seems to have implied he was influenced by Manichaeanism, so whether you attribute his beliefs about slavery to Christian or Manichaean influence is I guess an open question. But, there would be one example of an early advocate against slavery (as with most of this stuff, we usually learn about unorthodox beliefs thru the writings of their opponents).
@silvicultor,
Also of course, not that this needs mentioning here, but the fact that the said Eustatius was a Christian cleric who was *anathematized by a church council* is not meant to imply that the self-congratulatory stuff I sometimes hear about how “Christianity is the reason we don’t have slavery today”, quite the contrary. Just wanted to state the obvious though.
Aristotle’s Nikomachean Ethics argues that everyone has the capacity for freedom and happiness, right before walking back that statement and paper over it by asserting that, naturally, some people simply deserve to be enslaved (foreigners, women, you know, the lot).
I have read a fifteenth-century chronicle where the people are horrified by the proposal to break up and sell the first shipment of slaves landed by Henry the Navigator in Portugal and created such a disturbance that armed guards were called out. Portugal already had a few slaves (mostly from North Africa and the Black Sea) but slave-owners, working Portugese, and the slaves themselves had different views on this practice. Likewise, the Latin church tended to oppose slavery except as a way of bringing people to Christian countries to convert them.
Though Twitter is the most egregious because of specific tweaks made to its algorithms, it’s far from alone. Facebook and YouTube will also, if you show the slightest inclination, send you down ever more radical political pipelines – anger is, after all, an outstanding tool for increasing engagement.
And engagement pays the bills.
Parenthetically speaking, as a white, male, veteran “of a certain age”… YouTube is particularly annoying as it regularly goes through cycles of trying to tempt me into the fascist pipeline. Facebook OTOH seems to have finally given up trying to tempt me with any political content.
Yeah, i don’t have or use twitter, but I’ve still seen the pattern described plenty with facebook/youtube. It’s entirely possible that it’s an organic result of how engagement metrics work in practice, in that it’s not a conscious decision by the platform as much as a simple fact that chuds are more likely to click on/through adverts and subsequently convert into customers. After all, whilst ‘engagement’ is the common way to percieve how those metrics generally work out in practice- people who stay on the platform longer view more adverts and so respond to more adverts than people who are not looking at any adds at all – the actual metrics the algorithms are tracking are add clicks/conversions, as that is explicitly what google/facebook are billing their advertisers for (there’s no reason to design an algorithm based on what you think might work when you can just have it work off concrete data on what works).
I don’t think it’s a purely “organic result.” The people who own these platforms are absolutely 100% aware that this is happening, and they absolutely could weight the algorithm against specifically radicalization if they cared to. At this point, they have absolutely sat down and had a meeting or three with their senior subordinates involving the conversation “what about this right-wing pipeline that’s formed on our platform” and things wouldn’t be the way they are if the CEOs and owners hadn’t clearly decided, quite a few years ago, that the answer would be “let the pipeline flow.”
yeah, my point is more that they are accepting of it due to greed than a political motivation. They don’t have to hold Musk’s political views for the pipeline to exist, they just have to like meals at michelin starred restaurants, big houses, yachting in the tropics and expensive cars. The point being that the algorithm is weighted that way not because of political opinions that you and I can’t understand believing in, but because of the regular love for nice living that almost everyone (barring the members of a few monastic orders, the odd off-grid hippy living in a protest camp and so on) can easily understand. It’s why X is worse than twitter was, but not why twitter was so bad that someone bought it as a political stunt in the first place (Musk seems to believe in the politics more than he believes in the ignoring it and living it up part, possibly because he seems more ambitious than most of his peers, and i guess you can skip a few nights out in service of being buried on another planet).
I don’t think it’s pure greed (even for the non-Musk people). Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, would still be rich beyond the dreams of avarice even if he’d cracked down hard on the alt-right pipeline and assorted conspiracy theorists and propaganda pipelines and politically motivated botnets back in 2014-15.
If that’s motivated by greed, it’s motivated by a kind of greed that is functionally not much different from being motivated by active belief. The kind of greed where you’re willing to risk destabilizing your country, not just so that you can survive, or even so that you can thrive, but so that you can thrive while having a marginally bigger number.
There was in fact, a token attempt to reduce the pipeline after the end of Trump I, to counter the possibility of possible political fallout from encouraging the formation of the chud spaces that have formed Trump’s primary pillar of support.
But that policy was quickly reversed when the tech oligarchs started aligning with the Trump movement in exchange of promises for government contract, spearheaded by Musk and Thiel (who indeed have been rewarded with such contracts) and Altman’s OpenAI (who will inevitably bankrupt if they cannot make themselves look indispensible to the US government).
A slight correction: I can’t speak for Facebook, but Twitter and YouTube will not, in fact, funnel you down radical pipelines, only reactionary ones. I know you meant “radical” in the more general sense of “politically extreme,” but it is significant that the funnel operates only to the right, not the left.
Even if you are, as I am, actively looking for left-radical theory and history, you will have to go and find it. It will not be fed to you. Yet somehow YouTube has no problem identifying that, as someone who has watched videos related to the Weimar or the Makhnovshchina, I might be the perfect guy to show “ALL 20 WAFFEN-SS DIVISIONS EXPLAINED” to.
YouTube spent a long time trying to tempt me with either pro-woke or anti-woke content in a “I don’t know what your view on woke is, but whatever it is I bet I can get strong engagement out of it”. None of it was history content, but it was still offering me the radicalisation of my choice.
Okay, that’s fair: there probably is a narrow zone where YouTube is happy to show you pro-pronoun ragebait as well as anti-pronoun. I’ve seen a little of that sort of thing. But… Police and prison abolition? Anticolonialism? Anticapitalism? Even actual queer theory? Anything with even a little substance?
..obviously the algorithm won’t promote dry lectures “of substance”, from the left or the right
Regarding police and prison abolition, that’s probably not promoted much because it’s an incredibly fringe position that no nation state has, capitalist or not. As a result, it gets a minimal audience.
In my experience at least, I have seen anticolonialist, anticapitalist and queer theory recommendations in social media. Depends on what you consider to have substance; I don’t think those recs had it, but that might (as Anon said) just be due to the nature of social media.
“Regarding police and prison abolition, that’s probably not promoted much because it’s an incredibly fringe position that no nation state has, capitalist or not. As a result, it gets a minimal audience.”
Uh, so “we should have less cops” is fringe, but “check out how cool these Nazis were, let’s talk about that for an hour” is just a normal and good thing lots of people want to watch, in your book?
It’s very interesting that when I say “YouTube is happy to push fringe right-wing content For Engagement, but will not push fringe left-wing content,” your response is “oh but you see that left-wing stuff is fringe content. No one pushes fringe content… unless it’s incredibly right-wing.”
> “check out how cool these Nazis were, let’s talk about that for an hour” is just a normal and good thing lots of people want to watch
I’m not sure where you saw someone here claim that it’s a good thing. But yes, a lot of people are interested in the Nazis. Maybe it’s the leather uniforms, maybe its the blitzkrieg, maybe its a self-reinforcing effect with all the movies they show up in.
I think we’ve had random years in the gaming industry where it felt like every game was about WW2.. anticolonialism isn’t quite in that weight level.
@Devin,
I think that you and Fish are notnusing quite the same vocabulary. He takes “abolition” literally: “police and prison abolition” would mean there are no police whtsoever, no prisons at all. You use those words in the meaning of “reform” and “downscaling”.
Personally, I think that a system without police could function, but it would resemble feudalism much more than anything: the enforcement function would be provided by big companies, local cooperatives, individuals, you name it, but most people would need to subject themselves to someone who can credibly promise protection.
A world without prisons would be completely doable, though. However, it would probably have a model where smallish crimes are punished via Chinese-style reputation point system and larger ones with corporal punishments.
I do note that systems without police are actually fairly common: The police (especially more narrowly construed) really is a remarkably modern and specific institution. The vast majority of society never had anything even close to it.
(there’s also the argument that even beyond that “The Police” is actually an agglomeration of some fairly distinct functions (basically the public order functions and the investigative functions don’t neccessarily *have* to be handled by the same organization)
However, it would probably have a model where smallish crimes are punished via Chinese-style reputation point system and larger ones with corporal punishments.
@FinnishReader,
I think corporal punishment would probably be insufficient to deal with a lot of more serious crimes, the realistic alternative to prison would probably be some kind of forced labor. Which, don’t get me wrong, I think in many cases would actually be preferable to prison, at least if it didn’t fully isolate you from the community. Prisons are really terrible, at least in America!
There are some criminals though who are so dangerous that I don’t think forced labor with continued integration in the community would really be enough- the alternative to prison for the worst crimes is, well, death.
@Hector,
First, I do not adovocate for prison abolition, let alone for reintroduction of corporal punishment. And I think this i exactly for the reason that corporal punishment is easily too severe:
In historical systems of corporal punishment, the “corporality” of punishment ranged very widely. Death is one extreme means of corporal punishment, and many historical systems had various systems to cause not only deterrence but the temporary, partial or total elimination of the criminal’s capacity to participate in the society. Flogging, for example, may cause wounds that require months of recuperation, or cause permanent disabilities and in the hard end of the scale, flogging is simply a torturous method of execution. Flagellation of the soles is even more direct a method for confining an individual to home for the duration of healing. Castration and amputation of limbs reduce the individual’s abilty to commit crimes, and tattooing and branding mark an individual permanently as a criminal. Blinding or cutting of tongue are also quite efficient in detroying an individual’s possibilities to commit future crimes. Mongols were rumoured to use deliberate infliction of brain damage as a method to produce easily-handled slaves out of enemy prisoners.
In fact, the reason why we are using prisons is partially because corporal punishment for serious crimes tends to be so severe that it makes rehabilitation impossible. Prison gives, at least in theory, an opportunity for the freed inmate to return to normal life as an honest, productive citizen.
But technically, I don’t think that prison abolition would be similarly impossible as abolition of police, in the sense of abolishing all public authorities that might enforce the law with forcible means. It would simply mean a society so inhumane that I would not want to live in one.
@Arilou,
I know that there are many systems of police, and the first modern police forces were only created in 17th century France. However, I was thinking about removing every enforcement system above “hue and cry”, meaning essentially a return to a system where all judgements and defence of individual rights would fall upon individuals concerned, like in Ancient Republican Rome. And we know that Republican Rome was essentially a state where mafia-like protection rackets were the basis of all public life.
@Finnish Reader,
and in the hard end of the scale, flogging is simply a torturous method of execution
Tolstoy in, i think it was Haji Murad, refers to the Russian Czar ordering someone to be flogged with a number of strokes that would almost certainly be lethal, as a way to execute him while technically honoring the biblical “thou shalt not kill” precept. I’m not sure if that was ever actually official or unofficial Russian policy, or if that was Tolstoy exaggerating a point to condemn Czarist hypocrisy and immorality (it’s Tolstoy so it could be either one, i guess). I’ve heard about Tibetan Buddhist authorities back in the day using a similar kind of reasoning as well.
I guess I was thinking of the milder forms of corporal punishment, I was reading some years ago how Bolivia was reintroducing them under “customary law”, as an alternative to imprisonment for some minor crimes (as part of a general ideological effort to bring indigenous culture and perspectives, including customary law, into the institutions of society).
over the ‘of substance’ issue, youtube is very happy to recommend ‘you should be incredibly mad about american politics’ in both directions. Unfortunately for youtube, I am not, because I am not american, and because schadenfruede exists.
I seem to get more of that sort of material from the left, whilst more of the dubious ‘nazis are cool’ material from the right, but as they are two different political positions, I would expect their political material to, in fact, be different. Which is why we’re not arguing that ‘these cool facts about the T34’ funnels people to the left simply because those are cool left-wing tanks. Those do crop up somewhat similar ammounts to the ones about panzers, after all.
I’d argue that the main difference is that while youtube’s algorythm is fully capable of funnelling people into both wings of american politics via different looking funnels, the right wing funnel does work slightly better for non americans, given the history elements discussed here work for many other countries as history is frankly a lot more universal than something that might have happened in Tenessee last week if you believe the shouty man on youtube.
Yeah this doesn’t get called out enough but YouTube specifically (I don’t use any other platform) pushes exclusively right-wing content. I turned off recommendations a while ago but before that it would constantly push far right content despite me being subscribed to leftist channels like Current Affairs, engaging positively with left wing content, and disliking or reporting right wing content. Even so I never got recommended any content by channels like Contrapoints or about Chomsky or Zisek or prison abolitionism or anything else radically left. But there was no shortage of Shapiro or Peterson, or Crowder, or any one of the million right wing grifters.
That’s not my experience.
I use YouTube almost exclusively for music, cute/funny animals, and occasional “wow, Americans and Brits speak differently” videos. This does not prevent it from pushing left-wing politics at me. Not that I don’t love me my left-wing politics, but I don’t want to get it in the form of videos.
It’s yet to push anything right-wing at me. The most I get is somebody earnestly telling me that Jordan Peterson is a dick. Thanks, already knew that, do not recommend.
It might depend on the definition. In my experience, left-radical ideas of history are more likely to be shown in mainstream media. I’m not aware of any right-radical documentaries as notable as the Netflix one on Cleopatra*, nor any right-radical history-inspired movies as notable as the Avatar series.
* which at least did get widespread criticism for its historical inaccuracies
Bluntly, the people you’re calling left-radicals are a lot more likely to even bother with mainstream media. Many of them aren’t even that left-radical, or are basically “centrist, but with one or two hobbyhorses that seem extreme to you.”
Meanwhile, right-radicals have their own dedicated propaganda channels that exist for the sole purpose of propagating their content, and where nearly 100% of the available audience of the channel is likely to be receptive to that content. Why would they bother trying to get their movies aired in mainstream venues where fascist propaganda might alienate customers, when they can instead use their own alternative venues where all the extremists with interest and money to spend will come to them?
Nah man, you don’t get it. The true, correct, and centrist position is that Cleopatra looked exactly like Elizabeth Taylor, so a position like “if it’s okay for Elizabeth Taylor to play Cleopatra, it’s okay for a Black woman too” is indeed such a radical take that it would have shocked Lenin or Frantz Fanon. (Also I really want to know if he means the radical-left ideology of the Avatar with the flying buffalo, or the one with the blue tree-people.)
More seriously, the other part of the equation there is that reactionaries have had a lot of success with inducing the mainstream media to treat their propaganda outlets as “legitimate news.” Look at the treatment of Fox, OAN, Breitbart, the Daily Wire, etc in, say, CNN or the NYT. Now look at the treatment of… let’s say Dissent, Current Affairs, Jacobin, or CrimethInc.
If some insane groyper wants to spread racist lies about, say, Haitian immigrants eating your dog, he doesn’t have to go far, because if he puts his lies on OAN, the NYT will report on *that* and repeat his lies (even if the paper is careful to weasel-word everything so it doesn’t, itself, endorse the claims).
Facebook is the only social media I’m on, so I can tell you that I get both the “Stalin never did anything wrong” posts and the “Al Qaeda is in the pay of the French and the Americans, to undermine African socialist states” on the one hand, and other hand, the “We need to revoke women’s right to vote” and the “Colonialism was great actually!” posts show up in my feed. Both of which, to be clear, I disagree with.
Given my own politics though, the fact that the second set shows up in my feed *at all* is either a testament to the overall right wing bias of Facebook, or else (more likely i think) it’s a depressing example of how social media deliberately feeds us things we hate, because the algorithms “know” this is what is going to make us engage out of anger.
I
I wonder if there is a location factor. I’m located in a blue area and I’ve seen the occasional Chomsky and other videos that seem Democratic Socialist aligned in the feed although my viewing habits are more mainstream.
I’m also getting ads to contribute to democratic candidates.
Yeah, when I’ve been in Virginia during their gubernatorial elections my YouTube feed was spamming me with ads for Abigail Spanberger, and when I was there right before their judicially foiled attempt to “counter-gerrymander” their congressional map I was getting so many ads in favor of it.
My YouTube watching is *not* left-coded.
My sympathies to you, Derek, for having to deal with robots trying to recruit you into a fascist movement. I don’t get so much of it myself but I do get some.
There’s some irony that the chud’s ideology, which maps more into the bigotry of the New Imperialist Europeans, can also be disproven by comparing the cultural legacy of those empires in Asia and Africa with, say, the legacy of Spain or Portugal in America. Not to say neither of the iberian empires weren’t racist or exploitative, oh boy they were, but the NewImp ones were somehow even worse.
Frankly, I think its the very “depth” of those potholes that keeps the historical enthusiasts grounded in history instead of floating down an “algorithmic pipeline”. When you engage in history deeply, you get this sense of how different the past can be and clean stories don’t hold up nearly as well.
If you want to ground yourself in history, find something you can know deeply. Otherwise its far too easy to get swept up in propaganda-based clean narratives of one sort or another. But when you learn something deeply, you can challenge those narratives when you encounter them. Even if you’re limited to your own little pothole.
I remember going and finding as many Aesop’s fables as I could and being surprised to find a much more cynical and cautious attitude in the set as a whole than I did from the curated set normally presented to young kids.
I think one of the most interesting things one gets out of real history is how much the kinds of people that might otherwise by mythologised have a lot of setbacks, compromises, shortcomings, and outright failures once you get into the details. The kind of thing that marks them not as larger than life heroes, but regular folks doing what they can in positions of power when faced with complex worlds.
I cautiously opine that Caesar himself kind of acknowledged that a bit in his own writing of his endeavours (although perhaps sometimes by omission of his otherwise documented more embarrassing moments). But for Alexander… there’s possibly a way for some chuds to conceive of his drinking himself to death as something impressive verging on aspirational, but what of the administrative missteps, the volatile temper, the failed attempts to remodel his form of kingship, and his outright mutinies?
(Although I suppose one must approach that topic cautiously, lest one get into a web of “Alexander was grand and righteous until corrupted by Oriental Decadence”, except insofar as one might use it to draw out the fascist contradictions wherein their heroic figures are glorious and venerable but have no agency or responsibility for anything that might be considered culturally external which may infringe upon their character.)
Nit: your title is “Friday Friday”. I don’t think that’s what you intended.
“gotta get down on Friday!”
The chud analysis is right, which is what makes it a little too easy. The errors are so basic that pointing them out barely counts as a fight. They are egregious, but not that interesting.
The mirror problem strikes me as more insidious and more interesting. When people on the “left” (broadly defined) reach for ancient material, they often do know the sources. Challenge a reading that flatters their politics and the response is it’s “artistic license” or “the evidence is ambiguous, so it could be this way.” Often technically true but the ambiguity only ever resolves in the convenient direction.
“bOeRth SiDEs!!!! But really the left is worse.” *wink wink*
You guys ever take a beat and marvel at just how badly King undersold it when he warned us about the “white moderate”?
Oh sure, but is that a problem? Chuds will cite the fall of the Roman empire to diversity to justify a program in Belfast and leftists will say Romans were all racially egalitarian to…what, argue we should be too?
Framing it as insidious implies there’s something being harmed. I know what harm chuds do when they’re racist about history, they incite lynch mobs and programs, it’s material. When someone goes the other way they’re just wrong online, at worst it makes people slightly more naive about the past.
Well, naiveté regarding the past can lead to naiveté regarding the present. In fact, one could say that Bret’s usual comparisons between the auxilia and foederati (how the latter system was a worsening of the former and a significant factor in the fall of the Roman Empire) apply more to the left than to the right. After all, it is the left that insists multiculturalism is far better than integration/assimilation, if not that the latter two are harmful or even violate human rights.
And the idea that the left is much better than the right or does less harm is, honestly, part of the problem (and particularly with immigration). I don’t know how things are in the US, but in my country (Spain), it’s the left that’s pushing hard for an immigration system that’s much more like the foederati than the auxilia.
I have no problem with immigration, as long as they come to be just like everyone else. No ghettos. No associating only with “their own kind.” No setting up parallel structures outside the State. Adapting to the civic norms of the society that welcomes them. And there have been leftists who have called me a racist and a fascist for defending these things. So yes, part of the problem lies with the left.
The idea that fanaticism and moral myopia only belong to one side of the spectrum is, frankly, absurd.
The role of the foederati in the fall of Rome isn’t a matter of “multiculturalism versus assimilation” as we today conceive the question. The modern political right isn’t even offering assimilation as an option for immigrants; it just wants them gone, and this desire is very, very unsubtle.
Furthermore, even on the left, multiculturalism is not some kind of endorsement of the millet system. A society can celebrate and treat as valid many cultures, without having more than one legal system. And without creating subordinate sub-polities within itself that retain separate interests at odds with those of the broader polity, which is the place where the Romans started having trouble with the foederati.
So I don’t think this particular line of argument leads anywhere useful or valid. It’s an attempt to force-fit “the left is wrong because welcoming people into your country without assimilating them means they become disloyal fifth columnists who betray and ruin you” onto ancient events that do not correspond to teaching that lesson, and when moreover it’s not even an accurate representation of the immigration policies the left advocates.
“at worst it makes people slightly more naive about the past.”
Which tends to lead to them voting for counterproductive policy decisions because they don’t have a clue about how people actually work.
Also, frankly, glossing over the issues with assimilation and integration and how societies managed to accomplish such despite the difficulties with doing so leads people to think that A. the issues with current immigrants are somehow new, which increases fear and B. leads people to not emphasize what you actually have to do in order to get immigrants to assimilate and locals to integrate.
There’s a reason why the BNP never managed more than 2% of the vote and nobody really took Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech seriously.
You’re being too vague for me to take this very seriously.
> Also, frankly, glossing over the issues with assimilation and integration and how societies managed to accomplish such despite the difficulties with doing so leads people to think that A. the issues with current immigrants are somehow new, which increases fear and B. leads people to not emphasize what you actually have to do in order to get immigrants to assimilate and locals to integrate.
The “issues” with current immigrants are fake. If you aren’t deeply racist or listening to talking heads all day long you don’t experience them.
There exist separate issues which are often conflated onto immigrants, but this is fundementally an issue of bigotry. As seen when talking about specifics.
> There’s a reason why the BNP never managed more than 2% of the vote and nobody really took Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech seriously.
And that reason is unrelated to actual immigration policy because simultaneously, across the world, people started voting for far right extremists *irrespective of immigration policy*. Just as a bunch of billionaires started buying up all the media or using their captured media to push hate speech.
The reason these groups poll better now is because capital is poisoning the discourse. Capital is poisoning the discourse because inequality is becoming so severe it’s incompatible with democracy in any form, and hence capital is trying to destroy democracy. Natalist race riots are the best way to do that.
Hence I’m extremely skeptical of any vague assertion that starts with an assumption that there’s a problem with immigration, because I have several specific examples of the problem with immigration being a distraction for capital owners trying to fuck us all over for power.
Anyone who has experienced bringing someone new into a team of people knows that there is friction involved whenever outsiders come into an already established group, even if only for a short period of time.
I understand that you are in a hermetically sealed information bubble. That is not my problem.
I’m going to be harsh here.
You’re going to hell for this, guilders. I don’t mean that in the sense of me damning you, I mean that in the sense that you’re riding this issue to hell. It’s taking you there.
God came down to earth and sacrificed his Son, *Dying*, to tell you the *explicit* and *direct* command to Love your Neighbor as yourself, and your response to someone wanting to *be* your neighbor is to dismiss it as *too hard*? To simply refuse to meaningfully discuss it and hide in sound bites and platitudes?
I’m trying to get you to talk about something specific. If your response is hostility to the simple idea of discussion then that’s not merely an intellectual failing, that’s a moral choice to ignore any possibility that your actions and beliefs might be wrong.
It’s Pride and denial of God’s command.
I don’t live in a bubble. I don’t reject the idea that there’s something wrong with immigrants because I don’t experience negative interactions *with* immigrants. I just reject that it’s a problem with *immigration*, and can see that there are social problems that *involve immigrants*.
And I believe it is a moral imperative to at least attempt to clarify that, because people are dying, murdered in the street, over it. And because treating others as our equals is right.
I think the professor is over rationalizing the reason why the “chud visionaries of history” hate his input. It is simply because they do not trust him. They do not trust professional/academic historians because they are part of the “academy,” which is 99% of the time synonymous with “liberal/leftist.” I am just a humble high school teacher, and I greatly admire Professor Devereaux’s grasp of ancient history (facts and analysis). However, whenever he ventures into modern political commentary, I generally have one thought – “horse manure.” I’m pretty sure that if Victor Davis Hanson tried to engage the “chuds” about their misguided views, they would be much more receptive.
I’m pretty sure that if Victor Davis Hanson tried to engage the “chuds” about their misguided views, they would be much more receptive.
I have no doubt about that, given that VDH shares these very same misguided views (and is very probably a factor in creating them).
The thing is, Dr. Hanson would never bother to tell them they’re wrong about anything important. Indeed, that is the key dividing line here: right-wing extremists will reject the expertise and relevance of anyone who tells them they are wrong about something they consider important. If 99% of the scientists studying the atmosphere tell them global warming is real, they conclude that 99% of the scientists studying the atmosphere are complicit in the weird postmodern (((globalist))) hoax plot to destroy industrial civilization. If 99% of the economists tell them tariffs won’t fix the nation’s economic malaise but a beloved Maximum Leader tells them tariffs will, 99% of the economists must be too woke to work. And if 99% of the historians tell them they’re wrong about the past, they’ll selectively listen only to the 1% who do not do so.
I think one other thing with chuds is, their model for good rhetoric or debate or historical/textual analysis is often rooted in fundamentalist Christian apologetics and theology. They are coming from a context where “what if the author of the book is wrong or lying?” is a priori forbidden as an argument, because obviously you get kicked out of Liberty U seminary if you question the divine revelation of the Bible or whatever.
So when they take that model into areas like classics or modern politics, they are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to deal with ideas like “what if Livy is wrong” or “what if the people who wrote the Constitution were flawed human actors with biases”. Even just bringing up those arguments is an attack on their identity, because they’ve been intellectually trained to conflate their identity with the veracity of whatever Book the argument is about. I think that is a lot of why it’s hard to argue chuds out of their political beliefs – the political belief is emotionally tied back to a metaphysical and epistemological belief about the nature of truth and reality, which is much harder to refute or disrupt.
Please, stop giving the libs so much credit for what annoys the fash. Yes, fascists hate liberalism, but fascism is not born out of a reaction to liberalism. If it was, you wouldn’t see people who are already elites in the neoliberal soviety embrace fascism so frequently.
Fascism is borne out of a fear that the oppressed masses will want their share of the pie. It is the desperate defense of a failing capitalism against class solidarity among the poor: a tactic that divides people who would be natural allies. Sure, some liberal elites want to provide the lower class with enough comfort to defuse their anger, but others are ever more greedy and won’t stop until they have all of the money. As such, the workers start resenting their chains, and most of the elites panic and flock to the fascists.
In 2026, liberalism is a spent ideology. It has failed to maintain a class contract, and now you either join the ranks of the left or find that all your erstwhile allies now have rhino heads, to use Eugène Ionesco’s metaphors
I honestly think that you are missing a big part of the reason why the funnel/pipeline exists. Yes, the removal of moderation has something to do with it, but this happens on youtube as well. And it hasn’t gone through the change in ownership. Yes, the chuds know next to nothing about the history.
But I think the main reason is that people used to (and still do) look to history to find their heroes. And if mainstream historical community doesn’t provide them (and instead tears them down, cf Columbus), then people will go to those who will.
I also think that the majority of pushback to casting black Helen of Troy is caused not by her being black, but is simply a pushback to “Othello has to be played by a black actor” narrative of the lat 15 years. Frankly I think both are stupid, but no one even tries to slow down the pendulum anymore
While a lot of the people who are mad about a black Helen will say they are mad because nobody let them cast a white Othello, I am rather skeptical that this is their real position on the issue. Because I rarely if ever get the sense that I am dealing with someone who merely cares passionately about the idea of race-blind casting in all of fiction. I very often get the sense that I am dealing with someone who wants extremely race-conscious casting, but only in a way that they somehow see as ‘favorable’ to the white race.
I feel like this argument carried a lot more weight before the first wave of fascism came and went. Fascism obviously isn’t some sort of progression from european liberalism with the alternative being failure, because Italy did not become socialist after the fascism was scrubbed off. This isn’t to say fascism isn’t reactionary (it’s almost defined by being so) or that it doesn’t divide the working class to prevent solidarity, because it does.
But I think the relative forces at play show why this isn’t some sort of inevitable progression; once you move past the generalisation of all people with power in the neoliberal west being ‘neoliberal elites’ (which is a self-fulfilling label), it’s pretty easy to note that the ones leaning towards fascism currently are a new, separate group of people to both those who did last time (far fewer austrians and italians for a start) and from the ‘neoliberal elites’ of, say, 1996. To the point that they’re pretty universally indentified as having come into their power quite recently, either in their own lifetime, or within a generation or so – whilst the tech-bros didn’t grow up in poor neighbourhoods or come from disadvantaged backgrounds, America’s ‘ruling elites’ were never a secret coalition between immigrant businessmen, unicycle hockey players and dentists. So broadly it’s more probable that liberal capitalism’s ability to propel people of more modest standing (or foreigners) to the heady heights of political and economic power just has a tendency to be quite random in the makeup of the resulting elite. The waves of political change seem, historically, to result from the relatively small number of ‘ruling elites’ at any one time being drawn essentially randomly (at least in terms of political leanings, which are very rarely going to hamper your ability to run a business profitably) from the much larger sample size of ‘people who weren’t born poor’, resulting in times where they seem to follow a trend. But reading a pattern into random motion doesn’t make a pattern exist.
A. It’s not a tautological label because not all countries in the west need be neoliberal. The category isn’t defined to fit itself, even if it currently does fit itself.
B. It is not a separate group from those neoliberal elites. I mean, first principles, look at the age of Republicans who took power recently, they’re as old as ever. They’re all part of the same generation, all the modern fascist movement does is give them musical chairs to play to stay in power without changing anything. Even those who replace the old guard are just other members of the old guard, just not the previously ruling ones.
In other words you’re falling for a fascist rhetoric trap; their shuffle requires them to be revolutionaries but it’s a philosophy used by the old guard to hold power, the rhetoric is *irrational* and disconnected from outcome.
Now there are some examples where the maga movement has lost track of the goal, and their rhetoric has taken on its own political life. Most tellingly the war in Iran. It’s not good for capital to crash society, but that’s where we seem to be heading because the rhetoric only leads to one conclusion…but why does that mean it’s not something the old guard did to itself? It was in Hitlers interest to do everything up to declaring war on the soviets and losing, but him doing the first ten fascist things led to the eleventh act of suicide.
In other words, yes actually, these are the same neoliberal elites in power. Ergo why they elected Donald Trump, a person who could have been the patron saint of coastal elites in the 90s, as their figurehead.
C. Capitalism doesn’t correlate with propelling people of modest means to power. This is just propoganda. Every time someone tries to quantify the inherently of wealth and power the more capitalist the country is the more heritable power ends up being. In fact every time a new study on this comes out the researchers refining methodology tend to find that countries like America were more unequal than previously assessed, and are becoming worse.
If you look at Donald Trump and the senior Republican congressional leaders, sure, a lot of them are in the same age of that ‘old guard’ boomer generation… But it’s also clear that there’s a considerable number of people trying to rise to prominence as MAGA politicians, many of whom would have struggled to even be credible if the Republican Party had kept going in the same vein as it was in before, say, 2008. The Marco Rubios being pushed aside in favor of the Hegseths and Millers and assorted MAGA governors.
To expand upon what I am saying, the transition from a liberal political order to a fascist one is definitely something capitalists as a class may well pursue in an attempt to promote their interests and weaken those who work for a living. But that doesn’t mean there is no turnover or evolution within the elite as a result of it. The process has winners and losers even among the capitalist class, especially in relative terms (who gets ten times richer, who does not). It can also promote individuals who ride the political elite of fascism to the top, creating a new path to entry by awarding these new elites some of the wealth stripped from the general public or target minorities.
It’s not QUITE as simple as “the same old bosses are still in charge.” Many are, but many others are effectively just sitting back and watching the machine run, albeit in a direction that is unlikely to hurt them.
I think my point might be captured in ‘they’re as old as ever’ in a sentence that uses the word ‘recently’. The republicans who took power recently are indeed as old as the republicans that took power decades ago were decades ago, when they were in power. Nowadays, that latter group is mostly dead, because people keep ageing after their political careers – Sure Reagan was only 69 when he was sworn in, and Trump is older than that now, but Reagan was still 35 years Trump’s senior and still died in 2004.
Just because a new generation reaches the height of their power relatively late in their lives and the previous generation are remembered as having been old when they stopped being much at all doesn’t mean they were the same generation. Trump is an actual baby boomer, born during the actual baby boom – Reagan was not a boomer, because, again, he was born in 1911, three and a half decades before the baby boom took place. Basically ‘there isn’t some sort of mind-meld that happens to everyone when they reach retirement age, merging with the spirits of their ancestors’, they keep being separate people capable of having separate opinions.
To further my point, as i mentioned, the people who are rich now were often born well off. Dentists and psychiatrists are not poor! Unicycle hockey players clearly have money to spare! The children of immigrants can become quite successful slum landlords! Foreigners can be extraordinarily rich!
But those groups of aren’t well expressed as ‘the ruling class in America’, because they aren’t ruling, and in the last case, aren’t even in America (Nixon was not impeached by Pretoria city council, after all, and that’s where Errol Musk was a politician at the time of said impeachment).
Now this isn’t an argument for capitalism being good. In fact, I’d frame it as a more effective argument for why it is bad than some appeal to old grudges against the aristocracy. Just like monarchies are a terrible system of rule because they gift power to people by accident of birth, gifting power to people because they won big on the casino that is the stock market leads to the same issue of people with no ability or qualification to wield power, holding said power (though it does weed out those with crippling mental health issues and the literal children, so it’s not quite as bad as monarchy). The fact that capitalism holds the allure of winning big with a business idea or a well-timed investment as a motivation for the merely quite well off to preserve it does not mean that the people who do win big in that system deserve to go on to shape society. And yeah, party politics tends to have a separate pipeline of established candidates from old political families, but the influence of the capitalist ruling class is often not in the politicians from small districts that system promotes. There’s a reason Trump swanned in above all of them to take over the GOP having previously only been in politics when ran a (short lived) presidential campaign as an independent.
Bret is pointing out a historical trend, Subbak. Umberto Eco was drawing a line from fascism (and conservatism in general!) to a rejection of enlightenment ideals, which *at the time* were manifested in the philosophy of liberalism. Leftism (specifically socialism and anarchism) split from classical liberalism *after* this point.
In that context liberalism and leftism are interchangeable there because modern liberalism and modern leftism are unified. As you point out neoliberalism had abandoned a large part of the rational and egalitarian impulses that motivated classical liberalism, and in particular leftism sprouted off from liberalism earlier precisely because liberals were not idealogically capable of addressing those flaws; the liberal view of property rights is not compatible with the liberal ideal of equality, capital accumulation and rent seeking will create inequality. But fascism as a reactionary movement is a reaction against the fundamentals themselves, and as such hits both modern idealogies.
Where Brets analysis fails is he still clings to some vestige of the academics impartiality in framing and defining conservatism as being part of the liberal tradition, instead of recognizing it as part of a fundementally incompatible idealogy that briefly aligned in interest with liberalism when multinational monarchies were replaced with national republics. It’s just less developed or more polite fascism, but Bret is an academic and academics have strong biases against admitting that a political philosophy represented in their social circles is irredeemable. I doubt he could reasonably take that stand in person without consequences, which is a bias towards not believing it.
I think that both this and the overall analysis of “fascism” are wildly overfit.
The important thing that’s overlooked here is that capitalism and liberalism aren’t actually the same thing. There are those who are ideologically capitalist and whose loyalty is to capital, and there are those who are ideologically liberal and whose loyalty is to a perceived/desired political order (we might call it ‘the commonwealth’ or something).
Fascism is what happens when ideologically capitalist elites (that is, they are more loyal to capitalism than to democracy if the two come into conflict) start to consider liberalism as a potential threat to the interests and supremacy of capital. In the first wave of fascist states, this happened when socialists started winning elections and mobilizing to the point where right-wing paramilitary militias alone would likely not be enough to contain them.
Then they raise up a movement which rejects the political structure of liberalism (elections, freedom of assembly that at least provides a legalistic basis for insisting that unions be allowed to form, free speech for people who question capital and the Maximum Supreme Leader, et cetera). They will aim to replace the liberal political structure with a political structure that, while it may enable the Maximum Leader to arbitrarily and capriciously harm an individual capitalist here or there, will protect the capitalist class from mass action by the workers.
However, this is not the first moment in history when people said that no liberal territory still exists between the socialists and the fascists. As others note, washing the fascism off Italy and Germany did not automatically make them socialist.
On this, I have the perspective of a Lithuanian. From my point of view: If one is against Liberalism, and one is against Capitalism (in as much as one may conflate the two ideas) – what’s left as an alternative? I am using my own country as an example, which is in a definitive, unquestionable golden age, as compared to the past, at least.
Pre-Industrial aristocratic Manorialism (of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire) is clearly worse, since it restricted a lot of people as serfs and / or peasants, living in poverty on the margins and engaging in an inefficient subsistence farming-based economy.
Presidential Dictatorship, such as under Antanas Smetona, is also worse, as it led to restricted political rights, political persecutions (I had just recently visited Grūtas Park, and I found the Monument to the Four Communists to be quite powerful and sobering), frayed diplomatic relations and paranoia, diplomatic isolation, weakness, and ultimate dissolution.
Nazi Fascism, such as under Augustinas Voldemaras, was bad for… well, for being a Nazi Germany collaborationist puppet state. Its faults are self-evident.
Soviet Bolshevism under Antanas Sniečkus et. al. was bad for… well, at worst, under Stalin, just being a Fascist state with a red Marxist Hammer-and-Sickle coat of paint… and, even in better circumstances, being under an imperialist, colonialist, corrupt, paranoid, deeply stagnating, totalitarian regime, which had issues both providing for its citizens economically, as well as being very oppressive politically.
So, if one suggests tearing down Capitalism and replacing it with an another, better system – and, as a result, criticizes Liberalism for enabling and collaborating with Capitalism – then that’s an active argument that they actually need to properly set up. What are they going to replace Capitalism with? What’s that magical utopian ideology that will follow after the revolution? How will it make peoples’ lives better? How will it make the common man richer? How will it reduce inequality? How will it make the people more free, more involved, and more supportive and supported? These are all questions that can be answered (usually done so by vaguely hinting at Marx), but usually such discontent seems to be… unfinished. Wishy-washy. Underdeveloped; nothing done to ensure that tearing down the old social order wouldn’t lead to far more malicious actors taking power afterwards. Heck, some of the “leftist revolutionaries” tend to be Stalin-simping Tankies.
If the speaker does not provide an answer as to what would follow after the overthrow of Liberalism and Capitalism, then the listener has to pick up the slack and provide an answer himself. And if that listener then imagines such a revolution leading to the USSR again – then the answer is a very clear “no thanks, I find current society to be much better, thank you very much”.
I once read a book by Viktor Suvorov, in which he recounted an interesting conversation he had in the Soviet Army, around 1960. He had been detailed to empty a cesspit with another man, and recent talk about the imminent arrival of true communism had set this man wondering who would do jobs like that once it had come.
In the army the answer was simple: some underlings were told to carry the shit, or be punished if they failed. In capitalism the answer is also simple: some volunteers offer to do the job in exchange for a reward, and the reward is raised until they get enough volunteers. Looked at from the viewpoint of the people carrying the shit, the second option seems preferable.
So I feel that anyone who wishes to denounce the evils of capitalism needs to come up with an answer to the question of who does the worst jobs, that is better than “raising the rewards for doing so until we get enough volunteers”. I do not recall ever coming across such an answer.
So I feel that anyone who wishes to denounce the evils of capitalism needs to come up with an answer to the question of who does the worst jobs
I don’t think that’s a good question at all, at least in the context that you quote it. The Eastern Bloc societies in 1960 were absolutely *not capitalist*, and they still had people cleaning the cesspits and doing other undesirable jobs. In some cases through paying them more, in some cases through coercion. Whether you call those countries “lower stage of communism” (which is what I would call them) or prefer to call them “socialist”, or use some other term, is up to you, but they certainly weren’t capitalist in any meaningful sense.
They had problems of their own, for sure, and we could debate whether their flaws made them a better or worse bet than capitalism in the long run (we would probably disagree on that). And we could also debate whether the “higher stage of communism” which Marx envisioned, and which I think Suvorov was referring to, where that kind of large wage differential and/or state coercion is unneccessary, could ever exist (let’s just say I have my strong doubts, although in a few areas and contexts it could be approximated). But, none of that is really relevant to the question of “can we have a non capitalist society and still get the cesspits cleaned” because the answer to that is clearly yes.
some volunteers offer to do the job in exchange for a reward, and the reward is raised until they get enough volunteers. Looked at from the viewpoint of the people carrying the shit, the second option seems preferable.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but that has nothing to do with capitalism, per se. Capitalism requires (among other things) the ownership of the means of production by a class of private individuals that’s distinct from workers or the state. You can still have wage differentials (and certainly will have them), and even market pricing, in a non-capitalist, pre-capitalist, or post-capitalist economy.
There are many stripes of socialist who will say that the solution to the question of “who cleans the toilets under socialism” is “everyone who works or lives in the building has to take turns doing it,” and socialists will not hesitate to think of various schemes where places that need dedicated toilet-cleaners because nobody spends enough time there to really serve on a chores rota (e.g. movie theaters) can reward whoever cleans the toilet. In practice, even the Soviet Union itself (which few modern socialists would see as a perfect exemplar) absolutely did pay its own janitors in civilian life, rather than merely forcing them to clean toilets at gunpoint and spend the rest of their time in a gulag or something.
So capitalism is by no means unique in having the concept of “the person who cleans toilets should be compensated and rewarded to motivate them to do that.” Indeed, it is a foundational principle in Marx that the man who cleans the toilets in, say, an office building is just as indispensable to the overall production that comes out of that office building as anyone else, and so if the office workers will not clean their own toilets then whoever does it for them is far more entitled to a share of the wealth they generate than would be, say, a man whose sole contribution is “I inherited the company from my dad.”
The socialist critique of the capitalist handling of toilet-cleaning is that the capitalist is always incentivized to reshape both his own enterprises, and of society as a whole, so as to minimize what it costs him to get the toilets cleaned. Thus we find the rich man subsidizing political movements to disrupt freedom of assembly and of speech so that the janitors cannot organize and negotiate as a block for better working conditions, because he wishes to be part of an oligopsony of labor-buyers, not to have to negotiate against a labor-supplier who is in a strong position to demand a high price. We find the rich man disrupting community support networks and social programs that might make the janitor less anxious about losing his job because he knows he will not be immediately homeless and that his children will not starve, because the janitor’s fear of losing his (undesirable) job is a key asset in the rich man’s ability to keep the labor price down. And so on, and so on.
Cleaning cesspits was probably nasty job in the Soviet army, but on the other hand I have also heard a lot about the health hazards caused by burning cesspits in the US bases in Iraq. It’s pretty clear that neither capitalism or communism are a solution to the cesspit problem.
As a contrast I can provide the year I spent in the Finnish army in the late 90s. During that time I never had to clean a cesspit. I didn’t even have to use one of them for my needs. In fact, I was never even aware of the existence of one of those. In my experience there was two style of toilet facilities available. If the location was permanent to at least some degree there would be toilets with sewer. Or during field exercises a tiny ditch would be dug little distance from the tent with a small toppled tree trunk laid above it. This ditch or the whole tent would be located well before it would develop in to a cesspit.
If USA was a socialist democracy maybe the burn pits wouldn’t have existed. Maybe the expeditionary forces had been equipped with waste treatment containers that would have turned the human waste in to more useful or less harmful form.
What do you define liberalism as?
I, for one, certainly don’t think rule of law, separation of church and state, market economies, and non-personalist leadership are “spent ideas”, but I have a feeling those aren’t what you’re referring to.
I would also complain about you shortening down terms for political ideologies into monosyllabic soundbites (“fash!” “lib!” might as well throw “red” and “prog” in there), but we’re already referring to various far-right reactionaries/racists as “chuds”, so I don’t think that’d gain ground
Never said my thanks before, Professor, so that’s just the perfect moment for it: thanks for recommending Shattered Sword! It’s, really, it should be kept in Sèvres as a standard for a good history book and for a good, minute-by-minute reconstruction of past events. Although what hit me was how informal its language was. It’s a part of what makes it easy to read, but also, I think it speaks a bit about the academic culture of the United States: folks can afford to be informal and be treated seriously.
I have now listened to your PPP appearances, at least some of them. You say there were no such thing as steel bows – I will have to disagree with you there. There were bows made from high-quality steel in Mughal India. Just look up at YouTube – Steel Bow from India. Not sure *why* they were made from steel – status symbol perhaps? – but they did exist.
mostly in terms of the fact that a lot of the largest chud accounts that purport to explain antiquity to others don’t know Greek (which makes it pretty hard to have a useful opinion on a translation)!
I don’t think this necessarily makes you unqualified to have a opinion, in principle.
I don’t know Greek (much less Hebrew or Aramaic), and I’m neither a Jew nor a Christian, but I have some very strong opinions about which Biblical translations are better or worse.
That might be a little different though since obviously the Bible is a different kind of text than Homer, and your opinion about translations are going to be influenced as much by your worldview, and your views about religion, as they are by actual linguistic considerations.
I’d argue that that the chud “historian” uses Homer in exactly the same way that a certain kind of Christian uses the Bible – as a basis for justifying their beliefs and as a source of clobber verses.
Which aspects of various Bible translations give rise to your your opinions? That would determine whether you are in fact qualified to have an opinion. I have small Latin, less Greek and no Hebrew, so when it comes to questions of fidelity or accuracy, I have to depend on the advice of people who have a good knowledge of the original languages. On matters of readability and ease of memorisation I *am* qualified to speak, as a lifelong reader of literature and teacher of children and young people.
@Rachel,
So in addition to not knowing Greek, Aramaic etc. and not being a Christian or Jew, I’m *also* not a religious-studies scholar, so I’m sure I will be butchering some of this. But, my general understanding is that the biggest difference between translations of the New Testament, specifically, is whether they rely on the Critical Text, which attempts to recreate the oldest possible manuscripts, or what they infer to be the oldest, or whether they adhere more closely to the Byzantine textual tradition that eventually became dominant in late-antique and medieval Christianity. Most modern translations into English are based on something close to the Critical Text, whereas the King James translation, and modern “updated” versions based on the King James, rely on something closer to the Byzantine text. There are a bunch of passages that have formed part of the religious experience of most Christians for most of history, but that you will not find in the New Revised Standard Version, except as a footnote or in brackets. (To their credit, I don’t think they actually delete any of those passages, they just separate them from the main text).
I’m not a Christian, but I do see some truth *in* Christianity (as I do in many other religions), and I see religious scriptures not as stand-alone works but as small pieces of a much broader, living tradition. As such, I want to know what the New Testament says *as a crystallized form of the religious tradition and experience of Christians*. I’m not actually that interested, at all, in what the earliest manuscript might or might not have said. I take the same approach when I’m reading, say, the Mahabharata, or a Norse epic or a Zoroastrian theological text, I want to read these works as part of an evolving tradition, not as something set in stone to be uneditable for all time.
Therefore, I prefer the King James version (I have other reasons for preferring it, for literary reasons, but I think the fact that it’s closer to the majority text is the biggest one).
The “earliest manuscript” supporters are probably coming from a Sola Scriptura perspective, and hence value texts that come as close as possible to eye-witness accounts or Apostolic writings. That isn’t going to be as much of an issue for Christians who put more weight on tradition.
In the conservative Protestant church I beling to, we spend a lot of time arguing about whether it’s OK to use “thought for thought” translations rather than more literal “word for word” ones. We left the Authorised Version behind a long time ago, mostly for reasons of readability. I enjoy using the AV (and the Vulgate!) myself, because I have had the necessary education to use it, but I don’t think it’s the best choice for everyday use by ordinary congregation members.
It’s much more complicated – insisting on the King James Version is generally a sign of extreme Sola Scriptura beliefs. Many – but not all – of the verses and passages that are absent from the earliest manuscripts are either proof texts for orthodox belief or favour conservative practice (not allowing women to speak in church, for example). Sola Scriptura advocates generally want to retain those passages. On the other hand, I think a lot of modern progressive Biblical scholarship is rooted in a 19th century romantic view of authentic individual vision vs restrictive society, and so aims at recovering the authentic individual vision of the earliest texts.
Personally, I would tend to have a mediating opinion: the choice of manuscript tradition is mainly a case of historical accident. Erasmus of Rotterdam had Byzantine Greek teachers and was utilising mainly Byzantine manuscripts when he published the first printed edition of Greek New Testament.
On the other hand, the authority of Bible comes from the fact that the Church of Christ has used it with rather good unanimity throughout centuries. The question which manuscript tradition is the oldest or best representative of the original text is not really the same as whether that tradition is the most authentic Word of God. In my opinion, the actual history of use of the text sheds light on the fact whether a certain passage is actually inspired by the Spirit. The Spirit has, namely, inspired the reception and transmission of the biblical books, not just the original author – and even the original author has been just a human being, not inspired in each jot and tittle, but in his writing in general.
This means, then, that biblical interpretation requires good historical research, exegetigal accuracy, theological prudence and understanding of languages. And it is not clear-cut: you should not base anything major on just one random biblical passage, exactly because this is not something where clear answers are possible. All major doctrines have a lot of biblical support and are not dependent on the interpretation of single passages.
@Finnish Reader,
In my opinion, the actual history of use of the text sheds light on the fact whether a certain passage is actually inspired by the Spirit. The Spirit has, namely, inspired the reception and transmission of the biblical books, not just the original author – and even the original author has been just a human being, not inspired in each jot and tittle, but in his writing in general.
Yes, I think that’s exactly the way a religious person should view religious writings, and stated better than I could. (I think it’s the most reasonable way for a Christian to view Christian scripture and, if you’re of more pluralistic or perennialistic inclination, to view relgious writings in general).
All major doctrines have a lot of biblical support and are not dependent on the interpretation of single passages.
I think that’s true, yes, and it’s also true that, as they say, no major Christian doctrine (outside, of, possibly, the fringe idea of snake-handling, which is illegal in most of the US) hinges on any of the disputed texts. I do think some of the disputed passages are relevant to interesting theological questions, though, even if certainly not decisive. You mentioned further down the thread discussions about the role of angels in Christian theology, and that’s certainly one where a text like John 5:4 (or for that matter the entire book of Tobit, where Catholics/Orthodox also disagree with most Protestants about whether it should be in the Bible) seems like it would have some relevance. Likewise the Pericope of the Adulteress is relevant to discussions about the death penalty, etc..
> I don’t know Greek (much less Hebrew or Aramaic), and I’m neither a Jew nor a Christian, but I have some very strong opinions about which Biblical translations are better or worse.
Note that Bret didn’t say an opinion, he said a useful opinion.
And, to put it bluntly – based on the experience you have attributed to yourself, you probably don’t have a useful opinion on Biblical translations.
@Tea Kew
I mean, you’re welcome to find whatever you like useful, or not. Obviously I disagree, I think my opinion is legitimate because it’s completely independent of the source language, so whether I know the source language is not relevant. My issues are with what source material you choose to translate, and secondarily with what register of English you translate it into.
To make an analogy, let’s say that Bret finishes his book on Roman military history, publishes it, and then ten years later he decides “you know, I could make some improvements to the text, take into account new findings, etc.”, and publishes a second edition.
And then let’s say some Chinese scholar with an excellent knowledge of English translates the first edition, and a Chinese scholar with a poor command of English translates the second.
I’m going to say that the second Chinese translation will be preferable to the first, even though it’s done by a guy who may not know English all that well, because it’s based on a preferable text. The concern here is *what you choose to translate* as much as it is “how well do you know how to translate it”.
Some assessment of certain translations can be made based on the context of those translations. I don’t need to review the more mystical interpretations of the Bible myself to conclude that they probably don’t have a lot to say on actual history–their methods and stated goals are contrary to such things. Using those to understand history is like saying that I need a hunting license to drive a car; sure, I COULD hit a deer in such a way as to provide food for my family, but only accidently and at great cost to myself.
I’ve read that the King James version of the Bible was written to sound beautiful, rather than to be a strictly accurate translation. Translation is always tricky and never precise, but if that’s true (and I assume a historian is going to know more than a geologist if it is) I can see that being a strong objection as well. We’re talking about a religion that killed people because they believed the Spirit proceeded from the Father to the Son rather than from the Father through the Son; details kinda matter, and going “I don’t care about the text, make it reasonably accurate and make it sound good!” is going to cause a lot of trouble.
To be clear, I’m not saying the KJV IS what I’m describing. I’m merely pointing it out as an example whereby a knowledge of history can lead one to object to a text without personally reading it.
Thing is, there’s only so much a (valid) opinion you can have on whether a translation is correct or not without knowing at least a bit of the original text and language. I’ll cop to having a Muslim upbringing with a bias on “Translation is a neccesary evil”, but one can never underestimate the changes one can bring by translating something without the context of the language itself, especially one as distant in linguistic gene, society and time as English is to Ancient Hebrew or Ancient Greek.
Even in English, words can mean different things in different context (time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana), can be ambiguous between concepts in the same context (Is a slave that costs Rp.0 a free man?), have words that have no easy mapping to the other language (The word “the” is my own personal devil) etc.
thank you wordpress for not showing this until I double posted
My rule of thumb when I attempt to post something and it fails is to open a new blank tab and wait until the page in question loads completely before deciding to repost. Not sure why, but the “send post to page server” step is much less likely to fail than the “send result back to poster” step.
There was a full day between my posts, and I was using incognito mode both times in different session (and waited for the page to load); surely it can’t be a cache miss.
Thing is, there’s only so much (useful) opinion you can have on the _accuracy_ of a translation without knowing the original language and culture of the original text, even _before_ you try (re)translating it yourself, which is what one of the Stoneface claims is doing according to the Bulwark article. Especially since it’s debating on the subtext of a fictional(ized) story made in the distant past.
You can compare translations, sure; you can say that most others translate this this way, and the others that way. You can say that this translation sounds/flows better than that, or that this one uses the original text while the other is a translation of a translation. But ultimately it’s all statistics; it is _more likely_ for one translation to be accurate, but without the original text you can’t be _sure_ it is correct.
Speaking personally as an autodidact history buff I feel like most of my history knowledge is an ENORMOUS puddle that covers a bit of most everything but isn’t all that deep in most cases. Still, the sheer size of my puddle allows me to draw comparisons and connections quite well even if I don’t know much about the state of the historiography in most of the things I know about.
My deepest pot hole isn’t that deep (some historical artisanal techniques) but it can seem deep as this is the kind of topic that historians (including those writing on directly related subjects) tend to not know the first things about. My proudest moments as a history buff was getting two posts by professional historians delegated from the AskHistorians subreddit for spreading absolute nonsense about how things were made in the past.
The statue PFPs are the proud heirs of a tradition reaching back to Herodotus himself. They just happen to use the Greeks and Romans rather than the Scythians, Celts, Germans, etc., and their decadent counterparts as the canvas they paint on with the purpose of talking to and about their own society. Amusingly, while doing so may not be accurate, but is often close to the spirit of the original works — and many of the classical authors would have been correspondingly annoyed if someone nitpicked their depictions of the barbarians. (Arguably, the interesting thing about the statue PFPs is how many of their art supplies they bought from Victorian gentlemen.)
Their companions writing about the present day often use Russia as their canvas. But at least as far as I know, very few use China. Lacuna?
And for a serious thought: it is a justified concern that every society needs its heroes. (“Imagined communities” and all that.) Given that perfect humans do not exist, and have never existed, to have historical heroes it is necessary to take people who have done something praiseworthy or have exhibited some trait worthy of imitation, highlight that angle, and tacitly omit the rest. Now, it is not strictly necessary to have historical heroes — mythological ones can suffice — but given that even the modern equivalents (from comic books to Star Wars) are nowadays frequently deconstructed or deliberately tarnished even in canon works, mirroring this complaint with “those academics […] study antiquity only to “diminish and outright malign the classics”” has a core of truth under the significant overreach.
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My reaction to this quote is quite Vicky3-flavored. It is possible but very ill-advised to tell a large group of people (perhaps defined by psychological profile more than by the well-worn categories such as “intelligentsia”/”PMC”, etc.) that they have just about nothing to contribute to society. In parallel to the old joke about owing the bank a hundred thousand vs. a hundred million dollars, for an individual to be useless to society sucks for the individual; for a large group of people to be useless sucks for the society. Because people want to be useful (and for this to be recognized in some way, not necessarily in material terms!), and are willing to remake society into a form they can be useful for and loyal to, or at least to try.
Surely one can recognize that the same principle operates along other axes, too. Do note that the ask does not extend to being included in the governing coalition. (The penalties for having too many blocks in there…) Personally I’m interested in the “Bowling Alone” problem definition as a potentially fertile approach.
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Personally, I see a completely different motivation behind that quote. “Science has won” at least decades ago. Look at fantasy fandom; nowadays, when they try to write magic systems, most amateurs go out of their way to provide a naturalistic explanation of how it works. Tolkien is the north star of this fandom, yet the people in it find the supernatural inconceivable. It has become unconscious mental routine to them to, so to speak, grab an angel by the wings and put it under a microscope; in words, the assertion/assumption is that there are no separate magisteria, that all phenomena are connected in one web of causality, that everything that does actually happen (or, in a fictional universe, the equivalent) is a part of the natural world and should be treated as such. Moreover, it is mundane rather than sacred (or profane). Thus the supernatural needs to retreat into the mental or the metaphorical.
“At least decades ago” is very imprecise. Already in the 18th century many prominent thinkers were deists. Antisupernaturalism only continued spreading, with the obligatory “god is dead, we killed him” quote dating from the late 19th century. Thus it is indeed moderately remarkable to see a prayer written in the 19th century to exhibit a premodern (glossed as “medieval”) worldview, because there existed an intellectual subculture that happened to maintain supernaturalism that late.
Thus it is indeed moderately remarkable to see a prayer written in the 19th century to exhibit a premodern (glossed as “medieval”) worldview, because there existed an intellectual subculture that happened to maintain supernaturalism that late.
I mean, there are lots of people *today* (on a global level, I’d say it would be the large majority) who wholeheartedly believe in the supernatural, so I don’t think it’s remarkable at all to see a 19th century prayer using the language of angelic warfare.
Presumably the Pope is Catholic, both in the 19th century and today, and therefore believes in angelic warfare, and all his followers including myself.
The question here is not whether one believes in angelic warfare, but whether one chooses it to be a focal point of one’s kerygma.
Angels are, after all, quite minor a point of faith, and they are not independent actors, but servants of the Most High. They may bring messages, or help in wonders, but in my opinion, talk about “angelic warfare” is easily misunderstood and carries connotations that are not always quite inducive to sobriety in faith and practice. Therefore – it seems – quite a few of the most recent popes have been mainly talking about them on the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel. And not quite in the same terms that the prayer that we are discussing here. Although most likely, being Catholic, you are better versed in popes than I, a Lutheran.
Nay, what is remarkable is that Enlightenment philosophers had very good arguments against the Christian religion in the mid-18th century, and German Biblical scholars had eviscerated it in the 19th. And yet, large swathes of the population seem to have remained ignorant of these developments, so that religious devotion remained strong well into the 20th century even in the most educated countries! Why did secularisation proceed so slowly?
Because it turned out that the Enlightenment philosophers’ arguments weren’t actually that good (oftentimes being rehashes of arguments made during the early days of Christianity–there really is nothing new under the sun) and the Germans were wrong about quite a lot.
We *know*, we just don’t *agree*.
But at least as far as I know, very few use China. Lacuna?
Lots of people compare the US unfavorably to China (including, in many contexts, me), but mabe you meant that none of the “chuds” do, specifically? If so, that’s probably right, admiration for China (at least relative to the US) tends to come from other political perspectives.
>Thus it is indeed moderately remarkable to see a prayer written in the 19th century to exhibit a premodern (glossed as “medieval”) worldview, because there existed an intellectual subculture that happened to maintain supernaturalism that late.
Not exactly, since we have the entire Romantic movement in-between. (which also gets us the question to which extent something is *genuinely* supernaturalist or simply trying to evoke an old-timey feeling…
Yes, but the Catholic Church has always tended more towards a significantly logical / not-antirationalist / not-emotionalist approach that I would see as at odds with Romanticism (and it was Romanticism that lead to neopaganism).
In this sense the catholic church is simply very big, and different stremas (some more pietistic and romantic vs. some more logical/rationalistic) largely coexist(ed).
Also, part of romanticism was *itself* a kind of admiration for/infatuation with catholicism (as part of said medieval aestethics)
Why? This seems like a baseless ex nihilo axiom. Who decided that? What happens to societies that do not have any traditional heroes? The necessity for a society to have heroic tradition is a notion that I have just newly, freshly heard, just now. Has anyone actually discussed or analyzed this? (You referenced Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” – could you please give me a summary, as I haven’t read it myself?)
Instead of lipstick, the chuds are “Putting a toga on a pig”.
*Chef’s Kiss*
I don’t think it’s strictly accurate to say that Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media “pushes people into fascism”. They seem to push people into /extremes/, of which fascism is only one. There’s a similar “pipelines” leading to radical feminism, anarchism, communism, generalized antisemitism, racial supremacism of other sorts, and some absolutely bizarre religion variants, to name only a few.
Radical feminism makes an interesting case study, because I’ve seen multiple groups start out with basic feminism (men and women are equal, women need support and emphasis e.g. in history due to historic male-dominance) and then their respective pipelines lead them to /hate/ each other. So the former community dissolves into melee: trans-positive vs TERF vs “proud slut” vs puritanical vs SWERF vs slid off into a different direction and are howling that no one will be free until their brand of communism or anarchism or black separatism is established, so why bother empowering women now? These communities produce plenty of absolutely vile views and misinformation, historical revisionism, and ego-building.
However, fascism is viewed as unique in evil, thus unlike other forms of extremist or evil views it needs to be banned and disclaimed, must require some conspiracy to embrace, and as many views as possible that a speaker doesn’t like should be considered some form of it, so it seems to dominate.
As an architect with a lot of knowledge about classical architecture I feel your pain. Generally it’s posts from the same types with “why don’t we build like this anymore?” as a tagline. And while I love classical architecture there’s a million reasons we don’t build that way anymore. Might as well ask why we don’t all still wear powdered wigs.
I’d be curious to hear some of those million reasons, though I do not for a moment doubt that there are many of them.
Money. Reasons 1 through 999,000 are money.
To start the conversation you have to remember that the photos being shown as “what we used to build” are always the top few percent of buildings. It’s like comparing a standard home to a mansion from some multi-millionaire. The example I’ve seen is the house from Home Alone, which is presented as the “normal” family home of that era–except that the family is huge and the parents are treating their relatives to a trip to France.
Anyway, the average home for most of human existence was a cheaply put-together shack that was built with less care than they used to build the hog styes. When you compare those against today’s buildings, we come out pretty good.
As for why we don’t build like that anymore when it comes to commercial buildings, it’s money. We certainly can build like that, but it’s expensive. Hand-carved ornamental gingerbread requires a lot of time from skilled craftsmen to make. Even in a CNC machine it takes time and skill. The intricate paintings are pretty much only possible if someone paints the thing–wallpaper is an option to get around the cost, but no one likes it. And modern building methods aren’t amenable with a lot of ornamentation. Cast-in-place concrete walls don’t lend themselves to gargoyles.
Again, can we build like the past? Sure. We could build a cathedral no problem. The technology is mature and well-understood. But no one’s going to pay for it. Everyone wants the lowest cost, and every construction company wants the highest margin (money left over after expenses). Buildings aren’t built to be beautiful, they’re built to make someone money.
(This is why you should be THOROUGH in your inspections on a new home. I’m not a fan of composite studs/joists or of gusset plates–they’re the reason why you have 5 minutes to escape a house fire these days, as opposed to 15 in the past–but the number of corners cut on new million-dollar construction is absurd. There’s a whole genre of videos on social media of inspectors showing crap contractors have pulled.)
All that said, there are trends that are lamentable in interior design. Thanks to social media and some other trends we tend to decorate living spaces based on resale value rather than based on personal preference. The whole “Millennial Gray” thing. You see the same thing in house colors and cars–photos of the same neighborhood over time show a decrease in color in our world. It’s even infested baby toys, which is really problematic because bright colors are important for development. And that is 100% our own fault. We can, if we choose, design our spaces to be whimsical and functional and cozy, but we for decades have chosen cold sterility.
I think it’s worth clarifying that it depends on the time period you’re treating as nostalgic too. Cathedrals are expensive and there’s no appetite for them anymore, in fact even Catholics are trending towards clerical asceticism as an ideal in my personal experience, so no one really goes for the big buildings.
But if you’re talking about more modern building, circa the 20th century, everything costs much more now. And the core of that issue is rent seeking; there’s a foundational incentive to extract as much money from the public and consumer for as little work as possible in a capitalist economy. You alluded to this, and on a basic level it should produce cheaper construction.
But it’s resulted in a regulatory and business environment where you have consultants on top of consultants who are also the relatives or patrons of politicians, whom have basically rendered it impossible to *do* anything without paying a dozen different contractors to do nothing. The basic function of capitalism has led to a bunch more managers and administrators being supported on the labor of fewer and worse paid workers, which is why costs have blossomed at least 50-100% on all new construction. If not an order of magnitude or more. Accounting for generic inflation.
Its also not purposeful. This isn’t environmental regulation, or safety inspection, we know how to do that cheaply. There’s contracts for painting sidewalks that come in at a million dollars. That’s completely decoupled from any purposeful regulation.
The problem, throughout society, is rent seeking. It’s supporting an entire class of consultants and administrators that spend their entire time extracting rent from workers. It occurs in government and business, healthcare and religion. It’s international, acting without boundaries and irrespective of locality. And it’s why everything is so expensive, why no public works are done anymore, and why nothing gets built.
Even if people wanted to build a cathedral there’d be a hundred consultants getting paid for every man hour of work done, and it’d cost more than heaven itself to actually make. It’s a flaw caused by capitalism working as intended. Every owner gets their pound of flesh.
(And no-capitalisn unbound by government does not fix this, capitalists will gleefully extract rent in other ways if allowed and form their own government if undistributed. It’s a problem caused by *the concept of ownership*, that owning something necessary lets you extract as much money as possible from everyone else.)
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you don’t have a lot of experience managing construction projects, and no experience at all with environmental and safety regulations.
While such things as “consultants on top of consultants who are also the relatives or patrons of politicians” occasionally happen, it’s the exception, not the rule. I’ve been in the industry 20 years and I’ve never seen it. Mostly we’re hard-working experts in our fields who do what we can to support and protect our clients. If we DO have relatives in office it’s called a conflict of interest and we’re supposed to (legally required to) discloses it at minimum, and usually to recuse ourselves from the project. Even being in the same bowling league as a politician with influence over the project or regs in question can be enough to get someone blacklisted form the project. This isn’t the 1930s; we’re not fedora-wearing thugs with tommy guns. Folks take this VERY seriously.
Good consultants do everything we can to get you to done without running afoul of regulations. That’s our job. And while we may get paid more this time if we milk the job, we get paid more overall if we work efficiently. You’re dealing with a bunch of experts so it’s not exactly cheap, but that cost is factored into the costs of construction. And most of the time those costs are less than the costs of liability if you DON’T consider environmental and safety regs. Altering watersheds such that it increases landslides tends to anger communities. Look at the trouble fracking got into for not being thorough in investigating impacts. Or dams. It’s cheaper to pay up front and be certain you’re done paying.
Bear in mind that a cathedral–or a library, or anything like that–is going to be VASTLY smaller than any transportation or utility corridor. And we routinely accomplish major construction projects on the scale of cathedrals in fairly short time. See the Olympics for examples of this. The idea that regulations make this impossible is frankly laughable. It’s not “Dig, baby, dig!” but it’s not full stop either. The idea is to construct things in an efficient, organized, logical, and well-thought-out manner.
“This isn’t environmental regulation, or safety inspection, we know how to do that cheaply.”
Please explain this. I eagerly await this. As does my boss, and his boss, and my clients. If you could tell me how to do this for even 10% less it would give me such an edge in my bids that it would ensure I have work until retirement.
You’re not entirely wrong, which is why views like this are so seductive. What we’ve done is make a trade-off, and if you ignore the prior costs (which you completely fail to mention) you can pretend that we’ve increased costs. Once you add those trade-offs back in, the picture becomes much more complicated. Instead of destroying things without considering the impacts we at least make an attempt to control the damage we do and mitigate it. As for safety, we use up-front costs like fall harnesses, PPE, engineering controls, and construction methods to replace literally killing people. Used to be there was a line item in the budgets of construction projects for fatalities because they were viewed as inevitable. As a society we pay the cost of not killing people, rather than paying in blood.
Making construction projects consider downstream impacts, and also ensuring that they don’t commit the moral equivalent of manslaughter, isn’t making construction more expensive. It’s bringing the existing costs to light.
The ironic thing is that many of these requirements help companies. Turns out sites that kill people or run over endangered species have a bunch of other problems as well. They require massive amounts of re-work, crappy equipment that’s down quite often, poor work approaches that make things take longer than necessary, etc. There have been decades of study on this–check out “Behavior based loss prevention” sometime–and unsafe sites are ALWAYS inefficient. For every fatality there are THOUSANDS of smaller incidents that cost time and money. Same with environmental regs. Turns out actually managing your waste systematically allows you to 1) know what waste you have, 2) take advantage of economies of scale and similar stuff, since you’re not piece-mealling your waste management, and often 3) finding someone who can use the waste.
To be frank, I’m even more convinced your industry is fucked. I truly didn’t think you’d defend it. If you can’t even acknowledge the problems that’s a really bad sign.
I mean, are you seriously claiming people are following the law about disclosing conflicts of interest? Are you fucking kidding me? Fuck, they’re currently arresting people over a reflecting pool ruined because *the president* awarded a contract to his golf buddy donor! Corruption on that level implicates the entire system. Even if you’re somehow the one contractor not engaged in backroom deals you’d be speaking for a system that’s obviously corrupt.
It’s just…disqualifying to even claim that’s a defense of your industry.
I’m also not wholly ignorant. I’ve seen some of this corruption, and I’ve also seen little things that amount to the same. Outsourcing of functions best done in house resulting in price hikes are a big one. It adds people to the procurement chain but doesn’t add any value; we could do it, but are prevented from doing so. I can’t speak any more specific legally, but I *know* that this was done to siphon money. It wasn’t even hidden. There was open lobbying.
Plus, you know, the million dollar sidewalk paint contracts. Reality speaks.
You’re not pointing to evidence based on your expertise and saying “look! That’s what I know you’re missing!”, you’re pointing at your expertise and saying “Trust me that you’re ignorant”.
No. Sorry, but no. If this is a perspective thing yours is wrong.
“f you can’t even acknowledge the problems that’s a really bad sign.”
If you think I don’t know the problems that’s your problem. Trust me, I have an inside view of it–but most of what you’re talking about are not the problems. Your entire understanding of the industry appears to be from headlines and click-bate. Mine is from being a part of it.
One problem I’m going to have in this discussion is that because I’m in the industry I’m subject to non-disclosure agreements. You can–and apparently will–make any wild accusation you wish, and I can’t defend it without losing my job (because people DO watch for this sort of thing) or going to jail. I’ll do what I can to help put the record straight, though.
Also, you appear to be getting highly emotional about this. Which is funny, because you’re the one attacking me. You are literally telling me I’m either irredeemably corrupt (if I follow what you think are industry norms) or hopelessly incompetent (if I don’t). I won’t let you hide behind generalities; you’re discussing ME here. And you’re the one throwing a fit and swearing and whatnot. I would suggest you ask yourself why you’re offended by someone in the industry you’re attacking offering to discuss it with you.
“I mean, are you seriously claiming people are following the law about disclosing conflicts of interest?”
Are you seriously using something DONALD TRUMP is doing as representative of how the industry as a whole works? That should discredit your entire argument right there. NOTHING THIS MAN HAS DONE in the past TWO YEARS is normal. This includes EVERY ONE of his construction projects. (Yes, I’m getting emotional about this one. I have my reasons. No, I won’t share them.)
I can tell you that that that project was NOT conducted per industry norms. Sure, some conflicts of interest go undisclosed. It happens. But by and large the industry does disclose them. And we get audited routinely, partially to determine if there are conflicts of interest. Do sole-source contracts occur? The fact that we have a name for it says they do. I do them myself–been on both ends of it. But there typically are a lot of requirements, such as being below a certain threshold, proprietary technology, already working at the site so a lot of preliminary work is done, stuff like that. Trump ran rough-shod over all of these safeguards. Which again is not normal.
There are people (contract administrators) who spend their entire careers handling these issues, by the way. I assure you, unless you are a KA (the acronym for them, not sure why it’s a K instead of a C) you’re not an expert. I know I’m certainly not; I was reminded of that no less than six times today. For that matter, a KA for a client may not be an expert in contract law for subcontracts and vice versa. This stuff gets SUPER complicated SUPER fast, precisely to fight that corruption you claim is rampant.
“Plus, you know, the million dollar sidewalk paint contracts.”
I once saw a million-dollar toilet get installed. I asked about it. Not my project, just happening near a jobsite and I got to chatting with folks. Saw the receipt for the toilet–the toilet itself was a couple hundred, bought at Home Depot, same model as I have at home in fact. But the project was over a million dollars. Why? Because Step 1 was to dig out the old sceptic tank (which is a huge undertaking) and Step 2 was to tie into the new(ish, 30 years old at that point) sewer line. Then there was all the necessary work to bring a building built in 1935 and last renovated in 1960 up to modern building codes. Some re-wiring and other stuff had to happen as to get that done. All of this was because not doing so would cost the contractors their licenses. Ended up being around a million bucks to install the toilet–not because of corruption, but because of the non-toilet stuff necessary to put the toilet in.
Sidewalks are going to be particularly bad cases of this. Ever work with the DOT Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices? I got a crash-course in it a couple of years ago; sort of became the onsite expert, which wasn’t what I thought I’d be doing when I went to school for paleontology! But it’s an example of cost-saving measures the industry takes, as I served like six roles on that job. Anyway, what controls you need depend on how far you are from the lanes (the legally defined lanes, which may not match the pavement), who owns the road, and how fast traffic is going, among other things. And yes, this often applies to sidewalks, which are often within the distance where work requires traffic control (I’ve had that argument with multiple government agencies, trust me, you won’t win this argument). Ever price out those orange barrels? $50-$70 a pop. You may need a hundred or more, depending on the size of the jobsite. Plus labor to deploy them. And you have to have them at every location, because–as I said in a previous post–we got tired of killing construction workers a generation ago. Do this a couple dozen times and it can get expensive. And bear in mind that’s only one aspect. You need the signage (multiple, along multiple access routes), you may need flaggers (HUGE risks of liability), you may need to pay a cop to be there full-time, you may need lighting (so many lumines) if you’re working at night, etc ad nauseum. Costs rack up quick. Plus all your targeted ads become about traffic control, which is annoying.
Bear in mind, that’s just one regulation they have to follow. Where’s your SDS? Where’s your eye wash station? How often do you rotate the water? Where’s your spill kit? How do you handle broken sidewalks? What’s your relationship with the local gangs like? What’s your plan if the truck you’re using breaks down and blocks traffic? How low are the power lines, and how high is the truck? How are you disposing of the spent paint cans (which may be hazardous waste in some jurisdictions)? What’s the government rate for hotels and food? These aren’t hypothetical; these are real things I have to deal with, often routinely (yes, even the gang one; got my first company swag because of a treaty made with the local gangs on a job).
I’m not saying government waste doesn’t happen. I know FAR better than you about waste in this area, I assure you. But a lot of times what looks ridiculous from the outside only looks ridiculous because you aren’t familiar enough with the requirements and lack the details necessary to evaluate it properly. What I’d be asking for is the schedule of values and scope of work. That’s what’ll tell you if they’re inflating costs, and WHY they’re doing the things they’re doing. Without that you’re doing nothing but making an Argument from Personal Incredulity. I’m not going to base my next proposal on your views on how much it’ll cost; I’m going to base it on what the actual costs are.
If you think I’m not providing you with details and just relying on expertise, that just shows your ignorance. I’m telling you precisely where to look, including specific project documents and laws, to build your case. And bear in mind, this isn’t even a summary, just me giving examples. There’s something called a Change Management Meeting where we sit down and discuss all of this, in detail, routinely, to verify that all this stuff is going according to plan.
Again, does corruption occur? Sure. I’m the last person to say it doesn’t, I’ve seen too much. But you’ve got to look beyond the headlines, and look at what’s actually going on.
By the way, it takes YEARS to learn this. AT MINIMUM half a decade. The US ACE requires five years training under a CQM before you can be a quality manager (the person who ultimately ensures all this stuff gets dealt with). If you think reading a few headlines makes you an expert…..well, that just shows you don’t know enough to know how little you know.
Dinwar, Trump is a significant real estate holder in New York and Florida, among others.
Yes. His behaviors are typical of the larger real estate and contracting industry. This is what he’s been thriving in for the past sixty years. It’s why everything is so expensive, shitty, and nothing gets done.
Trump was not produced ex nihlo. He is a product of all the flaws and sins of our systems, and he’s not unique to them. If you can acknowledge that he’s bad but not why to are missing the point, massively. He’s such a damning indictment, and keeps getting away with it, because every new flaw we see in him indicates *everyone* on top of our society has always been the same as him.
And this ought not be surprising. They support him, after all. They all bent the knee.
I read your reply. I cannot meaningfully reply to all of it because you’re having an emotional reaction based on a perceived attack.
I will try one last attempt; you argued in defense of a million dollar toilet installation. You pointed to a bunch of regulations involving contractors losing their jobs. Your argument is that you know these regulations, and it’s complicated, and you’re an expert, so it makes sense.
What you’re missing is why they exist. You’re mentioning a bunch of positions and regulations and functions, and yet never asking who wrote them, who gets paid, and why.
Health insurance is the same way. You can walk through why each medicine in a stay costs so much. You can follow the patents, regulations, the single use shots and equipment and consults and explain each component. You can point to a dozen administrators and show what each of their jobs are.
But at the end of the day healthcare costs are double or triple what they are in other Western countries, and often orders of magnitude over all material and logistical costs.
The exact same incentives to create as much administrative bloat as possible exists in construction. Just like healthcare outcomes are awful and everything is over cost. Just like healthcare there’s universal issues in all western countries, only gated by degree. And just like healthcare there’s massive amounts of useless regulations and contractors.
I’ve had this conversation with healthcare administrators.
You’re saying the same things they did.
So no, an argument from absurdity *fucking works* because the situation is *absurd*. But it’s also an argument by comparison. This has gotten worse *in our lifetimes*. It’s gotten much worse in the last hundred years. The relative costs are higher for worse outcomes. By comparing to our own past we can tell that something is wrong.
“Yes. His behaviors are typical of the larger real estate and contracting industry. ”
Now you’re moving the goal posts. We started off talking construction. You included consulting, environmental, and safety–which isn’t the same, but fair enough, they’re related.
Now you are using real estate, contracting, and health care to justify accusations against the construction industry, industries that have no more to do with construction than tech startups or shipping or horse racing. And you’re refusing to even discuss the issues I raised, other than to attempt to hand-wave them away.
As for the rest, it’s just the Gish Gallop. You’re going to hurl every accusation you can against the industry, without any interest in actually learning anything. This is evident by the fact that I provided multiple case-studies to demonstrate why your accusations are wrong and you simply refuse to examine them.
The combination of incivility, bad-faith arguments, and willful ignorance make this a conversation I will not continue. I am only posting this so that others reading this comments section can see the extent of the dishonesty in your posting.
Nothing you said was *relevant* Dinwar. Everything you said amounts to “trust me, let me throw a bunch of anecdotal reasons I have authority here” at us, and that’s *not a fucking argument*! It doesn’t even answer the question! You can be completely correct on everything you said and everything I said is still right!
The only actual disagreement is you’re insisting everything is fine and everyone deserves their job. But your argument for that has nothing to do with mine. You’re arguing from the perspective that their jobs make sense in the system they’re in, and I’m arguing that system is flawed.
The reason I’m not addressing the specifics is you’ve framed them in a way I can’t without attacking you, because I need to either just say you’re wrong or attack your company.
Look, I’ll show you.
> Please explain this. I eagerly await this. As does my boss, and his boss, and my clients. If you could tell me how to do this for even 10% less it would give me such an edge in my bids that it would ensure I have work until retirement.
You have two bosses. Fire them. And you’re suspect too. There’s three levels of management between a manual worker and the client. Likely there’s an owner on top of the ceo too. There’s unknown numbers of other admins too. And I bet you all earn more than the workers in the field.
If there’s one excess manager per ten workers you’d cut 10%. Easy.
Do you see now? I have to argue you and the people you know don’t have jobs that matter. I cannot prove that to you, but that has nothing to do if I’m right; I don’t know your experience, and I’d have to argue from mine which I *can’t vet to you*, and even if I could prove that to you you’d never accept it because it’s personal.
And you’ve already admitted you’re under an NDA.
So by positioning your personal anecdotes and experience as the source of evidence you’ve ensured we *can’t* discuss this in that way. I keep trying to go back to the larger topic because that’s the only way to address the actual point without directly challenging you. And you already came out of the gate swinging.
And, as I said, your arguments aren’t even definitive. The things your saying explain why people made decisions in the system, not why the system is designed the way it is. Even if every one of the people in your supervision ladder has a purpose in the procurement process that has nothing to do with if a better procurement process could cut them.
So at least have the decency not to accuse me of deception. You’ve constructed an argument I can’t address for reasons well beyond its merits.
Well, I don’t know of anyone who wants to build *classical* architecture today; who would want a building like the Parthenon? But there are a lot of complaints we don’t build things that look like (with updated systems!) the buildings with classically-inspired esthetics from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
“magnitudo, ‘greatness’ is not a core Roman value”
That is somewhat surprising to me. I had understood the Roman triumphs as celebrations of, if not greatness, then at least something close to it. Indeed, the whole “cursus honorum” seems to me like a way to channel elite ambitions in a way beneficial to the state, and that only works if the elites already have a lot of ambition for, again, if not greatness, then something close to it. Have I misunderstood the purpose of these things?
I did raise an eyebrow at that and wondered if Sulla was aware when he granted Pompey his cognomen.
It’s my understanding that the cognomen of “Magnus” was contemporaneously regarded as atypical verging on kind of embarrassing.
This is in an era where there are still Roman values that place an emphasis on statue portraits that make one look old and craggy because that’s regarded as dignified, and the typical cognomen is something kind of performatively understated like “chickpea” and “bald”.
Regarding the casting of the Odyssey, consider the following: Let’s say some big-shot Hollywood director makes a movie based on African folktales. He casts lots of big name actors who happen to have dark skin, but none of them are actually from Africa, or only have a small portion of African heritage. One of the characters, not a central one but still important is Anansi the Trickster Spider. At one point Anansi turns into a human, and said human is a pale-skinned, blond-haired blue-eyed man. Would everybody who thinks Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey is just fine also be okay with this?
I feel we should not discuss that movie until most people have had a chance to see it. Wait a bit.
I’m fine with color-blind casting, so sure why not have Anansi turn into that kind of human.
As for the casting in the 2026 Odyssey, while I haven’t seen the movie yet, I have looked at the IMDB page. I don’t see any Greeks playing the Greek characters, yet somehow this doesn’t seem to upset the people complaining about Lupita Nyong’o. The entire cast would have been “barbarians” of one sort or another for a classical Greek audience.
I support color-blind casting for the somewhat high minded ideal that at least some stories have universal appeal, and thus should not be restricted in who can tell them. Hollywood though is mostly doing “woke” casting for the most capitalist of reasons: to make money. Studio don’t just want US dollars, they want euros, yuan, pesos, naira, … and the number of people who will pay to see a movie with an international cast exceeds the number of reactionaries who declare they’ll boycott the movie.
+1 for consistency, but given how badly the trailers have been received, I’m not too optimistic this film will turn a profit.
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? as asked. The answer was “Tolstoy.”
@PeterT,
The answers I prefer to that question are 1) “The Zulus may not have a Tolstoy, but I’m pretty sure they have a Homer”, and 2) the observation that the Zulus are actually pretty young as a national group (their language is still largely mutually intelligible with some of their neighboring languages), so it wouldn’t be surprising if it took them a while to reach literary flowering. America didn’t produce Nathaniel Hawthorne until like 200 years after Boston was founded, for that matter.
I think the problems with the Nolan Odyssey is just that it looks both incredibly cheap and incredibly dull. The casting is like… 20 steps down. And honestly if we’re going with fidelity filming it in England (?) and Iceland (???) is weirder to me than the casting.
I think it’s interesting in a way because they have the scenes of Odysseus with his crew on the journey home getting blown to waters that are Beyond (TM). When Homer sang of Odysseus’ homeward journey, I don’t think he meant to imply that you could personally hop aboard a ship and go find the island of the Sirens or whatever in a journey of reasonable length (say, within the Aegean, a week’s sailing or less away from much of Greece).
If Odysseus is traveling to the shores of the land of the dead, or to a place where armored giants and moving trees are slaughtering his men, it’s entirely appropriate for those places to make you think “wow, we are definitely not in Greece anymore!”
One of the characters, not a central one but still important is Anansi the Trickster Spider. At one point Anansi turns into a human, and said human is a pale-skinned, blond-haired blue-eyed man. Would everybody who thinks Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey is just fine also be okay with this?
I certainly wouldn’t be OK with it, in general. I’m not a big fan of “race blind” movies or literature, and I’m certainly not a fan of works that try to squeeze propaganda for multiethnic or multicultural societies into contexts where it really doesn’t belong. I especially wouldn’t be a fan of that kind of thing when we’re talking about an explicitly national literature. I certainly wouldn’t want to see a movie version of the Kalevala or Welsh mythology or whatnot be made with actors who look like, say, me. It’s not our nation, it’s not our literature, these aren’t our gods and heroes, they shouldn’t look like we do!
That said, I think the question here is whether the Greek culture and literature of classical antiquity belongs to a particular ethnic-national group, or whether it’s sort of a universal bit of “world literature”, the property of the whole globe. I don’t have that strong of an opinion on that question myself, and I don’t know what modern Greeks would have to say about it (or for that matter, people in modern Turkey who might be genetic descendants of the ancient Greeks even if their language, religion and the way they perceive themselves is different). But, I think it’s clear that at least *some* Greeks, since the time of Alexander the Great, and lots of people in countries like England and America over the centuries since then, saw Greek civilization as a kind of universal civilization with a global mission. If that’s how you perceive these stories, then it would make sense to make a movie without any particular concern for the race or ethincity of the people in it.
Here’s a statement from some modern Greeks:
https://greekcitytimes.com/2026/05/25/a-letter-to-hollywood-and-nolans-odyssey-cast-from-us-greeks/?_gl=1*o4sav6*_up*MQ..*_ga*MTUyMjM2MTU3LjE3ODM4NDQ2MTM.*_ga_QYX0VB6QBR*czE3ODM4NDQ2MTMkbzEkZzEkdDE3ODM4NDQ2NzckajYwJGwwJGgxMDY4MDQ4NDU3JGR4VUFUNTcyeGFkY2tKTVhZQWR4VG9KOWJSaGM0UlF5eXd3
BTW, the same paper reports that in the international publicity tour for the movie, Greece was left out.
@Hector,
I am not quite sure about your phenotype and nationality, but I think that in general, it is universally agreed that Kalevala is very unsuited to movie format. The TV series Rauta-aika is probably the best attempt, and it is more the work of its scriptwriter, the noted Finnish modernist writer Paavo Haavikko than about the book itself.
Thus, the race of the actors is somewhat immaterial, because no matter how you do it, a Kalevala movie is going to be pretty bad.
@Finnish Reader,
Thanks for the insight! I was not actually aware that it was considered “unfilmable”, but in that case it’s probably good that no one has tried. Some works definitely translate better to film than others.
For what it’s worth, i’m a US citizen of South Asian (Tamil) descent.
No, there have been attempts, but none successful. The most recent, Kalevala : The Story of Kullervo was made with rather massive state support (4.5 M€), concentrating on one short episodic story, and is widely considered a flop, not having received a hundred thousand domestic viewers. The critical reception can be summarised: “An altogether too long a movie about a whiny idiot.”
Personally, as I believe that Kalevala discusses human archetypal stories, some elements of which it shares with Vedic literature, I would not really have any issue about Indian actors playing roles in a production themed around it.
Well I like Jade Warrior. I guess you need to make a Chinese wuxia film to create an entertaining Kalevala movie.
I mean, I am torn about engaging with this leading question at all, but are you suggesting that Ancient Homeric Fantasy Greeks are supposed to exclusively be portrayed by ‘White’ actors?
Trojans were Anatolian, geographically. Myceanean Greeks were, probably a Mediterranean people. So what actors do you think should be cast? Presumably not Matt Damon – of Scottish, British, and Scandanavian ancestry according to his public profile – as Odysseus?
Nolan’s work is a modern Anglo-American adaptation using a wide variety of Hollywood actors. It’s fine.
Then you’d be okay with color-blind casting across the board, like scifihughf here? The question is meant to make you think. In the past people have complained about “whitewashing”, when white characters are cast for characters in a non-white setting, “Gods of Egypt”, Scarlett Johansson in “Ghost In the Shell.” If whitewashing is bad, then so is the opposite.
Personally I think if Nolan really meant to make this THE Odyssey of the 21st century, he would’ve been better served to look up Greek or at least Greek-looking actors and actresses (and yes, Anatolian-looking for the Trojans). Probably would’ve ended up with lesser-known cast members to work with, but his own name attached would be a sufficient draw, I’d think. He also would’ve been better served to get more period-accurate armor and clothing and such (I expect our host will get into that at least, when the movie comes out) and also use a more accurate translation of the original as a reference point.
If the movie was in a more contemporary setting, like “O brother Where Art Thou” or “West Side Story”, I doubt the backlash would be as severe.
The argument that if whitewashing is bad then so is the opposite assumes that there is equivalence between the representation of white people in films and theatre and the representation of black people in films and theatre. Maybe in a couple of generations we’ll be in a position where that’s true and there is parity. But we’re not there yet. In Western media looking caucasian is still the unmarked condition.
Personally I care more about quality than equivalence. That being said I’d love to see more films and TV showing non-white actors, just not as token slots or race-swapping. Either craft the kind of story when race doesn’t make any difference on the plot or characterization, or give non-white folklore and history better treatment. I think there’s plenty of untapped potential in stories out of places like Africa, the Middle East, etc. Just cast actors who at least LOOK like they come from the region you’re portraying, and do at least enough research that nerds like us who read blogs like this can’t spot the inaccuracies a mile away.
Ghost in the Shell is a very bad example of this because the character actually was white (or, more accurately, a ghost in a white shell, to allude to the fact that it’s not her body is such a major plot point it’s what the entire title is in refernce to. They did not race-swap the character’s shell, nor her birth ethnicity, where she’s portrayed as japanese, as in the original).
They still took heat for the casting decision, but I’ll grant it wasn’t race-swapping in the strictest sense. I should’ve gone with John Wayne playing Genghis Khan.
Question: who colonised who within the last couple hundred years?
Irrelevant, IMHO. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Much better in the long run than trying rationalize different for different groups in the same situation.
I am reminded of the meme depicting equality as “everybody who wants to look over a fence gets a box the same size, regardless of whether they’re already tall enough to see over it or too short for the box to help” and equity as “everybody gets a box big enough to help them see over the fence”.
Context matters, and power dynamics and the implications they create for recasting or reimagining certain character positions are not equivalent in all instances.
Equity is **everybody** gets a box who needs it. Whether your great-grandfather was a slave or a slave trader does not matter.
It’s a thought-provoking meme, but here are the problems I have with it: First, it presumes everyone has the God-given right to look over the fence. As I recall, what they are watching is a baseball game…which indicates none of them bought tickets for it. Just because you want something, it does not automatically mean you are entitled to it. Second, sometimes life just isn’t fair. We can try to make it a little more fair, or at least ameliorate the unfairness, but after a certain point you are simply moving the unfairness to somebody else. Consider the following video, where it’s not fair that a man is stuck with only one leg, but he wants to play Tarzan:
The medical field of prosthetics says what?
*different standards
Answer: I don’t care who colonised who. I believe in helping people based on the here and now, not what my ancestor did to your ancestor. (Since I’m northern European descent, it is almost always what my ancestors did.)
Why stop at the last couple of hundred years? That’s a convenient time frame, because going further back would bring up the large scale and long lasting slavery of Africans by the Islamic states of north African and the Middle East. And very often those African slaves were sold to China…
Yes this is “what about-ism”. That’s what bringing up historical injustices almost always ends up at, that’s why very little actually gets done to help the people in the here and now who need it. People today don’t need to acknowledge the sins of their fathers, and their father’s fathers, before they can make the world a better place. Trying to make people feel guilty about stuff they didn’t personally do and can never correct (without an actual working time machine) is more likely to make them ignore an issue, not confront it.
I’m not denying that an honest history of how we got to where we are today isn’t useful and necessary. But I’m not going to decide someone alive today needs help or not based on what happened to their great-great-grandmother.
Seconded. I will add that as an eroupan I find treating few houdred years this seriously is a bit silly. There are nations (and yes that includeds non-european ones) that have existed for thousend years. Few houdred is relevant, but it is ultimately just an era.
The consequences of 19th century policies continue to form the shape of the modern world, both in international power dynamics and numerous domestic situations. In a significant number of cases, what happened to a person’s great-great-grandmother is the basis for their material and social conditions today.
And it’s not as if the consequences of racially stratified imperialism are some distant abstraction. The last African country to be decolonised was in the 70s. Something that lines up rather elegantly with the African American Civil Rights movement, and its salient details such as Martin Luthor King laying out a rather elegant comparison between how the difference between the Homestead Acts and slavery drew a very direct line to the economic disparities that existed in his own day.
The last African country to be decolonised was in the 70s
Almost- Zimbabwe took till 1980 and Namibia took till 1990.
@Isator Levi
“In a significant number of cases, what happened to a person’s great-great-grandmother is the basis for their material and social conditions today.”
If I understand scifihughf correctly (please correct me if I’m getting you wrong, scifihughf), he seems to be in favor of providing help and assistance to everyone who clearly needs it. So, under his proposed approach to doing things, if someone did something to a person’s great-great-grandmother, and as a result, that person is now in material and social conditions where they need help and assistance, they would, of course, get that help and assistance. It’s just that the “official justification” would be that they need it, not that someone did something in the past.
Why stop at the last couple of hundred years? That’s a convenient time frame, because going further back would bring up the large scale and long lasting slavery of Africans by the Islamic states of north African and the Middle East. And very often those African slaves were sold to China…
I think part of existing problem is that slavery in America is so well documented, it is still fresh in memory and segregation didn’t end. It would be possible for the descendants of slaves to sue the plantations that owned them for lost wages. I bet many of those farms are owned by the same families as did 200 years ago and the families are still benefiting from the economical advantages they gained in those days, while the descendants are still suffering from the treatment of slaves. Companies like Volkswagen and BMW have been sued for the slave labour they used during WW2, it wouldn’t take much to extend the concept further. Pretty much the only obstacle is that the actual slave labourers are all dead. Except maybe prison labour which continued much longer.
Probably a bigger issue is the continuation of segregation. If in 1865 when slavery had been abolished there would have been a degree abolishing segregation too, all slaves would now be full citizens of USA and black and white populations would have been free to intermix and intermarry, things would probably be very different today.
Contrast this to the European slaves. Barbary pirates took huge numbers of Europeans in slavery in North Africa. During the Great Wrath possibly up to 7-9% of Finnish population was carried of to Southern Russia and Middle East. Where are their descendants? Can I go to Morocco and visit some remote village inhabited by blue-eyed people of British blood. I have never heard of anything as such. As far as I know, the descendants of these slaves have been completely absorbed by the native populations, except for the small minority that managed to return to their homes.
“who colonised who within the last couple hundred years?”
The Greek got colonized by a non-European people, of course.
Or are you lumping them in with western Europeans just because they’re (somewhat) white? That seems racist to me.
Well, he is a trickster …
At a certain point you’re arguing that acting is impossible. I mean, we don’t have a lot of Tower Guardsmen from Gondor–or, for that matter, Gondor natives–floating around. Should we only hire WWII vets to play in WWII movies? Should only Scotsmen play James Bond? We don’t have anyone racially pure from the standards of the polities in The Odyssey, so I guess no one can play those roles.
For my part, I’ve always liked the guys who played in “Hogan’s Heros”. Several were Jewish, and several were victims of the Nazis (the Frenchman has the concentration camp tattoo on his arm, and one of the guys that played a general has a facial scar from Nazi abuse). The guy who played Colonel Klink was asked about it, and he said something to the effect of “I can act as a Medieval British monarch, I can act as a German officer.” They were skilled in their craft and did it to the best of their abilities. And they made the Nazis look ridiculous, which helped I’m sure.
I think the key is, are you attempting to respect the source material? Ancient myths are subject to re-interpretation, and modern casting requirements are part of that. Again, we don’t have actors from the precise polities involved in the war, so we are forced to make do with what we have. As long as we’re attempting to fairly present the ideas we choose to focus on within those stories (and we choose parts in good faith), I don’t see how it’s objectionable. And including people of a variety of races in a story about sea-faring cultures at the junction between multiple areas is hardly a bad-faith attempt; it’s pretty likely that you’d get a wide variety of skin colors in those crews (trained sailors are ALWAYS in limited supply).
I think if race is significant you should find someone of that race. For example, in “Shogun”, having a black or white guy as the emperor would be an insult; there are plenty of good Japanese actors. By the same token, having Superman played by a black or Asian actor would be objectionable–not because they can’t act, but because, to be blunt, Superman isn’t (generally) black. It’d be better to make a new superhero to explore those themes. (I’ve heard the same objection from black people.) For ancient Greece that’s not really an issue, because again, not many pureblood Trojans running around. If race, gender, etc aren’t significant, or changing it is significant to address specific themes (say, a Superman multiverse thing specifically to explore how a black Kryptonian would have vastly different experiences and outcomes from a white one), go with what works.
As for the Anansi suggestion, I wouldn’t have any objection to Anansi being white, for the same reason I wouldn’t have an objection to Loki being black–or an eagle or a horse, for that matter. They’re shape-shifting deities, if the plot requires them to be X they can be X. I imagine, given what (admittedly little) I know of Anansi, it would play to themes of colonialism, as trickster deities tend to cause as many problems as they solve, if not more.
Almost entirely agree. The one exception is Superman: I think a black / asian Superman would be fine. Superman, to this Australian, represents “All American” values and that, now, is not limited to a particular ethnic type. Superman generally (I’m not a comic reader) is an optimistic superhero story, not Soviet style Social Realism, so portray the society we want rather than what we have.
There’s some interesting stuff going on there, I think.
Yeah, Superman could be black, or asian-american, I think, without much change. The thing is, I don’t think *Batman* (or rather, Bruce Wayne) could be. (without radically changing him into at least “A different version of Batman” as opposed to just “Batman”) he’s so thoroughly WASP-coded that changing him that way would change a lot of underlying stuff.
Weirdly I don’t think Tony Stark would require the same adjustments, maybe ebcause despite both having rich parents Stark always had more of a “Successful startup” as opposed to “Old Money” vibe? (I guess being a 1960’s rich guy rather than a 1930’s rich guy is part of it…)
Thor… Honestly wouldn’t matter (he’s so disjointed from anything anyway) Captain America? Eh, you’d lose the irony factor, but otherwise would work with any depression era kid.
I’m a bit in two minds about Peter Parker. I kinda feel like his origin story would be framed differently were he from an ethnic minority?
The thing with Peter Parker is that there’s Miles. There’s already a black Spiderman, again thanks to multiverse shenanigans. And the stories that I’ve seen at least do address the difference between a white boy, a black boy, and a white girl gaining those superpowers.
He’s basically the template I used for how to do this.
As for Batman, it depends heavily on the version. But do you really think a black vigilante beating people up at night in the middle of a crime-riddled city would end well? Even as a rich white dude Batman runs into trouble. Make him black or poor (a rich white woman would be Batgirl) and he’s going to be in tremendous trouble.
A black Tony Stark is basically Black Panther or Nick Fury. Since we already have characters that fill that role, why not just write a story for them?
There actually is a Soviet Superman story: “Red Son”. Haven’t read the comic, but the animated adaptation is on YouTube, and I’ve been meaning to watch it.
I disagree. For two reasons.
First, Superman has an established identity: He’s a white male from Krypton who grew up in Kansas. Changing those characteristics changes the character. Which isn’t necessarily bad–Supergirl is fine as a character, as is Red Son, to give two examples–but they’re not Superman. At minimum you need to explain why you changed those traits to the readers. Everyone has an idea of what Superman looks like, acts like, and….well, IS, and changing that requires the author to explain.
Contrast this with Master Chief. I’d have no issues if he was black. His race was never an issue anyway; he was a faceless protagonist to allow the player to step into the role.
Second, changing Superman’s race has rather profound impacts on his character arc. Part of the reason he can be optimistic is that he’s white. A black kid in the same situation at that time (vaguely post-WWII) in that place (Kansas) would have had a VERY different experience. As would an Asian kid. As would a girl. To alter Superman’s defining characteristics without addressing the fallout is viewed by at least some in the minority communities (as evidenced by the fact that they say as much) as the author telling them their stories don’t matter. That these things that they went through ONLY because of skin color aren’t real.
Again, contrast this with Master Chief. His race is irrelevant because we have a world with established characters in leadership roles from a variety of races, in an environment where differences of skin color are going to be pretty much irrelevant (future, plus fighting aliens). Since Master Chief, at least in the first trilogy, didn’t grow up in an environment where race created real, often character-defining issues, you can ignore them in this case without problems to the character.
As I said earlier, if you want to do a multiverse thing where you put a black Kryptonian in Superman’s place and explore the issues this creates, that’s fine. The explanation is “I want to explore the issues race would create.” I was perfectly fine with de Caprio’s “Romeo and Juliet” and “West Side Story” because transposing the characters to modern times was done in a way that was fairly respectful to them and to the play; the explanation was to portray them in a modern setting to resonate with modern viewers. (Plus WSS played on themes of racism and how minorities were treated.) So I’m certainly not saying it can’t–or even really shouldn’t–be done. What I’m saying is pallet swapping without fully understanding the impacts of that pallet swap is disrespectful to…..well, everyone.
“Blazing Saddles” is a good template, actually. They took the typical “hero rides in, becomes sheriff, saves the day” mold and made the sheriff black. Then they explored the consequences of this. It ended the way it always does, with the hero riding off into the sunset after besting the bad guys, but the path there is the important part.
I did say above that, if you’re portraying a particular region, I simply expect characters to at least look like they’re from said region. It’s not like I expect a DNA test. And yes, context makes a difference. I care less about Heimdall in the Marvel Thor movies being black, than I would about him being black in a more faithful, straight-forward adaptation of Norse mythology.
Having a folklore trickster character be colonizer-coded is an interesting idea. It would be tough to pull off in the current political climate, but I find the notion intriguing.
“I did say above that, if you’re portraying a particular region, I simply expect characters to at least look like they’re from said region. ”
Why?
With Europe, and the Med. Sea area, this is a very serious question. There’s been extensive trade routes through the region since before this incarnation of the Med. Sea existed. Extensive sea travel over thousands of years means that it’s entirely plausible to have an Egyptian in Scotland. We know there were Norsemen in the Byzantine Empire. Rome had envoys and diplomatic relations with China. And again, Greece lies in an area where multiple groups, even groups as broadly defined as “European” and “North African”, are going to mix. If you’re doing a small town setting you won’t get as much mixing, but if you’re in a city–especially on a trade route–one should expect to see a wide variety of races, at all ranks.
I’d be okay with the sailors and many soldiers being a mix of races, too. A hoplite army was more than just hoplites, after all, and while the elite soldiers would be Greek it’s very likely that lower-ranking folks and slaves would be varied, due to extensive slave trade networks and other factors.
@Dinwar,
I agree, I think gods in human form can be depicted however you want, including with people of any race you choose. They are gods after all, they can take on any form they choose.
I think the problem is, there are actually a lot of greeks running around (around 10.6 million of them in fact), none of them are playing named characters in this movie. Hollywood’s casting issues aren’t that they’re ‘woke’, it’s that they took a sample picture of a crowd 5 miles from their LA studio sometime in the 1960s and have expressed a religious fervour in maintaining that as the exact diversity of every film since, no matter the setting.
This is actually a tad weirder when hollywood attempts to depict its own location, because demographics change with time, and major motion picture diversity numbers basically don’t – they often drastically underestimate the number of hispanic people in LA, which should be impossible given you could just look outside. Hell, the actual crew are probably pretty representative of ‘people working in LA’ given they are people working in LA, so you’d get more representative casting if you left the camera facing the worng way. This also causes issues for the ‘hollywood studios’ that are actually in Britain (e.g. for James Bond), who are pretty bad at representing the british asian community (asian meaning south asian in the context of britain) despite their large presence amongst British actors (this also led to the weirdest ‘white washing’ thing in Iron Man 3, where they were accused of them of white washing by casting prominent English actor Ben Kingsley, presumably whilst being so ‘race-blind’ they forgot that Ben Kingsley isn’t, in fact, white).
I count myself as both ignorant AND blessed to not have encountered the term “chud” before this post. What does that tell me about myself? Hopelessly behind modern times or happily oblivious to some random, evanescent mindset?
What about both ?
The post by James (not me) doesn’t cover ISR at all – a commenter does, and I wanted to expand a bit more. I think the biggest effect drones have is by constant observation across the front line, armor has been totally neutered. Death of the tank is arguable but what is their use if the enemy can see they’re coming from 15km away and then attack with indirect fires (drone or mortar or artillery)?
I have pretty much the opposite view. Drones with thermal cameras can detect an infantry squad pretty much as easily than they can detect a tank, but at least the tank has a chance of surviving an artillery barrage if it won’t receive a direct hit. The infantry will just be pulverized. The tank will also be able to carry an antidrone machine gun that could automatically shoot down threats, the best protection infantry can have against drones is Beretta M4 and that’s hardly any protection at all. The Chieftain talks about this on his yesterday’s Q&A video #32, starting from 15 minutes.
Infantry will be able to hide inside bunkers and buildings as long as they stay away from windows and other openings, but at that point they are pretty useless as a fighting force. This is exemplified by the recent Russian tactic of using large drainage piping. Small infantry squads will advance for kilometers through pipes, but pretty much as soon as they leave the pipes and come out to the open Ukrainian forces will destroy them.
So I have some mixed feelings about this. For one this was fun to read. Also, perhaps to anedoctyli confirm the articles thesis as history enthuasist it is nice to hear something positive about people like myself. Yes, it was not uncritical, but I’m not a chud my ego can hadle that. On other hand I’m little warry of “lets poke fun at those idiots that are so easily critised”. It getting too close to social media crap which is not dignified for a normal person let alone a professional.
It would be unsporting except that these guys have actual clout and influence; the worldview they reinforce is prominent and clearly on the brains of some people who are very much determining the course of modern society, such as “the richest man in the world” and “the United States’ secretary of defense” and dozens of the influencers who encourage people to vote to keep such individuals in power.
It’s not quite like making fun of, say, My Little Pony fans where the group may have some silly things going on but ultimately it’s harmless because that silliness is purely the business of the people who engage in it. We’re living in an era where major wars can start, or millions of people be driven into poverty or even death, as a consequence of a bunch of Internet posturing that tips key demographics to elect this or that person in charge of a major nation.
Thats a fair point I suppose. What I’m perhaps overly worried about is slow degradaation to “reacting to social media crap” there is enought of that on internet for good or ill. There are more interesting things to write about. For example now that our host here has opend the topic of history enthusiasts I would like to see more. What are people like me doing right and more importantly what is wrong.
I mean, if that’s all we got here, I suspect most of us would find other folks to read. But I don’t mind it as filler for an off week.
I’m entirely sympathetic to this article.
As a paleontologist I’ve had my run-ins with Creationists, most of whom are similar to the chuds described in this essay. I have no problem with enthusiastic amateurs–paleontology is one of the few fields of science where amateurs can become experts, I know two journals (out of Italy) that have police and fire fighters as senior editors (there are more, I just haven’t personally met those editors). Most amateurs are extremely enthusiastic about a handful of things, which is great! Often they know things that I don’t, because they’ve studied them more than I have! Like, the swimming mechanism of xanthid crabs and how to identify predation marks of those nectic crabs in ammonites.
Creationists, on the other hand, tend to speak with overwhelming confidence but have the same knowledge of paleontology as the average goldfish. Occasionally you get one that knows something–they’re remarkably good at sediment migration in modern streams, very useful for dam removal–but for the most part you leave the conversation with less knowledge than you entered when you discuss the fossil record with Creationists.
People attempt to indoctrinate my children in this nonsense. Laws are being passed based on ideas that cannot survive even the most casual walk through a museum. I’ve had people threaten my life over this on multiple occasions. THIS STUFF HAS CONSEQUENCES.
For history, it’s worth remembering that the chuds are HEAVILY influencing the required reading of US officer training schools. These guys are teaching our military leaders how to fight. The results are a matter of historic record, and the record is uniformly bad.
The other thing is, if you put on the armor and pick up the sword and enter the list field, you’re saying you can hang with the rest of us. If you want to present yourself as an expert in history you get evaluated as one–and that means you can handle being criticized. This is what we go through every day, after all, and frankly Bret is kinder than many reviewers are. If you can’t handle having your errors called out, don’t pretend you’re an expert, simple as that. What Bret does with things like “300” and LOTR and “Game of Thrones” is literally how his field takes ideas seriously. To complain that he’s too mean is simply stupid and cowardly. If this is too harsh the best advice is to sit down, shut up, and let the grownups talk.
I would like to emphasise that this not an issue of this article being wrong. Rather what worries me is the possibility of this becoming frequent on this blog. I’m reading this for things like in-depth analysis of peasant life not “reactions to stupid pople on social media”. There is plenty of content like this elsewhere. Also, frankly critising these guys is too easy. That being said as long as article likes this remain rare it would by ok by me I guess.
It’s perfectly fine for a historian to call out issues within his field. Particularly when those issues have profound consequences on society, ones that are easily identified in history.
I do not understand the genre of comment “I hate this style of post.” If you don’t like it, don’t read it. It’s Bret’s blog, if he wants to post a long series of articles on how to groom cats he can. There have been plenty of posts I haven’t liked or been interested in, and I skipped them. It’s fine. No one’s going to arrest you for taking a week off.
>I do not understand the genre of comment “I hate this style of post.” If you don’t like it, don’t read it.
Examine your reasons for writing this and you might understand – they might as well be the same since you’re complaining about complaining. By the same logic, you don’t need to reply, and yet you did. Comments are allowed (or not allowed on some articles, further underlining my point) and it’s just as valid to use them to explain personal preference for other types of content as it is to heap praise on everything, as long as it’s in a civil manner.
Not like there’s any reason to think random strangers commenting can influence the blog’s direction, whether that’s with criticism or praise. It’s just a medium for speaking openly.
By the same token I’m free to critize him provided it is civil which I think I have been.. I mean he can disable the comments if he does not wish to be critized. I would also note that I have expressed approciation for his comments about history enthausist community and said it was kind of fun so it is not like I have been solely.
Frankly while I may have overreacted by worrying about degradation of this blog due to a single article you have overreacted even worse by complaing (as poster about correctly noted complainig about complaiing) about what was ultimately civil criticism I suggest you take a break.
Deveraux is fully aware of this matter, and I believe he has older posts where he directly addresses the issue. And if I remember correctly he was worried that not all his compatriots are as aware of it, and their ratio of beneficial posts to their complaint posts are high enough.
Deveraux creates his Tolkien series or the currently running Pre-Modern Armies series as a means to accrue respect/political capital he can spend writing posts like this. His Game of Thrones posts are the price he pays and this post is his reward.
I feel like this really tries to run too far with a basic concept (the issue of shallow, ignorant people who try to use history to justify a particular ahistorical right-wing reactionary philosophy). Obviously, I am very much right-wing, so I have a personal interest at stake even as I greatly dislike the tendency you describe.
First issue: The issue of alienation in a liberal society is brought up, but what actually should someone do in that scenario where they do indeed feel alienated? Meanwhile, I think a lot of the time including here a whole very specific racist-reactionary complex (about someone feeling entitled to stand above others by their race/identity/etc and resenting the loss of that) is presumed far in advance of the actual evidence for someone believing it. (Of course, in some cases people do come right up and make it explicit that they believe exactly that.)
Second issue: I think that it’s really easy to be irresponsible with Umberto Eco’s Characteristics of Fascism (in some cases you even see it used by people who clearly haven’t read the actual article). It’s easy to make the categories way too broad, and tar pretty much anybody who is dissatisfied with modernity in any way at all as a fascist.
So first good on you to admit your leanigs outright. As leftist I’m more frustrated by the unwillingess of my oponents to admit the ideological nature of diagreement than the disagreement itself.
As for your qestion well that is a quetion of this century really. I’m afraid that nobody can give simple answer if there was one thngs would be very different.
Now I’m not our esteemed host, but form what he has written about liberalism he seems to consider it a necessary cost for not having to deal with the higly constraining nature of past collectivist societies.
Of course the interesting question and the one you seem to be asking is what to do when you find yourself unable to just “suck it up” ?
Well, in that case it does seem that embracing political fridge whatever that means socialism (my prefered answer), fascism (my decidedly not prefred answer) or some entirely else (the weird answer) is the only option really.
That question of this century is whateve liberal capitalist democracies can endure and if not what replaces them. Notably, I do not subscribe to classical marxism so I’m not placing my bents ony any of these outcomes.
Lastly regardless of what others including me may think of that you can also try to secede rather than actively confort the modern world. Like say join/start a commune by which I mean a group of people living together to some extent not an explicitly socialist project. Like if you start a place where peple take turns being lord/lady of the manor for week it would at least be original.
I also tend to value liberalism a significant degree even as I am in tension with it and in particular do not *want* to go back to the days when, for example, if your religion wasn’t the state religion it was living on borrowed time at best.
But things like this I also am often very conscious of things like this being a hard-fought truce. I often feel that secularism is trying to act as both a party to the truce and a neutral arbiter, for example. And I think it’s seemed awfully unstable in the last twenty years (for example, I view this as the real trend behind the “woke” ragebait).
A lot of my frustration is basically a result of the sense that modern liberalism is shaking under both internal and external threats and I sometimes feel it is not even attempting to defend itself.
> a whole very specific racist-reactionary complex is presumed far in advance of the actual evidence for someone believing it
> in some cases you even see [Umberto Eco’s Characteristics of Fascism] used by people who clearly haven’t read the actual article
You seem to have read a lot of essays. Can you remind me which one ends:
> Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world.
I don’t disagree with the idea advanced in Umberto Eco’s Characteristics of Fascism.
> The issue of alienation in a liberal society is brought up, but what actually should someone do in that scenario where they do indeed feel alienated?
Change or die.
If you’re alienated by diversity your choices are to get over it or be crushed.
All societies much draw some limit around who is part of them, and the minimum for one that respects human choice is those who want to participate in it. Fascists don’t want to live in an enlightenment society, so enlightenment societies should excise them. And if you’re going to excise them from the body politic death is preferable to enslavement or death by exile.
There’s some vagueness here about what alienates someone, but not really in this context. The people who Bret is talking about are alienated by the existence of immigrants and minorities. These people have been cheering the Belfast pogam and support Trump’s rape of kids. They’re moral voids.
They feel alienated from human society they’re alien to it.
Not everyone who is alienated by liberalism society, not everyone with a deep sense that something is wrong is that type of person, but everyone who is this type of far gone can’t be saved by any policy or argument or circumstance. If your response to a sense that society is failing is to set an immigrants home on fire you’re an object, not a person. Not everyone who starts down that path ends up there, and not everyone who is alienated by liberalism overall ends up there, but it’s not societies responsibility to fix or accommodate those who do.
They have to change themselves, or die. You seem religious, so add praying for divine intercession and redemption. Those are the options we can give then, and it’s there responsibility to choose.
First issue: The issue of alienation in a liberal society is brought up, but what actually should someone do in that scenario where they do indeed feel alienated?
I’d say, start by recognizing that this isn’t a “right” or “left” issue, and that you may find lots of people across the political spectrum, who may not at all identify as “right wing”, who also share your alienation from liberal society. Me, for example. You may find common ground in places where you don’t expect it.
Going beyond that, I guess it would depend on which specific aspects of liberal society you find alienating and disagree with? It’s a hard question to answer without knowing the specifics.
How do you do the formatted type? Is it Markdown?
Carats, “letter I”, carats, text, carats, backslash, letter I, carats.
Like this:
italic
“…but what actually should someone do in that scenario where they do indeed feel alienated?”
As Heather Dale put it, find your tribe.
The whole attitude of the Right is deeply amusing to me, because what you’re feeling now is what I and my ilk (nerds, geeks, dweebs, and the rest of us) felt all through middle and high school. People like you are experiencing what people like you put people like me through for my entire childhood and teen years, and the childhood and teen years of everyone who preferred DnD to ESPN, who preferred science class to gym class, who listened to the wrong music, who dressed in the wrong cloths, and who didn’t fit the mold.
Welcome to what is, for many of us, the human condition!
To be clear, I’m sympathetic to what you’re feeling. Been there, done that, had the suicide attempt, I know how dark this sort of thing can be. So here’s what I did, and hopefully it helps you out: Go to your favorite social media platform and type “[X interest] in [your city]”. Look at the groups that come up and find one that looks reasonable. Go to a few events, meetings, whatever. For example, if you like shooting, go to Facebook and look for shooting groups in your area. If you like bourbon, look for bourbon tastings. If you like tobacco, look for cigar or pipe smoking groups in your area. There are groups for each of those things, and while some are full of jerks most are going to welcome a newcomer enthusiastically. It may take a few tries to find a group you gel with, but you will, and that feeling of alienation will go away once you meet people who share your interests. And it’ll grow beyond just shared interests; you’ll create a community.
The other bit of advice I can give you as someone who went through this is, learn to accept your own valuation of your life. Folks still think I’m weird, I just don’t care anymore. I enjoy the things I enjoy, I hang out with people that make my life and the lives of my children better, and I have enough real accomplishments under my belt at this time that I don’t need to care if anyone likes me. Their views on me are their problem; I’m too busy enjoying my life and doing work I care deeply about to care what anyone else thinks.
Ultimately the problem many people have is that modern society presents no pre-set standards. The Civil Rights movement, Feminism, Pride, and the like shattered the illusion that there was a standard way to live. The result is a society in which each of us has the right–and obligation!–to choose for ourselves. It’s a terrifying prospect. But you really don’t have a choice, so you may as well choose something that you enjoy.
The one thing you CANNOT do is tell ME how to live my life. In a free society you’re going to see a bunch of people doing things you think are absolutely absurd, even evil. As long as they don’t violate anyone’s rights you get zero say in it. The interracial lesbian Wiccan couple next door has the same rights as you, and the same privilege and obligation to find a lifestyle they are comfortable with. Morally there is no more justification in you demanding they change their lifestyle than there is in them demanding you change yours. And frankly there are too many of us to be silenced anymore. As long as you accept that, I’m entirely in favor of you finding a community you feel comfortable in.
I do suppose it is correct to say that many people long to be told that they are good girl/boy and are living “the correct way”. And to be clear I’m not trying to be condoscending here.
This is actually a reason while I have grown skeptical of individualism after I grew up. Not the the point of outright rejecting it mind you. I’m pretty sure that I have benefited singnificantly from it so it would be hypocritical. That being said I’m not as enthusistic about it anymore.
I have in fact grown warry of people that talk about “being yourself” or “thinking for yourself” etc. Such individuals are often conspiracy theorist or other such individuals who in realitity simply defer to autorities in their own communites.
And just be clear I apply this to myself as well. Now I would argue that I do not blindly belief everything our host writes here, but it has to be admitted that he does hold significat sway on my opionions especilly when it comes to history.
I’m not necessarily talking individualism. I used the term “tribe” for a reason. Being part of a group is a basic psychological need in humans and we should recognize that.
For my part, I take the opposite view you do. After a few people tried to kill me for differing from how they decided folks should live (for example, because of the music I listen to) I’ve come to the belief that those who preach conformity are really preaching control. Note how many people in positions of power on the Right are caught doing detestable things, and by that I mean things detestable by their own standards–the pastors who have mistresses, the politicians preaching family values caught with illegal pornography, the folks preaching how we need more Jesus in our lives while violating the Commandments routinely. It’s not just now, either; look at the history of the Popes to see how well they lived Christian lives. The folks who want conformity never want to conform, they want YOU to conform so they can control you.
I’m not saying the Left is free from this. They have their agendas and their share of contemptable wanna-be dictators. But they’re not actively attacking me and my friends right now. The Right is, so I’m gonna call them out on it.
“I’m pretty sure that I have benefited singnificantly from it…”
You are alive because of it.
I want to be clear that I mean this literally here. A few hundred years ago every one of us would have been murdered as a heretic, because deviation from the norm GOT PEOPLE KILLED. A few dozen years ago you’d probably have been viciously beat up for living your lifestyle. People were killed for being homosexual in the 1990s, and coming out was still an act of tremendous braver in the early 2000s. Social ostracization–the literal destruction of horizontal social ties–was a common enough treatment of people who broke the mold. Watch “Dead Poets Society” to see how that ends; I wasn’t kidding about the suicide attempt.
And besides, you really don’t have a choice. You have to choose your lifestyle for yourself. If you want a pre-selected one which are you going to choose? Even selecting a ready-made lifestyle is an exercise in individualism, a freedom of choice none of our forefathers had. Not choosing isn’t an option; there is no pre-established way of life in the Western world anymore.
Well, the impression I get from modern invidividualistic society is it does in fact have a tendecy to deny the basic need to part of “tribe”.
As for being alive thanks to invidualism I do in fact agree with you just be clear here. I’m rarely use strong words in writing feeling it uncessary and performative in case this I suppose I went too far in other direction.
A for conformism. I would say you are correct be warry. It just that in my experience a lot of people engaging in conformism from avarge people to extreme stuff like conspiracy theorists and extreme right do cover themselves in langauge of freedom these days.
As for even choosing a pre-made lifestyle being individualist strictly speaking that is not wrong, but I think it maybe strenching the meaning to point of meanglessness.
“…the impression I get…”
That’s part of your problem right there. The mere fact that we can name various groups pushing for expansions of rights, such as Pride and Feminism, demonstrate that these are groups–likely based on shared values rather than a rigid hierarchy, but sociological groups none the less.
Furthermore I’ve never met any individualist who would argue that joining a group based on shared interests is wrong. I’m a pretty hard-core individualist, yet I see no contradiction in joining a company that does work I enjoy and believe in, or joining a religious group that shares my beliefs, or joining a club to engage in leisure activities I enjoy. The idea that individualists need to be isolated islands with no connection to others is simply stupid. There is zero problems, morally or philosophically, with an individualist saying “I like these people, I’m going to spend time with them.”
“As for even choosing a pre-made lifestyle being individualist strictly speaking that is not wrong, but I think it maybe strenching the meaning to point of meanglessness.”
It was a rhetorical point, to emphasize the fact that in our current culture you cannot abdicate the necessity of choosing your lifestyle, and if you try to you end up….well, feeling alienated and lost. And it’s entirely your choice, because in an era where it’s easier than ever to find people to associate with you’ve chosen to not do so.
It is less about anyone explicitly saying that nobody shoudl join any groups really. It is just what this society often seems to be is bunch of isolated individuals. Also, as I noted I tend to find the modern seciety is often fake about their autonomy ultimately people are influenced in their views no matter how loud they are about “having your own opinion” (usually meaning agree with what I say). I suppse I’m just desilusioned with it all. Anyway we are getting kind off topic and are unlikely to agree have a nice day.
> The issue of alienation in a liberal society is brought up, but what actually should someone do in that scenario where they do indeed feel alienated?
That’s certainly a fair question. And I think you realize that the various neo-fascist movements do not make workable proposals for answering it. Even if they could remake a society to be culturally homogeneous in some way, their version wouldn’t be economically competitive against the “wussy-liberal welfare-state capitalist” countries that constitute 100% of the existing countries of the world that you’d be willing to live in.
In your shoes, I’d start by trying to introspect exactly how and why are you feeling alienated; What is lacking? How can you adjust your life to get more of it? What sort of “community” within the broader society could you organize that has more of it? (There are a lot of associations of like-minded types. There are also some broad religious communities that have a lot of collective solidarity — Roman Catholic orders come to mind, and the Latter-Day Saints church as a whole.)
Also, are you in the US? The US is a particularly individualistic culture, almost worshipping atomized ambition. (See the fantasies of the chud historians!) Most other advanced countries have a stronger sense of solidarity, but of course the price is that society’s conformity demands on the individual are stronger.
Back in 1993, on a tour through the Louvre, I found a Roman bust of a grumpy-faced old man who looks just like me. I used him as an avatar for years, but now these chuds have taken all the fun out of it.
ahh the great Man theory which only even somewhat works as a third of a thing.
The Great Man, the Great Idiot, and the Great Mundane.
Couple typos. “pouring over” – pour on the sarcasm but pore over books. “search for a new anchors for identity”.
It appears something very similar is going on with members/fans of the Society of St Pius X, aka SSPX, the anti-Vatican II group currently schisming with Pope Leo XIV. On bluesky user crime-sprees.bsky.social reported back from the SSPX group on Reddit (I’m not gonna link so I don’t go into Link Time-Out) with choice screencaps & analysis. He’s found that at least American, parishioner-level SSPX fans are “traditionalists” who don’t have really know Catholic history & tradition. For instance, when Leo XIV was elected, they were pleased at first because he chose a “traditional” name–in *complete* ignorance that Leo XIII was the “Pope of the Worker” who introduced the term “social justice” into official Catholic thought.
It will be no surprise to OGH that what *really* gets them exercised is anything about girl cooties, the misogyny is off the charts. Claire Willett (clairewillett.bsky.social), a devout gay Catholic aka The Archbishop of Bluesky, has been covering the schism on a daily basis. She keeps emphasizing that Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of SSPX, was a Vichy sympathizer and *raging* antisemite, and the European majority of the org is full of antisemitism, islamophobia, and out-and-out fascism. I’m sure the misogyny & queer hatred is there, too, but it’s the antisemitism in particular that the Vatican is cracking down on *hard*.
To get back to the topic of the post! It seems as though SSPX (and probably other TradCaths, too) are doing with Catholicism what chud historians do with ancient history: take their modern hangups and look to an imagined past for reassurance. In the case of TradCaths, they’re going to be particularly threatened because the institution really *is* continuous over many, many centuries, but also really *has* changed. Leo XIII was one of the Popes who laid the ground for the movements that built toward Vatican II–because no institution or human community can persist for centuries or millennia without changing, often so much that the thinking of earlier members of the community can, as OGH says, feel alien when you really get to know them. Or at least require a *reach*–if you feel Augustine (in English translation, no less) thinks the same way you do, uses words the same way you do, you are reading him *wrong*.
I will also note that SSPXers, like history chuds, just *love* AI art, it’s a vehicle tailor-made for the same impulse.
Since I have encountered SSPX priests, nuns and laypeople, I would strongly discourage you to judge this group from American online memes. Traditional Catholicism is noticeably less radical in Europe than in parts of the US, but above all it is far more sincere than those who view its followers as political enemies want to understand. (The people I encountered truly believed in their religion.)
It is also less worldly than many churches, often hostile to television and wary of the dangers of the internet. The tradcath online memes of recent years are not a good representation of its believers. And claiming that they are especially fond of AI art (why is that a bad thing?) is simply wrong.
The SSPX view of history has its problems, but Catholic critics tend to ignore how traditional it is! Most of the pious literature in use by the SSPX was written in the early-to-mid 20th century. It reflects views that were common or at least acceptable among Catholics of that time, who were part of a fairly reactionary institution after the French Revolution and before Vatican II (the period whose final decades traditionalist Catholics seek to preserve). Traditionalist Catholicism provides an opportunity for Catholics to look in the mirror and see what their church was up to, which included promoting a simple-minded and triumphalist conception of church history.
(Not that I am personally invested in the struggle; I view attempts to salvage Christianity intellectually as fairly hopeless. It is strange that the 1950s can send sophisticated Christians back shrieking because they were so old-fashioned, and yet they keep insisting that a Jewish preacher of the 1st century was much closer to their essentially secular moral views.)
“Most of the pious literature in use by the SSPX was written in the early-to-mid 20th century.”
I think this is where the issue fundamentally is with our culture. I mean, realistically Trump’s policies in his first administration were fairly middle-of-the-road Republican stances in the 1970s and 80s. Frank Burns would have felt quite at home with Trump–a fictional character sure, but one that works because he represents a lot of ideas floating around at the time. For that matter, a lot of his stances were pretty liberal for that time period.
What we have is a bunch of old men (it’s always men) hopelessly clinging to youth and the idea that back in the day they’d be important.
The idea that we should be constrained by the social, and even theological, ideas acceptable in 1975 is as asinine and suicidally stupid (and I mean that literally) as the idea that we as a culture should restrict ourselves to the medicines available in 1975. NO ONE would recommend we go back to snail mail, hard-copy construction reports, paper maps updated annually if you were lucky, music only when you could get it live, culture-wide racism, widespread disenfranchisement and removal of women from the public sphere (it was getting better but “better” isn’t “as good as today”–Mom still needed Dad to open a bank account in the 1980s where I lived), and all the rest of the problems going back even that small distance in time would necessitate. We are a culture that worships technology and innovation. If we haven’t improved some area in HALF A CENTURY we deserve the Hell we’ll create for ourselves.
Even if we grant that the past these guys say exists does exist–and that’s a HUGE concession, one that is ABSOLUTELY not true–well, it’s the past. I’m not saying that you can’t get good ideas from the past! There’s a lot of good there! But there’s a lot of bad as well. Ideas change–the lifestyles of the 1970s were scandalous to the people who grew up in the 1920s, and the folks in the 1920s would have horrified folks in the 1870s (and note that not many would accept that the 1970s were mid-20th century; I’m trying to be as generous as possible here). You can map this; mass communication means that we have records of what people wore, which is a reasonable proxy (with the same problems as any other proxy) for views on things in the culture in general. It’s the nature of living in a culture that advocates innovation for things to change. Whatever the group is, anyone trying desperately to cling to a fading past is on the losing side of history.
I often wonder the number of folks who’d have sided with Richie Cunningham back in the day, and who are now worse than his father. Or who sided with Hawkeye and BJ, but now make Frank Burns look liberal-minded. Do they realize what they’ve become?
I’m not sure who the people in your last paragraph are.
——————
I think, to say the least, that this represents *far* too much confidence that “progress” will be or has been towards something better than worse more than half the time.
“I think, to say the least, that this represents *far* too much confidence that “progress” will be or has been towards something better than worse more than half the time.”
Your personal views on whether progress has been good or bad aren’t really relevant; the issue is that our culture has changed, and these people are desperately attempting to cling to a past that only exists in their minds. That, more than anything else, is the issue. If you think certain aspects are good or ill, that’s a conversation we can have,–the very nature of my argument presupposes that cultures can change–but I think we can all agree that if culture as a whole has shifted, a group attempting to force us back into an older version, especially one that strips the rights away from whole categories of people, including entire genders, aren’t going to meet with much success and are going to cause a lot of problems.
“I’m not sure who the people in your last paragraph are.”
They are characters from popular TV shows, specifically built to represent certain ideals. Richie Cunningham was the main character of (early seasons of) Happy Days, and was written as a fairly idealized everyman high schooler. Hawkeye and BJ were doctors on M*A*S*H that were supposed to represent the good sides of culture (with some rough bits), whereas Frank Burns was designed to be basically a chud.
I am not a fan at all of the SSPX movement or theology but I am, as a Catholic convert since 2001, a lover of the traditional Tridentine Latin mass. I love its dignity and universality and dislike much about the modern mass as celebrated in most churches since Vatican II. I believe the older form is more poetic and transformational and I want to see it preserved and encouraged. I don’t want Church politics getting in the way and I resent how these are creating a tug of war over liturgical issues.
Not to stray too far off topic!
As I said above, I am Lutheran, but I do have a theological education, so I have some professional insight into the question of liturgy. The liturgical reform started by the Oxford movement in England and its Catholic counterparts in 19th century Germany and Italy is a curious thing. For us Lutherans, it meant that our mass has become clearly more catholic – and for the Catholics, the mass has started to look somewhat protestant (e.g. psalms sung by the laypeople, no secret prayers in the most important part of the mass) that I really don’t have that many theological compunctions against it (except for the saints and the laypeople getting eucharist in single form). In total, I believe that the liturgical reform has considerably enriched the liturgical life of all Western churches that have been touched by it.
And as far as I can understand, the books and official doctrine are actually somewhat different from the Catholic practice: you could celebrate the ordinary form in Latin with proper authorisations and a high-church style ordinary form has very much “traditional papist pomp”. So, if you wish to have a high-church mass in the ordinary form, it is quite possible. The question is simply that the normal way of celebrating the Catholic mass is so much simpler that in fact, it is even lower-church than the normal practice in the Finnish Evangelical-Lutheran Church.
The question is much more about the extraordinary form being a touchstone that means rejection of Vatican II in totality. However, as you have a personal feeling about this, I would be quite interested to hear exactly what parts of the extraordinary form you, personally, see as more poetic and transformational. I am truly and honestly interested.
FWIW, in my view the Extraordinary Form / traditional mass as it is celebrated today is very much a product of Vatican II and its renewal and wouldn’t exist without it.
I don’t think it is really a modern mentality in the small-m sense, it might be Modern in terms of the canonical historical periods but that capital-M Modern era ended quite definitively in 1945. There is a very real historical society they are reaching for, but you’re right in that it’s not from the ancient world. Rather, the whole chud history worldview strikes me as an attempt to resurrect the high culture of the British Empire in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Their whole approach to classics, from the translations that they use and the assumptions that they make, is a vulgarized, dumbed down version of the classics curriculum from British boarding schools, and so is their idea of the *purpose* of history–less to understand “wie es eigentlich gewesen” than as a source of myths for the formation of imperial officers and gentlemen. Deep down, they don’t care about the ancient world, but they care very much about the nineteenth century and feel a very deep sense of loss that that world was mortally wounded at Ypres and Verdun and its corpse fed a couple of decades later into the ovens of Auschwitz, and the UN building as a stake through its grave for good measure.
The darkly funny thing is that many of those people would pressumbly not end in a boarding school (addmitedly Victorian boarding school were terribly, but it would have been education if nothing else), but as workers whatever that would “downstairs”, as tenants or in a factory. People have rightfully spilled a lot of ink about Old Europe racism (and how it continues to affect Modern Europe), but we most not forget that Old Europe also engaged in lot of elitism that would seem arcane and insane to even the more conservative among us.
As someone who values the 19th century and its lost potential (although more from the direction of continental Europe, and who and wants to keep more sense of continuity with the medieval and earlier eras)
Some of this comment I could have written myself in my yearning.
And yet it’s hopelessly dumbed down and mythologized and gone astray. I really don’t like it.
The funny thing is that in a lot of ways the 19th century was *already* in an absolute state of rupture and undergoing the most radical changes in history up to this point since the agricultural revolution.
Positing the 19th century of all times as some edenic primeval environment always fascinates me: It’s literallly the period between two earth-shattering revolutions. I think there’s a weird tendency of both vaugely left-coded people (“Boo! Stuffy victorian racists!”) and right-wingers (“Yay, order, capitalism, christianity!”) to drastically overstate what an earthshatteringly radical period it was in a lot of ways. Remember most of the movements that would end up reshaping the 20th century (socialism, feminism, even anticolonialism) *Starts* in the 19th century.
I definitely don’t view it as “an edenic primeval time”. But I do view it, at least, as a (comparative) calm before the storm maybe? I’ve tended to seriously re-evaluate it since converting to Catholicism.
I tend to read the period roughly 1815 to 1914 as a century when philosophy and culture were processing the changes / adapting to technological development.
It was a time between two earth-shattering revolutions, both of which I would gladly have had fail, but maybe that’s the point, it was the time when you had a fairly recognizable modern society but it was between the revolutions and not during them.
Every cause has a cause before it, and before 1789 you have 1517.
It’s notable that in the 19th century you had a lot of these revolutionary ideologies emerging but they very rarely were in a position to wholly dominate society (and as a result also tended to be more disciplined, too).
If you ask me to sketch out The Way I Wish History Had Gone, there are a good number of possible points of departure, but starting around or a little before WWI is particularly attractive.
“Squandered potential” is particularly sorrowful. I think we both agree on it having a lot of potential?
“but they very rarely were in a position to wholly dominate societ”
I don’t think that at all. The 19th century “Victorian” ideological synthesis such as it is was *itself* highly revolutionary compared to what had come before. It was a period of a dominance of a specific ideology more than anything.
but they very rarely were in a position to wholly dominate society (and as a result also tended to be more disciplined, too).
@Hoffnung,
This is an interesting idea, but I think I pretty strongly disagree with it. It seems to me that ideologies are usually most extreme *before* they come to dominate a society: the process of holding power, and of having to deal with the challenges of keeping the lights on, keeping food on the shelves, and ensuring that ideological crusades don’t end up with burning the whole house down, itself tends to discipline people and moderate their ideological ambitions. And also, as the process of being a state ideology ensures that a lot of your new recruits end up being pragmatists who just want to do their job, rather than the ideological fanatics.
Thank you for this very interesting article. It makes me challenge my own “knowledge” of ancient history and makes me want to seriously dig into the classics and their criticisms.
Dr. Devereaux, what evidence do you have that the the statue pfps, their followers, or chuds, are primarily Americans? There are billions of people who have access to translation software. Many can type in American English–especially with computer aided writing.
I find the objection “Classicists …deliberately abandoned the prior noble emphasis of what the texts
might be said to teach: Greatness!” wonderfully weird. I mean, back when the (elite) sons were taught those texts — during the heyday of the British Empire — they were being taught those texts to enable those sons to advance the greatness of the British Empire. But that was to teach them the whole suite of Roman virtues; the people running the British Empire weren’t fools and knew that they didn’t need a thousand young men fantasizing about being the next Julius Caesar.
The pathetic reality of this movement is captured in the tweet by “Roman Helmet Guy” proposing to write a chud translation of the Odyssey. But he won’t — he doesn’t have the focus and dedication to do all that work. If he did, he wouldn’t be moaning that the world doesn’t let him be Alexander the Great, he’d be making something of himself In Real Life.
The world lets very few of us to be Alexander the Great, as most people are not first-borns of the King of Macedonia who has spent a lifetime preparing an army of conquest for us to inherit.
“The pathetic reality of this movement is captured in the tweet by “Roman Helmet Guy” proposing to write a chud translation of the Odyssey. ”
I got the impression he doesn’t speak ancient Greek, which would seem an obstacle to such a translation. Is it an obstacle he proposed to rectify?
The whole manosphere thing of performing their idea of some kind of world conquering machismo always makes me think of that one exchange from The Office. Where Dwight is critical of Andy with “you can’t protect her” and Andy incredulously shoots back “from what, bears?”
That and the extent to which it’s all clowning about for an audience. As if public performers weren’t really low in the social hierarchy of the societies they admire. Everybody they position as a hero would look upon their chosen career with contempt.
I genuinely think that academia in modern times has gone through an inwardly hyper-self-critical turn and I don’t like that very much.
And these guys have the worst possible response.
I can add to this: The chuds crave greatness and so they crave heroic myths. Similarly, like the first books of Livy, history evolves into such myths through a few centuries of oral transmission. Those myths scratch deep emotional itches. But actual greatness is like actual Roman history (the later books of Livy). As far as I can tell from ACOUP, Rome created a huge empire because it successfully *bureaucratized* war. It could fight 12 wars in one summer because it didn’t need great leaders to fight and win. And for that matter, it could field 12 armies because it (intentionally or accidentally) built a system in which conquered cities were assimilated enough to provide additional citizen soldiers (who thus had some motivation outside of their pay). All of which is not emotionally satisfying to the male keyboard jockey craving greatness.
Something funny that I recently realized on this topic: I do think you could make a very solid case that one of the major causes of the collapse of the Roman Empire was immigrant minorities who refused to assimilate (and conversely that one of the reasons Rome was so successful for so long and has cast such a historical shadow was its ability to persuade minorities to assimilate). But if you’re making that argument, you must also take note that the “unassimilable minorities” that brought down Rome were *white Europeans*. It wasn’t an influx of black Africans or of Indians which collapsed the Western Empire, it was Goths and Franks and Vandals and Saxons and all the other core European “barbarians”.
This is true, and probably partially about the fact that these minorities were crossing into the poorest part of the empire, which was least capable of assimilating them. At the time that Franks settled in Northern Gaul, it had been badly ravaged by civil wars and barbarians, and the empire made the mistake of allowing the Franks to retain their internal social and military structure, and thus become a nation instead of a minority. Still, the Roman empire manged to assimilate Franks pretty well. In a hundred years, they were already speaking Frankish, the early form of French, not the Frankish that was a Germanic language of old Francia. Goths and Langobards assimilated perhaps even better, although they did manage to destroy the Western empire.
I don’t see how Alaric’s Goths (“Visigoths”) destroyed the Western empire, though they certainly contributed somewhat to the ongoing war and destruction. Theoderic’s Goths (“Ostrogoths”) were IMHO the best thing that could have happened to Italy – they brought considerably more peace, prosperity and allowed Latin literature to flourish more than the previous emperors had. If anything, Justinian was responsible for the destruction of Roman civilization in Italy, and the Langobards appeared on the scene when that drama had already ended.
Sorry. I was, perhaps, a bit too heavy on the Goths. I was thinking of Theoderic, too, and personally, while I agree that his rule was a boon for Italy, the existence of a foreign nation, with its separate language and legally defined status, inside Italy, and the simultaneous, independent-in-fact Visigothic realm destroyed the possibilities to reform a Roman Western Empire. Theoderic was a good king, and a preserver of civilization, but his existence was an antithesis to the Roman imperial rule, in the sense that Diocletian and his successors had ruled.
On the other hand, Justinian was, like you say, a ruinous power, but he was about bringing the Roman empire back to the West. And based on this, you can really question whether there was anything positive in the idea of restoring the old Roman empire.
The ostrogoths even brought the senate back to prominence!
The assimilation practiced previously (from a position of Roman strength) was fairly brutal: a draft of young men for the auxiliaries, the rest divided into small groups and parceled out as underclass tenants to landowners across the empire. What changed was the balance of power – the ability of the Gothic federation after Adrianople to insist on remaining within the empire as a unity. Note that they continued to serve it for some time: they were loyal allies for a century of more afterwards.
“Refused to assimilate” is a strange phrasing of “Were never allowed to participate in the politics of the empire and were legally enforced to be second-class non-citizens, no matter how much they adapted to the culture.”
I do think the problem was on the Roman side, which was unable to persuade anymore. Just a few decades before the historic defeat against the Goths at Adrianople, Constantine I. had settled a similarly large group of refugees from beyond the Danube inside the empire – Sarmatians instead of Goths. The sources speak of tens of thousands of resettled barbarians in both cases. The Sarmatians promptly disappear from historical records, so were apparently assimilated without problems.
I see no reason to suppose the Romans at the end of the 4th centuries had any cultural or ethical qualms about assimilating barbarians. The problems were of a political nature, namely the regular civil wars between contenders for the imperial throne that started immediately after Constantine’s death and resurged every few years until the 460s at least. Many more Roman soldiers died in civil wars than battling barbarians (just read about the battle at the Frigidus), and after 380 CE, due to internal conflicts, Roman power quickly collapsed in Northern Gaul, Germania and Britannia.
Not to take away from your main point, that Romans felt no “white” kinship with Germanic or British tribes at all.
What matters isn’t skin color, but cultural similarity. Obviously, there was more similarity between Romans and Egyptians (Mediterranean, urban, state-run cultures) than between Romans and Germanic peoples. The thing is, that’s not the case today (although, of course, culture still matters: as a Spaniard, I’d feel quite uncomfortable if I discovered that there was a neighborhood in my country that had become a ghetto of white dixies with its own parallel structures, like those created by some immigrants from certain countries).
There’s another problem with that argument–leftist academics don’t really like it, because it implies that perhaps the non-western immigrants can and should assimilate to Western values, and said leftist academics aren’t convinced of either, because in a lot of cases they’re just as racialist as the right-wingers deservedly derided here and don’t believe that the West is worth assimilating to.
The Rawlsian veil of ignorance argument doesn’t work on right wingers. The more vulgar ones will insist they are genetically or mystically predestined to elite status, and the more thoughtful ones will, following from a rejection of Enlightenment universalism, insist that imagining yourself living in another time and place is absurd, you were born into a particular set of circumstances and someone born into others would be a completely different person, and the happiness of individuals matters little anyway compared to the “asabiyya” or “vitality” or whatever of the entire society
I mean, I have (what I would hope are better grounded than what you mention) philosophical objections to both the Rawlsian veil of ignorance and to many types of anthropic arguments.
@Hoffnung,
I’d be interested to know what your objections to the veil of ignorance are? I actually agree it has significant problems (for one thing, as @WoolieWool suggests, I think that the well being of society as a whole has to be considered in addition to the well being of individuals, and for another thing, I don’t see that it takes into account the temporal dimension, i.e. trading off suffering or privation today as the cost of a better society a few hundred years down the line). But, I still think it has significant weight- it’s not an absolute criterion of judgment, but it should carry *some* weight in our considerations.
Oh god. Not this again
To paraphrase Blackadder “There is one tiny flaw in this essay: it’s bollocks”
Let’s start with the basics: Umberto Eco’s essay is taken seriously by no real scholar of fascism. And isn’t it interesting that those scholars are completely unmentioned – as though no one but Evo ever studies fascism?
In reality, that moronic essay is popular for one reason: it allows intellectuals to pretend that fascism is anti-intellectual and therefore nothing they’d ever be part of. Right. In humdrum reality, fascism is a massively intellectual movement, past and present, and its advocates have always been intellectuals.
Here’s a quote: “Given supreme power over Germany, I would spare all the ordinary people and even most of the leaders… But I would hang every intellectual in the country, and the professors three feet higher than the rest”. That’s from the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a German Jew, writing on 1943. That’s the difference between dealing with real fascism and make-believe, Eco fascism.
But let’s move on. Who are these “Chuds”? Do they exist anywhere but the convincing construction of this essay? I went and looked at the linked blog post. It’s… not good.
One of the “chud” twitter accounts supposedly obsessed with Greece and Rome is “TradWest”. But that account has nothing to do with either – it is a Catholic fundamentalist account that focuses on theology and the lives of the saints. It never mentions the classical world.
“Daily Roman Updates” is about Rome – about memes about Rome. It’s an endless series of jokes about being a history nerd and, here’s the kicker, it is strictly apolitical
Aiyaiyai
This is not hard stuff to find out. The whole premise of this post can be refuted with a few minutes research on X.
(Do I need to say that the guff about ‘alienation’ is completely made up?)
Granted, that doesn’t make for such a good, or self-flattering anyway, story about brave intellectuals saving the world from the fascist menace of Twitter accounts – but I do think truth should matter a bit, yes?
But, as someone said, you can’t reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into…
Very interesting that those scholars of fascism are *still* unmentioned, even though you claim they refute Bret’s use of Eco. Bret cited a source. Why don’t you?
An no, Klemperer doesn’t count. He wasn’t a scholar of fascism, he was a scholar who lived during fascism. And also, if you read his diaries critically, the first thing you’ll notice that he doesn’t have a good sense of who’ll be drawn to Nazi ideology. It’s always his wife who’ll predict who goes Nazi. Also, he’s a professor of literature and his social circle is other academics, so we should not be surprised he focuses his ire on academics.
To your second point, Bret linked 10 chud accounts in that paragraph. You address two of them, one of which (TradWest) we might grant as being outside the scope of the article (although frankly also fitting the rank bigot anti-historian pattern Bret identifies, just for a different period) and one of which I could find bigoted material for with a few minutes of scrolling on Twitter. So why don’t you address the other eight?
Oh dear. You don’t seriously think I am making scholars up, do you? Here: Roger Griffin. Robert O. Paxton. Stanley G. Payne. Emile Gentile – who went scorched earth on Eco’s essay.
Now, isn’t it interesting in all of Devereaux’s blog posts talking about fascism he never once mentions any of these scholars? That you would not know from reading him that such a field existed at all?
Isn’t that a little curious? Isn’t dismissing a whole field of historians in favour of one single essay, rather like like dismissing the whole field of Roman history in favour of reading only “Roman Helmet Guy” tweets?
(And the sheer arrogance of saying that you understand more about the experience of Nazism than a Jew who lived through it – that is not even worth addressing)
As do your comments about the twitter accounts – you have conceded that I am right in those that I cite. Your excuse – that TradWest may have nothing to do with ancient Rome, and doesn’t pretend to be a historian, but he is a big horrid meanie, so therefore he counts – is just silly. I selected representative examples.
This is enough to make the whole post a laughing stock. Imagine turning in an essay about the Roman Republic, and one of you prominent sources was on Church law in the 14th century. What grade do you think Devereaux would give you?
But I will indulge you. Devereaux does _not_ link 10 “chud” accounts above; in fact, he doesn’t link one in the post above. Like the Great Invisible Ghost Of Ur Fascism, the “chud” accounts seem things that are apparently everywhere felt and nowhere seen. Or, rather, it is easier to talk them up as a big menace, rather than to point to evidence of the same.
But, as I say, I will indulge you. I go to his linked post and see what I can find. So we are quite clear, to count as evidence for this thesis, an account has to fulfil three criteria:
1. Needs to be about ancient Rome (Republic and Empire)
2. Needs to be political
3. Needs to be anti-liberal, at least fascist adjacent. Standard complaints about the decline of society, much less about the academy, don’t count.
For brevity, take it as read that if one isn’t about Rome and/or is not political, it is not fascist either.
Can we agree on those criteria? So, let me take them from the top, which accounts he links:
1. Trad West – neither political, nor about ancient Rome
2. The Cultural Tutor – not about Rome but about Art history, especially architectural history, and not political
3. Daily Roman Updates – about Rome, but not political, just memes
4. Roman Helmet Guy – about Rome and political, but no evidence given for fascist sympathy. Devereaux’s main complaint is that RHG disagrees with him about Wilson’s Odyssey. I read the exchange and RHG comes up on top. Helen really does refer to herself as ‘dog-faced’, which, in context, really does mean something like ‘shameless bitch’. The Bronze Age Achaeans were terribly uninformed of 21st century feminism…
5. Thinking West – not about Rome, and no evidence of fascism given.
6. Learn Latin – about Rome in the sense that it teaches latin and does art history. But not political. It doesn’t think much of the academy, though
7. Ancient Philosophy – not actually focused on Rome, nor politics mainly
8. Athenian Stranger – not focused on Rome, but the Great Books
9. Modern Caesar – finally, a hit! About Rome, and Political but… oh, gosh darn it, it seems your standard grumpy conservatism, not fascism. (I know that conservatism = fascism in the academy, but here we can get real)
10. The Hellenist. FINALLY, WE HAVE A WINNER! The Helenist is absolutely anti-liberal, and it is a coin toss to see if he’s just a 4chan troll or really means his crap about slavery, but who cares? So, anti-liberal, and political but… gosh darn it again! Not about Rome. He’s about Greece. Keeps advocating for a return to the worship of Zeus.
11. The Culturist. Not about Rome, apolitical, cultural history.
…this is a rout. Out of _11_ “chud”_ accounts cited in his piece not one – not ONE – passes all three criteria (it’s about Rome, it’s political, it’s at least fascist-adjacent). This isn’t scholarship – if you handed an essay like this in to me, an F- would be the least of it as I dug into my choicest native German expletives.
The main gripe about the “chud” accounts is that they don’t think much of the academy, and on a showing like this, who can possibly blame them?
And also? It should NOT be for me to hunt through these accounts to see if Devereaux’s description stacks up. There should be direct citations, screencaps – you know, evidence.
(incidentally, even if all 11 staked up, try saying the following aloud with a straight face: “We know there is a deep, resurgent threat of fascism because of 11 twitter accounts”)
Professor Devereaux, if you are reading this, please. Please just _stop_ with this cultural warfare nonsense. I learn a lot from you purely historical analysis, and even have a lot of fun with your stuff on Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings (though you are dead wrong about the Rohirrim – challenge me!). But whenever you start warning about the Great Ghost Of Fascism you come away looking pompous and ridiculous. Not a good look.
Let me add one point about why I get testy – where this stops being funny. It occludes real, actual fascism and dangers. You may bet your last cent that neither Devereaux nor any of his colleagues dropped one vote for Trump and congratulated themselves on being so gosh-darn enlightened in voting for the other party. Well, in 2016, the other party was Hillary Clinton who was bringing back Henry Kissinger, a man wanted in several countries for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and for using the US power to sponsor fascist coups. Real, actual fascist coups, with real secret police and death squads and real, flesh and blood victims. That’s what you get when you indulge in empty hysterics about non-existent threats – the real monsters are still out there, breeding.
This is why the idea popularized by Eco – we’re intellectuals, we can never be pro-fascist by definition! – is so sinister.
Just so I’m not misunderstanding what you’re trying to say here: Is your point “If people had not erroneously called Trump a fascist in 2016, then now he wouldn’t be using state power to crack down on political opposition in a clear authoritarian way, completely hollow out democracy in pursuit of an ideological project and immiserate the whole world in a stupid and pointless war?”
Because I’m really not sure that this is in any way a defensible position. I will not defend Kissinger, and no Democrat who couldn’t see the monster he was. But if you’re critical of one candidate’s cabinet choices and policies, you need to be critical of every candidates’ cabinets choices and policies. People are dead because of Trump’s choices, and many more will die because of his choices. Real flesh and blood victims.
I see that reading comprehension went by the wayside wherever you got your degree.
What I said, plain and simple, is that those congratulating themselves over opposition to the mean ol’ Orange Man were turning a blind eye to real and actual fascism.
That is the beginning and the end of it.
I’m going to give you two things. One relying on a single essay is kind of lazy. Two Democrats have skeletons in the closet. The rest of if thought ?
You have engaged in what smells of Trump apologia considering his clear autoritariansim. You have attacked intelectuals in a way that crosses from critisism to hatefull screed and only makes you look more like Trump apologist .
@testx
> You have engaged in what smells of Trump apologia
And that, as we know, is the unforgivable sin. Orange Man Bad – all the rest is commentary. Who cares about truth, or facts, or real crimes, real tyrannies, real genocides? All can be excused for the sake of stopping the Orange Man.
Excuse me. This is the bullshit that I am challenging – and note that you, not I, said “democrats”. I never mentioned them. I talked about _intellectuals_.
I am against this assumption that being an intellectual somehow makes you more immune to defending the worst people in the world. That is the only reason that stupid Eco essay is popular, and why it remains popular despite the easily provable fact that Fascism is an intellectual, modern, anti-traditional progressive, even _futurist_ ideology
This assumption is crap. Intellectuals are actually more susceptible to taking the side of depraved power. Look at your own comment – I wasn’t talking about ‘skeletons in the closet’, I said that Kissinger is wanted in several countries for war crimes. There are children still being born with life-destroying birth defects in Vietnam because of what that goon and his monstrous boss did there.
But, who cares, right? Orange Man Bad, that’s all you need for absolution.
This is why people have this need to believe that Trump is a fascist rather than just being a cheap crook and opportunist. Because then they are absolved and justified and never need to engage in any self criticism.
This near invincible arrogance of intellectuals is incredibly dangerous. The whole twentieth century can be seen as the record of intellectuals run amok.
But Orange Man is so bad that any opposition to him is justified. Right? Right?
No. I watched all the right thinking people say that Covid could not possibly have come out of a lab doing Gain Of Function research, no way, nuh-uh. Didn’t matter that molecular biologists have been warning about this for at least 25 years, doesn’t matter that all the evidence pointed that way. The Orange Man must be opposed.
This is lethally dangerous stupidity. It has sabotaged efforts to shut down gain of function internationally, and believe you me, Covid is nothing compared with what might come crawling out of a lab. But Orange Man has banned it, so it must be permitted.
But – hey. At least it’s not Trump Apologia, right?
First, your point about gain of function research is deeply flawed.
For one the scientific analysis is extremely controversial on this topic, which when combined with the political influences mean that no conclusion should be absolutely trusted. No one is rationally looking at the current state of the evidence and saying beyond a doubt that covid came from a lab, because it’s an astounding claim backed by insufficient evidence. There’s much more likely explanations, like the meat markets which epidemiologists and zoologists have been warning about for a century being at fault. It’s still possible, but that’s it.
Second, the primary critique of Trump among intellectuals was that he was using the claim irresponsibly, to deflect blame for his handling of the pandemic in a way with consequences for public safety and trust. Which he was. There was no need for him to spotlight the possibility at the time because it did not influence the response to COVID.
Three, your equation of Hillary with Trump is simply wrong. Hillary wasn’t a fascist and Tump is, according to several of those same scholars you literally just cited.
The “actual fascism” in America is almost universally in the Republican camp. The exceptions are fringe and apolitical fascism (I’ll address this) and support for larger fascistic systems. If your argument is that support for the military industrial complex is fascist then fine, but the only opposition to this which is politically active comes from the DSA, independents, the progressive caucus, and lately Massie and a few Republican radicals. If accepting that is sympatico with your point then you can claim Hillary’s campaign was fascist, but do note you’d be *agreeing* with the people you’re accusing of *ignoring* Hillary’s fascism; the most intellectual wing of the left. They’re the only ones who were saying that in earnest during Hillary’s campaign. They just also think Trump is the most destructive influence in modern politics.
Fourth, those scholars you cited are all highly controversial. Some are directly accused of apologia
Payne in particular is wildly rejected in academia because his argument that fascism was opposed to conservatism is contrary to the fact conservative movements embraced fascism in every situation it gained power in. He also favorably cites Spanish historians who are apologists for the Carlist fraction in Spain, and is critiqued as accepting the fascist position that the west is decayed because of liberalism as uncritically true.
Gentile is likewise rejected for arguing a position that is actually damning to *your position*, namely that fascism is unique to the 20th century and inapplicable to modern politics, which is why he rejects Eco. This is horseshit, but your argument about Hillary is downwind of the horse. Citing an author who disagrees with Eco in a way that disavows your own position does not indicate that Eco isn’t valuable.
Combined with the fact that I think Paxton is on record saying Trump is fascist since 2021 (a position I agree with) I think it’s less a matter of you making up citations and just you not understanding them, not to speak for op.
I can likewise point out how the twitter users you and Bret cite are actually fascists, mostly, but I don’t have twitter so I’d be reduced to citing academic papers that reference them. Which exist! Trad West is cited by name in one I skimmed. But I honestly have seen enough to just trust Brets analysis in conjunction with a few examples I have seen of similar accounts (linked elsewhere). Plus as Bret notes, there’s a pipeline. Not all are openly fascist, but they lead to each other by design.
Fifth, and finally, the core disagreement your position and sources have with Eco is that he identifies it as conservative and anti rational.
But this isn’t the same thing as saying it’s not part of intelligencia. What your sources tend to argue is that it’s part of the utopian movement, which has ties to an ideal of progress. However your sources are being deceptive or wrong; the thing fascism rejected was the direction of progress, specifically any ideal of bettering the citizen as opposed to the state, a clear break with the rest of the utopian movement. The only thing it shares is that it makes radical future prescriptions for society, but that’s an artifact of populism in general, it’s a sheer product of what rhetorical techniques work. The movements which aren’t don’t attract the popular base fascism does.
Intellectually it never had a deep base of support, even though it had absolute social power. There’s also absolutely fascist writers and thinkers, but they aren’t respected directly except by cranks and were very few and far between in the interwar period. They didn’t gain power through academic authority, they seized power and forced academia to award them authority.
But your sources are mostly wrong here, not non-existent. It’s a debate. But the position you’re arguing is the minority by far.
The remaining fact and what Eco is arguing, is that fascism is irrational. It might contain trappings of intellectual justifications and movements, such as utopian rhetoric and goals, but it rejects the core statement that human beings all possess equality through our capacity to reason, and that we have shared rights arising from that reason. That’s the thesis statement of the enlightenment, famously written in American and French founding documents, and dominated western intelligencia for centuries. They motivated in part the driving urge to make society better for the people in it, the utopian drive we mentioned earlier. It’s also intertwined with the idea that there is a reality we can understand through analysis and reason, an idea that directly leads to the concept that reason is fundementally human and equalizing. A king and a peasant aren’t judged by their authority, but by if they’re *right*.
When Eco is using such terms he’s referring to foundational rationalism, the ideal of reason that leads to human rights and honest inquiry. Fascism rejects *that*, and in rejecting it leads to all sorts of contradictions and insanity embedded in the fact that the rhetoric that leads to power without reason will always eventually conflict with reality, and hence eventually unreasoning power will exceed itself. That’s the core characteristic of fascism to Eco.
And he’s right.
But the trappings of intelligencia, utopia, and even the term liberal, are not *ontologically* associated with enlightenment ideals. I don’t remember if Bret is being curt on this and you’re mirroring him, but it’s important to clarify here because it’s not always honestly clarified even by academic sources. A fascist movement can occupy intelligencia and yet he anti intellectual. A fascist movement can achieve power in democracy yet it is antidemocratic. The core idealogy remains.
@Terry:
“I don’t remember if Bret is being curt on this and you’re mirroring him, but it’s important to clarify here because it’s not always honestly clarified even by academic sources. A fascist movement can occupy intelligencia and yet he anti intellectual. A fascist movement can achieve power in democracy yet it is antidemocratic. The core idealogy remains.”
That, I think, touches on one of the biggest problems with Robert’s line of argument: He seems to assume, at least implicitly, that you can use the methods, analytical tools, ways of deriving conclusions, and standards of proof of abstract higher mathematics to understand and talk about matters of human life, human thoughts, human actions, and human interactions. And that, of course, simply doesn’t work, because human beings are not mathematical abstractions.
Human beings are messy. Human beings are fuzzy. Human beings are complicated. Human beings are chaotic. And human beings are contradictory.
And in pretty much all cases where things related to human matters can be sorted into categories, at least some of those categories, at least to some extent, overlap. Which is why, for instance, it doesn’t make sense for him to assert that if fascism is a political ideology, it can’t possibly be a psychological phenomenon as well. Politics and psychology are clearly overlapping categories. Anyone who’s spent enough time observing the types of people who are most likely to be very much into politics should know that.
Which means that Eco’s psychological analysis of fascism and other people’s insights into it as a political ideology are not in some way magically mutually exclusive. I don’t know about the other three scholars he cites, but what I remember of reading Paxton makes me thing that he and Eco aren’t necessarily contradicting each other; they might as well be read as *complementing* each other. But since they’re saying somewhat different things, under a certain kind of ultra-abstract logic, that shouldn’t be possible.
Related to that is what appears to be Robert’s main motive for posting so much and so passionately in this thread: He assumes that Eco and Devereaux have claimed that intellectuals would be somehow magically immune to being fascists. Which, of course, Devereaux never said, and Eco probably didn’t say either.
Under a kind of math-like logic, if fascism is anti-intellectual, that might mean that intellectuals can’t be fascist. But, of course, human thoughts and actions don’t follow the logical standards of abstract mathematics.
In higher mathematics, the idea of a “positive negative number” might well be a silly oxymoron. But in human matters, the idea of an “anti-intellectual intellectual” is perfectly plausible.
@Raphael
Exactly. In fact, a movement that rejects rationalism would be more vulnerable to this behavior; it’s not strange that an ideology that doesen’t believe in reason is unreasonable.
It’s why I mentioned (then forgot) to clarify what I meant by apolitical fascism; a fascist can be part of a movement without understanding *anything* about it. This harkens to the myth of the good Wehrmacht soldier, which is primarily argued in the negative these days but which is a horse worth kicking every once in a while. If a person materially supports a fascist regime, particularly more than required of them for safety, they *are* a fascist. The ideology has captured them. A Wehrmacht soldier didn’t need to be a believer to be a Nazi.
Hence there’s an eclectic assortment of supporters of fascism whom don’t tick traditional blocks. Kanye West when he’s off his meds, for instance. He’s not *politically* a fascist, but he’s part of the movement. In his case because his brain is actually just broken, but less clinical examples exist. He’s not sane enough to actually be ideological beyond that he’s exceedingly vulnerable to irrational rhetoric.
Oh, and as a final aside, Eco explicitly talks about how Intelligencia becomes co-opted in his works on fascism. Plus he wrote entire books about how intelligencia becomes trapped in circular reasoning and madness, it was arguably his primary genre. If it weren’t so goddamn dense Foucault’s Pendulum would almost be worth reading due to it’s modern applicability to cases where academics on twitter went completely batshit insane during the pandemic, or how AI using technocrats have spiraled into madness.
The last is actually a pun, because spiralism is an AI cult based on recursions.
Ironically, someone probably fed Eco’s works into AI as training material, because chatbots are quite familiar and consistent when summarizing his talking points. Which means his own works on intellectual spirals might be part of the tendency for AI to talk about intellectual spirals, which leads the unwary technologist into an intellectual spiral. Which, given that metacommentary, obsession, and applicability are common themes to his work, is it’s own *fucking spiral*.
I don’t recommend reading Eco too much.
@Terry,
> or one the scientific analysis is extremely controversial on this topic,
No, not it is not. There is no controversy here. I learned about the dangers of Gain-Of-Function in 2002 in my Molecular Biology course. This is long before Trump was known as anything but a game show host and real estate bigmouth.
And all – _all_ – the evidence is that this came out of a lab. I reviewed the safety arrangements in Wuhan; they were a joke.
But – hey. Who cares, right? 70 million dead is no biggie; the important thing is Orange Man Bad.
> Second, the primary critique of Trump among intellectuals was that he was using the claim irresponsibly
See? It doesn’t matter what is true. It doesn’t matter what killed 70 million. It doesn’t matter what could cause something so much worse in the future. What matters is that mean ol’ Trump could _use it irresponsibly_! That’s what matter! The hell with the truth, the hell with life and death, Orange Man Bad, that’s the whole of the law and the prophets.
> The “actual fascism” in America is almost universally in the Republican camp
Source: Trust me, bro. Bruh, you can’t even _define_ fascism.
> Fourth, those scholars you cited are all highly controversial. Some are directly accused of apologia
By intellectuals who really, really, really want to think there is one totalitarian disaster they were not up to their eyeballs in.
Again. Tell me how they are wrong, give evidence, or leave it alone.
Trump may have met Kissinger, but it was Hillary who wanted to bring him back. And I still do not see anyone who is willing to acknowledge the problem there.
And, again, I am not defending Trump! I could do a better job than all of you put together in tearing him down. What I am attacking is this nearly impenetrable self-satisfied assumption of intellectuals. History, and the present, has shown how dangerous that is.
Again:
> But I honestly have seen enough to just trust Brets analysis in conjunction with a few examples I have seen of similar accounts
Who cares about the truth? Who cares about what these actually say? Who cares that there is no connection between the truth you can see with your own eyes and Devereaux’s account?
This is what I mean.
> Fifth, and finally, the core disagreement your position and sources have with Eco is that he identifies it as conservative and anti rational.
No, My disagreement with Eco is that the essay is bullshit, that it is “not even wrong”, it invokes something no one has ever seen or can prove, and it makes the definition of fascism so loose that it can be stretched to fit anything…. except intellectuals. Which is its purpose.
> But your sources are mostly wrong here
Source: trust me bro.
But you evade the main point. Whether or not these scholars can be criticised here or there, even criticised fairly, Devereaux never even brings them up. He acts like the whole field does not exist.
The impenetrable self-satisfaction of the intellectual, the idea that it is never _their_ fault no matter how many corpses are piled up: that is what I attack. And I make no apologies for doing so.
Well, I had a look at all four scholars you cite, and what I come away with is that you’re clearly not capable of arguing your point. If you’d actually read any of those four definitions, you’d not blithely write “Needs to be anti-liberal, at least fascist adjacent. Standard complaints about the decline of society, much less about the academy, don’t count.”
All four definitions include the component that it’s about a recreation of society which is considered “fallen” due to liberalism. Therefore, by all four definitions, the question of “Is this rhetoric about the decline of society” is important because it enables the important follow-up question of “What is its proposed policy to fix this perceived decline?” and “What does it imply as the source of the decline?”
Also, all both Payne and Gentile’s definitions include components of youthful masculinity, and all three except Griffin also note the role of permissibility of violence in these movements. Which does not really clash with Eco, so I don’t see how they’re eviscerating him.
Also, funnily enough, Gentile basically comes back around to Eco’s anti-intellectual point in his definition by describing the fascist cultural ideology as defined by aesthetics instead of theory. In other words, anti-intellectual.
What I take away with is that where these four scholars differ with Eco is primarily that Eco’s definition does not include political actions or processes. Which, fair enough. Personally, I’d say that does not invalidate him, especially when it comes to analysing the utterances of people without political power.
(I’ll also say that as much as I’d be willing to accept that other people’s definitions of fascism might be different, I’ll say that those components listed in Ur-Fascism are all inherently abhorrent to me, and anyone who espouses them is not somebody I want to be politically aligned with, whether it’s called fascism or not.)
As for the rest of your rant, I’ve decided that your judgement of what is political and what’s not, and who is a threat to democracy and who isn’t, is about as trustworthy as your understanding of k-means clustering, which is none whatsoever.
Oh, it’s you. I remember, the ignoramus who thinks a college degree is the same thing as functional understanding – and thinks that insults and arrogance can cover his deficit.
>All four definitions include the component that it’s about a recreation of society which is considered “fallen” due to liberalism
Yeah, the classic motte-and-bailey fallacy. Even Devereaux knows this is crap. By ‘liberalism’, I am not talking about the American definition of ‘blue-haired-layabout-bigmouths’. I mean the Enlightenment definition. You’d have to show that any of those support , e.g., the establishment of dictatorship. And to say you haven’t passed that bar, dearie, is to say the least of it.
Notice I didn’t say “against democracy”, because I know the dodge that you are relying on. I mean, you are against democracy, aren’t you? Trump was duly elected. That means he can do what he wants. What are you, against _democracy_?
That’s the b.s. move
> What I take away with is that where these four scholars differ with Eco is primarily that Eco’s definition does not include political actions or processes
Yes, thank you for making my point about why Eco is crap. Let me make it really simple, here is what fascism is _not_:
– It is not a spirit or ghost
– It is not a sensibility
– It is not a psychology
– It is not bacon and fries or any other weird comment Eco and his fools come up with.
Fascism is a _political ideology_. It is saying “This is the way that society should be organised”. That is what the actual originator of fascism, Mussolini, writes, as do all other fascists. It descends from, or rather is a mutated version of, Hobbes’ concept of sovereignty, the way Communism is a mutated version of Rousseau’s obsession with equality, and Anarchism is a mutated version of Locke’s emphasis of liberty.
Fascism is a belief in the Total State, that the State is the absolute reality and moral authority. That’s why fascist states are so heterogenous and contradictory; it is a simple idea that can be adapted to local conditions.
When Eco, or anyone, starts describing fascism as anything other than a political ideology, they reveal themselves to be complete fools and unworthy of serious discussion.
I note with extreme weariness that you are mischaracterising Gentile’s point. Yes, fascism’s popular culture was anti-intellectual. As was communism. Established tyrannies don’t want people asking questions of _them_. But that does not change one hair of the fact that fascism and communism are both profoundly intellectual and revolutionary movements, and both fascists and communists are intellectuals first and foremost.
As to the rest of this, you are admitting that I have the facts on my side and you don’t. You are not contesting that those X accounts say what I say they do, and not what Devereaux claims or implies. You are not contesting this, just trying to dismiss it as a ‘rant’. Well, I am not interested in characterisations, but in facts.
Actually, I think I can make this sharper. You know who was an actual precursor to real life fascism? Samuel Adams. Yup, him. He said that the American Revolution should create a, wait for it…
…wait for it…
…a Christian Sparta. Yup, Sparta.
Jeremy Belknap wanted to go further and revive the Spartan tradition of collective meal taking, “All men must eat together and their labour be put into common stock – in short, let the individuals be poor and the state be rich.” Benjamin Rush wanted to convert Americans into Republican Machines who were taught that they did not belong to themselves but to the state, that they were public property.
So, why didn’t any of this horror come to pass? Populism. The Revolution was fought by people who never read Plutarch – shock! – and probably didn’t even go to college – horror! – and had no time for such intellectual schemes – oh no! – but instead saw themselves as defending not an ideal of liberty, but the real liberty they had achieved in the New World. So the intellectual’s totalitarian tendencies were checked by populist fury.
You won’t read this in Devereaux’s self-flattering account of the Declaration. And it is easy to see why. If you accept that the success of liberal revolution that made the United States was largely thanks to populist defiance of intellectuals, why, where would we be? The great unwashed might think for themselves. They might not need intellectuals. They might even laugh at them.
I am exaggerating, but not by much. It is a persistent vice of all intellectuals to imagine themselves as the guardians of civilisation against the mob. And Eco’s damn essay is a very pernicious example of that.
Don’t bother. This noise machine will always be right, will never not have something to say, and is obviously all too ready distort and cherry-pick whether it’s deliberate or plain ignorance. Note the invocation of Henry Kissinger – wasn’t that cute?
Explain the steps to me how I’m engaging in motte-and-bailey fallacy here. Also, when did I make any claims about what kind of liberalism I was talking about?
I also have the feeling we’re talking past each other concerning the definition of “anti-intellectual”. I think you’re using the word as “against the scholarly class in society”. But what Eco and I use it as is “against the process of rational reasoning”. Those two positions can quickly blend into each other – what’s the point of having a class of people dedicated to figuring things out with rational reasoning of you don’t value rationality? But it’s important to note that they don’t have to overlap. You can have people who consider themselves part of the scholar class but who put rationality aside to argue for an emotional position. And you can have people who value actual expertise, who want to be able to trust a person who says “I researched it, and vaccines do not contain a significant amount of mercury” without having to do the research work themselves by becoming part of the scholar class.
Like every class under fascism, the academics found ways to adapt, which often meant having to abandon certain fields of study despite being well-evidenced and well-reasoned, and having to instead produce output that looked scientific and agrees with the people in power but lacks good reasoning. That, to me and to Eco, is anti-intellectual. And maybe, just maybe, what Professor Viktor Klemperer meant when he said “Let’s hang all intellectuals and the professors even higher” is that he felt betrayed by those people, who were willing to abandon the very principles on which their state in society is founded, to support this contemptible regime. You know, instead of arguing that he himself should be hanged as part of the horrible class of academics.
Also, being elected does not mean “Doing what you want”. The constitution is pretty clear. It enumerates which powers congress has, and which powers the president has. By logical reasoning, it follows that there’s powers they do not have, and things they’re not allowed to do, even if they want to. We don’t need to get into details, because I’m really not sure why you keep bringing up Trump unprompted. It’s almost as if you’re having an emotional response.
I am going to cut through this self-flattering guff and make it simple:
The idea that intellectuals are somehow above and beyond fascism, somehow innately opposed to fascism, is codswallop. Intellectuals were the first and most enthusiastic champions of fascism.
As to the rest of this, you have conceded I have the facts on my side and you do not. You now want to argue over nuance and interpretations – sorry, I’ll pass. Those are matters of judgement and I have little time for yours.
,the way Communism is a mutated version of Rousseau’s obsession with equality, and Anarchism is a mutated version of Locke’s emphasis of liberty.
This isn’t a very accurate or useful description of communism, for a start. (I don’t know enough about what anarchists believe to say whether it’s correct there, but i doubt it).
The best description of what made fascism unusual and different that i’ve seen, i forget the exact phrasing, but it has to do with idea of national renewal through violence/aggression. I don’t actually think this fits a lot of the groups that are popularly called “fascist”, but it’s hard to deny that it fits the Trump regime in the US, as well as their counterpart in present-day Russia.
@Hector
I don’t think someone whose lengthy and histrionic comments refuse to engage honestly with their interlocutors is trying to fashion a definition, so much as a cudgel.
@Hector,
Well, it is the description that fits the definition Mussolini gives in his “Doctrine of Fascism”, the foundational text. But, hey, what did he know?
I know the definition you are reaching for – Palingenetic Ultranationalism. It’s from Roger Griffin (one of those scholars that Devereaux never mentions). If you read Griffin, however, you will not find that he contradicts my point.
Saying that Trump is fascist is asinine. He’s not an absolute dictator, he isn’t calling for totalitarian control of society, isn’t calling for permanent militarization et cetera.
@raymond, ah, yes, citing facts and seeing descriptions meet those facts is ‘histrionic’. What are they teaching in those colleges…
@Alien@System,
Actually, there is one thing I want to bring up. Why did I bring up Trump? I made it plain, but since you like to pretend you don’t get it:
The idea pushed by Eco and Devereaux is that fascism some weird, alien ethos of the unenlightened. It is anti-intellectual, and those who have gone to finishing college and university and are properly trained intellectuals will be proof against it. While the great unwashed may fall for fascist blandishments, they’re not properly educated, and the rightly educated intellectual class will be proof against it. Just look at the post above and try and tell me it doesn’t scream this attitude
This assumption is not true. This assumption has never been true. The originators of fascism and its fiercest defenders have always been intellectuals. The origins and defence of fascism has _never_ been some weird archaic ethos – there is, in fact, nothing ‘primitive’ about fascism. Fascism is ultramodern and futurist, and it comes from the mindset that is still very much with us today: the conviction of intellectuals that, as those fitted with foresight and wisdom they are best placed to guide society
And THAT is why I brought up Trump. Because the 2016 election can be seen easily as the rout of the intellectuals – and while the intellectual class, left and right, were congratulating themselves on their supposed antifascism, it is a simple fact that a vote for Clinton in 2016 was a vote for a real patron and supporter of real life fascism. There is no getting around that.
I bring this up to puncture the habitual self-satisfaction of the intellectual; this habit of being able to see the flaws in everyone’s thinking but one’s own.
“Fascism is a belief in the Total State, that the State is the absolute reality and moral authority. ”
I don’t think that’s actually the case. (or rather, if that is the case you end up with a very specific definition of fascism that excludes, eg. nazi germany)
“Saying that Trump is fascist is asinine. He’s not an absolute dictator”
By that logic Mussolini wasn’t a fascist until 1922 and arguably *never* was considering he was deposed by his own regime. (and thus hardly “absolute”)
There are arguments against Trump being a fascist but “He’s not actually successfully become a dictator yet” isn’t really one of them.
> I don’t think that’s actually the case. (or rather, if that is the case you end up with a very specific definition of fascism that excludes, eg. nazi germany)
Fine. On what basis do you disagree? What documents are you referring to? What theory of fascism are you invoking based on what evidence?
Because the Total State is absolutely central to Mussolini’s “Doctrine of Fascism” – the foundational text.
And why do you say this excludes Nazi Germany? Hitler was completely explicit, well before he was even a lunatic fringe candidate: democracy and liberalism must go, the entire society must be organised as a Total State.
Now pause and look at what you just wrote. You took one point I made, wrenched it out of context, dismissed it without evidence. This is not how people write or think when they are aware of a mature field of study.
This is not your fault! This is an indictment of both the schools and the culture. You should have known about things like the “Doctrine of Fascism” and these scholars and the rest of it. Just imagine if we were disagreeing about the cultures of the Plains Indians, how different that would be – and that’s not even Devereaux’s speciality, he just did basic diligence there.
But in this field, he writes as though there was nothing but that crap Eco essay. That is just not good enough.
@Robert Bosch,
I haven’t read Roger Griffin, so i’m not borrowing him, not directly anyway. The phrase “national renewal through aggression/violence” doesn’t actually require a totalitarian or even authoritarian state. Trump doesn’t need one, right now. Outside of academia and medicine/health, he has either full, dominant, or partial control of all the other institutions in American life, from the Supreme Court down to the police forces. He can get what he wants, for now, or most of it at any rate, without needing authoritarian measures.
The reason I like that definition is because i think it gets to why so many people, all across the political spectrum (socialists, communists, anarchists, nationalists, liberals, religious believers, even quite a few “normal” conservative authoritarians) saw the Nazis and their allies in the 1930s/1940s as such a threat. It wasn’t really about the authoritarianism, it was about the aggression, and the whole worldview in which the aggressive warfare played such a big part. Aggresion was the centerpiece of the Nuremberg trials after all.
And if you don’t think that Donald Trump and his followers believe in national renewal through aggression, especially when it comes to his foreign policy, then all I can say is you haven’t been listening enough either to his speeches, or to those of his cabinet members, or to those of his propagandists and defenders. I guess you’re lucky, i’ve heard a lot more of this stuff than I would ever care to.
@Hector
Two parts here. First, the idea that Trump gets everything what he wants and has control over media, academia et cetera seems a little hard to square that those largely hate him. Fascists tend not to have people who make big bucks yelling about how mean they are in academia & media.
As to the second bit, okay, let’s hear it for AI. Some quotes from the last 10 US presidents:
Donald Trump: “The golden age of America begins right now.”
Joe Biden: “A day of history and hope. Of renewal and resolve.”
Barack Obama: “We have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.”
George W. Bush: “We renew that purpose today, to make our country more just and generous.”
Bill Clinton: “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”
George H. W. Bush: “A new breeze is blowing, and a nation refreshed by freedom stands ready to push on.”
Ronald Reagan: “Let us begin an era of national renewal.”
Jimmy Carter: “Let us create together a new national spirit of unity and trust.”
Gerald Ford: “Our long national nightmare is over.”
Richard Nixon: “The time has come for a new American revolution
Talk of national renewal is commonplace. And this is why it isn’t enough to just take a sentence and see if you can squint until it agrees with you. You need to read the actual source.
Once again: fascists advocate for the total state – everything in the state, nothing outside it. This means dictatorship – the abolition of all competing parties. They have a cult of uniformity, they want _permanent_ war, and so on. This is not Trump and it is just plain silly to pretend otherwise.
First, the idea that Trump gets everything what he wants and has control over media, academia et cetera seems a little hard to square that those largely hate him
You didn’t read what I said carefully, I said “either full, dominant or partial” control, and I specifically said *all the institutions except for academia and medicine*, which are nearly completely opposed to him.
As for the media, yes a lot of them hate him, but we also live in a culture where there are now a lot of GOP-aligned media as well.
@Hector,
> As for the media, yes a lot of them hate him, but we also live in a culture where there are now a lot of GOP-aligned media as well.
Diversity of opinion in the media. Clear sign of fascism.
And I did misread, but you are completely conceding my point. Academia is the first to knuckle under to real fascism. That Trump has universal opposition from academia is a point for me. I would say, though, that the opposition is more class prejudice than principle.
ANYWAY, TO GET BACK TO THE ORIGINAL POINT:
No one has challenged me on my point that none of the X accounts Devereaux quotes say what he says they do (invoke ancient Rome in the service of fascist adjacent ideology), nor has anyone defended that awful Eco essay.
>”Fine. On what basis do you disagree? What documents are you referring to? What theory of fascism are you invoking based on what evidence?”
On the basis that Hitler’s “supreme reality” was not the state but the race, of which the state was an instrument. Hitler clearly does not see the State as the supreme moral authority because he specifically went in to reshape it in order to fulfill his ideals of how it should be, he didn’t reshape himself according to the existing state, *he did not acknowledge its moral authority*.
@Robert Bosch:
Jeremy Belknap wanted to go further and revive the Spartan tradition of collective meal taking, “All men must eat together and their labour be put into common stock – in short, let the individuals be poor and the state be rich.”
I would object very strongly to a “Christian Sparta” (though since fascism is a modern ideology, calling for that in the 18th c is somewhat different than calling for it today). But, collective meal taking and collective control of labour were like the least objectionable things about Sparta- this is not why people, at least me, would find the idea of a Christian Sparta horrible.
@Arilou
>On the basis that Hitler’s “supreme reality” was not the state but the race, of which the state was an instrument.
YES! AT LAST! Finally a good argument in this thread. I am dead serious – I am so happy to see this.
This is excellent – you have put your finger on a live controversy in the field of fascist studies. Many serious scholars that say that the Nazis were not fascists, for precisely the reason you describe – that Hitlerism is something unique and terrible.
I disagree, and here is why. Fascism is very simple and it can be made into many different forms. You can have racist fascism and non-racist fascism (see Mussolini). I say that Hitler’s racial philosophy is not an essential part of fascism, but that he found fascism perfectly suited to his racial philosophy. The total state, the cult of uniformity, the idea of a ‘New Man’, the worship of war – all these fit Hitler’s racial ideas. Fascist politics was a good tool for racial ideas.
So. You can have fascists who are not racial. You can have racialists who are not fascist. And you can have Hitler who was both.
That is why I say that Hitler was a fascist, but I see why some disagree.
@robert_Bosch
>And THAT is why I brought up Trump. Because the 2016 election can be seen easily as the rout of the intellectuals – and while the intellectual class, left and right, were congratulating themselves on their supposed antifascism, it is a simple fact that a vote for Clinton in 2016 was a vote for a real patron and supporter of real life fascism. There is no getting around that.
>Two parts here. First, the idea that Trump gets everything what he wants and has control over media, academia et cetera seems a little hard to square that those largely hate him. Fascists tend not to have people who make big bucks yelling about how mean they are in academia & media.
Do you want to square the self contradiction here? Because it seems like you’re arguing that Clinton was a fascist for being supposed by the “intellectual class”, that Trump was not because he has detractors there, yet Clinton had detractors in the “intellectual class”. Enough that she lost, in fact.
@Terry
Oh dear
>t seems like you’re arguing that Clinton was a fascist for being supposed by the “intellectual class”,
Does anyone read these days? No. I said that Henry Kissinger supported fascists because – not in theory, but in real, flesh and blood reality – that evil bastard sponsored fascist coups.
Real, actual fascist coups and genocides. Look up Kissinger’s role in defending the Bangladesh genocide – 3,000,000 daed.
And that is who Hillary Clinton was bringing back.
And the whole intellectual class was fine with that.
This is why I get angry at this.
@Robert Bosch:
“And that is who Hillary Clinton was bringing back.
And the whole intellectual class was fine with that. ”
What do you mean by, Hillary Clinton *brought Kissinger back*? Do you think that he was ever gone in the first place? If so, you are sadly mistaken. The next time you read about his life, you might want to check out the parts *after* the end of the Ford Administration, too.
Hillary Clinton’s biggest flaw is probably that ever since she became a permanent political fixture, she’s been way too *conventional* – always eager and willing to go along with what “everyone” in the circles in which she traveled agreed on. Note: by “the circles in which she traveled”, I mean the political class, not the intellectual class – there’s a lot of overlap between those classes, but they’re far from identical.
In any case, one of the most repulsive aspects of the political class in the USA is how accepting they are of American war criminals and political criminals more generally. Clinton’s attitude in that context is horrible, but by no means unusual.
“that is who Hillary Clinton was bringing back” makes it sound as if he would generally have been treated as a widely condemned outcast until Clinton, in her evilness or stupidity or whatever, welcomed him back into polite society. But unfortunately, the ugly truth is *much worse* than that: It’s that he had never been excluded from polite society in the first place. He should have been, but he wasn’t. Basically everyone in US politics except for the leftmost parts was fine with him.
Oh, and for the record, the last President who appointed Kissinger to an actual government position was George W. Bush. I remember one earlier thread where you passionately defended George W. Bush against his critics. If being friendly to Kissinger proves the overall badness of Hillary Clinton and those who supported her, why doesn’t appointing Kissinger to an actual government position prove the overall badness of George W. Bush and those who supported him?
While we’re at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:President_Trump_Meets_with_Henry_Kissinger_(33787724293).jpg
I eagerly await your angry condemnation of the President in that photo, and of those who voted for him or supported him.
I’ll also note that Clinton’s friendly words for Kissinger were just that – words. There’s no good reason to believe that she would have *acted* in any way like him as President. Trump, on the other hand, did commit and is still committing real, substantial crimes which harm the, as you put it, flesh and blood of actual people. Recently, one Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Is his death just theoretical for you? Or just some culture war bullshit?
And in the larger scheme of things, Trump is one of the main leaders of the cultural conservatives of his country. Western variants of cultural conservatism are usually a lot less bad than outright fascism, but they still cause a fair amount of misery to many of those flesh and blood human beings who have the misfortune of living in places where culturally conservative attitudes are socially dominant. Is the misery of those flesh and blood human beings just some culture was bullshit for you? In any case, you seem to be very angry at people in that position if and when they react to their experiences by voting against the leaders of the political and cultural movement that brought them their misery.
Out of curiosity, where’s your evidence that the entire intellectual class was fine with Clinton’s closeness to Kissinger?
@robert_bosch
> And that is who Hillary Clinton was bringing back. And the whole intellectual class was fine with that. This is why I get angry at this.
So…your assertion is that because Clinton had ties to Kissinger she was a fascist?
So did Trump. He met with him after winning, and Kissinger visited twice in 2017. Trump actually bought Kissinger back.
You seem to be holding Hillary to a standard based on what you imagine she may have done, but not Trump to the same standard for what he actually did. So again, care to square that circle?
The chuds remind me in some ways of groups like the Ricardians or the Shakespeare authorship crowd, or for that matter the Jesus mythicists. In each case they adopt a position that doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny, so they reject the idea of scrutinizing their position. Since academics are in the best position to do this, they reject the academy. The classic argument is that academics need to embrace orthodoxy to keep their jobs, so therefore academics’ arguments are inherently tainted. This is, of course, a textbook ad hominem argument, but no matter.
The chuds differ in motivation. My sense is that the typical Shakespeare authorship enthusiast simply enjoys contrarianism. Finding a good contrarian position and supporting it requires expertise, which is to say it requires effort. Claim the Earl of Oxford, or whoever, wrote those plays and you get a prepackaged contrarian thrill without having to put work into it. The chuds, on the other hand, are coming at it from an overly political starting point. But the methods are similar.
I always find it amazing how people will prefer to make stuff up rather than go and look at reality.
>are coming at it from an overly political starting point.
I would not dismiss sheer contrarianism in the political sphere either.
I don’t know nearly enough to have an opinion, but I have heard someone make the case that the “Shakespearean” corpus had to have multiple authors, because the vocabulary was too large to have represented the output of a single person. Yes, the guy is a bit of a contrarian, but he did seem to have at least a superficially coherent argument.
Yes, but it’s an argument plucked from thin air. There’s no evidence whatsoever that anyone but Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems, and a great deal of positive evidence that he did (eg the testimonies of friends, fellow playwrights and actors of the time, the records of the Lord Chancellor’s office …)
On the face of it, everyone who has read and understood Shakespeare’s plays has vocabulary at least as large as that he used writing his plays, so it cannot be that unreasonably large.
“others don’t know Greek (which makes it pretty hard to have a useful opinion on a translation)!”
I think I would disagree slightly with this – not knowing Greek means that I can’t have a good opinion of a translation qua translation, but I can still have a good opinion of it as a work of literature.
For example, I do not speak Anglo-Saxon, but I still feel qualified to say that the early 20th century translation of “Beowulf” that translated the opening “Hwaet!” as “What-ho!” is not a good translation.
(Not to see that I would not read a translation of Beowulf written throughout in the style of PG Wodehouse. I would pay through the nose for it. This is not that.)
Sure, but ultimately what you’ll be having an opinion of is of the translated story, not the original.
And this is beside the point; the chuds _are_ debating over translation, and in the bulwark article there’s some Formerly Twitter posts of it directly attacking on some words being different than other translations, and therefore “inaccurate to the source material (to further An Agenda)”. Whether or not it sounds prosaicly good to them seems to be beside its point.
Side tangent, from what I see in Wiktionary’s citation, “What ho” _is_ contemporary within the 1910-1920, so I don’t think it’s a bad translation _back then._
The issue is that you’re making a judgement about the qualities of the finished text, but by definition you don’t know what the original is like.
You can read the text as an english text and make judgements about it (how well it flows, how the words work etc.) but since you can’t read the original you have no way of knowning how these things cohere with the original text.
Recently in the London Review of Books we find that Chuds are a ‘Murican tradition:
“The most illuminating section of Visser’s book describes attitudes to pedantry during and after the American Revolution.
The plain style of Thomas Paine initiated a wave of resistance to small cliques of classically educated rulers, who might unite pedantry with tyranny and irreligion. The key question became: What was useful knowledge for the new nation?’ And the answer to that question was often: ‘Knowledge that isn’t pedantic’, in various senses.
Religious leaders could insist, as one anonymous preacher put it, that ‘larnin’ isn’t religion, and eddication don’t give a man the power of the Spirit In the presidential election contest of 1828 between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, a farmer asked which was ‘the best dictionary man?’ On being told it was Adams he declared his intention of voting for Jackson, on the grounds that ‘dictionary men’ get everything wrong.”
From the review:
Dictionary Men
Colin Burrow
ON PEDANTRY: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE KNOW-IT-ALL by Arnoud S.Q. Visser.
Princeton, 333 Pp., £25, November 2025, 978 o 6g1 25756 3
Page 31 LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 9 JULY 2026
Great article as always! It very much brought to mind one of my all-time favourite online interactions: “the sculptor is a chinese woman you dork ass losers”
Just for fun I ran my ACOUP comment counter for this week, at a time when there were 313 comments.
Original post by Bret Devereaux 3515 words.
Of the 90 strong commentariat, so far Dinwar and Robert Bosch have both comfortably passed that word count, and Terry is less than a hundred words behind.
Great to see classical studies attracting so much attention and passion. And a little surprising, for the previous week Declaration of Independence nobody came close to the original post. (Although that may have been because comments were closed early at 274.)
Interesting! Can you tell us more about the technical side of that comment counter?
It’s two to three hundred lines of Python depending on what you count as necessary, plus the requests and Beautiful Soup packages. Runs on Linux. I wrote it a few years back when there was a sustained burst of political comments, and someone else wondered just how much wordage was being generated.
Runs on either the URL for a post plus comments, or previously downloaded and saved HTML. (Separate download is better for testing, means I don’t keep hammering the server.) I use the Beautiful Soup package to break up the HTML into elements, and then extract the raw text from the original post, and the author/text of various comments, from the elements. Once that’s done, I just need a dict by author name to add up the word counts.
(Word counts are whatever standard Python thinks is a word when you split a long string. I’ve checked and the results are more or less identical to Unix wc and Microsoft Word’s counts. There’s a slight mismatch to human readers in that two hyphenated words, or two words joined by a full stop where the writer forget to insert a space, get counted as just one; but since the totals are hundreds to thousands of words these aren’t worth worrying about.)
Major hassle is that WordPress breaks up comments over time, the “Older” and “Newer” links visible on any less recent post that attracted sustained commentary. So I have to manually check each post + comments page and make sure I use the URL for the oldest block. (Anyone know if there’s a standard WordPress URL for “give me all the comments” ?)
Oh, interesting! Thank you!
I feel like you’re punching down here by going after well known idiot (such as @romanhelmetguy) while not adressing the “higher end” of the chudspace (such as Lavader who’s an influencer who has clearly more erudition and tends to source his work from what I’ve seen of it).
It’s easy to see this space as a monolith of emotionnal idiots who only got interested in history to further an agenda, but to have went down the rabbit hole due to being on twitter and a bit too chronically online, I can assure you that there’s various level and “factions” among the chuds (such as a divide between europeans and american one since the re-election of Trump).
So while the article isn’t wrong, it’s just picking an easy target of well known idiots among the group, while not adressing the actual thinking part of “the chuds”.
if they’re anything like the supposed intellectual heavyweights of fascism, your Curtis Yarvins etc, I am not particularly impressed
A whole week late, but the nonviolent protest vs violent insurgents podcast got me thinking on how else protests succeed or fail? Because I have an impression that an increasingly common failure state is not “there’s no spectacle” or “everyone gets shot” but rather “the spectacle doesn’t get transmitted to people” or “the state/media is able to portray the protestors as internal enemies against whom any violence is implicitly permitted,” but I don’t know how common these actually are
I wonder if reaction should be understood in terms of class and class mobility: men who see themselves as an aristocracy, defending the boundaries and privileges of their class against “commoners”.
My impression is that 1) both fascism and more generically reactionary politics tend to be found among people from all kinds of classes, at least among the dominant ethnic group in each place, and 2) fascists and more generically reactionary people from all kinds of classes tend to see right-wing politics as something that is good for their own class and bad for competing classes.
So you get rich reactionaries and rich fascists being very happy that their preferred politics mercilessly crush those annoying far-left rabble-rousers who might encourage the commoners to come for their money, and also poor or at least less wealthy reactionaries and fascists being very happy that their preferred politics are a great way to stick it to those arrogant elitist snobs who (really or supposedly) always looked down on them.
Fascism: It has something for everyone!
(Late, but…) In a similar vein, I wonder whether American chud classicists are a reaction to the manner in which Confederate apologists are now stereotyped as “lower class.” There’s certainly a stereotype now about what sort of person flies a Confederate flag – and it’s a man with a beer, an ostentatiously-large beard, and a rusty pickup with truck nuts.
I wonder if chud classicists are simply taking the same framework of grievance, and the same misconceptions about economics and politics, and transferring them to more “high-class” societies with extensive slave labor and a presumed-white ruling class, because the class-based stigma of Confederate apologism in the modern day doesn’t fit their self-conception.
It would be interesting to see whether their most glaring inaccuracies about Greece and Rome map well to pro-Confederate narratives.