Despite the common misunderstanding of the word, “celibate” does not refer to someone who abstains from sex. “Celibate” refers to someone who forgoes marriage — the part about not having sex is implied, at least in the Christian world, give or take an Alexander VI or two. “Chaste,” at the same time, doesn’t quite mean what people think it does: It refers principally to the abstention from extramarital sex, which in the case of the celibate means abstention from sex categorically. But chastity is part of marriage, too, describing a reverent attitude toward sex. In the Christian view (which is to say, in the view of Western civilization until ten minutes ago), the procreative act is the means by which men and women in union with one another participate in God’s creative work. “Chastity” means a lot more than mere abstinence. Chastity isn’t some kind of genital veganism.
There has been some pretty elevated stuff written on that subject, and if you want to take that particular high road, then Professor Robert George of Princeton is your guy. But consider the low road, too. There’s another conclusion, maybe a little bit cynical, that could be drawn from this: If you are a sexually frustrated young man, the smart play would be to join a church.
Kevin D. Williamson, “Advice for Incels”, National Review, 2018-05-10.
August 7, 2020
QotD: Celibacy and chastity
August 6, 2020
QotD: Selling booze to the immature
I am, by the way, fully aware of how innovation works — that most of civilization has occurred because someone, somewhere said: “Y’know, I bet if we just changed …” — but that’s confusing improvement with extension. Tinned fruity-flavored gin is not an improvement.
I know that raspberry-flavored beer may have caused more people to take to beer drinking, but that’s changed things, and not for the better. Go into any bar and look at what beers are on tap these days. Barely a drinkable one available, and worse, they’ve pushed all the decent beers into bottles (or out of stock) while hipsters and chickies are catered to with the latest fad, Strawberry IPA [pause to be sick].
Basically, booze manufacturers are changing their products to appeal to people who don’t like booze. In the old days of marketing, we used to call that pointless endeavor “catching eels” (try catching an eel in mid-air when someone tosses it in your direction and you’ll see what I’m talking about). Not only is it pointless, it’s mercurial because what’s popular today won’t be popular tomorrow as your fickle new customers chase after the next “Flavor Of The Month”, and you’ll have gone from catching one eel to catching multiple eels. That’s something they don’t teach in the Marketing section of the typical MBA course because MBAs are all about theory (“line extension”, “product enhancement”, etc.). And don’t tell me I’m talking nonsense because I’ve seen the curricula.
Kim du Toit, “Gilding the Lily #268”, Splendid Isolation, 2018-05-24.
August 5, 2020
QotD: Responsibility
The sort of thing I mean is when a British Conservative Party politician says, perhaps to a room full of people who, like me, take the idea of personal liberty very seriously: Yes, I believe, passionately, in personal liberty. The politician maybe then expands upon this idea, often with regard to how commercial life works far better if people engaged in commerce are able to make their own decisions about which projects they will undertake and which risks they will walk towards and which risks they will avoid. If business is all coerced, it won’t be nearly so beneficial. We will all get poorer. Yay freedom.
But.
But … “responsibility”. We should all have freedom, yes, but we also have, or should have, “responsibility”. Sometimes there then follows a list of things that we should do or should refrain from doing, for each of which alleged responsibility there is a law which he favours and which we must obey. At other times, such a list is merely implied. So, freedom, but not freedom.
The problem with politicians talking about responsibility is that their particular concern is and should be the law, law being organised compulsion. And too often, their talk of responsibility serves only to drag into prominence yet more laws about what people must and must not do with their lives. But because the word “responsibility” sounds so virtuous, this list of anti-freedom laws becomes hard to argue against, even inside one’s own head. Am I opposed to “responsibility”? Increasingly, I have found myself saying: To hell with it. Yes.
I have often been similarly resistant to the language of Christianity, of the sort that dominates what is being said in churches around the world today. How many times in history have acts of tyranny been justified by the tyrant saying something like: We must all bear our crosses in life, and here, this cross is yours. “God is on my side. Obey my orders.” The truth about the potential of life to inflict pain becomes the excuse to inflict further pain.
Brian Micklethwait, “Jordan Peterson on responsibility – and on why it is important that he is not a politician”, Samizdata, 2018-03-30.
August 4, 2020
QotD: Epicureans are not hedonists
Many people consider that a fair summary of the Epicurean philosophy, named for its founder, the Athenian philosopher Epicurus who lived from 341-270 B.C., a few generations after Plato. It is a natural mistake. After all Epicurus did say that “Pleasure is the starting-point and goal of living blessedly.”
A common Greek word for pleasure is “hedone,” whence our word “hedonism.” A hedonist, we know, is someone who devotes himself to sensual pleasure. Add that to the fact that Epicureanism is a deeply materialistic philosophy — “all good and bad,” Epicurus says, “consists in sense experience” — and it is easy to see why people often conclude that Epicureanism advocates sensual abandon.
Easy, but mistaken.
For in fact, Epicureanism is a deeply ascetic philosophy. It preaches the gospel of pleasure. But it defines pleasure in such a way that no hedonist worth his salt would embrace it.
A hedonist is someone devoted to pleasure in the positive sense: he seeks to gratify his senses.
An Epicurean is devoted to pleasure in the negative sense: he seeks to avoid pain. “We do everything we can,” Epicurus wrote, “for the sake of being neither in pain nor terror.”
It is a melancholy fact that the human frame, while capable of great joy and pleasure, is susceptible to even greater pain and misery. The pleasures afforded us are delicate blossoms; the pains we are susceptible to are like a raging wildfire in comparison. Epicurus and his followers took note of this fact. Indeed, it was a fact that mesmerized their imaginations.
Epicurus says that pleasure is the goal of life. But what he taught was immunity to pain. “The removal of all feeling of pain,” he wrote, “is the limit of the magnitude of pleasures.” There was a core of common sense about the Epicurean approach to life. He advised his followers to live simple, healthy lives, to shun extravagances of all sorts. Of course, that is something many philosophers, indeed many friends and parents, would also advise. There is nothing distinctively Epicurean about the injunction to live simply and soberly.
There are three things distinctive about Epicureanism. One is its identification of pleasure with the absence of pain. Another is its emphasis on sense experience as the ultimate reality. The third is its identification of tranquillity as the aim or goal of life. (The Greek word is “ataraxia,” i.e., not troubled, not disturbed: note the privative character of the Epicurean ideal.)
If it is to succeed, Epicureanism must deliver us not only from physical pain but also from anxiety and mental anguish. The prospect of death, Epicurus knew, upset many people. Hence he and his followers expended a great deal of effort trying to remove the sting, the fear, from the prospect of death.
Epicurus offered two things to battle the fear of death: an attitude and an argument. The attitude was one of mild contempt: the right sort of people, he implies, do not get in a tizzy about things, not even about death. The argument is equally compelling. “Get used to believing,” he says, “that death is nothing to us.”
Roger Kimball, “Coronavirus, Flynn and Epicureanism”, American Greatness, 2020-05-02.
August 3, 2020
QotD: History or “Her” story?
In my last year in college, I had American Literature taught by a Fullbright exchange professor. I will never forget the moment the poor man — talking to a class of 36, all women as such classes often are — let slip the innocent word “him” to mean an indeterminate gender. He paused, went white, his eyes widened, and he said, “I mean, I mean, he or she.”
Meanwhile, the class of 36 was staring at him in puzzlement. It took us a while to take it all apart and realize he thought we’d be offended by the use of “he” to mean someone generic, of indeterminate gender.
I think we patted him kindly on the shoulder and told him that no, really, we weren’t offended. The usage was the same in Portuguese and we’d been told it was the same in most Indo-European languages. And who on Earth would get offended over semantics? The language was the language. It meant nothing about us personally.
This was of course before I married, came to the U.S. and found that for the American woman circa 1985, the language was not just personal, it was personally offensive.
I remember standing in horror underneath a bookstore section proudly labeled Herstory.
Of course the etymology of the word history is not his + story, the sort of pseudo-clever deduction about language that I was used to from the near-illiterate elderly people in the village. (It would be too complex and involve Portuguese, but there was this old farmer who had somehow deduced from the Portuguese word for farmer that farmers were the only ones who would be saved at the end of time.)
History, of course, is not originally an English word. It comes from the Latin historia — meaning a relation of events — by way of the French estoire, meaning story. Note please that in neither of those languages does “his” mean “belonging to him.” And that making the same sort of illiterate assumptions about the French word, we’d get “It is oire.”
I thought that the store must have hired an illiterate employee, but no, over the next ten years, in various circumstances, and possibly still except for the fact that I’ve learned to silence such fools with a death glare, I’ve come across the same smug-idiot assumption and “corrections” of the English word, so as to “fight against the patriarchy.”
That this is done by people who paid more money than I make in a couple of years for a college degree, and who, doubtlessly, think that etymology is a dish made with onions, or perhaps a conspiracy of the patriarchy fills me with a sort of dull rage that has no outlet.
Sarah Hoyt, “The Semantic Whoredom of the Left”, PJ Media, 2018-05-11.
August 2, 2020
QotD: Marx’s imperfect economic understanding
We can find, if we look properly, Marx’s insistences of how appalling monopoly capitalism would be in Smith. They’re both right too, it would be appalling. But we do have to understand what they both mean by this. In modern terms they mean monopsony, more specifically the monopoly buyer of labour. What is it that prevents this? Competition in the market among capitalists for access to the labour they desire to exploit. That very competition decreasing the amount of grinding of faces into the dust they’re able to do. Henry Ford’s $5 a day is an excellent example of this very point.
Ford wanted access to the best manufacturing labour of his time. He also wanted to have a lower turnover of that labour, lower training costs. So, he doubled wages (actually, normal wages plus a 100% bonus if you did things the Ford Way) and got that labour. At which point all the other manufacturers had to try and compete with those higher wages in order to get that labour they wanted to expropriate the sweat of the brow from. Marx did get this, he pointed out that exactly this sort of competition, in the absence of a reserve army of the unemployed, is what would raise real wages as productivity improved.
Smith also didn’t like the setting of wages as it precluded just such competition and such wage rises.
Where Marx went wrong was in not realising this power of markets. He knew of them, obviously, understood the idea, but just didn’t understand their power to ameliorate, destroy even, that march to monopoly capitalism.
[…]
The thing we really need to know on this bicentenary about Karl Marx is that he was wrong. He just never did grasp the power of markets to disrupt, even prevent, the tendencies he saw in capitalism. Specifically, and something we all need to know today, the power of competition among capitalists as the method of improving the lives of all us wage slaves. You know, that’s why we proletariat today, exploited as we are and ground into the dust, are the best fed, longest lived and richest, in every sense of the word, human beings who have ever existed. Something which is, if we’re honest about it, not a bad recommendation for a socio-economic system really. You know, actually working? Achieving the aim of improving the human condition?
Tim Worstall, “Marx At 200 – Yes, He Was Wrong, Badly Wrong”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-05-04.
August 1, 2020
QotD: Voluntary self-censorship
Any fair‐minded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian “co-ordination” that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines — being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn’t do” to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right thinking people will accept without question. It not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid‐Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet regime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet Government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticize the Soviet Government, at least you are reasonably free to criticize our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals. And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the U.S.S.R. is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld. There are other forbidden topics […] but the prevailing attitude toward the U.S.S.R is much the most serious symptom. It is, as it were, spontaneous, and is not due to the action of any pressure group.
The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onward would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicized with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. To name only one instance, the B.B.C. celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky. This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar with out mentioning Nelson, but evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia. In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favored by the Russians and libeled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so. A particularly glaring case was that of Colonel Mihailovich, the Jugoslav Chetnik leader. The Russians, who had their own Jugoslav protégé in Marshal Tito, accused Mihailovich of collaborating with the Germans. This accusation was promptly taken up by the British press: Mihailovich’s supporters were given no chance of answering it, and facts contradicting it were kept out of print. In July, 1943, the Germans offered a reward of 100,000 gold crowns for the capture of Tito, and a similar reward for the capture of Mihailovich. The British press “splashed” the reward for Tito, but only one paper mentioned (in small print) the reward for Mihailovich; and the charges of collaborating with the Germans continued. Very similar things happened during the Spanish civil war. Then, too, the factions on the Republican side which the Russians were determined to crush were recklessly libeled in the English leftwing press, and any statement in their defense, even in letter form, was refused publication. At present, not only is serious criticism of the U.S.S.R. considered reprehensible, but even the fact of the existence of such criticism is kept secret in some cases. For example, shortly before his death Trotsky had written a biography of Stalin. One may assume that it was not an altogether unbiased book, but obviously it was saleable. An American publisher had arranged to issue it and the book was in print — I believe the review copies had been sent out — when the U.S.S.R. entered the war. The book was immediately withdrawn. Not word about this has ever appeared in the British press, though clearly the existence of such a book, and its suppression, was a news item worth a few paragraphs.
George Orwell “The Freedom of the Press”, 1945 (written as the introduction to Animal Farm, but not published in Orwell’s lifetime).
July 31, 2020
QotD: Princess may have to wait to be rescued
“I cry myself to sleep,
And I wear skinny jeans.
I have a lumberjack beard,
and I cry when I wake up.”What’s amazing was that my lyrics fit every single whiny soy-boy vanilla song.
Someday all the princesses are going to look around and wonder why the princes are all married to homosexual exotic animal dealers or are simply not interested. The girlzz will be friend-zoned and will answer their biological urge to be a mother with the sperm banked by a stranger.
Paul Piatt, responding to a post on Mewe, 2020-04-29. (Reposted by permission.)
July 30, 2020
QotD: The “strong female protagonist” in movies and on TV
Now I perfectly understand the legitimacy of feminist concerns regarding the portrayal of women in the media as consistently demure, retiring, and subservient to men. I grant that, in most of the action/adventure movies that I saw growing up, women would typically twist an ankle or get captured and then require rescuing by the swashbuckling male hero — and I realize how galling this must have been to generations of women. And therefore, a certain correction was undoubtedly in order. But what is problematic now is the Nietzschean quality of the reaction, by which I mean, the insistence that female power has to be asserted over and against males, that there is an either/or, zero-sum conflict between men and women. It is not enough, in a word, to show women as intelligent, savvy, and good; you have to portray men as stupid, witless, and irresponsible. That this savage contrast is having an effect especially on younger men is becoming increasingly apparent.
In the midst of a “you-go-girl” feminist culture, many boys and young men feel adrift, afraid that any expression of their own good qualities will be construed as aggressive or insensitive. If you want concrete proof of this, take a look at the statistics contrasting female and male success at the university level. And you can see the phenomenon in films such as Fight Club and The Intern. In the former, the Brad Pitt character turns to his friend and laments, “we’re thirty year old boys;” and in the latter, Robert De Niro’s classic male type tries to whip into shape a number of twenty-something male colleagues who are rumpled, unsure of themselves, without ambition — and of course under the dominance of an all conquering female.
It might be the case that, in regard to money, power, and honor, a zero-sum dynamic obtains, but it decidedly does not obtain in regard to real virtue. The truly courageous person is not threatened by another person’s courage; the truly temperate man is not intimidated by the temperance of someone else; the truly just person is not put off by the justice of a countryman; and authentic love positively rejoices in the love shown by another. And therefore, it should be altogether possible to hold up the virtue of a woman without denying virtue to a man. In point of fact, if we consult the “all conquering female” characters in films and TV, we see that they often exemplify the very worst of the traditional male qualities: aggression, suspicion, hyper-sensitivity, cruelty, etc. This is what happens when a Nietzschean framework has replaced a classical one.
Bishop Robert Barron, “The Trouble With the ‘You Go Girl’ Culture”, Word on Fire, 2016-10-18.
July 29, 2020
QotD: Grog in the Royal Navy
Actually, we do, at least as a floor: we know the quantity of the Royal Navy’s spirit ration, which until 1823 was based on half a pint of rum (284 millilitres in foreign) per man per day. We also know its minimum strength, since it was tested by trying to ignite gunpowder soaked in it: it had to be over 57% alcohol by volume (“proof strength”) to pass. That’s sixteen units of alcohol – not per week, but per day – or north of a hundred units a week, just for the issued ration before sailors bought any extra from the purser. (No wonder Jack Tar was jolly back in those days!)
But clearly, we would expect a body of men consuming such suicidally destructive quantities of booze to be physical wrecks, raddled by cirrhosis and disease? As Dr James Lind (he of the discovery that citrus fruits were a sovereign remedy for scurvy) put it,
It is an observation, I think, worthy of record that fourteen thousand persons, pent up in ships, should continue, for six or seven months, to enjoy a better state of health upon the watery element, than it can well be imagined so great a number of people would enjoy, on the most healthful spot of ground in the world.
(For context, around this point the Navy won the battle of Quiberon Bay, with twenty ships – who had less than one man sick per ship).
The ration was halved in 1823, and again in 1850, but for a hundred and twenty years until Black Tot Day in 1970, the Navy still issued nearly thirty units of alcohol a week to everyone on the lower deck (junior rates got theirs diluted, seniors got neat rum). Either folk were hardier back then, or Britannia managed to rule the waves and keep her sailors reasonably healthy despite being a pack of hopelessly addicted alcoholics.
Jason Lynch, “How Much Is ‘Too Much’?”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-05-08.
July 28, 2020
QotD: Incentives and opportunity costs
No, really, there was one of those natural experiments, when inheritance tax laws changed at the end of the year. There was a definite blip downwards in the death rate of people rich enough to pay inheritance tax at the end of the year, a corresponding one upwards again as the new, lower, rates came into effect in January. Incentives really, really, matter.
Tim Worstall, “What’s The Over And Under On Tesla’s 200,000th Car Being Delivered On July 1?”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-05-03.
July 27, 2020
QotD: People on social media are the worst!
No one asked me, he said with a petulant sniff. I think it’s turned out well for those who regard it as a personal publishing platform, and don’t regard social media as an equivalent or replacement for the real world. It is a shadow realm full of tricksters and devils and angels and blokes and sheilas. It’s Second Life except it seems real because it contains Kardashians, who are the most important and fascinating people on earth.
Anyway, it’s mostly lamented now because A) Trump, and B) People are jerks.
Rich Kyanka: Social media was supposed to be about, “Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Now it’s like, “Oh my God, did you see what she wore yesterday? What a f**ing cow that bitch is.” Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. It was founded to connect people all over the world. But now you can meet people all over the world and then murder them in virtual reality and rape their pets.
Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. I don’t think so. I think it has to do with people on the internet. People who otherwise wouldn’t say boo to you as you passed on the street, but feel as if it is their duty to yell at everything on Twitter, because there are no consequences. If you got into the elevator at work every day and acted rude to everyone in the car, eventually it would have consequences. The Internet is a hellish version of an elevator car — everyone is looking at everyone else and talking at the same time about everyone else and themselves.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2018-05-02.
July 26, 2020
QotD: Bureaucracy at its heart
Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.
When something goes wrong, the bureaucrats play the blame-shifting game. Musical chairs will begin, and some poor fool will be stuck without a chair. When something goes right, of course, executive management will take credit. Your job as a bureaucrat is to be an implicitly political creature; to make your boss look good and, for yourself, to evade blame.
Bureaucracies become much worse when they are divorced from the profit motive. At least a large corporation must theoretically serve its customers in some positive manner, or they won’t remain in business for long. So while the internal politics of a large corporation are likely to suck like a Hoover, the external face of the company is often still somewhat pleasant for the customer.
With government bureaucracy, even that small consolation is lost. Go to the DMV, or any large government bureau. Long lines, smelly “customers”, and agents with extremely unpleasant attitudes abound. The motive is not to serve citizens well, or even to serve them quickly, but rather to meet the bare minimum necessary to avoid blame — and sometimes not even that.
Thales, “Bureacracy is Designed to Suck”, The Declination, 2018-05-02.
July 25, 2020
QotD: The real life implications of “positive” rights
[…] the moment all your necessities are furnished by someone else, someone else gets to make all the decisions for you. I mean, if your health is paid for by the taxes of your fellow citizens, and the government aka the nation looks after your every need: should they pay for your health if you insist on smoking or drinking? Or should those resources be husbanded for people who take better care of themselves? Okay, Sarah, but isn’t there a point to individual responsibility? Why shouldn’t you be required to take minimal care of yourself, so you get the benefits of the government’s care, which as you say someone else pays for.
Ah, but there’s the rub. See, ultimately, there’s always something some of us say or do that can be used to justify denying care or giving only palliative care. For instance, I’m overweight, which seems to be one of the remaining sins in the current lexicon. Sure, I gained tons of weight over 20 years of untreated hypothyroidism, even though I was starving myself for a long portion of those. But hey, I allowed myself to be overweight. So my prognosis is poor. Why spend money on me, when someone else could have better results?
Hell, even when it comes to my autoimmune. I’m a poor prospect, so why give me top of the line care?
If the government controlled other things, it would be exactly the same. Food? Sure, I break out in eczema all over when I eat a diet rich in carbs. But hey, flour and rice are cheap, and why should I get a specialized diet, since I’m only a writer who isn’t even a leftist or a supporter of the state, and besides my prospects of survival are poor?
College? Sure you want to be an economist, but your teachers say you’re cheeky and talk back, and the state doesn’t need that. What we need right now are pipe fitters. Here, you can take this six week course.
When the state is paying the bill, the state gets to decide what is better for you. The European constitution gives you the right to “death with dignity” because death with dignity is much cheaper than expensive treatments with a low chance of survival. After all this money is for everyone, you know?
And like the NHS, in Britain, they won’t even let you seek treatment outside their tender mercies. Why should they? They pay for you. That means in the end they decide what to spend on you. They own you. And if you went outside their system and your kid got cured? It would look pretty bad for them, wouldn’t it? Why should they allow you to do that? And besides, peasant, you have a bad attitude.
Sarah Hoyt, “Slouching Into Shackles”, According to Hoyt, 2018-04-27.
July 24, 2020
QotD: A death in the Roman Empire
Yet then something miraculous happened. Spreading from east to west across the Mediterranean, travelling along the great network of roads and shipping lanes that constituted the arteries of the Roman Empire, news began to spread that this man whose mortal remains supposedly lay entombed in the grave had been seen alive. Most people, of course, scoffed at such reports — but there were some, small communities of believers, who did not. These, even as the decades passed, kept the faith: the conviction that their saviour would come again, that he would reign, in the words of a widely circulated prophecy, as “the king of Jerusalem”, that he would bring to groaning humanity a universal peace.
In the event, Nero did not come again. Despite the various imposters who appeared in the wake of his death in AD 68, and the fact that, centuries later, there were cities in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire that still honoured his memory, his fate was to be commemorated, not as a saviour, but as a monster. And so, in numerous ways, he was. His readiness to have members of his own family — mother, brother, wife — put to death ensured that when he himself died the dynasty of the Caesars perished with him.
His sex games were notorious. He was darkly rumoured to have set fire to Rome. By the time that Suetonius, half a century after his death, came to write his biography, the details of his life could be structured almost entirely as a catalogue of deviancies and crimes. “Insolence, an uninhibited sexual appetite, dissipation, greed, cruelty: these were the vices which, to begin with — because he gave expression to them only secretly and incrementally — might well have been chalked up as the excesses of youth, had it not been manifest to everyone even at the time that they were failings, not of age, but of character.”
Nero’s rule had become one protracted blasphemy against the customs of the Roman state. These, hallowed by the centuries, enabled the people of a city that had conquered most of the known world to feel a sense of communion still with the mos maiorum: the customs of their distant ancestors. To no class of society was this more important than the Senate, which still, despite the collapse of Rome’s venerable republican order and its replacement by the autocracy of the Caesars, cherished its time-honoured role as the guardians of tradition.
Tom Holland, “When Christ conquered Caesar”, UnHerd, 2020-04-10.
