As with almost every one of these crusades the left goes on, it ain’t what they’re saying it is. And those of us on the right(ish) who think that it’s all part of a master plan to destroy society so the great communist utopia appears automagically aren’t precisely right. I mean, most people on the left would welcome collapse, because, yes, they believe a communist matriarchy is ONLY waiting for the “oppressors” who create capitalism and patriarchy to vanish (oblivious to the fact that “capitalism” is trading, which seems to be a natural condition of the human monkey and not eradicable by any regime real or imaginary; and that “patriarchy” doesn’t exist in the west.) But that’s not the point, because they don’t think they’re bringing about collapse. They think they’re fighting injustice.
When we say “merit” and “meritocracy” they think we’re using “code words” to say “white males”. There are reasons for this, besides the fact that the left is heavily into Manichaean thought systems that go something like: identify problem — find a person who MIGHT be responsible for/benefits from the system as it exists — assume that if that person were removed, the problem would be gone. See, French Revolution.
The initial confusion on the left arises from the fact that they might never, in fact, have witnessed meritocracy in their dealings or those of people around them.
This is because, as part of the long march, and to secure absolute control of all fields and institutions, the left has a mythology (the Manichaean thing again) that anyone who disagrees with them is evil. And of course, you don’t hire evil people.
The problem with that type of hiring is that you’re NOT hiring the best. And most people know they’re not the best. And hire someone less bright than they are. This in four generations takes you to the level of management/operation that takes monarchies twenty generations of inbreeding to achieve.
Right now, in everything but the hard sciences and STEM (and they’ve gotten into some of those, and can’t always be routed around.) the people in power would consider pouring piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the sole a feat of unachievable genius.
Most of them are so vacuous they don’t even know they’re incompetent. Or, like Michelle Obama in her essay on why everyone was mean to her at Harvard, they assume everyone else is just as incompetent.
The reason they get hired, stay hired and continue to get push/accolades/power is that they have the “right picture in head” by which you should understand “the left picture in head”. They view the world exactly as they were taught to view it by their Marxist teachers and professors. Reality is Manichean, and if there is any issue at all, you find the person who might be causing it (hint, usually you find the person who is a heretic to the left, even if in a minor thing) and you attack that person. If the person is not immediately obvious, you look for deviationism or examples of hidden thought crime.
It’s appalling, and in a society with no protection for the individual, it fills mass graves, but it is the way their minds — for lack of a better term — operate. They’ve been trained to operate that way. Not to look at human nature, or the conditions in the world, or even the limits of engineering and materials (what’s holding us back on batteries, for instance. They prefer to think oil executives, personally, are holding back the all-electric solar cars we should already have.) No. “Find the culprit” “Eliminate him/her” “Everything is beautiful in the garden”. Seen in this light, the Green Nude Heel makes “perfect sense”. And is a genius work in scope. Which is why she got all upset at criticism and thought that it only meant people wanted her to find all the little subculprits and work out all the details of the pogroms necessary to make it work. Not getting that people were saying “Not in this world, not with these humans, not in this REALITY”.
Sarah Hoyt, “Just Deserts”, According to Hoyt, 2019-06-06.
June 11, 2023
QotD: The revolt against “meritocracy”
June 10, 2023
QotD: The word “objectively”
Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
For years past I have been an industrious collector of pamphlets, and a fairly steady reader of political literature of all kinds. […] When I look through my collection of pamphlets — Conservative, Communist, Catholic, Trotskyist, Pacifist, Anarchist or what-have-you — it seems to me that almost all of them have the same mental atmosphere, though the points of emphasis vary. Nobody is searching for the truth, everybody is putting forward a “case” with complete disregard for fairness or accuracy, and the most plainly obvious facts can be ignored by those who don’t want to see them. The same propaganda tricks are to be found almost everywhere. It would take many pages of this paper merely to classify them, but here I draw attention to one very widespread controversial habit — disregard of an opponent’s motives. The key-word here is “objectively”.
We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are “objectively” aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the “objectively” line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore “Trotskyism is Fascism”. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions. For there are occasions when even the most misguided person can see the results of what he is doing. Here is a crude but quite possible illustration. A pacifist is working in some job which gives him access to important military information, and is approached by a German secret agent. In those circumstances his subjective feelings do make a difference. If he is subjectively pro-Nazi he will sell his country, and if he isn’t, he won’t. And situations essentially similar though less dramatic are constantly arising.
In my opinion a few pacifists are inwardly pro-Nazi, and extremist left-wing parties will inevitably contain Fascist spies. The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. It is this habit of mind, among other things, that has made political prediction in our time so remarkably unsuccessful.
George Orwell, “As I Please”, Tribune, 1944-12-08.
June 9, 2023
QotD: The Fundamental Paradox of Internet Liberalism
- If you were smart enough to understand what I’m saying, you’d be a liberal, too
- You aren’t smart enough to understand it, because you’re not a liberal
- And yet here I am, arguing with you anyway.
So who, exactly, is the dumb one?
Severian, “Alienation II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-30.
June 8, 2023
QotD: Heroes, demi-gods and gods in the ancient Greek world
These figures – complete with tales of being swept up into divinity while still alive or at the moment of their death – are in some way atypical of hero worship in the Greek world. More typical is a figure like Achilles, who very definitely was mortal and very definitely died and whose spirit is very much in the Underworld in the Odyssey (and neatly contrasted with Heracles – only Heracles’ shade is in the underworld, for his soul was divine; but cf. Pindar on Achilles, Olympia 2.75-85). Our sources (e.g. Plin. Nat. 4.26) continue to speak of Achilles as a man, with a physical tomb. And yet Alexander pays him honors (Arr. Anab. 1.12.1) and we have ample evidence for cult observances of Achilles in the Greek world. it was possible to be a man in life, and yet have enough influence to be worthy of cult in death.
This sounds strange, but its worth noting that some of the most common mortal figures to receive this kind of cult worship were founder figures – people (often legendary or mythical in nature) credited with the foundation of a community. We’ve actually discussed that here before in Lycurgus and Theseus, but as you might imagine, such figures were very common. It is not entirely crazy to assume that these figures have some power to shape your world or life, because they already have – you live in the city they founded! They deeds in life continue to shape the confines of your experience – why wouldn’t that influence, in some way, carry with them?
(And while I’m here, I should note that the American architectural veneration of our founder figures on the National Mall is explicitly framed in terms of Mediterranean cult observance. The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials both borrow their forms from Roman temples and contain super-life-sized cult statues exactly as and where a Roman temple would has the cult statue of the god, while the Washington Monument – as an Egyptian style obelisk – mimics Egyptian practice quite intentionally. We even have our monuments to the di manes [the divine shades of your dead ancestors who watch over you] in our war memorials, framed around collective veneration. A Roman time-traveler would have no problem interpreting the display, and might think the many millions of visitors coming from all corners quite pious in their observance.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part IV: Little Gods and Big People”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-15.
June 7, 2023
QotD: A “second front” in 1943
There are some points in their favour. The invasions of North Africa definitely took resources that could have been built up in Britain, and therefore slowed things down. (And the withdrawal of the new escort carriers, escort groups, and shipping from the Battle of the Atlantic for the North African adventure, definitely did huge damage in the loss of shipping and supplies, slowing things down further.) As a result the huge buildup in North Africa was much easier to use against Italy before moving on to France. Certainly another distraction or delay … but only if you don’t think that knocking Italy out of the war would make Germany weaker!
But once Sledgehammer [the plan to invade France in 1942] was abandoned, this operation was the only possible way to get US troops into combat in Europe, short of shipping some to Russia. It was also the only possible way of coming close to keeping Roosevelt’s ridiculous promise to the Russians.
[…]
Nonetheless it is wrong to think that the British never had any intention of [mounting Operation] Roundup. Despite what Roosevelt and many other Americans convinced themselves, the British were, at the start of 1942, far more optimistic about the possibility of invading Europe through France in 1943 than they had been about Sledgehammer. Their studies seemed to show that Germany would only have to be weaker, not suddenly collapse, to make invasion in 1943 a realistic possibility. Realistic that is as long as the rest of the plans for training and shipping troops, building and concentrating invasion craft, and moving enough supplies to make it sustainable, all came together.
They didn’t.
For the British, the middle of 1942 revealed how little would be available in time for the middle of 1943. Even on the best assumptions of American training and preparation, there was no chance that the majority of forces for Roundup would not be British … assuming they could supply them either. In practice mid-1942 saw the Axis continue to advance on every front. Burma collapsed; the Allied position in New Guinea was under threat; the Japanese were still expanding to places like Guadalcanal; Rommel was advancing in Egypt; the Germans were advancing on the Caucasian oil fields and towards the Middle East; and more and more was needed just to keep Russia in the war. As a result British troops, shipping and supplies were continuing to flow away from Britain, not towards it.
Much of the Royal Navy was trying to save the dangerous losses caused by [US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral] King’s refusal to have convoys in American waters (too “defensive-minded” he thought.) These alone, the worst eight months of the war, were threatening to scupper Roundup. The rest was so busily deployed in the Indian and Pacific Oceans against the Japanese, or North Atlantic trying to fight supplies through to Russia (a high proportion of tanks and planes defending Moscow were British-supplied), that there was virtually nothing left in the Med to slow Rommel’s advance. The merchant ships surviving the fight across the oceans were actually more vitally needed to take men and equipment from the UK to other places than to bring in a buildup for the UK.
Nor was the American buildup going to plan. Less well-trained troops were becoming available too slowly, could not be shipped in adequate numbers anyway, and were in no condition to face German veterans. (The very best US units to go into action in 1942 – the Marines in Guadalcanal – and 1943 – the 1st Infantry and 1st Armored divisions which were actually professional troops not conscripts in North Africa – had very steep learning curves. Particularly at Kasserine. They were clearly not fit to face German veterans yet.
And American resource buildup was also not up to promises. King and MacArthur were milking supplies far beyond what had originally been agreed under “Germany first”. In practical terms they were doing so for the same reasons the British were: an immediate desperate situation had to be saved before a future ideal one could be pursued.
Nonetheless I have read all sorts of apparently serious suggestions that after North Africa was cleared, or at the very least after Sicily was cleared, an invasion of France should have happened.
Delusional.
Nigel Davies, “The ‘Invasion of France in 1943’ lunacy”, rethinking history, 2021-06-21.
June 6, 2023
QotD: “A second front” in 1942
[…]
A plan put together for the incredibly unlikely event of sudden German collapse, was Sledgehammer. This was the understanding of Sledgehammer adopted by most Americans. A very limited offensive by very inadequate forces, which could only succeed had Germany already gone close to collapse. Given the circumstances this was somewhat delusional, but it never hurts to plan for eventualities, and the British were happy to go along with this sort of plan.
[…]
Any attempt at Sledgehammer would of course have failed. The German army had not yet been bled dry on the Eastern front, and the Luftwaffe was still a terrifying force which could be (and regularly was) easily moved from Russian mud to Mediterranean sunshine and back again in mere weeks. Even ignoring the opposition, the British were gloomily aware that the Americans had not a clue of the complexities of such a huge amphibious operation. At the time of discussion – May 1942 – the British were using their first ever Landing Ship Tanks and troopships equipped with landing craft to launch a brigade-size pre-emptive operation against the Vichy French on Madagascar. (Another move many historians think was useless. But coming only months after the Vichy had invited the Japanese into Indo-China – fatally undermining the defenses of Malaya – and the Germans into Syria, it was probably a very sensible precaution. Certainly Japanese submarines based in Madagascar [could] have finally caused the allies to lose the war at sea!)
The British deployed two modern aircraft carriers, and a fleet of battleships, cruisers, destroyers and escorts and a large number of support ships, on this relatively small operation. It was the first proper combined arms amphibious operation of the war, and was very helpful to the British to reveal the scale of amphibious transport needed for future operations. By contrast the US Marines hit Guadalcanal six months later from similar light landing craft, and with virtually the same Great War-vintage helmets and guns that the ANZACS had used at Gallipoli. Anyone who reads the details of the months of hanging on by the fingernails at Guadalcanal against very under-resourced Japanese troops, will be very grateful that the same troops did not have to face veteran German Panzer divisions for several years.
So I do not know of any serious historian who imagines that an invasion of France in 1942 could have led to anything except disaster. There are no serious generals who thought it either. (Only Marshall and his “yes-man” Eisenhower consistently argued that it might be possible. And Eisenhower later came to realise – when he was in charge of his third or fourth such difficult operation – that his boss was completely delusional in his underestimation of the difficulties involved. See Dear General: Eisenhower’s Wartime Letters to Marshall for Eisenhower’s belated attempts to quash Marshalls tactical ignorance about parachute drops and dispersed landings for D-Day.)
In practice no matter how much Marshall pushed for it, only British troops were availabe for such a sacrificial gesture, and the British were not unnaturally reluctant to throw away a dozen carefully nurtured and irreplaceable divisions on a “forlorn hope”, when they would prefer to save them for a real and practical invasion … when circumstances changed enough to make it possible.
Unfortunately Roosevelt told the Soviet foreign minister Molotov that “we expect the formation of a second front this year”, without asking even Marshall, let alone wihtout consulting his British allies who would have to do it with virtually no American involvement. The British Chiefs of Staff only had to show Churchill the limited numbers of landing craft that could be available, and the limited number of troops and tanks they could carry, to make it clear that this was ridiculous. Clearly this stupidity was just another example of Roosevelt saying stupid things without asking anyone (like “unconditional surrender”) that did so much to embitter staff relations during the war, and internationaly relations postwar. But it seems likely that the British refusal to even consider such nonsense was taken by Marshall and Stimson as a sample of the British being duplicitous about “examining planning options”.
The British fixed on a “compromise” to pretend that a “second front” could be possible. North Africa, could be conquered without prohibitive losses. It was not ideal, and in practical terms not even very useful. But it might satisfy the Americans and the Russians. Nothing else could.
Marshall in particular spent the rest of the war believing that when the British assessment clearly demonstrated that action in Europe was impractical and impossible, they had just been prevaricating to get what they always intended: operations in the Med. In some ways he was correct. The British had done the studies on France despite thinking that it was unlikely they would be practical, and were proved right. Marshall and Eisenhower had just deluded themselves into thinking an invasion might be practical, and could not accept that there was not a shred of evidence in favour of their delusion.
Nigel Davies, “The ‘Invasion of France in 1943’ lunacy”, rethinking history, 2021-06-21.
June 5, 2023
QotD: The four types of college papers for English Majors – 4. The Old Switcheroo
That’s because the Old Switcheroo turns everything into its opposite. If you master this technique, you can prove anything, no matter how implausible. Water isn’t wet. War is Peace. We have always been at war with Eastasia. You name it.
Everybody thinks that Shakespeare’s King Lear is a tragedy, but for the Old Switcheroo, you prove that it’s actually a comedy. Everybody thinks that Mozart is a great composer, but you prove that he stole everything he wrote from Salieri’s butler. Frankenstein wasn’t a monster, but a respected scientist. Etc. etc.
Up is down. Black is white. Fire is ice.
Make no mistake, the Old Switcheroo is A+ work, and no fooling. Even more, it’s a surefire path to career success. There’s just one tiny problem: The people who master the Old Switcheroo are batshit crazy and have a psychological profile dangerously close to that of a serial killer. They might end up in the White House, but you wouldn’t trust them to house-sit your chia pet.
Ted Gioia, “The 4 Types of College papers for English Majors”, The Honest Broker, 2023-02-27.
June 4, 2023
QotD: The four types of college papers for English Majors – 3. The DIM
Those bozos think that Moby Dick is a novel about a great white whale. But we know there’s a Deep Inner Meaning to the book — that whale is actually a stand-in for the author’s annoying mother-in-law. Or maybe it’s a surrogate for the President of the United States. Or a displaced sex object.
Let your imagination run free. It really doesn’t matter which you choose. It just can’t be anything obvious. And then you need to talk a good game, and not pay too much attention to facts and plausibility.
And who said you don’t learn useful job skills as an English major?
If you spread the B.S. thick enough, and never let on that you even sniff the stench, you have better than even odds of getting a top grade. It helps, by the way, if you show up in class dressed in something unseemly and having omitted several steps in your morning grooming routine — which are seen as signs of incipient genius in the School of Humanities.
Ted Gioia, “The 4 Types of College papers for English Majors”, The Honest Broker, 2023-02-27.
June 3, 2023
QotD: The four types of college papers for English Majors – 2. The TWIT (They Were Idiots Then)
We know that unfailingly, for the simple reason that they didn’t think like us. They were stupid and stodgy and superstitious and held all sorts of irritating views.
And it’s true. You can take absolutely any book from a hundred years ago, and find infractions on almost every page. The past is a different country, where everybody is a knucklehead.
Here’s how to write a TWIT: You take a yellow marker and highlight every time somebody in the book makes a blunder, according to our current rules of decorum this week. Trust me, you won’t even have to read the whole book. Within a chapter or two, your book will have more yellow highlights than Nicki Minaj’s hairdo.
Now you’re ready to roll.
You write up the infractions like it’s a district attorney’s indictment. But here’s the key — you must give it some fancy name. You can’t just call a twit a twit in your TWIT paper; you have to refer to your harangue as a critique or an exegesis or a deconstruction, starting with the title — which should be something like “A Critique of Phallogocentrism in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw“.
Once you get the hang of this, it’s as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. There’s just one problem — everyone else in the class is also writing TWIT papers. It’s the most popular thing on campus since the invention of the senior admin job. So you only get a B on these. Or maybe B+ if you throw in a few French words (for example, inserting différance whenever you’d normally say difference).
Ted Gioia, “The 4 Types of College papers for English Majors”, The Honest Broker, 2023-02-27.
June 2, 2023
QotD: The four types of college papers for English Majors – 1. The Reliable C&C
Then you list 5 ways they are similar and 5 ways they are different. Voilá — you’ve written a college paper!
Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen are both writers who share the same language: English. But Hemingway is an American who liked bullfighting and drinking martinis. Jane Austen is English and never fought a bull. She probably drank tea, because the martini wasn’t invented until 1863, some 47 years after her death …
You can write this stuff in your sleep, provided you dream about Wikipedia entries. But be forewarned: the reliable C&C probably only gets you a reliable C grade.
Ted Gioia, “The 4 Types of College papers for English Majors”, The Honest Broker, 2023-02-27.
June 1, 2023
QotD: “The Puritans were the SJWs of their day”
The Puritans, as English Calvinists were called, wrote difficult prose, but in translation it sounds shockingly modern. The Puritans were the SJWs of their day, obsessed with their own pwecious widdle selves. They didn’t get around to making up xzheyr own pronouns, but they did give themselves self-righteous new names — when Ben Johnson called his caricature Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy he got big laughs, but he wasn’t really joking, they really did stuff like that. To be a Puritan requires two things: An obsessive focus on the tiniest micro-movements of your own soul …
… and an equally obsessive focus on forcing other people to disclose the tiniest micro-movements of their souls. There’s nothing anyone could ever do, so trivial that a Puritan could in good conscience overlook it. Calvin’s Geneva was the closest thing to a police state 16th century technology allowed, and when their turn came, Oliver Cromwell and the boys gave importing it to England the old college try. And, of course, Plymouth Bay Colony started as a Puritan police state …
Ideology, then, removes the distinction between public and private. You can’t simply say you’re a Puritan, you really have to BE one — constantly, perfectly, since there’s nothing that Puritanism doesn’t touch. And the only way to do that, of course, is to do everything in full public view at all times. Calvin did — as Walzer remarks, John Calvin, the man, is almost completely absent from Calvin’s writings. (Unlike Luther, whose idiosyncratic, not to say lunatic, personality comes through in practically every sentence). Calvin achieved that clear windowpane prose Orwell claimed was the mark of a great writer — nothing between audience and subject at all. Calvin would, indeed, take the remark that he’s almost a complete cipher, personally, as a very high compliment.
Severian, “Ideology II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-09.
May 31, 2023
QotD: The second system of war
In such war, the goal was to deliver the siege. But delivery of the siege meant a large army which might now be confronted in the field (for it was unlikely to move by stealth, being that it has to be large enough to take the town). And so to prohibit the siege from being delivered, defenders might march out and meet the attackers in the field for that pitched battle. In certain periods, siegecraft or army size had so outpaced fortress design that everyone rather understood that after the outcome of the pitched battle, the siege would be a forgone conclusion – it is that unusual state of affairs which gives us the “decisive battle” where a war might potentially be ended in a stoke (though they rarely were).
We may term this the second system of war. It is the system that most modern industrial and post-industrial cultures are focused on. Our cultural products are filled with such pitched battles, placed in every sort of era of our past or speculative future. It is how we imagine war. Except that it isn’t the sort of war we wage, is it?
Because in the early 1900s, the industrial revolution resulted in armies possessing both amounts of resources and levels of industrial firepower which precluded open pitched battles. All of those staples of our cultural fiction of battles, developed from the second system – surveying the enemy army drawn up in battle array, the tense wait, then the furious charge, coming to grips with the enemy in masses close up – none of that could survive modern machine guns and artillery.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
May 30, 2023
QotD: The technical flaws of modern cameras
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Grand Illusion”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-08-19.
May 29, 2023
QotD: The size of the Great Library
“It was the largest library in the ancient world, containing over 700,000 books.”
It is entirely possible that it was the largest library in the ancient world, though we have no way of confirming this given that we have little reliable information about the size of its collection. Despite this, popular sources regularly repeat the huge figures given for the number of books in the library in several ancient sources, and usually opt for the ones that are the highest. Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s popular history The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (Vintage, 2012) won critical acclaim and even garnered him a Pulitzer Prize, despite being panned by actual historians for its many howlers and weirdly old-fashioned historiography (see my detailed critical review here, with links to other scathing critiques by historians). Greenblatt’s account sticks closely to the nineteenth century narrative of “the dark ages” beloved by New Atheists, so it’s hardly surprising that the myths about the Great Library feature prominently in his account. Thus he informs his readers with great assurance that:
“At its height the Museum contained at least half a million papyrus rolls systematically organised, labelled and shelved according to a clever new system … alphabetical order.” (Greenblatt, p. 88)
The figure of “half a million scrolls” (or even “half a million books”) is the one that is usually bandied about, but even that colossal number is not quite enough for some polemicists. Attorney and columnist Jonathan Kirsch plumped for a much higher number in his book God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism (Viking, 2004)
“In 390 AD … a mob of Christian zealots attacked the ancient library of Alexandria, a place where the works of the greatest rarity and antiquity had been collected … some 700,000 volumes and scrolls in all.” (Kirsch, p. 278)
Obviously the larger the collection in the Great Library the more terrible the tragedy of its loss, so those seeking to apportion blame for the supposed destruction of the Library usually go for these much higher numbers (it may be no surprise to learn that it’s the monotheists who are the “bad guys” in Kirsch’s cartoonish book). But did the Great Library really contain this huge number of books given that these numbers would represent a large library collection even today?
As with most things on this subject, it seems the answer is no. […] Some of these figures are interdependent, so for example Ammianus is probably depending, directly or indirectly, on Aulus Gellius for his “700,000” figure, which in turn is where Kirsch gets the same number in the quote above. Others look suspiciously precise, such as Epiphanius’ “54,800”. In summary of a lot of discussion by critical scholars, the best thing to say is that none of these figures is reliable. In her survey of the historiography of the issue, Diana Delia notes “lacking modern inventory systems, ancient librarians, even if they cared to, scarcely had the time or means to count their collections” (see Delia, “From Romance to Rhetoric: The Alexandrian Library in Classical and Islamic Traditions”, The American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 5, Dec. 1992, pp. 1449-67, p. 1459). Or as another historian once put it wryly “There are no statistics in ancient sources, just rhetorical flourishes made with numbers.”
One way that historians can make estimates of the size of ancient libraries is by examining the floor plans of their ruins and calculating the space their book niches would have taken up around the walls and then the number of scrolls each niche could hold. This works for some other ancient libraries for which we have surveyable remains, but unfortunately that is not the case for the Mouseion, given that archaeologists still have to guess where exactly it stood. So Columbia University’s Roger S. Bagnall has taken another tack. In a 2002 paper that debunks several of the myths about the Great Library (see Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 146, No. 4, Dec. 2002, pp. 348-362), he begins with how many authors we know were writing in the early Hellenistic period. He notes that we know of around 450 authors for whom we have, at the very least, some lines of writing whose work existed in the fourth century BC and another 175 from the third century BC. He points out that most of these writers probably only wrote works that filled a couple of scrolls at most, though a small number of them – like the playwrights – would have had a total corpus that filled many more than that, even up to 100 scrolls. So by adopting the almost certainly far too high figure of an average of 50 scrolls to contain the work of each writer, Bagnall arrives as a mere 31,250 scrolls to contain all the works of all the writers we know about to the end of the third century. He notes:
“We must then assume, to save the ancient figures for the contents of the Library, either that more than 90 percent of classical authors are not even quoted or cited in what survives, or that the Ptolemies acquired a dozen copies of everything, or some combination of these unlikely hypotheses. If we were (more plausibly) to use a lower average output per author, the hypotheses needed to save the numbers would become proportionally more outlandish.” (Bagnall, p. 353)
Bagnall makes other calculations taking into account guesses at what number of completely lost authors there may have been and still does not manage to get close to most of the figures given in our sources. His analysis makes it fairly clear that these numbers, presented so uncritically by popular authors for rhetorical effect, are probable fantasies. As mentioned above, when we can survey the archaeology of an ancient library’s ruins, some estimate can be made of its holdings. The library in the Forum of Trajan in Rome occupied a large space 27 by 20 metres and Lionel Casson estimates it could have held “in the neighbourhood of 20,000 scrolls” (Casson, p. 88). A similar survey of the remains of the Great Library of Pergamon comes to an estimate of 30,000 scrolls there. Given that this library was considered a genuine rival to the Great Library of Alexandria, it is most likely that the latter held around 40-50,000 scrolls at its height, containing a smaller number of works overall given that ancient works usually took up more than one scroll. This still seems to have made it the largest library collection in the ancient world and thus the source of its renown and later myths, but it’s a far cry from the “500,000” or “700,000” claimed by uncritical popular sources and people with axes to grind.
Tim O’Neill, “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction Of The Great Library Of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2017-07-02.
May 28, 2023
QotD: Karl Marx and the “excess labour” problem
This is not to say that slavery is the only answer. There are lots of ways to absorb excess labor. Ever gone shopping in the Third World? There’s one guy who greets you at the door. Another guy follows you around the store, helpfully suggesting items to buy. A third guy rings up your purchases, which are packed up by a fourth guy, and a fifth guy carries them out (or arranges delivery by a sixth guy). And none of those guys are actually the shopkeeper. They’re all his cousins and whatnot, fresh from the sticks, and all of them are working four jobs with four other uncles at different places in the city.
Nor is it just a Third World thing. Basic College Girls love that Downton Abbey show, so I’d use that to illustrate the point if BCGs were capable of comprehending metaphors. George Orwell wrote eloquently about growing up on the very ragged edge of “respectability” at the turn of the century. He knew all about servants, he said, and the elaborate codes of conduct in dealing with them, even though his family could afford only one part-time helper. Your real toffs, of course, had battalions of servants to do every conceivable job for them. What else is that, old bean, but an elegant solution to labor oversupply?
Note also, since I’m giving you very basic Marxist history here, that we’ve just discovered the foundations of Feminism. Though Karl Marx was — of course — a total asshole to both his wife and his domestic help (of course he had “help”; the tradition of using and abusing servants while bemoaning the plight of the proletariat comes straight from the Master himself), he realized that his theories had a hard time accounting for the very real economic effects of domestic labor. Hence Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which proves that even lemon-faced termagants with three degrees and six cats pulling down $100K per year shrieking about Feminism are MOPEs. You can cut the labor supply in half by shackling single gals to the Kinder, Küche, Kirche treadmill.
Severian, “Excess Labor”, Rotten Chestnuts<, 2020-07-28.
