Quotulatiousness

February 10, 2025

Immortality, ancient versus modern

Filed under: Health, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Immortality used to be something you only got in the eyes of others, as Benjamin Franklin put it, “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing”, but modern tech bros want the other kind of immortality … the one where you don’t actually die:

In ancient times, you attained immortality by doing great deeds.

Today you attain immortality by getting blood transfusions from teenagers, and freezing your body for later revival.

Needless to say, there’s a huge difference between these two strategies.

In the first case, you serve others by your great deeds — eternal renown is your reward for this. But folks seeking immortality today are the exact opposite. They have reached peak narcissism — other people are, for them, literally just a source of fresh blood (or stem cells).

Until recently, I thought those Dracula movies were just a story to scare little kids. I now know that they’re an actual playbook for Silicon Valley elites.

With a better business plan, our Transylvanian count could have raised some serious VC money.

Nowadays he would be running a medical rejuvenation startup with a billion dollar market cap

Not long ago, I would have thought that the tweet below was a joke. But not in the current moment.

By the way, don’t miss the motto on his shirt.

I’m tempted to make some joke about this — but we’ve now arrived at a point where reality itself morphs into dark comedy. No punchline is necessary

And here’s another similarity between tech billionaires and the monsters in old horror movies. Somebody recently sent me a link to a website that sells bunkers to tech elites, and they remind me of dungeons in a Frankenstein film.

Go ahead, click on the link. Don’t let me stop you.

In both instances, horror is the right term.

Just looking at these things and imagining some delusional transhumanist getting on the table in his dungeon for a rejuvenation procedure is very creepy.

But there are some similarities between ancient heroes doing great deeds, and today’s Silicon Valley transhumanist. They both want to be like the gods (only their methods are different). Also, they are both admired leaders in their respective societies.

That’s the part that troubles me most. If the dude slurping up stem cells in a bunker was just another crazy person, I wouldn’t worry about it. But, unfortunately, these unhinged narcissists include some of the most powerful people on the planet.

January 21, 2025

Claim – First Nations lived sustainably and harmoniously with their natural environment. Reality – “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Pim Wiebel contrasts how children are taught about how First Nations before contact with Europeans were living fully sustainable lives in a kind of Garden of Eden until the white snakes man arrived and the rather less Edenic reality:

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump near Fort McLeod, Alberta.
Photo by Mike via Wikipedia Commons.

Among the many “proofs” offered in First Nations circles to support the claim of a pre-contact Eden imbued with an ethos of environmental harmony, is the idea that before the Europeans arrived, the buffalo was considered sacred, treated with great respect, and killed only in numbers that would sustain it in perpetuity.

Each of these notions require scrutiny.

For the Great Plains tribes, the buffalo was an essential source of food and of materials for tools, clothing and lodges. It is unsurprising that the buffalo featured prominently in tribal mythology. Among the Blackfoot, the animal was considered Nato’ye (of the Sun) sacred and to have great power. Buffalo skulls were placed at the top of the medicine lodges and prominently featured at communal ceremonies.

It is ubiquitously asserted that the tribes only killed as many buffalo as they needed for their sustenance between hunts, and that every part of the animal was used. A Canadian history website suggests, “The buffalo hunt was a major community effort and every part of the slaughtered animal was used“. An American publication states, presumptuously: “It’s one of the cliches of the West; Native Americans used all the parts of the buffalo. It’s something that almost everyone knows, whether you are interested in history or not.” The Assembly of First Nations weighs in, teaching Canadian school children in their heavily promoted “Learning Modules”, that “Hunters took only what was necessary to survive. Every part of the animal was used.”

But was the Indigenous relationship with the buffalo in reality one of supreme reverence? Was every part of the animal used, and were the buffalo always killed only in numbers that would satisfy immediate needs while ensuring the sustainability of the herds?

The evidence suggests something quite different.

Archaeologists have studied ancient buffalo “jump sites”, places where Indigenous bands hunted buffalo herds by driving them over high cliffs. Investigations of sites from the Late Archaic period (1000 B.C. to 700 A.D.) reveal that many more buffalo than could be used were killed and that rotting heaps of only partially butchered bison carcasses were left behind.

Buffalo jumps continued to be used as a hunting method long after first contact with Europeans. Early Canadian fur trader and explorer Alexander Henry, made the following entry on May 29th, 1805 in his diary of travels in the Missouri country: “Today we passed on the Stard. (starboard) side the remains of a vast many mangled carcasses of Buffaloe which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immense pile of slaughter and still there remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcasses they created a most horrid stench. In this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke.

Alexander Henry described how the buffalo jump unfolded. The hunters approached the herd from the rear and sides, and chased it toward a cliff. A particularly agile young man disguised in a buffalo head and robe positioned himself between the herd and the cliff edge, luring the animals forward. Henry was told on one occasion that the decoy sometimes met the same fate as the buffalo: “The part of the decoy I am informed is extremely dangerous if they are not very fleet runers the buffaloe tread them under foot and crush them to death, and sometimes drive them over the precipice also, where they perish in common with the buffaloe.”

The Blackfoot called their jump sites Pishkun, meaning “deep blood kettle”. It is not difficult to imagine the horrendous bawling of the animals that suffered physical trauma from the fall but did not immediately succumb. Did the hunters have the ability, or even make an attempt, to put them out of their misery with dispatch? We do not know.

December 18, 2024

The modern Furies

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Greek mythology, the Erinyes (the Furies) — euphemized as the Eumenides (the “Gracious ones”) were the goddesses of vengeance. You may dismiss the ancient Greeks and their beliefs, yet they often encapsulate hidden wisdom for those who know how to interpret their stories. Today, as Janice Fiamengo points out, we have no need for mythological Furies, as they’re frequently embodied in otherwise ordinary women:

The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies
Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862, in the Chrysler Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons.

Feminist uproar over Trump’s election was easy to predict, and not long in coming. Within ten days of the election, Clara Jeffery wrote in Mother Jones that “Women are furious — in a Greek mythology sort of way“. Taking examples from TikTok, Jeffery chronicled abundant “sorrow, disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage”, which many women vowed to exorcise on men: “‘If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue‘”, she quoted one.

In The New York Times, a 16-year-old girl, Naomi Beinart, charted her tumultuous emotions, which included a sense of betrayal because her male classmates had carried on with their lives on the day after the election, seemingly immune to the girls’ all-pervasive gloom and outrage. “Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future,” Beinart opined melodramatically.

No one with even a minimal acquaintance with social media can have missed the many similar, raging reactions: the heads being shaved, the death threats, the promised sex strikes, the fantasies of revenge against Trump-voting husbands. We are to understand that the re-election of a man rumored to lack sufficient pro-abortion commitment justifies thousands of self-recorded screams, imprecations, and poisoning plots.

At least one group of women gathered physically in Wisconsin to shout their angst and anger at Lake Michigan, and there have already been tentative (though apparently less enthusiastic than formerly) plans for a revival of the anti-Trump Women’s March protests, in which women with vulgar placards and pink hats exhibited their “collective rage“.

Women’s rage is all the rage.

It is not enough, it seems, for these women to say that they are disappointed by Trump’s win, and certainly inadequate for them to state strong disagreement with his policies or style. Expressing evidence-based positions is the sort of thing a rational person would do, and significant groups of women appear increasingly uninterested in rational talk or behavior. Instead, they reach for the most extreme language, tone of voice, postures and actions to express what feminist journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett called the “visceral” “body horror” produced by the Trump victory, including the “profound physical revulsion” Cosslett and many of her sisters allegedly feel simply as a result of seeing one of Trump’s tweets (talk about fragility!).

Like so many feminist pundits telling us of women’s “horror” and “fury“, the emphasis is squarely on feeling and the female body, as if to bypass the intellect and the will altogether. The idea some feminists once scorned — that women are less reasonable and self-controlled than men — seems to have become a feminist axiom.

[NR: Edited to fix the broken URL.]

December 4, 2024

Facing the Sphinx

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Doyle provides a bit of historical context for the question currently convulsing Britain’s supreme court:

Bonaparte Before the Sphinx, 1886, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904).
Painting from the Hearst Castle collection (Accession number 529-9-5092) via Wikimedia Commons.

It was known as the sphinx: a terrifying hybrid with a lion’s body and a human head. According to the legend, the sphinx was sent to guard the city of Thebes by the goddess Hera who wanted to punish the citizens for some ancient crime. It perched on a nearby mountain, and whenever anyone attempted to enter or leave the city it would pose a riddle. If the traveller failed to answer, he or she would be devoured, but the riddle was so confounding, so esoteric, so abstruse, that even the greatest intellectuals of the day soon found themselves reduced to snacks for the mighty sphinx.

And what was this riddle? What was the question that foxed even the sharpest of minds? It was simply: “what is a woman?”

And now, a hearing at the UK’s supreme court has taken place to solve the sphinx’s riddle once and for all. The campaign group For Women Scotland raised the case in order to challenge the Scottish government’s contention that the word “sex” in the Equality Act includes men who identify as female and hold a Gender Recognition Certificate. We can expect the results of this hearing over the next few months.

And yet I’m sure most of you are thinking to yourselves: “How will these judges possibly answer such a metaphysical conundrum?” And you’re not alone. Many valiant and learned individuals have fallen in the attempt.

[…]

Inevitably, activists tend to frame the entire question of “what is a woman?” as some kind of “gotcha”. Or they claim that to even broach the question of sex differences is “transphobic” and “hateful”, a means to bully the most marginalised. But of course, the transgender lobby wields incredible power in our society; it can see people silenced, harassed and even arrested for speaking truth, and all in the name of “progress”. Genuinely marginalised groups do not enjoy this kind of clout.

Others will say that all of this is a distraction from the “real issues”. But gender identity ideology has a deleterious impact on everyone, and has proved to be a major factor in political change. In its post-election analysis in November 2024, entitled “How Trump won, and how Harris lost”, the New York Times singled out an advertising campaign by Trump’s team which drew attention to Kamala Harris’s statement that all prison inmates identifying as transgender ought to have access to surgery. The tagline was: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”.

Although the New York Times considered this a “seemingly obscure topic”, its writers were forced to admit its efficacy. Even Trump’s aides had been astonished at how popular the campaign had proven. According to the political action committee Future Forward, a group established to support the Democratic Party, this advertisement actuated a 2.7 point shift in favour of Trump among those who saw it. Inevitably, the New York Times misclassified the message as “anti-trans”, a ploy guaranteed to exacerbate the very resentment that made the campaign so effective in the first place.

To ask a politician the question “what is a woman?” isn’t some kind of cruel test. It’s a way to ensure that those in power are being honest with us. We know that they know the answer. And they know that we know that they know the answer. It isn’t that they can’t define it, it’s that they are too frightened to do so. It’s one thing for politicians to lie and hope they get away with it, but quite another for them to lie when they know that we are all fully aware that they are lying. It suggests a degree of contempt for the electorate that is unlikely to translate to success at the ballot box. And it hasn’t escaped the attention of feminists that the question “what is a man?” mysteriously never seems to be asked.

November 26, 2024

QotD: Hesiod’s five ages of man

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The only text I vividly remember from my university semester in Classics is a poem by Hesiod entitled Works and Days. I read Homer, of course, and Virgil, and Ovid, and the three tragedians, but their texts have long become a blur of strange names, strange desires, inventive use of parataxis and the word “destiny”. But I remember Hesiod. Memory is a peculiar thing.

Hesiod is the seventh century BC management book writer. He didn’t write about digital strategy, but his poems drone on in the earnest monotone of an old-school sociology lecturer who — after years of correcting student papers — decides to try his hand at fine letters. Hesiod is ace at conveying fact, but not at re-inventing it. This makes him a fine chronicler, but not a poet. I cannot imagine anyone reading Works and Days today for anything other than anthropological curiosity.

I don’t remember all eight hundred lines of Works and Days — just five stanzas: one for each of the Five Ages of Men. First came the Golden Age, in which the land was bounteous, the forests were rich with game, and men were decent, happy, and favoured by the gods. But this state of bliss didn’t last. Cracks began to appear during the next generation with the emergence of the Silver Race — small crooks and delinquents who “could not keep from sinning and from wrongdoing one another”. Zeus didn’t like them and eventually killed them off. The third generation, the Bronze Race, managed to be an even greater disgrace, a bunch of hoodlums of great physical strength with “unconquerable arms which grew from their shoulders on their strong limbs.” (I find this image rather powerful. It reminds me of my gym on a Friday night.) Things looked up momentarily during the subsequent Heroic Age, as Zeus created a “god-like race of hero-men called demi-gods”. But everything went definitively, irrevocably tits-up in the fifth and final age: the Iron Age. Land became barren, crops wilted, stock died of disease; men were poor, men were bitter, son betrayed father, neighbour killed neighbour, chaos and treachery ruled.

As a story of decline and fall, it’s a nice one (although I’ve seen better). In terms of literary merit, it’s nowhere near Homer. So why am I harping on Hesiod? (Now do pay attention, as here comes the point of this essay.) The key variable between the time when men were happy and the time when they were not, according to Hesiod, is work. “In the Golden Age,” he writes, men “lived like gods … remote and free from … hard toil …” But in the Iron Age, “men never rest from labour …” Writing about the Iron Age — the age of hard work and misery — Hesiod wrote about his own time, but he also wrote about our time. We live in the Iron Age. It is a sad age. It is the age when people have to work. And work kills the spirit.

Elena Shalneva “Work — the Tragedy of Our Age”, Quillette, 2020-01-29.

November 17, 2024

Contrasting origin stories – the 13 Colonies versus the “Peaceful Dominion”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter outlines some of the perceived (and real) differences in the origin stories of the United States and Canada and how they’ve shaped the respective nations’ self-images:

The US had plans to invade Canada that were updated as recently as the 1930s (“War Plan Crimson”, a subset of the larger “War Plan Red” for conflict with the British Empire). Canada also had a plan for conflict with the US, although it fell far short of a full-blooded invasion to conquer the US, designated as “Defence Scheme No. 1”, developed in the early 1920s.

In perennial contrast to its tumultuous southern neighbour, Canada has the reputation of being an extremely boring country.

America’s seeds were planted by grim Puritans seeking a blank slate on which to inscribe the New Jerusalem, and by aristocratic cavaliers who wanted to live the good life while their slaves worked the plantations growing cash crops for the European drug trade. The seeds of America’s hat were planted by fur traders gathering raw materials for funny hats.

America was born in the bloody historical rupture of the Revolutionary War, casting off the yoke of monarchical tyranny in an idealistic struggle for liberty. Canada gained its independence by politely asking mummy dearest if it could be its own country, now, pretty please with some maple syrup on top.

America was split apart in a Civil War that shook the continent, drowning it in an ocean of blood over the question of whether the liberties on which it was founded ought to be extended as a matter of basic principle to the negro. Canada has never had a civil war, just a perennial, passive-aggressive verbal squabble over Quebec sovereignty.1

America’s western expansion was known for its ungovernable violence – cowboys, cattle rustlers, gunslingers, and Indian wars. Canada’s was careful, systematic, and peaceful – disciplined mounties, stout Ukrainian peasants, and equitable Indian treaties.

Once its conquest of the Western frontier was wrapped up, America burst onto the world stage as a vigorous imperial power, snatching islands from the Spanish Empire, crushing Japan and Germany beneath the spurred heel of its cowboy boot, and staring down the Soviet Union in the world’s longest high-stakes game of Texas Hold’Em. Canada, ever dutiful, did some stuff because the British asked nicely, and then they went home to play hockey.

America gave the world jazz music, rock and roll, and hip-hop; Canada contributed Celine Dion and Stan Rogers. America has Hollywood; Canada, the National Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. America dressed the world in blue jeans and leather jackets; Canadians, flannel and toques. America fattened the people with McDonald’s; Canada burnt their tongues with Tim Horton’s, eh.2

The national stereotypes and mythologies of the preceding paragraphs aren’t deceptive, per se. Stereotypes are always based in reality; national mythologies, as with any successful mythology, need to be true at some level in order to resonate with the nations that they’re intended to knit together. Of course, national mythologies usually leave a few things out, emphasizing or exaggerating some elements at the expense of others in the interests of telling a good story. Revisionists, malcontents, and subversives love to pick at the little blind spots and inconsistencies that result in order to spin their own anti-narratives, intended as a rule to dissolve rather than fortify national cohesion and will. Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States is a good example of this kind of thing, as is Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tendentious 1619 Project.

Probably the most immediately obvious difference between Americans and Canadians is that Americans don’t suffer from a permanent identity crisis. Demographic dilution due to decades of mass immigration notwithstanding, Americans by and large know who they are, implicitly, without having to flagellate themselves with endless introspective navel-gazing about what it means to be an American. The result of this is that most American media isn’t self-consciously “American”; there are exceptions, of course, such as the occasional patriotic war movie, but for the most part the stories Americans tell are just stories about people who happen to be American doing things that happen to be set in America. Except when the characters aren’t American at all, as in a historical epic set in ancient Rome, or aren’t set in America, as in a science fiction or fantasy movie. That basic American self-assurance in their identity means that Americans effortlessly possess the confidence to tell stories that aren’t about America or Americans at all, as a result of which Hollywood quietly swallowed the entire history of the human species … making it all American.

As Rammstein lamented, We’re All Living in Amerika

Since we’re all living in Amerika, the basic background assumptions of political and cultural reality that we all operate in are American to their very core. Democracy is good, because reasons, and therefore even de facto dictators hold sham elections in order to pretend that they are “presidents” or “prime ministers” and not czars, emperors, kings, or warlords. Insofar as other countries compete with America, it’s by trying to be more American than the Americans: respecting human rights more; having freer markets; making Hollywood movies better than Hollywood can make them; playing heavy metal louder than boys from Houston can play it. It’s America’s world, and we’re all just along for the ride.

America’s hat, by contrast, is absolutely culturally paralyzed by its own self-consciousness … as a paradoxical result of which, its consciousness of itself has been almost obliterated.

Canada’s origin – the origin of Anglo-Canada, that is – was with the United Empire Loyalists who migrated into the harsh country of Upper Canada in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. As their name implies, they defined themselves by their near-feudal loyalty to the British Crown. Where America was inspired by Enlightenment liberalism, Canada was founded on the basis of tradition and reaction – Canada explicitly rejected liberalism, offering the promise of “peace, order, and good government” in contrast to the American dream of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.


    1. Quebec very nearly left the country in a narrow 1995 referendum in which 49.5% of the province’s population voted to separate. It is widely believed in Anglo Canada that had the rest of the country been able to vote on the issue, Quebec would be its own country now.

    2. Well actually a Brazilian investment firm has Timmies, but anyhow.

October 12, 2024

Classics Summarized: The Oresteia

Filed under: History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published Jul 19, 2017

Nobody look at how long ago I promised to do this.

That’s right! The sequel to Iphigenia, which itself was a prequel to the Iliad, has finally been given the ol’ OSP treatment! And it only took me TWO AND A HALF YEARS
(more…)

June 12, 2024

England “is a parochial country doomed to nostalgia and irrelevance by its unwavering belief in a series of grandiose historical myths”

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Fred Skulthorp reviews England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country and How to Set Them Straight by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears:

Should Keir Starmer find himself in Downing Street after the next election, he will have little to play with in terms of zeitgeist. Unlike Blair, there is no Cool Britannia to tap into. There are few unifying cultural figures and despair seems the only discernible national mood. Starmer has only the recent success of the Lionesses and an oft-quoted anecdote about his dad being a toolmaker to inspire the nation.

But there is one nation-renewing narrative on the centre-left that has emerged since 2016. England, unlike the rest of Europe, is a parochial country doomed to nostalgia and irrelevance by its unwavering belief in a series of grandiose historical myths. The real 21st century England is being held back by people singing “Rule Britannia” at the Last Night of the Proms and the fantasies of Daniel Hannan.

In England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country, Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin and former Labour Party speechwriter Mike Stears embark on a journey to set us free from such falsehoods. In Hull we find that William Wilberforce has given the nation an unqualified moral superiority. In Plymouth we discover that Sir Francis Drake is the inspiration for “the aggressively macho nationalist idea” that Brexit can “restore the country’s global reach”. In Runnymede we find that Magna Carta has given rise to the idea of an “Anglo-Saxon birthright sealed with the blood of dead kings”.

Whether anyone actually believes these things is beside the point. These national myths, the authors insist, can account for everything from the popularity of Michael Portillo’s railway documentaries to the 2016 vote to leave the European Union.

Journeys in search of England tend to lend themselves more to projection than discovery. This book presents the worst of that sin. Reading Seven Myths is a bit like being stuck on a very long car journey and regretting having asked the driver: “Whatever happened to the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics?”

Unsurprisingly, much of what follows spouts repackaged Blairite clichés about football, curry and the NHS. Lingering behind their polemic is the tedious psychodrama of the Corbyn years and Labour infighting about how the party should allow itself to feel patriotic. This book is as much about two middle-aged Starmerites trying to work out what it is acceptable to like between their party, the electorate and the limited scope of their inquiry into the England of the 2020s.

And the scope is indeed limited. Reportage and interview, where the book is allowed to breathe away from the grating polemic, is cramped, incomplete and tokenistic. The most memorable soundbite is from Nigel Farage, who tells them — perhaps half-mockingly — that his favourite place in England is London: “It gets faster and more trendy every year that comes”.

Interactions with the public are even more painful. “What do you think of Enoch Powell?” one “brown-skinned man” is asked in Wolverhampton. A refugee from Hong Kong is asked “Does Magna Carta mean anything to you?” Unsurprisingly these conversations don’t return much, but they pave the way for the eye-rollingly mundane conclusion that when it comes to English identity there is “complexity everywhere” (as if anyone’s sense of national identity were ever simple).

Still from the 1964 movie Zulu with Michael Caine as Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead, 24th Regiment of Foot.

For a book that spends nearly 400 pages debunking myths and trying to correct the course of English history, its sources require a lot of reading between the lines. Many can be narrowed down to soundbites from a few politicians and forgotten op-eds in the Telegraph (one quoted is dated as far back as 2004).

All this generates endless false dichotomies, strawmen and reductive statements to account for a grander myth loosely referred to as “English exceptionalism”. At times, attempts to source these myths in the body politic come across as comically desperate. Zulu (1964) becomes a film which kept alive the “British Empire myth” and which “the current generation of politicians would have watched growing up”.

Ironically, the writing itself is laced with the sins of myth-making: boring, trite, incoherent, lazy and unfunny. At times it veers into self-parody. In Runnymede, the “high iron gates” of a housing development near the Magna Carta memorial serve to remind us that national identity myths can “make others feel excluded”. In Plymouth, Greta Thunberg is placed in a pantheon alongside Darwin and Drake who both set sail from the Devon port: “None of these dead Englishmen have as much relevance right now as [the voyage] undertaken from the same city by a Swedish Girl”.

May 19, 2024

Alexander III of Macedon … usually styled “Alexander the Great”

In the most recent post at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Bret Devereaux considers whether the most famous king of Macedon deserves his historic title:

Alexander the Great
Detail from the Alexander Mosaic in the House of the Faun in Pompeii, attributed to the first century BC, via Wikimedia Commons.

I want to discuss his reign with that title, “the Great” (magnus in Latin or μέγας in Greek) stripped off, as Alexander III rather than merely assuming his greatness. In particular, I want to open the question of if Alexander was great and more to the point, if he was, what does that imply about our definitions of greatness?

It is hardly new for Alexander III to be the subject of as much mythology as fact; Alexander’s life was the subject of mythological treatment within living memory. Plutarch (Alex. 46.4) relates an episode where the Greek historian Onesicritus read aloud in the court of Lysimachus – then king of Thrace, but who had been one of Alexander’s somatophylakes (his personal bodyguards, of which there were just seven at at time) – his history of Alexander and in his fourth book reached the apocryphal story of how Alexander met the Queen of the Amazons, Thalestris, at which Lysimachus smiled and asked, “And where was I at the time?” It must have been strange to Lysimachus, who had known Alexander personally, to see his friend and companion become a myth before his eyes.

Then, of course, there are the modern layers of mythology. Alexander is such a well-known figures that it has been, for centuries, the “doing thing” to attribute all manner of profound sounding quotes, sayings and actions to him, functionally none of which are to be found in the ancient sources and most of which, as we’ll see, run quite directly counter to his actual character as a person.

So, much as we set out to de-mystify Cleopatra last year, this year I want to set out – briefly – to de-mystify Alexander III of Macedon. Only once we’ve stripped away the mythology and found the man can we then ask that key question: was Alexander truly great and if so, what does that say not about Alexander, but about our own conceptions of greatness?

Because this post has turned out to run rather longer than I expected, I’m going to split into two parts. This week, we’re going to look at some of the history of how Alexander has been viewed – the sources for his life but also the trends in the scholarship from the 1800s to the present – along with assessing Alexander as a military commander. Then we’ll come back next week and look at Alexander as an administrator, leader and king.

[…]

Sources

As always, we are at the mercy of our sources for understanding the reign of Alexander III. As noted above, within Alexander’s own lifetime, the scale of his achievements and impacts prompted the emergence of a mythological telling of his life, a collection of stories we refer to collectively now as the Alexander Romance, which is fascinating as an example of narrative and legend working across a wide range of cultures and languages, but is fundamentally useless as a source of information about Alexander’s life.

That said, we also know that several accounts of Alexander’s life and reign were written during his life and immediately afterwards by people who knew him and had witnessed the events. Alexander, for the first part of his campaign, had a court historian, Callisthenes, who wrote a biography of Alexander which survived his reign (Polybius is aware – and highly critical – of it, Polyb. 12. 17-22), though Callisthenes didn’t: he was implicated (perhaps falsely) in a plot against Alexander and imprisoned, where he died, in 327. Unfortunately, Callisthenes’ history doesn’t survive to the present (and Polybius sure thinks Callisthenes was incompetent in describing military matters in any event).

More promising are histories written by Alexander’s close companions – his hetairoi – who served as Alexander’s guards, elite cavalry striking force, officers and council of war during his campaigns. Three of these wrote significant accounts of Alexander’s campaigns: Aristobulus,1 Alexander’s architect and siege engineer, Nearchus, Alexander’s naval commander, and Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s bodyguards and infantry commanders, who will become Ptolemy I Soter, Pharaoh of Egypt. Of these, Aristobulus and Ptolemy’s works were apparently campaign histories covering the life of Alexander, whereas Nearchus wrote instead of his own voyages by sea down the Indus River, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf which he called the Indike.

And you are now doubtless thinking, “amazing, three contemporary accounts, that’s awesome!” So I hope you will contain your disappointment when I follow with the inevitable punchline: none of these three works survives. We also know a whole slew of other, less reliable sounding histories (Plutarch lists works by Cleitarchus, Polycleitus, Onesicritus, Antigenes, Ister, Chares, Anticleides, Philo, two different Philips, Hecataeus, and Duris) do not survive either.

So what do we have?

Fundamentally, our knowledge of Alexander the Great is premised on four primary later works who wrote when all of these other sources (particularly Ptolemy and Aristobulus) still survived. These four authors are (in order of date): Diodorus Siculus (writing in the first century BC), Quintus Curtius Rufus (mid-first cent. AD), Plutarch (early second century AD) and Arrian (Lucius Flavius Arrianus, writing in the early second century AD). Of these, Diodorus’ work, the Bibliotheca historica is a “universal history”, which of course means it is a mile wide and only an inch deep, but Book 17, which covers Alexander’s life, is intact and complete. Curtius Rufus’ work survives only incompletely, with substantial gaps in the text, including all of the first two books.

Plutarch’s Life of Alexander survives intact and is the most substantial of his biographies, but it is, like all of his Parallel Lives, relatively brief and also prone to Plutarch’s instinct to bend a story to fit his moralizing aims in writing. Which leaves, somewhat ironically, the last of these main sources, Arrian. Arrian was a Roman citizen of Anatolian extraction who entered the Senate in the 120s and was consul suffectus under Hadrian, probably in 130. He was then a legatus (provincial governor/military commander in Cappadocia, where Dio reports (69.15.1) that he checked an invasion by the Alani (a Steppe people). Arrian’s history, the Anabasis Alexandrou (usually rendered “Campaigns of Alexander”)2 comes across as a fairly serious, no-nonsense effort to compile the best available sources, written by an experienced military man. Which is not to say Arrian is perfect, but his account is generally regarded (correctly, I’d argue) as the most reliable of the bunch, though any serious scholarship on Alexander relies on collating all four sources and comparing them together.

Despite that awkward source tradition, what we have generally leaves us fairly well informed about Alexander’s actions as king. While we’d certainly prefer to have Ptolemy or Aristobolus, the fact that we have four writers all working from a similar source-base is an advantage, as they take different perspectives. Moreover, a lot of the things Alexander did – founding cities, toppling the Achaemenid Empire, failing in any way to prepare for succession – leave big historical or archaeological traces that are easy enough to track.


    1. This is as good a place as any to make a note about transliteration. Almost every significant character in Alexander’s narrative has a traditional transliteration into English, typically based on how their name would be spelled in Latin. Thus Aristobulus, instead of the more faithful Aristoboulos (for Ἀριστόβουλος). The trend in Alexander scholarship today is, understandably, to prefer more faithful Greek transliterations, thus rendering Parmenion (rather than Parmenio) or Seleukos (rather than Seleucus). I think, in scholarship, this is a good trend, but since this is a public-facing work, I am going to largely stick to the traditional transliterations, because that’s generally how a reader would subsequently look up these figures.

    2. An ἀνάβασις is a “journey up-country”, but what Arrian is invoking here is Xenophon’s account of his own campaign with the 10,000, the original Anabasis; Arrian seems to have fashioned himself as a “second Xenophon” in a number of ways.

April 18, 2024

Wagner’s Ring Cycle, summarized

Filed under: Germany, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I have to admit that aside from some amazing helicopter music, most of Wagner’s music isn’t my cup of tea drinking horn of mead. As a result, I didn’t know what the whole Ring Cycle was all about and mostly didn’t care. Coming to my rescue, Kulak provides a summary for my fellow non-Wagner fans:

So researching my epic length piece on female warriors, pre-Christian sexual politics, and the unique development of North European culture I got really into Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle after stumbling on Arthur Rackham’s gorgeous illustrations to the English translations of the text of the operas (Link 1, Link 2).

And one of the things that immediately jumped out to me, even beyond everything listed in the long piece, is how weird and unique the sexual politics of Pagan Germanic culture is.

Sure it’s Wagner, it’s not a primary source. It’s a 19th century romantic composer interpreting several different legends of pagan era Germany and Scandinavia, as record by Christian monks and scholars 100s of years after the fact. So academically not the most accurate thing to draw conclusions from, however if you subscribe to any blood memory, or spirit of a people, or eternal culture theory … it’s almost better.

This is the version of the tale that’s survived and been refined across first oral, then written traditions, then preserved by Christian monks, then revived by high Victorian romantics into one of the most celebrate and popular operas of all time. If there’s anything we could learn about the eternal character of North European women, sexuality, and sexual politics (and by extension modern sexual politics, we’re all North Europeans now) it is here.

And damned … what a datapoint.

What follows is a MeToo story on hyperborean crack.


The Female lead Brunhilde starts out as a Valkyrie who disobeys her master/father the god Wotan (Odin) in a matter of divine importance so as to save a mortal man. For her disobedience Wotan strips her of her divine nature and curses her to sleep on the earth as a mortal woman until such a time as the first man to find her wakes her, then she is to be his wife. However, taking pity Wotan lays out an magical wall of fire to guard her so no coward, only a great hero, would ever succeed. (end opera 1/3).

20-ish years later Siegfried, the son of the man Brunhilde saved, finds her (she hasn’t aged a day), and perfectly fearless he braves the fire to wake her, where-upon they fall in love (end opera 2/3)… then taking leave for more adventure Siegfried takes off promising to return and remember their. Where-upon he meets the King Gunther and his sister Gutrune, who seduces Siegfried and makes him forget Brunhilde. Making friends with Gunther, Siegfried conspires with him that he should have Brunhilde for a wife (given she’s the best woman he can think of for his friend), but there’s a problem … Gunther cannot brave the fire, he’s not fearless like Siegfried. So Siegfried, conspires to impersonate Gunther using his magic, brave the fire again, seduce Brunilde again, get her to consent to marry him in the Guise of Gunther, spend the night using his sword to divide himself from Brunhilde. Then in the morning swap back, Siegfried Married to Gutrune, Gunther to Brunhilde … The plan worked perfectly.

Then Brunhilde found out.

Learning what had been done she conspires with Siegfried’s enemies to have him killed, falsely accuses him of rape, and successfully maneuvers him into admitting to lying in an oath he wasn’t even aware was a lie … so that his fearless perfect life can end with a stab in the back.

So you may ask: Having avenged herself does she settle-down with her husband?

Hell no! You think you could fill the shoes of Siegfried you curr, you coward, you beta-cuck?! You will NEVER be Siegfried.

Instead she gives the mother of all angry speeches denounces Gertrude and everyone else of the court to their face, and then rides Siegfried’s horse onto his funeral pyre, determined it is better to die with Chad than live with Brad.

THE END.

Of the entire opera cycle. No more.

The Fat Lady has sung.

Your 4 day trip into the German mountains to experience 3 1/2 Operas over as many days and a combined 15 hours has concluded. Go Home.

Rhinemaidens, Minnesota Opera production of Das Rheingold

I’m Sorry bros, the hoes have always been like this.

Even in the mythical past of high Germanic mythology … the hoes were like this.

April 13, 2024

“One of the banes of the traditionalist and neoreactionary is ideology”

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theophilus Chilton urges conservatives to rebuild the crucial social structures that modern life has so signally undermined: churches, the männerbund, and militias (and no, I’d never heard of männerbund either).

One of the banes of the traditionalist and neoreactionary is ideology. Now, any thinking person has a worldview, a comprehensive picture of how they view the world and interpret what they see around them that is based on their experiences, education, and background. However, this is not what is meant with the term “ideology.” Instead, an ideology is a set of beliefs – often unsubstantiated – which are held in a doctrinaire fashion, even in the face of any and all evidences that the beliefs are wrong. Moreover, ideologues will demand adherence to these beliefs, and will actively seek to ridicule and punish those who do not sufficiently fill out the list of checkboxes demanded by the ideology. In short, an ideology is a way for people to avoid having to think for themselves, to resist bringing their worldview into line with reality as it is manifested around them. The key to the concept here is not that of having a cohesive worldview, but the fact that this worldview is held in spite of any countervailing evidence. The ideologue refuses to consider any evidences or objections to his belief system, and will try to find ways (accusing his opponent of being racist, sexist, etc.) to get around having to deal with them.

One such ideology is modern American conservatism, along with its close relative by cousin marriage libertarianism. Just as much as modern neoliberalism demands a blind adherence to a rigidly held set of ideological positions which are increasingly out of step with human nature and reality, so also does modern conservatism. One of the most obvious examples of this is the conservative/libertarian idolisation of “rugged individualism” and “the sovereign individual”. Indeed, these folks have created an elaborate mythology which places the “rugged individual” at the centre of the American experience throughout our history. Like most beliefs built on a purely ideological foundation, this mythology is deeply held while being deeply out of touch with actual history and reality.

If I were to make this criticism on a typical conservative site such as Free Republic, it would be roundly met with automatic and unreasoning condemnation. How dare I suggest that Americans should be anything less than atomised individuals with no connexions or associations of community to each other! I must be the reincarnation of Josef By-George Stalin!

And yet, the whole history of America has been one of traditional communities acting in concert. The Revolution was driven by citizen associations formed in churches and taverns, who then fought as community militias. The settling of the West was not done by individuals, by and large, but by groups who traveled by wagon train for mutual support and self-defence. Even today, most local community matters are handled by citizens acting together. While the individuals in American history may have been rugged, they were not alone. America, like most other traditional Western societies from the classical period forward, was communitarian and group oriented.

In other words, there is ample evidence which suggests that our choices don’t have to be either Ayn Rand or Bernie Sanders. There is a third option, which is to recognise the organic bonds of community, society, and nation which bind men together.

This is important for us to keep in mind today because there are any number of influences due to the modernism of our world today which act to draw people away from community and the positive associative bonds we used to have with each other. One of these which I’ve discussed previously is the set of social phenomena surrounding the creation of suburbia after World War II. Our forms of popular entertainment work toward this end as well – instead of towns and villages coming together to celebrate births, marriages, and deaths with song, dance, and competitions, modern American man sits alone in front of his television or in a darkened movie theatre where he’s not allowed to talk to those sitting next to him. Modern American religion plays into this as well, with its selfish emphasis on “what church can do for me”, rather than the other way around, and where Americans “church hop” from assembly to assembly, never integrating into a body of believers, but always flitting about looking for the next new program for their kids.

I say that we ought to reject this modernism as inferior to what we once had. In place of the atomised individual of conservative and libertarian phantasies, those of us in tradition and neoreaction ought to seek to restore and then strengthen traditional social bonding institutions.

The three institutions which I’d like to discuss in particular here are churches, the männerbund, and militias. Each of these institutions play different, yet complementary, roles in communitarian society. Each also, I believe, appeals particularly to one of the three complementary and interdependent tripartite divisions (spirit, soul, and body) of the holistic makeup of man.

February 9, 2024

Rome: Part 2 – Consolidation of the Republic

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published Feb 8, 2024

This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.

Lecture 2: Consolidation of the Republic

• The Roman Revolution against the Kings
• How Brutus put his own sons to death
• How Horatius kept the Bridge
• Scaevola and Lars Porsena
• The Roman Constitution: an Overview
(more…)

February 1, 2024

Rome: Part 1 – Mythical Origins to the Founding of the Republic

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 31 Jan 2024

This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.

Lecture 1: Mythical Beginnings and the Founding of Rome (753 BC – 509 BC)

• What is said by the archaeology and modern research on the origins of Rome
• The lack of authentic literary history of Rome in its early period
• Legend of Romulus and Remus
• The establishment of Rome’s early monarchy
• Transition to the Roman Republic
(more…)

November 18, 2023

“René Girard’s famous book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning isn’t directly about Barack Obama being the Antichrist”

Filed under: Books, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander reviews I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard:

The phrase “I see Satan fall like lightning” comes from Luke 10:18. I’d previously encountered it on insane right-wing conspiracy theory websites. You can rephrase it as “I see Satan descend to earth in the form of lightning”. But “lightning” in Hebrew is barak. So the Bible says Satan will descend to Earth in the form of Barak. Seems like a relevant Bible verse for insane right-wing conspiracy theorists!

Philosopher / theologian Rene Girard’s famous book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning isn’t directly about Barack Obama being the Antichrist. It’s an ambitious theory-of-everything for anthropology, mythography, and the Judeo-Christian religion. After solving all of those venerable fields, it will, sort of, loop back to Barack Obama being the Antichrist. But it’ll do it in such an intellectual and polymathic Continental philosophy way that can’t even get mad.

Girard’s starting point is the similarity between Bible stories and pagan myths. You’ve heard about this before — dying-and-resurrecting gods, that sort of thing. You might expect Girard, a good Catholic, to reject these similarities. He doesn’t. He says they’re real and important. Pagan myths resemble the Bible because they’re both describing the same psychosocial process. The myths are distorted propaganda supporting the process, and the Bible is a clear-eyed description of the process which reveals it to be evil. Just as worshipful Soviet hagiographies of Stalin and sober historical analyses of Stalin will have many similarities (since they’re both describing Stalin), so there will be unavoidable resonances between myth and the Bible.

Girard calls this process “the single-victim process” or “Satan”. It goes like this:

  1. Most (all?) human desire is mimetic, ie based on copying other people’s desires. The Bible warns against coveting your neighbor’s stuff, because it knows people’s natural tendencies run that direction. It’s not that your neighbor has particularly good stuff. It’s that you want it because it’s your neighbor’s. Think of two children playing in a room full of toys. One child picks up Toy #368 and starts playing with it. Then the other child tries to take it, ignoring all the hundreds of other toys available. It’s valuable because someone else wants it.
  2. As with the two children, conflict is inevitable. As the mimetic process intensifies, everyone goes from complicated individuals with individual wants, to copies of their neighbors (ie their desires copy their neighbors’ desires, and they become the sort of people who would have those desires). Alliances form and dissipate. There is a war of all against all. The social fabric starts to collapse.
  3. Instead of letting the social fabric collapse, everyone suddenly turns their ire on one person, the victim. Maybe this person is a foreigner, or a contrarian, or just ugly. The transition from individuals to a mob reaches a crescendo. The mob, with one will, murders the victim (or maybe just exiles them).
  4. Then everything is kind of okay! The murder relieves the built-up tension. People feel like they can have their own desires again, and stop coveting their neighbors’ stuff quite so hard, at least for a while. Society does not collapse. If there was no civilization before, maybe people take advantage of this period of relative peace to found civilization.
  5. (Optional step 5) Seems pretty impressive that killing one victim could cause all this peace and civilization! The former mob declares their victim to be a god. Killing the god was the necessary prerequisite to civilization. Now the god probably reigns in heaven or something. Maybe they die and resurrect every year. Whatever.
  6. Rinse and repeat.

Girard is against this process. Not just because it involves violent mobs lynching innocent people (although it does), but because that step perpetuates the whole cycle: people greedily desiring whatever their neighbors have, people hating their neighbors, internecine war of all against all. He dubs the process Satan, based partly on the original Hebrew meaning of Satan as “prosecutor”. Satan is the force that tells people that the victim is guilty and deserves to be lynched.

(and did you know that Paraclete, the Greek word for the Holy Spirit, originally meant “defense attorney”? The Paraclete is the force that — no, we’ll get to that later).

Are all myths and Bible stories really about this process? Girard says yes. For example, consider the myth of Oedipus. Around the end, Thebes is stricken by plague (Girard says plagues should usually be interpreted metaphorically as social plagues, ie discord). Everyone goes to the oracle and asks for a solution. The oracle says that someone has killed his father and married his mother, and the plague won’t end until that person is removed. It is revealed that Oedipus is the culprit. The mob expels Oedipus from the city, and the plague ends.

Okay, that’s one myth. Are there others?

November 17, 2023

Prometheus

Filed under: Books, Greece, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Virginia Postrel tries to correct the common misinterpretation of the story of the Titan Prometheus:

“The Torture of Prometheus” by Salvator Rosa (1615-1673)
Oil painting in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Corsini via Wikimedia Commons.

Listening to Marc Andreessen discuss his Techno-Optimist Manifesto on the Foundation for American Innovation’s Dynamist podcast, I was struck by his repetition of something that is in the manifesto and is completely wrong. “The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares,” he writes.1 On the podcast, he elaborated by saying that, although fire has many benefits, the Prometheus myth focuses on its use as a weapon. He said something similar in a June post called “Why AI Will Save the World“:

    The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods.

No. No. No. No.

Prometheus is punished for loving humankind. He stole fire to thwart Zeus’ plans to eliminate humanity and create a new subordinate species. He is a benefactor who sacrifices himself for our good. His punishment is an indicator not of the dangers of fire but of the tyranny of Zeus.

Prometheus is cunning and wise. His name means foresight. He knows what he is doing and what the likely consequences will be.

Eventually his tortures end when he is rescued by the hero Herakles (aka Hercules), who shoots the eagle charged with eating Prometheus’ liver every day, only for it to grow back to be eaten again.

The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē. They appreciated the gifts of civilization.

The ancient myth of Prometheus is not a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that technē raises human beings above brutes. It is a myth founded in gratitude.


    1. Frankenstein isn’t The Terminator either. Frankenstein is a creator who won’t take responsibility for his creation, a father who rejects and abandons his child. The Creature is frightening and dangerous but he is also the book’s moral center, a tragic, sympathetic character who is feared and rejected by human beings because of his appearance. Only then does he turn deadly. Frankenstein arouses pity and terror because we empathize with its central figure and understand his rage.

    The novel’s most reasonable political reading is not as a story of the dangers of science but as a parable of slavery and rebellion. “By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein’s monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him,” writes historian Jill LePore, who calls the “Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model … a weak reading of the novel.” I agree.

    The Romantics tended to identify with Prometheus and Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a play called Prometheus Unbound, further undermining the reading of Frankenstein as an anti-Promethean fable.

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