The colonies were paradise until White women showed up.
That’s what all the Old Hands said in the 19th century, and if you think about it for a second, it’s obvious. Going East of Suez was more or less a life sentence. Retiring to a nice country house back in dear old Blighty was the standard-issue dream, but it almost never came true — and everyone knew it. You went to India knowing you’d die there — You went, so your brothers wouldn’t have to. Life in those circumstances, surrounded by like-minded men, is a blast. Ask anyone who has spent time in a war zone.
But, of course, the Raj wasn’t a war zone for long. The Mutiny took care of that, so much so that guys actually started coming home at the end of their tours. Word leaked out about how the Ruling Caste lived over there, and all of a sudden Calcutta harbor was home to “the fishing fleet”, the boatloads of single girls that arrived each spring determined to snag themselves a husband. Think about that for a second — take the kind of girl who doesn’t have the looks or connections to get married back home, then plop her down in a situation where she’s the only White woman in a thousand miles. Give her an army of servants, a basically unlimited budget, and the whole power of the State enforcing her whims. Is it any wonder social relations got so awful so quickly? The burra memsahib was a staple of Imperial fiction for a reason.
Severian, “If there is Hope, It Lies in the PUAs”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-02-27.
April 3, 2022
QotD: Life in the Imperial outposts
March 28, 2022
Republic to Empire: Catiline, Cicero, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar the Death Spiral
Update 6 Feb 2024: Dr. Gabb replaced the original part 7 which discussed the cultural impact of Ancient Greece on the rising Roman Republic.
seangabb
Published 20 Feb 2021
In 120 BC, Rome was a republic with touches of democracy. A century later, it was a divine right military dictatorship. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.Here is the seventh lecture, which discusses the Catiline Conspiracy and the rise and disintegration of the First Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. There is a digression on Eastern politics and the Parthian Empire.
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March 27, 2022
QotD: Period culture in old movies and TV shows
What that meant is if you wanted to know what it was like to live in 1945, you had to ask someone who was alive in 1945. You could get a little taste of it from watching old movies on a Saturday afternoon, but that was a stylized version. To really get a feel for the age before color movies and television, you had to rely on the fading memories of grandma and grandpa. Of course, this was true for all of human history until recent. It’s why old people are good at telling stories about the old days. They’re built for it.
Today it is different. I watched The Thomas Crown Affair the other night off the Kodi machine. This was the 1968 version with Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen. There was a remake of this in 1999 with Pierce Bronson. I had seen the remake a few times, but I never saw the original. In fact, I did not know there was an original. That’s a bit of interesting cultural data right there. Just about every movie produced over the last twenty-five years is either a remake or made from a children’s comic book.
What I found remarkable about the movie is something I notice whenever I watch old movies and that is the maturity. A movie about the cat and mouse between a male and female today will have at least half an hour of rutting and humping, along with some explosions and lots of vulgar language. The modern presentation of male-female relations is so crude, that porn makers of the past would have been offended. In the old days, the film maker and audience expected a more sophisticated portrayal of sexual relations.
That is the other thing that turns up in old movies and television. Hollywood made assumptions about the cultural awareness of the audience we don’t see now. In The Thomas Crown Affair, there is a long scene around a chess game. It was supposed to be a stand in for the sexual tension between McQueen and Dunaway. It’s a bit ham-handed, but vastly more sophisticated than anything you would see today. One reason is the typical viewer today knows nothing about chess, so it would be lost on them.
Part of that is due to Hollywood relying on international audiences to make money. You can’t expect to make money in China or India when your film is full of essential references to Anglo-Saxon cultural items. When you make films for the universal culture, you are making movies for a culture that does not exist. That means the goal is to remove cultural references, rather than rely on them to tell a story. There can be no subtlety and nuance without common cultural reference points understood by the audience.
The Z Man, “Old Movies”, The Z Blog, 2019-02-13.
March 24, 2022
What a bunch of hosers! Take off, eh?
In The Line (which is operating on skeleton staff due to March break), Laura Mitchell considers the existential question of Canadian nationhood: what if we’re just a bunch of hosers?
Bob and Doug MacKenzie’s “Great White North” on SCTV.
Screencapture from YouTube.
Remember Bob and Doug MacKenzie? I’m old enough to have owned a bag featuring this pair, Canada’s quintessential Hosers. But for those of you who might not remember, Bob and Doug were a pair of TV characters played by Canadian comedians Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, who played up Canada’s silly, self-deprecating sense of humour on SCTV.
[…]
Now, The Canadian Encyclopedia has a definition and an entry to define this particular personality subtype, and it’s not terribly flattering:
Hoser: is a slang word for a Canadian of limited intelligence and little education.
I profoundly disagree. Hoser is all of us and we are all hosers.
Hidden in the silliness of baby bottle beer chugging and yodelling, there is subtle genius to the premise behind these characters (beyond the genius of the entire concept, of course — Bob and Doug sketches were cheekily and overtly mocking “CanCon” rules by providing government regulators content that was wildly over the top in its stereotypical portrayal of an average Canadian). In this particular sketch, we see just two normal dudes concerned about local matters and asking basic questions. They don’t try to be anything more than they are and they don’t apologize.
In the entry above in the Canadian Encyclopedia, there is much hand wringing over the idea that a hoser has to be white. This obviously stems from the fact Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas are white and the skits are set in rural Ontario in the early ’80s, when Canada was noticeably less diverse. But focusing on race misses the point of the whole thing. Hoserdom isn’t racial, it is a state of mind. To be a Hoser is to accept your place in the world and to be at peace with it.
[…]
The Canada of the 21st century is suffering from an identity crisis — somewhere along the line we stopped feeling inferior and began to fancy ourselves superior. Whether it be our health-care system, immigration policies, perceived influence on global affairs or success of some of our celebrities (looking at you, Celine Dion), we took on a feeling of grandiose majesty we simply don’t deserve. Our current prime minister is the personification of this collective delusion — pretty on the outside but hollow and fake beneath. Canada is alarmingly little more than a two-bit Instagram influencer with a closet full of free designer clothes but no ability to pay the gas bill.
March 20, 2022
QotD: The mythical Victorian conformity
Back in my youth, the “lifestyle” sections of big newspapers and magazines were always reporting on families cleaning out granny’s attic, only to find boxes full of great-grandpa’s translation of the Poetic Edda into Spenserian sonnets. Or great-grandma’s recreation of the Bayeux Tapestry in multicolored yarn. Or what have you. Everyday, plain-jane people back then were always undertaking these massively ambitious, frankly weird projects — great-grandpa was the village parson, and so far as is known, he never left his home parish, and yet he somehow got it in his head to write a history of the Assyrian Empire … and actually did write it, hundreds if not thousands of pages of it, based only on books in the parsonage library, or that he could borrow from the local squire.
In other words, the Victorians were extremely tolerant of “eccentricity”, sometimes extreme eccentricity, the kind of thing we Postmoderns would call “off their meds”. Just because the postmaster spends his off hours trying to commune with the fey folk doesn’t mean he’s not an effective postmaster …
That‘s the kind of thing we need to encourage. What kind of world do we want? A world where, above all, we recognize that people aren’t the same. “Reason” is just a tool, and a crude tool at that. Trying to force people to live “reasonably” always ends in tyranny. What we want is actual diversity. So long as he’s not harming himself or others — and the threshold here is actual physical harm, not feelz — who cares what the postmaster gets up to on his off hours? The supposedly stuffy, rigidly conformist Victorians didn’t, because c’est la vie.
Severian, “Truly Special Snowflakes”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-02.
March 17, 2022
If everything is about justice, then nothing is
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander wonders why everything these days is said to be about “justice”:
Freddie deBoer says we’re a planet of cops. Maybe that’s why justice is eating the world.
Helping the poor becomes economic justice. If they’re minorities, then it’s racial justice, itself a subspecies of social justice. Saving the environment becomes environmental justice, except when it’s about climate change in which case it’s climate justice. Caring about young people is actually about fighting for intergenerational justice. The very laws of space and time are subject to spatial justice and temporal justice.
I can’t find clear evidence on Google Trends that use of these terms is increasing — I just feel like I’ve been hearing them more and more often. Nor can I find a simple story behind why — it’s got to have something to do with Rawls, but I can’t trace any of these back to specific Rawlsian philosophers. Some of it seems to have something to do with Amartya Sen, who I don’t know enough about to have an opinion. But mostly it just seems to be the zeitgeist.
This is mostly a semantic shift — instead of saying “we should help the poor”, you can say “we should pursue economic justice”. But different framings have slightly different implications and connotations, and it’s worth examining what connotations all this justice talk has.
“We should help the poor” mildly suggests a friendly optimistic picture of progress. We are helpers — good people who are nice to others because that’s who we are. And the poor get helped — the world becomes a better place. Sometimes people go further: “We should save the poor” (or the whales, doesn’t matter). That makes us saviors, a rather more impressive title than helpers. And at the end of it, people/whales/whatever are saved — we’re one step closer to saving the world. Extrapolate the line out far enough, and you can dream of utopia.
“We should pursue economic justice” suggests other assumptions. Current economic conditions are unjust. There is some particular way to make them just, or at least closer to just. We have some kind of obligation to pursue it. We are not helpers or saviors, who can pat ourselves on the back and feel heroic for leaving the world better than we found it. We are some weird superposition of criminals and cops, both responsible for breaking the moral law and responsible for restoring it, trying to redress some sort of violation. The end result isn’t utopia, it’s people getting what they deserve.
(cf. Thomas Jefferson: “I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just.”)
What is “climate justice”? Was the Little Ice Age unjust? What if it killed millions? Is it unjust for Mali to have a less pleasant climate than California? What if I said that there’s a really high correlation between temperature and GDP, and Mali’s awful climate is a big part of why it’s so poor? Climate justice couldn’t care less about any of this. Why not? Hard to say. Maybe because there’s no violation and no villain.
March 16, 2022
QotD: Muslim views of western culture
a collection of casinos, supermarkets and whore-houses linked together by endless highways passing through nowhere. All that money, all that effort all those resources that are wasted so that idiotic women and shallow men can prolong their lives … You see ancient women who refuse to die at a normal time and who continue to paint themselves and crave youthful lovers right to the edge of the grave … To eat tons of hamburgers and popcorn, to imbibe oceans of Coca-Cola and whisky, to watch hundreds of hours of stupid television, to copulate mechanically a few hundred times, to be on guard minute against being robbed, raped or murdered. That is the American way of life.
Our civilisation is regarded as evil, and its destruction is taken as a sacred duty for reasons both defensive and offensive.
Defensive
There can be no doubt that Khomeini was a firm anti-communist. But, unlike the timid monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula, he saw quite clearly where the true threat to Islam lay. Throughout his reign, the Russians presented at least a potential threat to the northern borders of Iran, But this was as nothing to the actual ideological threat of the west, Marxism in Iran had converted its tens of thousands, and influenced its hundreds of thousands. But western civilisation — with its clothing fashions, its films, its music, its enshrinement of individual happiness, its secular knowledge — had captured its millions. There was a “Great Satan” devouring Islam; and its body was not communism, but the West; and its head was not Russia, but America, “We must break those pens” he wrote, “that teach people there is something other than divine law. We must smash those mouths that tell the people they are free to say whatever they please, regardless of right and wrong in accordance with the commands of the Almighty”. On this reasoning, to carry the fight from Iran, or wherever, into the west, is the equivalent of turning from the periphery to the centre of an infection.
Offensive
In one of his occasional attempts at humane argument, Khomeini justified a war of extirpation against the west on the following grounds:
If one allows the Infidels to continue playing their role of Corruptors on Earth, their eventual moral punishment will be all the stronger. Thus, if we kill the Infidels in order to put a stop to their [corrupting] activities, we have indeed done them a service. For their eventual punishment will be less.
For the most part, however, it is conversion to Islam that is desired of people in the west. Only those refusing to convert are to be slaughtered. In the first instance, all those areas of the world that were once Islamic, but have since been lost, are to be restored; and all those areas that contain sizeable Moslem minorities are to be Islamised. In 1982, a new map of the world was presented to Khomeini by the Cartological Society in Teheran. It was divided into three regions, distinguished by three colours. First, in green, came the House of Islam — this being the 41 member states of the Islamic Conference, together with soviet central Asia, southern Spain, Malta and Lampedusa, Albania, part of Yugoslavia, north eastern China, parts of Siam, Burma, the Philippines, and most of Africa. The remaining areas, the red and black, were divided between communism and the west. But the final state of affairs is to be a totally Islamic world. No part whatever is to be left in the hands of the “Cross worshippers”, as the Christians are contemptuously termed. Moslems in Great Britain at the moment comprise barely three per cent of the population. Nonetheless, “[t]hose Moslems” says Dr Shabbir Akhtar of the Bradford Council of Mosques, “who find it intolerable to live in a United Kingdom contaminated with the Rushdie virus need to seriously consider the Islamic alternatives of emigration (hijira) to the House of Islam or a declaration of holy war (jihad) in the House of Rejection. The latter may well seem a kind of hasty militancy that is out of the question, though, with Allah on one’s side, one is never in the minority. And England, like all else, belongs to Allah.
March 12, 2022
QotD: Defining an empire
That definition goes back to the root of the word in Latin: imperium, literally meaning a command or control; imperium comes from the Latin verb imperio (lit: “to order or command”). Thus imperium was a sphere of command over others. In Roman politics, this could mean an individual had the authority to command an army or to set up courts (consuls, praetors and dictators had this sort of imperium), but the Romans understood their empire as a sort of command exercised by the Senate and People of Rome over non-Roman people, thus they called that too imperium – an imperium of the Roman people (imperium populi Romani), crucially over the non-Roman people; once cannot, after all, have imperium over one’s self. An imperium of the Roman people must be an imperium over someone else.
Contrary to the venerable Wikipedia, empire does not require a monarchy. Rome was an empire while it was still a Republic, and France continued to hold an empire after it stopped being a monarchy. Athens, famously, converted the Delian League into an Athenian Empire (the Greek word used is ἀρχή (“arche“, pronounced ar-KHAY) while it was still, internally, a democracy. Often, when discussing the internal politics of these states (especially for Rome and France) we will distinguish between a period of “empire” and “republic” to note the shift from a republic to a monarchy or vice-versa, but that sort of nomenclature should not be taken to disguise the fact that, for instance, the Roman Republic in 150 B.C. was very much possessed of an empire, while still functioning as a republic.
Empire, I should note, seems to be one of – if not the – dominant form of large-scale human social organization since at least the bronze age (which is to say: since as far back as our sources let us see clearly). Ideas like loose federations of states (e.g. the EU) or nation-states are relatively new; in many cases, our modern nation-states are merely the consolidated form of what were originally empires of various sizes (e.g. China, Russia, but also France (see: Crusade, Albigensian), etc.). We don’t think about them that way anymore, because the steady application of state power created the shared culture that subsequently formed the foundation for the nation […] In many respects, empire is normal (which, please note, does not mean it is good), whereas this modern world composed primarily of nation-states is an unusual aberration.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-22.
February 20, 2022
QotD: The male animal
David Warren, “Manliness”, davidwarrenonline.com, 2006-03-26.
January 31, 2022
QotD: Weird attempts to violate the Efficient Markets Hypothesis
The book begins and ends with a celebration of contrarianism. Contrarians are the only people who will ever be able to violate the EMH. Not every weird thing nobody else is doing will earn you a billion dollars, but every billion-dollar plan has to involve a weird thing nobody else is doing.
Unfortunately, “attempt to find violations of the EMH” is not a weird thing nobody else is doing. Half of Silicon Valley has read Zero To One by now. Weirdness is anti-inductive. If everyone else knows weirdness wins, good luck being weirder than everyone else.
Thiel describes how his venture capital firm would auto-reject anyone who came in wearing a suit. He explains this was a cultural indicator: MBAs wear suits, techies dress casually, and the best tech companies are built by techies coming out of tech culture. This all seems reasonable enough.
But I have heard other people take this strategy too far. They say suit-wearers are boring conformist people who think they have to look good; T-shirt-wearers are bold contrarians who expect to be judged by their ideas alone. Obviously this doesn’t work. Obviously as soon as this gets out – and it must have gotten out, I’ve never been within a mile of the tech industry and even I know it – every conformist putting image over substance starts wearing a t-shirt and jeans.
When everybody is already trying to be weird, who wins?
Part of the answer is must be that being weird is a skill like any other skill. Or rather, it’s very easy to go to an interview with Peter Thiel wearing a clown suit, and it will certainly make you stand out. But will it be “contrarian”? Or will it just be random? Anyone can conceive of the idea of wearing a clown suit; it doesn’t demonstrate anything out of the ordinary except perhaps unusual courage. The real difficulty is to be interestingly contrarian and, if possible, correct.
(I wrote that paragraph, and then I remembered that I know one person high up in Peter Thiel’s organization, and he dresses like a pirate during random non-pirate-related social situations. I always assumed he didn’t do this in front of Peter Thiel, but I just realized I have no evidence for that. If this advice lands you a job at Thiel Capital, please remember me after you’ve made your first million.)
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.
January 29, 2022
QotD: English patriotism
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
January 28, 2022
Spartan glossary
As part of a multi-post series at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry on explaining (and debunking) the modern day mythology of classic-era Sparta, Bret Devereaux compiled a useful glossary of terms that will be of use as I’ll be excerpting several sections of his series for today’s and several future QotD entries. I’ve added a few entries that seem necessary and expanded some others, but these are enclosed in square brackets “[ ]” to show they’re not directly from Bret’s original post.
Leonidas at Thermopylae by Jacques-Louis David, 1814.
Wikimedia Commons.
Acclamation. A vote held by acclamation (sometimes called a “voice vote”) is a vote where, instead of getting an exact count of yes and no votes, the outcome is judged by the volume of people calling out yes or no. Obviously it would be very hard to tell who had really won a close vote. This is used in modern democracies only for very lopsided (typically unanimous) votes; in Classical Sparta, this was the only voting system, votes were never counted.
[Agoge. The Spartan education system for boys (ἀγωγή, pronounced ah-go-GAY). “Spartan boys were, at age seven, removed from their families and grouped into herds (agelai) under the supervision of a single adult male Spartan – except for the heirs to the two hereditary kings, who were exempt. Order was kept by allowing the older boys to beat and whip the younger boys (Xen. Lac. 2.2). The boys were intentionally underfed (Plut. Lyc. 17.4; Xen. Lac. 2.5-6). They were thus encouraged to steal in order to make up the difference, but severely beaten if caught (Plut. Lyc. 17.3-4; Xen. Lac. 2.6-9). … We are not told, but it seems unavoidable that in a system that intentionally under-feeds groups of boys to force them to steal, that the weakest and smallest boys will end up in a failure spiral where the lack of food leads to further weakness and further victimization at the hands of other boys. I should note that while ancient parenting and schooling was certainly more violent than what we do now – the Spartan system was recognized as abnormally violent towards these boys, even by the standards of the time.”]
Apella. The Apella was the popular assembly of Sparta, consisting of all adult male Spartiates over the age of thirty. The Apella was presided over by the Ephors and all votes were by acclamation. The Apella did not engage in debate, but could only vote “yes” or “no”. The Gerousia had the power to ignore the decisions of the Apella. [In most other Greek poleis the equivalent body would be called the ekklesia.]
Ephor. The Ephors were a board of five officials in Sparta, elected annually by the Apella (technically plus the two kings). The Ephors oversaw the two hereditary Spartan kings and could even bring a king up on charges before the Gerousia. In practice, the Ephors – not the kings – wielded the most political power in Sparta. The Ephors were also responsible for ritually declaring war on the helots every year. The institution as a whole is sometimes collectively referred to as the Ephorate.
Gerousia. The Gerousia – literally a council of old men (the members were “Gerontes” – literally “old men”) which consisted of thirty members, 28 elected (by acclamation in the Apella) plus the two hereditary kings. The elected members all had to be over the age of 60. Gerontes were elected for life. The Gerousia decided what motions could be voted on by the Apella and had the power to cancel any decision of the Apella. It also functioned as a court, with the power to try Spartiates and even the kings. In practice, with the Ephors, the Gerousia wielded the real political power in Sparta.
Helot. The subjugated slave class of Sparta, which made up the overwhelming majority of its residents, the Helots did the agricultural labor which kept the Spartan state running. Helots can be further subdivided into the Laconian helots (those living in Sparta proper) and the Messenian helots (the populace of Messenia which had been reduced to helotry after being conquered by Sparta in the 7th century B.C.). Helots often fought in Sparta’s armies, apparently as screening light-infantry forces (and also as camp followers and servants).
Homoioi. See: Spartiates.
Hoplite. Hoplites were Greek heavy infantry soldiers who fought with a heavy round shield (sometimes called a “hoplon” but more correctly an “aspis“) and a spear, typically in armor.
Hypomeiones. One of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta, the Hypomeiones (literally “the inferiors”) were former Spartiates who had fallen off the bottom of the Spartan social system, either through cowardice or (more likely) being unable to pay the contribution to the Syssitia. Though free, they had no role in government.
[Kings. Sparta had two royal lines and two kings at all times. The kings were drawn from the Agaids and the Eurypontid families. In theory, both kings had the same set of powers. The kings’ wealth was derived from lands allocated from territory taken from the perioikoi, and the eldest son of the current king in each line was the presumptive heir. On this basis, the kings were almost always the two wealthiest men in Sparta.]
[Kleroi (sing. kleros). The (theoretically) equal plots of land allocated to each Spartiate, worked on his behalf by Helots to generate the contributions to the individual Spartiate‘s Syssitia. Up to half of the production of the kleros had to be paid to the Spartiate by the Helots who worked that land. At some point, the kleroi became inheritable property, which facilitated the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, contributing to the demographic collapse of the Spartiate class.]
Lycurgus. [The name of the (almost certainly) mythical founder figure of Sparta.] Lycurgus had been the younger brother of one of Sparta’s two kings, but had left Sparta to travel when his brother died, so that he would be no threat to his young nephew. After a time, the Spartans begged Lycurgus to come back and reorganize society, and Lycurgus – with the blessing of the Oracle at Delphi – radically remade Spartan society into the form it would have for the next 400 years. He did not merely change the government, but legislated every facet of life, from child-rearing to marriage, to the structure of households, the economic structure, everything. Once he had accomplished that, Lycurgus went back to Delphi, but before he left he made all the Spartans promise not to change his laws until he returned. Once the Oracle told him his laws were good, he committed suicide, so that he would never return to Sparta, thus preventing his laws from ever being over turned. So the Spartans never changed Lycurgus’ laws, which had been declared perfect by Apollo himself. Subsequently, the Spartans accorded Lycurgus divine honors, and within Sparta he was worshiped as a god.
Mothax. One of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta, the Mothakes were non-citizen men, generally thought to have been the children of Spartiate fathers and helot mothers, brought up alongside their full-citizen half-siblings. Mothakes fought in the Spartan army alongside spartiates, but had no role in government. A surprising number of innovative Spartan commanders – Gylippus and Lysander in particular – came from this class.
Neodamodes. One of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta, the Neodamodes were freed helots, granted disputed land on the border with Elis. Though they served in the Spartan army, the Neodamodes lacked any role in government. We might consider the helots who served in Brasidas’ army, the Brasideioi as a type of the Neodamodes (they did settle in the same place).
Peers: See: Spartiates.
Perioikoi (sing. Perioikos). The perioikoi (literally the “dwellers around”) were one of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta. The perioikoi were residents of communities which were subjected to the Spartan state, but not reduced to helotry. They lived in their own settlements under the control of the Spartan state, but with limited internal autonomy. The perioikoi seem to have included Sparta’s artisans, producing weapons, armor and tools; they were also made to fight in Sparta’s armies as hoplites.
Polis (pl. poleis). A complicated and effectively untranslatable term, polis most nearly means “community” and is often translated as “city-state”. However, there were poleis in Greece without cities (Sparta being one – a fact often concealed by translators rendering polis as city). Instead a polis consists of a body of citizens, their state, and the territory it controls (including smaller villages but not other subjugated poleis), usually but not always centered on a single urban center. Poleis are almost by definition independent and self-governing (that is, they have eleutheria and autonomia).
Skiritai. The Skiritai were one of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta. Dwellers in Skiritis, the mountains between Laconia and Arcadia, they were mostly rural people who were free, but subject to the Spartan state, similar to the perioikoi. The main difference between the two was that the Skiritai – perhaps because of their mountainous homes – served not as hoplites, but as an elite corps of light infantry in the Spartan army.
Spartiates, also called peers or homoioi. The citizen class at Sparta, the Spartiates were a closed ethnic aristocracy. Membership required both a Spartiate father and a Spartiate mother, as well as successful completion of the Agoge and membership in a Syssitia. Spartiate males over thirty were the only individuals in Sparta who could participate in government, although the political power of the average Spartiate was extremely limited.
Syssitia (sing. syssition). The Syssitia were the common mess-groups into which all adult Spartiates were divided. Each member of the Syssitia contributed a portion of the mess-group’s food; the contribution was a condition of citizenship. Spartiates who could not make the contribution lost citizenship and became Hypomeiones.
January 26, 2022
QotD: “Waltzing Matilda”
A gay Fusilier was marching down through Rochester
Bound for the war in the Low Country
And he cried as he tramped through the dear streets of Rochester
Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?
Who’ll be a sojer? Who’ll be a sojer?Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?
Marlborough being the Duke thereof: Winston Churchill’s forebear. “Cried as he tramped”? “Sang as he watched”? Don’t tell me that’s not a conscious evocation. Nonetheless, “Waltzing Matilda” is a splendid improvement on the original. If you’re a non-Australian who learned the song as a child, chances are you loved singing it long before you had a clue what the hell was going on. What’s a swagman? What’s a billabong? Why’s it under a coolibah tree? Who cares? It’s one of the most euphonious songs ever written, and the fact that the euphonies are all explicitly Australian and the words recur in no other well known song is all the more reason why “Matilda” should have been upgraded to official anthem status.
And yes, a “swagman” is a hobo, and this one steals a “jumbuck” (sheep), but he ends up drowning, which gives the song a surer moral resolution than most similar material. Yet in a sense that’s over-thinking it. It’s not about the literal meaning of the words, but rather the bigger picture that opens up when they’re set to the notes of that great rollicking melody: the big sky and empty horizon and blessed climate, all the possibilities of an island continent, a literally boundless liberation from the Victorian tenements and laborers’ cottages of cramped little England. Few of us would wish to be an actual swagman with a tucker bag, but the song is itself a kind of musical swagman with a psychological tucker bag, a rowdy vignette that captures the size of the land. One early version of it went “Rovin’ Australia, rovin’ Australia, who’ll come a-rovin’ Australia with me” – which is a lousy lyric, but accurately describes what the song does.
One sign of the song’s muscular quality is the number of variations. Of the rock’n’roll crowd’s monkeying around with it, I think I’ll stick with Bill Haley and the Comets’ goofy “Rockin’ Matilda”. The Pogues-Tom Waits approach – “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, “Tom Traubert’s Blues” – seems to me to glum up the works unnecessarily. To use it for the story of a soldier who loses his legs at Gallipoli is unduly reductive: It’s too good a real marching song to be recast as an ironic marching song. I don’t know whether today’s diggers marched to “Matilda” in Afghanistan and Iraq and East Timor and wherever’s next but it’s one of the greatest marching songs ever, and today as a century ago it remains the great Australian contribution to the global songbook:
Waltzing Matilda
Waltzing Matilda
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me
And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabongYou’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me
Mark Steyn, adapted from A Song for the Season, 2008.
January 24, 2022
“Men and woman exist”, opens What Do Men Want?, “Occasionally, we even like each other”
Jarryd Bartle reviews What Do Men Want? by Nina Power:
“Most men are, like most women, a mixture of good and bad, but they are not, as a rule, irredeemable,” Power notes.
Indeed, if there is ever to be a reconciliation between men and women, it may require considering the interests, needs and desires of good men, rather than a laser focus on the bad.
What then, do men want?
When Power asked her male friends this incredibly leading question, the responses ranged from “To be left alone” to “Pussy” to “Beer”. However, the real answer seems to be: something to do.
Power writes, “It is hard to imagine how the role [of men] today could be any more evacuated of meaning or status.”
The old-fashioned role of the Patriarch has been dead for at least one full generation now, and we haven’t really found an adequate replacement. The result is that men are adrift in a state of nihilism. In pop culture men seem to play the role of the “horny jester” to the self-serious goals of feminine social change. But men aren’t just interested in sex and frivolity; they also want a life of meaning.
The consequences of this listlessness are all too evident. Men are vastly overrepresented in statistics on suicide, unemployment, drug overdoses and crime.
Most men aren’t violent, but they are far more violent than women. Women are sometimes the target of this violence, but far more often men take out their pent-up aggression and sadism on other men. Often, we are told to blame these pathologies on “toxic masculinity” — that men need to be liberated from their preferences and to embrace the feminine ideals of tenderness, openness and sociability.
This solution sees sex difference as an irrelevancy, merely a reified founding myth of hegemonic masculinity, perfectly capable of tinkering. For Power, this approach is exceedingly cruel, failing to accept men as embodied creatures with a distinct way of experiencing the world:
To describe masculinity as “toxic” is to suggest that not only have men been poisoned, but that they are extending their poison to the rest of society.
This recent call to feminise men also didn’t occur in a vacuum.
There has been a significant decline in the needs for physical labour in Western countries since the turn of the century. Our increasingly service-oriented, tech-mediated economy requires very different temperaments, often drawing on the feminine virtues of empathic communication.
For Power, these broader structural changes have meant “certain kinds of behaviour come to be rewarded over others”.
Whilst we can’t turn back the clock, this re-evaluation of the role of men in society should be done in a manner which respects the dignity of men as different from woman.
January 21, 2022
QotD: Wrecking online civility is merely a byproduct
Turning people into hateful shitheads raging in echo chambers is just a side effect.
Tamara Keel, Twitter, 2021-10-19.
