Isn’t it a bit circular to say that non-decadent societies are impressive because when they occasionally succeed it’s despite their lack of wealth? Rugged warriors beating a state with “higher per capita GDP….proto-industries producing high-quality armor, swords, and (eventually) gunpowder weapon[sic]…libraries full of books on generalship dating back to Sun Tzu and beyond…meticulous records that could be used for taxation and drafting” is impressive precisely *because* it’s weird for a state with that much civilization and wealth and writing to lose a military conflict.
Yeah, but there's less chance of the conflict even really becoming a conflict *unless* the barbarians have a good chance of believing they might actually be successful in beating the civilized state.
Only a few people are going to write about all the times when the civilized state effortlessly crushed the hapless barbarians, no-one's going to write about all the times when the barbarians huddled together and the hothead son of the king goes "Is this the year when we roll into the plains and throw the weak decadent city folks off their thrones and loot their lands?" and the wiser and older king goes "Well, obviously not, there's 20 000 of us and 20 million of them, no matter how tough we are they're going to kick our ass if we try, we'll just spend this year raiding the weaker tribes for cattle as usual".
Related to this, I was recently thinking about a Twitter claim arguing for police abolition with the argument that the police are useless anyway because look at all the serial killers where the police completely dropped the ball multiple times allowing them to kill and kill and kill. It was pointed out that if the police don't drop the ball and catch potential serial killers after only one kill then by definition they're not serial killers and won't feature in serial killer lists and podcasts as examples of proper police work...
...but even this would diminish the police efficiency, since you obviously would not see at all the cases where the police presence or a chance visit from officers who have grown suspicious for any reason deter a potential serial killer from doing the first murder or violent act that would set them on the path to becoming Night Butcher, the killer of 20 young women who all resemble his ex-girlfriend and cutting off their noses, and instead getting therapy (or secluding themselves into the forest or whatever).
> no-one's going to write about all the times when the barbarians huddled together and the hothead son of the king goes "Is this the year when we roll into the plains and throw the weak decadent city folks off their thrones and loot their lands?" and the wiser and older king goes "Well, obviously not, there's 20 000 of us and 20 million of them, no matter how tough we are they're going to kick our ass if we try, we'll just spend this year raiding the weaker tribes for cattle as usual".
This is pretty much what Nurhaci said, but things worked out better than he expected.
Sure, but still, the reason we remember him is because he tried, whereas those who didn't try obviously don't get remembered.
I'm also reminded of another point: frequently the "Fremen mirage" is presented as barbarians just sweeping the pampered civilized people out of the battlefield since the civilized people have grown so soft they are no longer accustomed to any form of warfare.
However, just as often the problem is just about the opposite; the civilized state is riven with hardass generals who spend their time engaging in costly foreign wars or fighting each other, and when the barbarians come, its those wars that have led to a lack of manpower, and some of the generals will outright ally with the barbarians for a chance at more power through that avenue. Of course, the point about barbarians being more unified and the civilized people lacking that unity still stands.
Akkadian Empire - Sargon of Akkad - Probably city-state dweller, but limited information exists - Not Fremen (probably)
Egyptian Empire - Multiple emperors, city-state dwellers - Not Fremen
Hittite Empire - Multiple emperors, steppe dwellers at least initially - Fremen
Achaemenid Empire - Cyrus the Great - Fremen
Macedonian Empire - Phillip II and Alexander the Great - City-state dwellers; Phillip II had a military upbringing, Alexander had a noble upbringing
Roman Empire - Julius Caeser - City-state dweller, rural upbringing
Nanda Empire - Unclear; historical accounts lean towards the first emperor being the son of a barber, who may or may not have been captured by bandits for a time before taking over the band; I'm leaning towards Fremen upbringing
Maurya Empire - Also unclear; leaning towards city-state upbringing
Han Empire - Gaozu - Peasant upbringing
Islamic Caliphates - Broadly Fremen upbringing
Mongol Empire - Broadly Fremen upbringing
Ottoman Empire - Fremen upbringing
Mughal Empire - Fremen upbringing
Edit: Cat sat on my keyboard and posted before I had finished, but this is good enough.
A Fremen upbringing among the leader(s) appears to have strong correlation with success at empire-building. But, looking over the list, the secret ingredient may be -just not growing up in court-, particularly in some kind of structured extended kinship structure, and having some kind of opportunity for a meritocratic rise despite this - so the real advantage of a Fremen upbringing may be the relative meritocracy. Even if the Fremen group isn't particularly meritocratic within-group, the large number of groups represented by the Fremen lifestyle means that one good chief can take over all their neighbors, so there's kind of an intragroup meritocracy in action.
Which kind of leans into Scott's hypothesis that the real secret is "having friends you can trust", or perhaps having an upbringing which permits you to have friends you can trust - which absolute wealth wouldn't figure into in and of itself, but relative wealth would definitely do. (So - it's not necessary to be an ascetic to get the advantages of the Fremen upbringing. Only to not be so wealthy that your upbringing is tainted by being surrounded by sycophants.)
Old time raiders probably fare about as well as modern time robbers. Any robber, or small gang is highly likely to be very successful for a very short time. You or me, or anyone walking outside in the morning can be surprised by an armed gang, beaten, murdered, they could invade our homes, take what they want, burn the rest. This could go on for days ... until they meet their comeuppance, at which their careers would be over for a very long time.
Playing hit-and-run on fringe farming communities would be very successful for a gang of mounted archers, especially since they're not maintaining anything other than their horse-tack and tents. They're neither farming, nor producing anything. Instead, they eat what they steal, they collect whatever coin they can carry, have their lackeys transport slaves and livestock back to safer camps. In and around an agricultural community, the farmers can't keep a spare horse to chase down any potential bad guys. Once the bandits discover the officials are going to do something about them, they pack camp and skedaddle out, being 100% mobile, they can easily escape any standing army.
This is probably why the Romans were so successful, they didn't keep a standing army in Rome, they kept private armies roving the frontiers of the enemy lands. Raiding, constantly expanding the empire.
The settlers of the American West driving big heavy wagon trains, had a particularly hard time crossing the deserts, big numbers died, most ended up abandoning everything in the Nevada Desert. Unlike Lewis & Clarke 50 years prior, who parked their boat in the Missouri River, and traveled on horses to The Pacific Ocean, then back to the Missouri River, and boated back to St. Louis. They only lost one man on the entire two year trip—likely to appendicitis—and that was in the first few weeks.
Likewise General Fremont, mounted, traveled across the west, traced all up and down Spanish California, crossing The Sierra Nevada thrice, was kicked out by the Mexicans, traveled north to Oregon, received a message to attack, rode back south, overthrew the Mexican Government in California, freed the native slaves, established The Bear Flag Republic—six days later it becomes The California Republic, later a state.
I think the lesson is: Highly mobile soldiers can win many small battles, sometimes topple governments.
> they kept private armies roving the frontiers of the enemy lands
To nitpick, I don't think the legions (in the Republic) were "roving". AFAIK, they always had a particular purpose. It's just that Roman leaders, intentionally or not, almost always made sure that there was a purpose or two every year. Sometimes allies would ask for help, and sometimes Rome would be attacked, and the rest of the time they'd pick a fight with someone. But your point still stands in that the armies gathered, went out, fought, came back, and disbanded, ideally bringing back more wealth than they lost. As opposed to standing armies which consume wealth, and often indicate that the overall situation is bad enough that the lack of an army would consume even more wealth. (That is, you'd get your ass kicked if you don't close the legion gap.)
right. acoup is comparing the societies... if a barbarian society has lower gdp, etc. then you must factor that in. organizing society to produce wealth should not be handicapped against you, its the whole point!
I don't want to stretch this too far but if you look at barbarism vs civilization as a sliding scale and you're looking for European barbarians...you should probably look at the Germans.
Like, in 0 AD, under Tiberius, the Gauls have all been unified under a centralized Roman power and the Germans are disunited tribes of savages that are, frankly, too savage and violent to be tamed.
And in 1700 AD, ya know, things change...but the French are under an absolute monarchy and the Germans are ~400 squabbling principalities, principalities which can and have held their own against the French and other large, powerful states for hundreds of years.
And that's weird, right? Like, the French are this highly centralized state with colonies across the world and Versailles and big fancy things, why can't they just roll over these anarchic Germans? Why can't the Russians or the British?
And, like, there's better examples of this but if I start talking about the Liao and the Jin and the Song...people aren't as familiar with that. But that's the core thing. You've got these...more barbaric, more anarchic societies which seem like they should get beat up by large, centralized states and yet the often hold their own and it's weird. That discrepancy, I think, is what people are trying to grapple with.
>principalities which can and have held their own against the French and other large, powerful states for hundreds of years.
No, not really. Europe had just seen several centuries of warfare mostly consisting of bigger powers, including Sweden with its few million pop, basically walking across Germany at will, looting and killing and fighting each other. It has been argued that the memory of these times led to several complexes in German nationalism that would be manifested powerfully in the first half of the 1900s.
Still, what probably contributed rather more to German disunity than any inherent barbarism was simply the bad graces of living in a state-form where the Pope, the most powerful man in Europe, had a special interest in preventing the formation of an united state or having an Emperor rise up to become too powerful.
It's been a while, but as I recall, it had to do with the (Holy) Roman Emperor nominally being of equivalent or possibly superior status to the Pope, vis-a-vis the entirety of (Western) Christendom. If the core of the Empire could be kept disunited, the Emperor couldn't really do much, and the Pope could go on being the supreme authority. Compare to the eastern empire, where the empire stayed united and the Patriarch was, politically speaking, a second fiddle. (But a very important second fiddle!)
Also, while the empire was disunited, a lot of power accumulated in the hands of bishops, who sort of took over the administrative aspect of Roman government, and so an important question was "who controls the bishops". (See also, Henry VIII of England.)
A particular low point was when the Pope excommunicated the Emperor, who had to wait outside a castle gate for three days in a blizzard while barefoot and wearing a hair shirt:
I mean, other than the Swedish thing, this is...basically Machiavelli's analysis of Italy and Italian city states. Is the Pope keeping Italy and Germany down?
And yeah, I'm sure there was lots of warfare on German land but..."walking across Germany at will, looting and killing"? Who? The fact that I'm sure lots of people fought on German land also describes...Italy and the Byzantines and England and maybe France, that southern border with Muslim Spain was always spicy.
This is exactly my thought; the greater wealth, population density, technology, access to trade, and sophistication of institutions is exactly *why* a "decadent" urban population has an advantage. Still, one could argue the advantage is not as large as it might seem. Others brought up selection effects (both in terms of when the Fremen pick a fight, and in terms of which fights get recorded). I've enjoyed the podcast *Fall of Civilizations*, and a few things have stuck out to me.
One is that we don't often have details of ancient battles, and so we may not really know why it actually was won or lost. But also, clever tactics and new inventions can take you a long away, even against a numerically superior force. The Romans were notable for this, for example against the superior naval prowess of the Carthaginians and against Hannibal's elephants. Doubly so if the opposing leader is incompetent, as was often the case when the king was likely to be sociopathic and nepotistic--taking charge himself or appointing an incompetent friend.
Two is that the difference between "decadent civilization" and "savage barbarian" is probably not as distinct as one might think. Many old empires fell to up-and-coming new empires, who themselves had already established trade, cities, temples, wealth, etc. There might have been some build-up of cruft and corruption over time, but this doesn't mean that "barbarians" are beating empires, just that regression to the mean exists.
Speaking of corruption, third is that empires tend to deal with plenty of internal issues of their own that I wouldn't really call "decadence." For example, the Khmer empire dealt with internal instability partially as a result of the *more* austere Therevada Buddhism becoming more popular than the gaudy, decadent Hinduism and other forms of Buddhism (not directly as a result of the austerity, but as a result of the religious conflict and loss of trust in leaders). The Maya city-states ran out of land and encountered extreme drought. The Babylonians faced over-salted farmland from repeated silty floods. The Inca lost their leader (possibly to Spanish disease) and dealt with a resulting civil war before encountering the Spanish in person. Many empires suffered due to simple incompetence, and it's a lot easier to destroy than to build.
Basically, building a large, complex, wealthy society in ancient times is hard, and requires a lot to go right, and if any of those factors change, the society can be greatly weakened, having nothing to do with its inhabitants being "weak."
> Two is that the difference between "decadent civilization" and "savage barbarian" is probably not as distinct as one might think.
That was one of acoup's points in the Fremen Mirage posts - in most cases, the "barbarians" that conquered "decadent" civilizations were simply the next-least-decadent-and-civilized civilizations around, who occasionally acquired advantages over their slightly-more-civilized neighbors.
One claimed reason for the Mongols’ success is because they had a strategy of brutally annihilating victims who refused to surrender, while being very gracious and hands-off with conquerees who surrendered right off the bat. Sounds a little bit like Cyrus!
I can provide some support from a different quarter for the idea that Cyrus took a relatively benevolent approach to his subject territories. Weavers, Scribes, and Kings relates that before the Persian conquest, Babylon was notionally ruled by a king known to us by his biblical name of Nabonidus, who was the son of an immigrant to Babylon and felt keenly patriotic toward his mother's home city. He didn't care for Babylon at all.
One rather shocking way in which he expressed his distaste for Babylon was that he left it and went to live in exile in the desert. He left his son in charge, but a major religious festival -- the new year celebration -- which called for the participation of the king just didn't happen for many years.
One notable thing that Cyrus did after assuming power in Babylon was hold the new year festival. He did this even though he didn't live there and there was ample precedent for not doing it.
It's unsurprising that a new king might want to pick up free legitimacy this way, but it still represents a strategy of staying in power by having people want you to be there.
I heard (poorly sourced, sorry) that most of our knowledge of Nabonidus comes from historians writing during the reign of Cyrus and his successors, who were heavily encouraged to make him sound terrible.
Argh, I just spent a while responding to this, and the page reloaded and I lost the comment in progress.
Short summary: according to the book I've been referencing, Nabonidus was the subject of many waves of very hostile propaganda, this started well before Cyrus was any kind of threat to Babylon (but continued after Cyrus had taken over), and the foundational claim that Nabonidus spent ten years in voluntary exile ignoring his own empire is backed up by convincing evidence, including the record of the new year festival, his own royal inscriptions, and excavation at the location where he said that he was. None of those three types of evidence is subject to the desire of other people to make the king look bad, unless you believe that the royal inscriptions were forged.
My read, based on this single pop history source, is that Nabonidus was not as bad as propaganda eventually portrayed him (for example, I don't see much reason to believe that he lost his mind), but the reason for all the propaganda casting him in the most negative light imaginable is that he was a terrible, godawful king.
Were they much of an early clique? My impression from the Washington biography is they mostly only met around the time they were already planning to start the rebellion (or later). Washington and Franklin didn't go to high school together or anything.
One successful clique that *does* come to mind are the Bolsheviks. Sure, they started to splinter and factionalize very early on after taking power (and during this process, but they were kept together still by the expectional leadership of Lenin), but Stalin managed to prune out the splintering elements through ultraviolence and fused the rest together by fear. Once the party started getting complacent and ran out of belief in its own mission and worth, the whole situation was quickly upended, though even this happened more as an internal factional takeover than by an outside force entering.
Yeah. The standard authoritarian regime origin story is a military officer with a group of hardcore loyalists, who use that to take over a larger more divided group
I think possibly more on an individual level? Washington had his own clique of officers who he trusted which made him a very effective general. But their overall success required cooperating with other cliques
It's not that barbarians are strong, but that extended civil wars, military coups and tax revolts make empires weak.
Mysteriously, barbarians fail to conquer empires that enjoy peaceful succession and obedient provinces. Yet suddenly, barbarians become very good at taking over empires when those empires have had multiple emperors succeed by war against their predecessors, half their provinces in tax revolt, trust no generals for fear of coups, et cetera.
You see this pattern in the fall of Rome, in the Islamic conquest of half the Byzantine Empire, and the fall of multiple dynasties in China.
If you want a barbarian victory, give them a neighboring empire whose citizens no longer pay taxes, or whose armies spend half their time fighting each other.
If you want a barbarian failure, give them a neighboring empire whose citizens pay their taxes and whose ruler doesn't fear his own generals.
If you think that "barbarian virtue" comes into it, you need to explain the mysterious coincidence of virtuous barbarians with periods of extended imperial tax revolts and civil wars.
If you think that "ruling class decadence" comes into it, you need to explain why, as Devereaux points out, the exact same criticisms kept being made by Roman critics of their decadence for centuries, on and through the very height of the empire's success, with no correlation to the time when Rome fell.
So long as "decadence" didn't interfere with peaceful succession and tax-paying in Rome, the empire defeated the barbarians, reliably. Once the civil wars got ruinous enough and the generals untrusted enough, no amount of heartfelt Christian reform could long forestall the barbarians' triumph.
More precisely, barbarians have one key advantage: they don't need taxes to set up an army, because everybody is a part-time raider or bandit anyway. So as long as a barbarian zone can find a decently charismatic leader to rally everybody to raid the Big Rich Neighbor, they can put together a big force on small notice.
This does the barbarians little good if the Big Rich Neighbor has their military-fiscal act together, since, as Devereaux notes, a professional military of a settled empire can easily outfight barbarians on the defense, and often though not always on the offense too.
But if the Big Rich Neighbor's tax system collapses, or the emperor stops trusting his generals enough to allow them to raise armies, or the generals' armies fight each other instead of the barbarians... well, then your charismatic barbarian leader has a once-in-three-centuries opportunity.
(BTW, nearly all famous barbarians are famous because they succeeded. There's a reason that's fame-worthy. Rome subjugated and assimilated an absolutely ridiculous number of barbarian nations in its thriving years, and only professionals remember all their names.)
So the "Marxian history via SSC/ACX" version of "good times create weak men, weak men create hard times" is something like:
"The rate of burning social capital in the fires of Moloch to obtain relative advantage in internal power struggles, will eventually exceed the rate of replenishment of social capital. Social capital is used to counter existential threats, but once the level of social capital sinks low enough that not even the best available leader can counter the current existential threat, there occurs a transformation of society to create a synthesis between the existing society and the threat itself."
Its probably more like: Our fathers (hard men) defeated the barbarians, now we have easy times, so we beat the swords into plow-shares (became weak men), grew lots of food, had time for leisure, dancing, family, arts & learning. A group of highly mobile mounted archers raids our peaceful kingdom, now its back to hard times. If we survive, we abandon our farming, beat the plow-shares back into swords, become hard men, defeat the barbarians.
As I stated above, probably the Romans were so successful, is that the Senators employed private armies, who raided the neighbors for profit, but in doing so, also kept a safe border for The Roman Empire, and furthermore, they expanded the empire. 700 years for The Western Empire is a pretty good run.
That sounds like the standard interpretation. But, and perhaps my locality bias is showing here, I think the true vice of peaceful civilization is political infighting.
That is, my picture of the political situation in late Imperial Rome is more about praetorians, backstabbing, and civil war, rather than "too much dancing and art". But I do think it's somewhat on point about leisure, per se. I think it's possible to get out of practice at dealing with existential threats. And I think if modern America had to fight WWII every 50 years, there'd be a lot less performative moaning about who counts as "literal Nazis".
So is "decadence" just the same thing as "moral mazes"?
I feel like the word decadence is too often used and too little defined, but is decadence just a state in which an organisation's ability to deal with the external world becomes atrophied as internal status competition becomes the primary activity?
Maybe? I haven't read the book, just some of Zvi's writing on it. It sounds like "moral mazes" is about how to navigate the effect from the inside, in businesses, while "decadence" is more about criticising the effect from the outside, in societies. But the effect might be similar? Also Zvi wrote this comment about simulacra levels:
So riffing on the simulacra levels, maybe it's something to do with advantage for agents shifting away from making the external world suit your goals, to navigating the pre-existing external world, to making the political world suit your goals, to navigating the pre-existing political world. Once you move away from conquering and improving the land around you, to manipulating neighboring states, to creating internal political coalitions to get things done, to manipulating existing political coalitions because it's too hard to make new ones, it's all over. Invading barbarians don't care about Byzantine chariot teams. And maybe it's all over by the 2nd stage, where you can no longer competently go out and remake the world, and instead have to resort to playing your neighbors off of one another.
(A failure of this set of analogies is that it's assuming an ancient empire or a modern superpower; the first stage doesn't really fit a balance-of-power scenario, or a minor power. So it needs re-working.)
This sounds a lot like the theory of collapse that Joseph Tainter advances, where "social capital" is replaced by "social complexity". The idea is that there are diminishing returns to social complexity, and when some crisis arrives, the increasing social complexity needed to solve it can even be net negative, leading to an "overhang". And then coming back to a "simpler" society actually liberates resources.
I am not sure it is the best analysis, but it is interesting.
Hm. I could easily buy a version of that where the complexity ossifies and turns into an overhang, reducing the ability to deal with new threats. I think that's going to be the real problem with climate change. Humanity won't go extinct, and there's arguments that overall the world would be better suited for humans if it were a bit warmer. But we've built up a lot of civilizational capacity around the climate range of the last few centuries, and we seem to be bad at handling that sort of change. Coastlines shift, currents change, tundra thaws, islands vanish, farmland changes, species die out or retrench, and California still won't change its water rights system.
> But before that happened, the Romans conquered hundreds of barbarian tribes in the process of taking the entire Mediterranean region and holding it for hundreds of years. The score is still settled states 100, barbarians 1. And this is a typical record - look at China, the Middle East, etc, and you will find a similar pattern.
> Grant that settled states beat barbarians most of the time (for example, by Devereaux’s numbers, China was only ruled by barbarians for 13 - 24% of its history).
Modern Chinese view their premodern history as consisting mainly of five major dynasties (Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing). This would cover basically the period from 600 to 1900. (Obviously, there is more history before that, but it's viewed as belonging to a period that is different in kind.) Of these roughly 1300 years, roughly 300 each are assigned to the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing, and the Yuan last for an unimpressive ~100. There are also periods where no one is firmly in control, which (here) get lost to rounding errors.
That's barbarian rule for a stylized 400 out of 1300 years.
But then again, even where someone is firmly in control, exactly what they are in control of may shift. The Song dynasty is divided into the Northern Song (controlling the north and the south) and the Southern Song (just the south). During the Southern Song period, the north was ruled by... barbarians, the Jin dynasty of 1115-1234.
How do we count those 100 years? Are the barbarians getting 500 out of 1300 while the Chinese get 900 out of 1300? Do we say it's 500/1400 vs 900/1400? Should we weight it by the Chinese population ruled by each regime?
This problem of simultaneous Chinese / barbarian rule (of different parts of China) gets much worse if you want to look farther back in time.
To sum up, Deveraux's ballpark figures there look defensible if low, but the idea that the score is civilization 100 to barbarians' 1 is ridiculous. Barbarians inflicted major defeats on settled states all the time, and held power outright for a very large minority of history.
And then, think about how often China was forced to pay tribute to its barbarians. When that happens between two states, we call it a win for the state that forces the tribute. Why are we calling it a loss for the barbarians when they force the tribute?
> Why are we calling it a loss for the barbarians when they force the tribute?
Hm. "Force" might be the key: who decides on the transfer of wealth?
As a possible counter-example, wasn't the British Empire largely net negative in resources, after a certain point? (Not to mention Kipling's "White Man's Burden".) And yet they gained something from it, a certain je ne sais quoi which is decidedly absent in the modern UK.
And the Chinese empire, in its various incarnations, had a semi-regular habit of giving back more in gifts than they got in tribute from their neighbors. There seemed to be a sense of "if you make language noises acknowledging us as the center of the universe in all respects, we will make your culture appear pitiful by giving you more wealth than you can bloody well imagine".
> And the Chinese empire, in its various incarnations, had a semi-regular habit of giving back more in gifts than they got in tribute from their neighbors.
From what I read, the Emperor would overpay for tribute. But at the same time, tribute missions invariably included a lot of contraband [direct trade between the mission and the locals being illegal] that they sold in China without first giving it to the Emperor. So the 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑡 loses money on the tribute missions, but it's not so obvious that the 𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑖𝑟𝑒 does.
> "Force" might be the key: who decides on the transfer of wealth?
The barbarians do. It isn't like US foreign aid. Here's a conversation I had which should be illustrative of the modern Chinese view of how this kind of thing went:
[me] 你说中国给北方付钱，叫进贡 [You said [when] China paid money to the north, that is called "paying tribute"]
[me] 皇帝能不能用别的词？为了保全面子？[Could the emperor use another word? In order to save face?]
[me] 进贡是不是比较丢脸的事情？[Isn't paying tribute a fairly embarrassing situation?]
[friend] 但是没办法。。。 [But there's nothing you can do about that...]
[friend] 不进贡就要战争 [If you don't pay the tribute, you have to go to war]
[me] 我的想法是，政府可能必须付钱 [What I'm thinking is, the government may have to pay the money]
[me] 但是不用形容钱为贡吧？[But there's no need to describe the money as "tribute", right?]
[friend] 到了清朝，就变成赔款了 [By the Qing dynasty, it became "reparations"]
[me] 可以说“我们两个国家是好朋友，我们作为老大需要照顾好他们”什么的？[Could [someone] say "Our two countries are good friends, [and] we as the elder brother must take good care of them" or whatever?]
[friend] 这个。。。 你的想法很好 [Uh... that's a really good idea]
[friend] 但是，我觉得战败方，怎么能觉得自己是老大。。 [But I think, the party that loses a war, how can they believe that they are the elder brother..]
[me] 我以为中国总是觉得自己比附近重要点？ [I thought China always felt that it was a little more important than [the countries] around it?]
[friend] 被打败后就不会这样想了 [After being defeated, [you] can't think like that]
There's also the sinosization issue. The first generation to conquer a dynasty might be barbarians, but the next is nearly indistinguishable from the previous regime. And it normally takes several generations to re-establish a larger Empire
> There's also the [Sinicization] issue. The first generation to conquer a dynasty might be barbarians, but the next is nearly indistinguishable from the previous regime.
You could make this argument for the Manchus, and it would work pretty well in some areas and not well at all in others.
The Moral Mazes analogy is a good one. Empires can suffer parasitic infighting to a degree that barbarians can't: how do you connive at tax exemptions when there are no taxes? The same organizational infrastructure that makes an empire strong (regular taxes, professional armies) creates new ways to 'defect' and parasitize (tax exemptions, military revolt).
So why does it look to Xenophon like "decadence"? Because elite defection is contagious by imitation. The more nobles have tax exemptions, the more will seek them; the more generals try military revolt, the more generals will seek to try - and the more emperors will seek to preemptively disempower or assassinate them.
This isn't a purely ancient problem, by the way. What's the best predictor of a coup d'etat? How many prior coups that country has recently had.
Why not agree with Xenophon, then, and call it decadence? For two reasons.
First, because barbarian tribes are just as treachery-prone as civilized empires; the famous leaders were famous in part because they had enough charisma to forestall their allies' fission long enough for the next conquest to keep people sweet.
Second, because an empire's tax norms and military-obedience norms don't seem to correlate with more personal virtues. It's hard to call the late Roman Empire less "virtuous" on a personal level than the early one - if anything, Christianity made at least attempting personal virtue vastly more important.
But we should grant Xenophon this: any successful state must have a norm of cooperating with authority rather than parasitizing or rebelling against it, and that the breakdowns of these norms past a certain point become cultural, self-perpetuating, the way that the psychological threshold for tax evasion is lower among Italians than Americans, and the threshold for shooting someone with a gun is lower among Americans than Italians.
But that's not because Americans are more inherently conscientious than Italians in a general sense, or Italians more inherently pacific. "Decadence" misleads us into looking for general vices among an empire's elite, where we should instead look for specific emerging parasitic norms.
(Was it "decadence" that let Hitler take over Germany, and "virtue" that made postwar West Germany so much different? No, but the Weimar norms of emergency government gave him an opportunity he exploited, and the backstop of American power prevented any similar erosion after the war. Just because the Romans and Babylonians are further away from us is no excuse to say "ah, they became decadent" when we see the flaws in that answer for Germany.)
I think also decadence has unfortunate moral character and connotations. One thing modern Western society has proved is that the instinct to enjoy nice food, and to defect in prisoners dilemma situations, are not particularly correlated. And if anything a bit of material decadence makes people more comfortable In taking pro-social risks.
Since you mentioned the supposed Amorite conquest of Babylon, it's the perfect time to bring up something I've been meaning to mention in an open thread. This is a quote from Weavers, Scribes, and Kings:
> By 2000 BCE, Ur-Namma's dynasty in Ur had lost its grip on Sumer. A number of factors led to its decline. Scribes later blamed this loss on the arrival of a new group of people, the Amorites, who supposedly disrupted the peace, but scholars have discounted this.
> Amorite was a Semitic language that began to spread throughout Mesopotamia around this time; it was the native tongue of a group of people who may have originally come from the west. But they had lived in Mesopotamia long before the end of the Ur III period and had not invaded or suddenly arrived. A king of Ur went to the trouble of building a long wall between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers to try to keep the Amorites out, but it didn't work. They were already too integrated into Mesopotamian society for a wall to have made any difference at all. Over the next few centuries, kings with Amorite names and Amorite ancestry led many Mesopotamian kingdoms, notably in Babylon, where the most prominent king was named Hammurabi. We will return to him later. The Ur III kingdom collapsed for more prosaic reasons, one of them being that it continued to be impossible to hold together, for any length of time, large groups of people who were spread over a wide area.
As best I can parse this, Amanda Podany is saying that
I. At this point in history, several different Mesopotamian kingdoms left records complaining that they had been overrun by Amorites;
II. One of those kingdoms went to the effort and expense of constructing major military fortifications to hold off the Amorites; and
III. Shortly afterward, the rulers of these kingdoms had been replaced by Amorites; but
IV. This is all just a big coincidence, and there was no Amorite invasion.
If there is a charitable way to read this, I'm not seeing it. It appears to make as much sense as arguing that Mexico's loss of Texas to America couldn't have been related to the arrival of Americans there.
Numbers 21 describes the Israelites' defeat of "Sihon king of the Amorites", following which Israel settled in Amorite territory (in trans-Jordan) and drove the Amorites out. The writer refers to a now lost "Book of the Wars of the LORD" and quotes a poetic fragmant, from which we can conclude that the story of the Amorite defeat is ancient.
We find the term "Amurru" in Akkadian and Sumerian texts, but that simply means "the West". From the perspective of Mesopotamia, the Levant is to the west, so in some cases Amurru seems to have been used to mean the whole of Syria and Israel/Palestine. But in other cases, it referred to a specific polity, which you might see marked as Amurru (or "the Amorite kingdom") on maps. ("Amurru" also referred to a deity, although it is now frequently doubted that the Amorites actually did worship a deity of that name.) The kingom of Amurru was north of the Orontes, so it is hard (but not impossible) to argue that these were the same people who appear in Numbers 21.
There was a semitic language which we call "Amorite", which is known mostly through place and proper names recorded in other languages (e.g. Deuteronomy 3:9). But this raises a problem: how do we know that the names come from a specific language? When does Amorite separate from other Northwestern Semitic languages? Is it truly distinct from Ugaritic?
So, to get to the point of your comment, what do we conclude from the spread of Amorite (i.e. some Northwestern Semitic language) in Mesopotamia during the late 3rd and early 2nd millennium (including the appearance of Amorite names in king lists)? It could be explained by an invasion of Amorite speaking people (whether or not originating from the polity called Amurru), but the evidence of such an invasion is missing from the archaeological record. Another possibility would be peaceful migration and/or cultural penetration.
If the writer you quote is saying that there definitely wasn't an invasion (which isn't clear from the passage quoted), then I think that pushes the point beyond the scholarly consensus. But conversely, it would be wrong to say there definitely was an invasion. The state of the evidence is currently inconclusive.
It's perhaps obvious, but I think it worth stressing, that if there was an invasion, it wasn't by the same people mentioned in Numbers 21 so continuing to refer to them as "Amorites" is confusing.
The concept of an "Amorite invasion" has been a topic of debate among historians and archaeologists. The main points of contention include:
* Lack of Direct Archaeological Evidence: There is a notable absence of direct archaeological evidence clearly pointing to a widespread, violent invasion by the Amorites. Such evidence might include widespread destruction layers in cities or significant shifts in material culture that could be distinctly attributed to an invading group.
* Evidence of Peaceful Assimilation: Some evidence suggests that the spread of Amorite influence in Mesopotamia and surrounding regions might have been more gradual and peaceful. This could have involved migration, intermarriage, and cultural assimilation rather than military conquest.
* Historical Records: While ancient texts, including those from Mesopotamia, mention the Amorites, they often do not provide a clear picture of an invasion. These texts sometimes portray the Amorites as foreign rulers or as integrated into existing societies, but they do not unanimously support the idea of a large-scale military invasion.
* Evolution of the Term "Amorite": The term "Amorite" itself evolved over time and may have referred to different groups or a cultural-linguistic identity rather than a single, cohesive invading force.
In conclusion, while some scholars have proposed the theory of an Amorite invasion, particularly in the context of early 2nd millennium BCE Mesopotamia, there is no consensus on this point. The evidence can support multiple interpretations, ranging from violent invasion to peaceful migration and cultural assimilation. The topic remains an area of ongoing research and debate in the field of ancient Near Eastern studies.
Incidentally, I suspect that this all stems from an error in the post. I doubt that Scott really meant to refer to the Amorites since (a) the first Babylonian empire was famously founded by Hammurabi (which is an Amorite name), so it's not as if the Amorites took over a pre-existing empire, (b) the usual Amorite invasion account takes them to be a state-based people, so they don't fit the pattern and (c) the Amorites are not recorded as occupying any particular hill-territory. I wonder if Scott intended to refer to the Kassites.
Rome did aggressive anti-christian campaigns, then a few generations later their emperors were all Christian. But it would feel weird to say that the Christians conquered Rome. In the same way Rome conquered Judea
Regarding IV: she isn't saying there was no Amorite invasion at all, just that it happened centuries before Ur III even rose, so it doesn't explain its fall.
> It appears to make as much sense as arguing that Mexico's loss of Texas to America couldn't have been related to the arrival of Americans there.
Given the above, it's more like arguing Mexico's loss of Texas couldn't have been related to the arrival of, I don't know, Apache.
Yes, the quote only says "But they had lived in Mesopotamia long before the end of the Ur III period" instead of "before the start"; but e.g. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Amorite gives the same dates I've seen elsewhere, with Amorites appearing c. 2400 BC and Ur III dates of c. 2112–c. 2004 BC.
It does say "they were believed to be one of the causes of the downfall" of Ur III but I think this "were" is consistent with the quote; some post-Ur III records say so but the modern historians don't believe that.
Oddly enough, at the part about "how did Cyrus manage to conquer the Medes?" I was thinking it might be something like the Mongols.
The thing is, when we say "barbarians", we have this image in mind like Conan the Barbarian: clad in skins, rough and simple, tough and good at fighting, very strong.
That's not so much the historical truth. The Mongols may have been barbarians (to the Chinese) but they had their own culture and society. They had leaders, warbands, and internal politics: Genghis Khan got his start by having his family abandoned after his father's murder because he was too young to push his claim as heir and their tribe left them behind. He had a real struggle to survive, but he managed, and then slowly starting gathering power, making alliances, and taking back leadership, then fighting with other tribes and conquering (or losing to) them. It didn't happen overnight, and while it may have seemed that suddenly out of the West this horde of barbarian horsemen overthrew Chinese rule, it was more chipping away bit by bit, gaining territory, consolidating power, until he was in a position to overthrow the Jin Dynasty, then over time his armies and successors kept expanding and conquering.
The Vandals in North Africa were also a similar tribe being pushed west by the invading Huns, fighting with the Romans, settling in Spain, being driven out of there and arriving in North Africa.
I bet Cyrus and the Persians were much the same; he didn't come out of nowhere, and the "hill tribe without cities" may not have had cities, but that doesn't mean they had nothing, they presumably had some sorts of settlements, major trading centres, and so forth, and by chipping away over time, as vassals and mercenaries then taking over the rule you were supposed to be working for, Cyrus founded his empire (because the Medes weren't just lolling around on silken cushions and taken by surprise, they were fighting other wars and were probably not all that dissimilar to the Persians in their origins).
I wouldn't say that Cyrus was being nice/kind so much as being prudent and clever; making friends and allies he could bind to himself by personal indebtedness and loyalty due to his clemency and lack of looting and pillaging meant he had greater assurance that once he turned his back, they wouldn't be queuing up to stab him in it and he could safely move on to the next phase of conquest and assimilation. Though that doesn't mean that he couldn't also have preferred to be merciful when possible.
William the Conqueror had a similar trajectory. Started as a young heir of questionable legitimacy, and slowly consolidated and expanded his power by exploiting opportunities, manufacturing claims, and outright conquest. By the time he "conquered England"/"defeated a rival claimant who was spreading disinformation about the succession procedures", he was really really good at what he did.
The scope was smaller, and he didn't establish a stable succession, and he only questionably counts as a barbarian, but other than that...
He also picked the perfect time to launch his invasion/'only turning up to get the inheritance I was rightfully promised'; after Harold and his forces had been fighting invading Norwegian forces and had won, but before they could rest and recover, they then had to take the field against a fresh new army.
You have to wonder how many "hard barbarians overcame decadent city-dwellers" had victories as a result of "the decadent city-dwellers' armies were exhausted after years of constant warfare".
If it's internal warfare, or internal political squabbling that leads to an intentional weakening of the armies, I'd count that as evidence of decadence. But not if it's from constant external threats; that's just bad luck or good enemies.
Like Gondor in LotR. You can see a bit of decadence in Denethor, where he takes his eye off the ball (so to speak) and worries about Stewards vs. Kings. But overall, even though Gondor's armies are weaker than they used to be, it's a result of constant external warfare, plus an overall decline in "civilizational capacity", which may be caused by resource drain or by some sort of mystical effect.
Ah, yes. How true Deiseach. The importance of coincidences. Always neglected in the telling of world history...If the wind had blown in the other direction across the Atlantic those fateful weeks in September 1066, William the Conqueror would have reached England from Normandie (he had been ready to sail for weeks) before Harald the Hard Ruler (Hardrade) arrived from Norway.
Meaning that Harold Godwinson would first have fought William at Hastings (East Sussex). And then whoever of them won that fight, would have had to march across the land to Stamford Bridge (Yorkshire) to fight Harald and his newly arrived Norwegian Viking troops, rather than the other way around.
There is little doubt that Harald would have beaten the exhausted troops of whoever won at Hastings (Harold or William). As Norwegians tell this story, if it had not been for the direction the wind blew in those fateful weeks, everyone in Great Britain would now speak something akin to Norwegian (rather than French), and 800 years later as the Nor-British conquered the rest of the world Norwegian, rather than English, would be today’s global lingua franca. A bitter thought for a small language community of course, but what can you do when you are up against those who have more luck with the wind than you do.
Luck, the true-born child of coincidences, is the most underestimated actor at the world stage.
Of course, a Nordic Britain might have been so different that it wouldn't have conquered the world at all. Maybe Spain or Italy would've industrialized first in that timeline, and the Mediterranean Romance languages would be dominant.
Britain's "choice" was between Nordic and Frenchified Nordic, and either alternative was pretty much by definition going to be predisposed to occasional wars of conquest delivered by sea.
And Britain's geography gave whoever was there an enormous advantage in the field of world conquest and empire-building, once people got oceanic navigation figured out. Only Spain had any real chance of competing with them on that front, and even they were at a disadvantage.
> Cyrus made his school friends into officers and satraps, and was always confident in their competence and loyalty. This sounds similar to the story of Alexander the Great and his generals, making me think this really was a big advantage in those days.
Alexander's generals were his drinking buddies because they were his generals, not the other way around. Just the standard VIPs hanging out with other VIPs, like in any other culture that has VIPs. (Perhaps relatedly, Alexander's friends didn't have enough camaraderie to keep the empire together after Alexander's death.)
Another beautiful article from Scott Alexander. So unlike mainstream media. I learned much. He models curiosity and independent thinking. This is why I send my monthly tribute to Scott!
Xenophon is kind of awesome, in a "we came, we saw, we kicked their asses", reactionary aristocrat way. I haven't read the Cyropedia, just Anabasis ("There and back again"), his Socratic dialogues, and some of his History. He seems to be one of those writers where everything they encounter turns into a demonstration of the fundamental correctness of their worldview. But at the same time, he's unsubtle enough about it that it makes it easier to see the subtle biases of his contemporaries (by our scale), like Herodotus, Thucydides, and most especially Plato.
This is cooperation being stronger than selfishness in the long run. It's why multi-cellular life exists, why social animals evolved, and why zero-sum thinking is so destructive.
"Decadence" is a reversion/capture by zero-sum thinking. Small minded people get into positions where they can only see their own advantage and chew up the free energy that could have contributed to the growth of a stronger whole.
Barbarian invaders would not stand a chance against a state that is operating cooperatively. But they can easily exploit the cracks created by zero-sum thinkers.
Bret Devereaux does not understand Chinese history and he should have left it out of his analysis. We have an entire new branch of history, called New Qing history, focused specifically on understanding Manchu thought under the Qing because, well, all the important government documents and writings were written in Manchu, not Chinese, and so it's only been recently that some Western and Eastern scholars became sufficiently fluent in Manchu to read and interpret them.
And while the field is still new, it's hard to read something like Mark Elliot's "The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China" and not think that the Manchu's believed...at least parts of the "Fremen Mirage" and actively created laws and social customs specifically to preserve their..."Fremen" heritage. And it's really bad to reference an area to support your thesis when the final dynasty, with their view of all Chinese history, would have explicitly rejected your thesis.
And it's not like his references to the rest of Chinese history are much better. It's not like steppe horsemen just appeared and disappeared one year, they were kinda always there and a significant factor for every dynasty, 'cuz it's not like the Chinese military ever had a sterling record against them.
This is not to rip on Devereaux too much, it's unfair to expect anyone to be deep in the historical literature of every region on Earth but...if you don't know that much about a region, just leave it out.
This is your regular reminder of my pet petty complaint every time that sequence of articles gets referenced.
1. Horse nomads were a serious threat to any premodern empire whose fiscal-military setup broke down.
2. Both premodern nomads and premodern imperials professed to venerate their elders, and so liked to attribute these organizational breakdowns to imperials' failure to honor ancestral ways.
3. But the fiscal-military breakdowns and internal strife of empires, and whether they reorganize in time to stave off barbarians, are not actually well predicted by personal virtues or the amount of obsequious ancestor veneration.
4. Likewise, the military strength of empires often (though not always!) rests on fiscal and logistics systems that are utterly orthogonal to barbarian ways and virtues of war.
I think Devereaux agrees that all of the ancient people involved thought the Fremen Mirage was true, he just thinks they were all wrong and believing it for self-serving purposes.
I also don't think he believes the steppe horsemen just appeared; if my summary of him sounds that way, it's my fault and not his.
"In Part III (‘a‘ and ‘b‘) we asked – if this Mirage isn’t a useful analytical tool for understanding history or conflict (modern or pre-modern, as we’ll see in a moment) – why do we have it? We found this mode of thinking emerged largely out of the ‘decadent’ societies’ own self-criticism and self-definition: the myth was never about the Fremen at all, but about the settled people who fought them, a mix of nostalgia, deflected political criticism and a deep concern present in seemingly all societies that proper, martial masculinity – true manliness – was being steadily eroded by the times."
So Devereaux thinks that "Fremen" is primarily a rhetorical tool for cultural self-criticism. Cool, that makes sense and is very probably true for the Romans. That is not how the Manchu/Aisan Goro/Bannerman conceptualized themselves. They very clearly were aware and concerned about Sinicization/getting soft at the beginning of their empire and, if Mao Haijian's "The Qing Empire and the Opium War" is any guide, they didn't think they'd lost their manliness/virtue by the 19th century, they thought it was their trump card against the British.
#2
"1636-1912: Qing Dynasty. While not Han Chinese, the Manchus were largely not nomads, but agrarian peoples who had been settled for some time."
I want to be clear here: this is semi-true, the Manchus were not pure nomads or steppe hunters. But this is also an empire that specifically banned Han migration into traditional Manchu or Mongol lands specifically to prevent widespread urbanization or agriculture (fengjin zhengce). It's a society that generally prohibited bannermen from civilian occupations. Maybe this isn't the perfect "nomad" society but...this is simply not comparable to the Ming or the Song. This is like saying the Iroquois and the Canadians are the same because neither of them are pure nomads. It's...funky.
#3 As for the steppe horseman just appearing, I mean something a little different. Like, watch this map of China over time.
Look at some of that contested territory: look at Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan...Vietnam. There were always tons of people living in modern China who either were never under the control of the dynasties or were only temporarily under the control of the dynasties but...all those people kept living when the dynasty retrenched, sometimes in states of barbarism, sometimes in highly structured societies, and often in between. That's what I mean by they were always there, Devreaux uses the term "China unified under an agrarian, non-nomadic state." for most dynasties and, like...no. If you were in that core Chinese area it was always stable agrarianism but, like, you can't read the history without noting all these weird border areas like Tibet which...ya know, aren't nomadic by and large but they're also not rice farmers.
Again, not to ding him hard, history is hard but...surprise, surprise, Chinese history does not fit in well to Roman rhetorical devices. The only reason I think he's touching it is, well, everybody knows the Mongols but...don't do a whole section on China if you're a Roman and Greek history guy.
I confess I’d mostly known about Cyrus as “the world’s first non-Jewish Zionist”: the righteous king who unexpectedly let the Jews return to Israel after the Babylonian Exile, and who Jewish history has fondly remembered for that for 2500 years, and who Harry Truman (well-versed in the Bible) consciously took inspiration from when he decided to recognize the State of Israel in 1948.
This post helps fill out the picture, showing Cyrus’s role in Jewish history as just another consequence of his, for his time, extreme generosity and liberality of spirit.
Can someone give a convincing account of the Taliban's overthrow of the more numerous, better equipped, more urban ANDSF that does not sound like "hard men conquered the decadent?"
You're absolutely right: the Taliban victory is a perfect modern example of what the ancients would have flagged as barbarian virtue beating decadence. The real story is subtler: it's not that being employed by Kabul made you cowardly, but it meant that bravery didn't pay.
The US-backed folks were, up until the last moments, in competition with each other for a share of the vast American funds, and in consequence were rewarded based on their relative forces available, not their absolute civilian territory controlled. So it was always best to let somebody else's units do the fighting against the Taliban, keeping your units available to pressure your rivals.
Meanwhile, the Taliban lieutenants got glory and rank for, well, actually bringing people over to the Taliban. So once any tribe switched to the Taliban, their leaders' promotion incentives were straightforwardly to induce additional surrenders by either fighting or negotiation.
In other words, the American-backed forces, split by rivalries for the fixed pot of American money and with no obligation to deliver conquests, were incentivized to make sure someone else took any losses fighting the Taliban, and so collectively avoided fighting. Meanwhile the Taliban, with no vast pot of money to count on, demanded actual progress from their subordinates and got it.
The Americans treated the Kabul government as a unit that would defend its own existence (an approach that worked fine in South Korea, to be fair). But the factions in Kabul were factions, and once handed a functionally unconditional pot of money by the Americans, as opposed to the de facto pay-for-performance setup of the Taliban, they correctly saw their medium-term paycheck danger as not the Taliban, but each other.
The individual Afghan warriors fought just fine; many switched sides in either direction at multiple points. But the incentives at the top were different.
The Americans could have solved the problem the way the British did in colonial India, by having separate pots of money doled out to multiple leaders based on performance, forcing them to actually compete by going after the Taliban. But that would have put America a hair's breadth from being a colonizer itself: creepy and organizationally unfamiliar terrain that both Defense and State preferred to avoid.
In sum, the Taliban won not because its fighters were harder -- they were often the very same people! -- but because its incentives were aligned. It turns out more money makes your side weaker, not stronger, if money is doled out more for internal leverage than external progress.
Thanks. This is the sort of comment I was hoping for, and it's pretty interesting.
But I can't help but think that your analysis of the incentive structures is consistent with the corrupting influence of money and luxury on the martial virtues.
Were the Kabul government to steel itself against venal influence, would it have defeated the Taliban? Perhaps Xenophon's ideas about Cyrus's virtue and success are correct.
Yeah, there's an alternate universe where a truly charismatic leader in Kabul got a virtuous circle going, knocked everyone's heads together and saw to it that the money went to actual hard workers whether or not they were "on his faction." This is the military version of the "reforming, results-driven CEO takes over," and it sometimes really does work. George Washington, Ulysses Grant and Ramon Magsaysay arguably all illustrate aspects of this.
OTOH, the "decadence" model makes it sound like it's a split between "martial" and "indolent" personnel, when these were mostly the same people and culture groups on both sides, just with very different promotion/pay incentives. What's more, the great driver of the factionalism wasn't past luxury, but past division: by 2019, Afghanistan had been at civil war for forty years! So it's deceptive to talk of virtuous men beating vicious ones (they were the same men, switching sides) or of men made factional by a history of peace (it was a history of grinding war).
Overall, you could say the whole country had lost any culture of unity, which created the opportunity for the Taliban's better incentives to outweigh Kabul's better funding.
The virtue model does get a certain pessimism right: it's hard to generate charismatic leaders or organizational reforms to order. Rome went through multiple major reconstitutions, and that's part of its longevity -- but in each case only after decades of nearly fatal civil war.
(PS. Scheidel, in fact, suggests the argument that Rome *would* have fallen more utterly to the barbarians, and perhaps sooner, if it had had as much exposure to horse nomads as China. (Scheidel, _Escape from Rome_.) In other words, part of Rome's greater success against barbarians than China or Babylonia was that Rome's adjacent barbarians in the West were mostly footmen and so "easy mode". A rickety empire will do better against charging sword-armed Goths than against galloping arrow-shooting Mongols. Much of the historical differences between Rome and China may come back to that accident of geography -- China borders the Mongolian steppe, but Rome bordered the central European forests.)
Suppose that, for some reason, Mike Tyson became convinced that if he beats me in a fight enough times, he'll get a free pet unicorn. Every time we meet, he beats me to a bloody pulp, but then gets confused when the unicorn isn't there. Eventually, he realizes the unicorn doesn't actually exist, and decides there's no point in continuing to fight me. Would it be reasonable for me to summarize this situation by telling people "despite my physical disadvantages, my virtuous masculine hardness has allowed me to triumph over the soft, decadent Tyson?"
Now replace "Mike Tyson" with "the US", "me" with "the Taliban", and "free pet unicorn" with "Arab country that shares America's core values"...
I think you'd need a subplot about how Tyson contracted out some of the fighting to one of your neighbors, who only did well because Tyson would sub in if you ever looked like you were winning. And then Tyson got distracted by rumors of unicorns on the other side of the planet, and it turned out that your neighbor never learned how to roll with a punch.
Oh, my bad, I assumed this was about the US because the "decadent" side in these narratives is usually a major empire.
If we're talking about the ANDSF, I agree with other comments here that their backgrounds weren't different enough from the Taliban to bear on the validity of the Fremen-mirage narrative one way or the other.
I don't think he was talking about the US; he was talking about local regime that the US backed.
Which is a bit weird in a different way. It's hard for me to think of the American-backed regime in Afghanistan as a "decadent civilization" - I'm not sure it counts as a separate "civilization" from the Taliban at all.
I'm not sure that Taliban were, as individuals, essentially "harder" than the other Afghan forces. If you wanted to find "barbarians" in this conflict, the various warlords practicing premodern customs like bacha bazi would come closer than the Taliban, who have frequently been seen as a particular variety of a modernizing force (if a brutal one with many ideological features we usually do not associate with modernity) in the specific Afghani context.
Sorry, my previous response was flippant and not helpful. I'll try to explain a bit more, but first a couple more flippancies to get out of my head:
* It's like when a necromancer gets injured and their skeleton army collapses.
* If you've read Timothy Zahn's original Star Wars trilogy, it's like when the Emperor died and the Imperial forces fell apart because they'd grown dependent on his use of battle meditation.
Anyway: Empirically, there were no serious challengers to the Taliban when we went in. We spent about 20 years trying to create a force that could challenge them, but we failed. IMO, we failed because we don't understand how to do that, at either a theoretical or practical level. It might not even be possible to do in a reproducible way, at least in a foreign country.
What methods were we using to bind the ANDSF into a unified force? Money, desire for power, foreign political systems, secularism, the approval of international organisations? Whatever they were, they didn't work once we left. It was all empty words and ink on paper, insufficient to motivate them to fight and die for ... what? Whereas whatever bound the Taliban into a unified force had already proven itself sufficient to forge a national government out of nothing, and furthermore had kept them going through 20 years of occupation by the global superpower. And I bet everyone on the ground knew this in their bones, and predicted what would happen, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But maybe if we'd stuck it out for twice as long, for 40 years, maybe then it would work. Maybe 60. Maybe once we got a generation or two of Afghanis who had never known anything but American occupation, and had gained experience with a functioning civil government, and who had grown to enjoy and value the freedoms that they would lose under the Taliban.
Thanks, Moon Moth. Given my comment history, I can't object to flippancy. :)
Originally, I asked the question because, stripped of details, the Taliban's victory over the ANDSF seems to pattern-match the 'hard men beat the decadent' archetype—rural versus urban, with Kabul's leadership (allegedly) fleeing to the Gulf States with money, despite the ANDSF having better equipment and outnumbering the Taliban by something like three or four to one.
Maybe it's a strong case of Ibn Khaldun's concept of asabiyah.
But since this event happened recently, close observers know many details. I suspected these details might tell a story that weakens or contradicts the oversimplified idea of hard versus decadent.
The point is that we are in a much worse state with respect to ancient history--we have few details of the Scythians, for example. If the Taliban/ANDSF doesn't match the archetype, I downgrade my estimate that it is true of ancient people.
I try to make a case, in a different thread above, that "political infighting" is the true vice by which decadent civilizations can be known.
I'll suggest that three choices when faced with an attacker are fight, run, or switch sides, and that a major part of what makes people "hard" (assuming that this is a coherent concept) is a willingness to keep choosing the first way. Maybe it's one of those counterintuitive game theory things where having more choices can lead to worse outcomes on particular measures. So maybe the question isn't so much "why did the ADNSF give up?" as "why didn't the Taliban ever give up?". In this sense, "hard" is a fake explanation (there's probably a rationalist term for this, maybe that it doesn't have "gears"?). It's a word that refers to the process as a black box, but gives no insight into the mechanism, and thus lacks detailed predictive power.
I don't think anyone serious would claim that this is always the only explanation. At most, it's a thread in the tapestry of history, and if it can be noticed that it often appears in certain types of situations, then perhaps there's a relationship.
And yeah, it's important to treat ancient sources critically, noticing who the author and audience are. Not just names, but their context, in their society, their expertise and their biases, and what they thought the purpose of the writing was. (It's also important to do this with non-ancient sources, including all modern political content. It can be very disappointing to see historians abandon all their professional skills when it comes to modern politics.)
"Maybe once we got a generation or two of Afghanis who had never known anything but American occupation, and had gained experience with a functioning civil government, and who had grown to enjoy and value the freedoms that they would lose under the Taliban."
Ah, you mean like the modernisation programme in Afghanistan that reached its peak and then decline in the 1970s?
The major problem has been "more urban" - if Kabul is becoming 'the Paris of Central Asia' but the hillfarmers are still ploughing with oxen and enmeshed in tribal webs of relationships, then the further you go from Kabul, the less your urban army is going to achieve. They don't have local relationships, their loyalty, if any, is to the central government which may be hugely unpopular, and there's nothing there to maintain it all once the Western forces withdraw their support and backing.
The Soviet invasion and then the Western backing of the Taliban didn't help matters either. The Taliban had a coherent strategy and philosophy all along about what they wanted, intended, and believed in; the modernising side swerved depending on was the king in power, was he overthrown by his left-wing cousin, was that cousin now assassinated, was it a pro-Communist Soviet-backed government in power or a pro-'democracy' Western-backed government in power, and oh look the Westerners are pulling out and leaving us holding the baby.
Unless I've missed it in history the barbarians very rarely had huge amounts height of weaponry and funding from a nearby powerful nation-state. The Taleban were not in any way a self-sustaining force without weapons, funding, and a safe place to hide in Pakistan. As well as support from other regional actors.
If you want ancient analogy it would be more like when Rome would bankroll one side of a succession dispute. On the implicit understanding that date would be a de facto Roman subject afterwards.
I believe China is kind of a weird case here. My understanding is that the ruling bureaucracy was always super worried about generals taking over and so deliberately kept the military weak. Sometimes they were just kept too weak, and some Barbs got in.
I think decadence theorists would classify that as a subtype of decadence, and hardly one limited to Imperial China. I've heard the same accusation against eg Putin.
“Machiavelli said that it is better to be both loved and feared, but if you can only have one, be feared.”
…that’s the part everybody learns. But it is only half of Machiavelli’s advice. He goes on to say: “But above all, you must make sure you are not hated.”
…Because if you are hated, you can never sleep peacefully at night. And there might be an assassin behind every tree.
So, Machiavelli says, how can you achieve being feared without being hated?
Actually, it is easy: You must make your rule predictable. If people will know in advance under which circumstances you will come after them, torture them, take all their belongings & wives (for example if they conspire with your enemies), and under which circumstances you will leave them in peace (just mind your own business and never engage in politics) your subjects will fear you, but they will not hate you.
This is the first, and arguably still one of the best, arguments for a Rechtstaat – and seen from a purely self-interested ruler’s point of view.
It may seem from you review that Cyrus lived according to this principle. Since his reputation for being “nice” seems rather similar to being “predictable”.
Who knows, maybe Machiavelli got the idea from Xenophon.
> You must make your rule predictable. If people will know in advance under which circumstances you will come after them, torture them, take all their belongings & wives (for example if they conspire with your enemies), and under which circumstances you will leave them in peace (just mind your own business and never engage in politics) your subjects will fear you, but they will not hate you.
I feel like this explains a lot about the Chinese Communist Party.
Agreed. Machiavelli solves a major decision problem (how to be feared while avoiding being hated) for all autocrats, including Chinese autocrats. Enlightened autocrats introduce the Rule of Law, and stick to it. Not-enlightened autocrats allow their arbitrary will to rule their decisions, thereby risking being hated.
Machiavelli is silent on a related decision problem as seen from the point of view of subjects: How to reduce the danger that a ruler slides from being enlightened to being not-enlightened across time. Since in an autocracy, there is no-one around with power to interrupt the slide.
The main role of democracy is to solve this decision problem on behalf of those who are subjects of a ruler. "Democracy" defined as elections being held at more-or-less regular intervals, that create institutionalized uncertainty as to which of aspiring rulers that will be in charge after the election: Hence providing the ruler with a self-interest to stay enlightened. Or alternatively, giving subjects an institutionalized ability to replace him, if he is not able to control the oh-so-human temptation to take whatever he wants, when he wants, because he can. (I.e. the risk of he becoming a self-restraint-is-for-pussies Callicles, Socrates' formidable opponent in Plato's dialogue Gorgias.)
The main problem for Communism, including Chinese communism, has always been how to put in place an alternative mechanism (to democracy) to prevent a slide from an enlightened to a not-enlightened ruler. For some years, is seemed as if the "gentlemen's agreement" in the Chinese elite not to stay in power longer than max 10 years (2X5), served as an alternative mechanism. But Xi broke this gentlemen's agreement when he extended his rule at the last Party congress to 15 years, thereby indirectly opening up the possibility to be ruler-for-life.
We'll see what happens as he grows older and gets gradually more drunk on his own power, boosted by all the yes-men that surround such a ruler. Will it gradually gnaw away on whatever self-restraint he still possesses?
> "Democracy" defined as elections being held at more-or-less regular intervals, that create institutionalized uncertainty as to which of aspiring rulers that will be in charge after the election
Tangentially, just last night I wound up watching my favorite episode of "Yes, Prime Minister", "Power to the People", which had a few things to say about the parts of government that side-step this uncertainty. ;-)
My model for a while has been that the "decadence/barbarism" axis - one where every society claims to be on exactly the right level, unlike those fops/savages next door - is real, useful, and fundamentally about how much you live in socially constructed versus physical reality; at extreme levels of physical reality you can't build an effective civilization because all the people with guns notice they could just take over and then they do, and at extreme levels of socially constructed reality the Emperor is incapable of hearing that any nation with better weapons than his exists or that his plans have failed, because everyone agrees the Emperor is perfect, and so all his strategies operate according to the ancient law of "garbage in, garbage out." It's nice to see you inventing it independently.
Sure. "Private property," "rule of law," "loans," and "democracy" are all socially constructed and require a certain level of Taking Rules More Seriously Than Physics to pull off. A lot of third-world countries are suffering from overmuch focus on physical reality and insufficient belief in the imaginary thing known as a state to make it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
... But also, in general in history, I would say that when you're at the too high level of physical reality, you aren't one civilization, you're two hundred at 0.5% the size of the civilization that's your neighbor, because you don't have the (socially constructed) belief that other people will cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma when it doesn't serve their interests. For this set of things, I would gesture at tribal societies that can't build any social structures larger than the kinship group:
- You'll note that pre-Mohammed Arabia basically consisted of a bunch of small tribes people quarreling with each other in the desert that was the least valuable bit of dirt around; the more valuable bits belonged to an empire that could build a workable state. Then Mohammed unified everyone with Islam and off they went.
- The history of various steppe empires that exist solely by the ruler's charisma and then fall apart in a generation or two because all the loyalties were wholly personalistic, instead of founded on (socially constructed) institutions. (Also other empires, see Alexander the Great.)
- - Two of the three Mongol empires (the Ilkhanate of Persia and the Yuan dynasty collapsed around a hundred years after they were founded, my history of the Yuan dynasty blames the inability of the central government to control the nomads once the charismatic rulers were gone; the third was the Golden Horde, based on the steppe.
- - The Caliphate slightly collapsed like that (it lost Spain and North Africa was kind of fuzzy) but remained about the size of Persia At Its Maximum Extent for centuries, having something to hold it together other than Family and Hero in its religion.
- Afghanistan has failed to ever build any workable society that didn't immediately collapse into If We Take Their Stuff It Will Be Our Stuff once the charismatic leader was dead. Afghanistan is also fantastically dirt-poor. These facts aren't unrelated.
I think something that complicates the dichotomy is that the skill set/ virtues that make for a successful conqueror are different from those of successful ruler of civilization. History is full of examples of very successful generals and conquerors who failed to hold the Empire together, or even keep up basic day-to-day logistics. Past a certain scale you need to be good at dealing with social realities to succeed. So the challenge becomes combining that with enough feedback on reality to make good decisions. (E.g. the emperor's clothes, rituals and court etiquette are not objectively important, and an emperor who thinks they are fails. But they can be practically important for persuasion, maintaining legitimacy, handling disputes, etc.).
Right, agreed. I'm not saying one is better or worse than the other; they have different advantages and disadvantages in different situations and civilizations can fail or succeed in either the physical-reality or social-reality direction. But I think the axis is real, in that emphasizing one usually means downplaying the other.
Do the Conquistadors pattern-match sufficiently to the "small band of Fremen barbarians taking down a much larger empire"? Admittedly they had a technological advantage, which the barbarians usually don't, but otherwise they followed a very similar playbook.
I think you could argue that the Mongolian horse archers were a technological advantage. Just not one that fits into our traditional ideas of a tech tree.
Also possibly analogous inlet Cortez only succeeded because the vassal states of the Aztecs use the opportunity to rally against them. A lot of the cases of barbarians conquering larger civilisations are them coming in on one side an existing political divide, and tipping the scales.
Barbarian and decadent are interesting words. They have so many connotations to me, that muddy the plot.
Barbarian; thick, rough rug-headed men who pillage and rape and destroy what is beautiful and good.
Decadent; decaying, degenerating, indolent, a slave to sensual pleasures with no higher aspirations or even appreciation …losing one’s connection to the thing that sustains you.
So I went and looked up barbarian, just to clear my head.
Barbarian: Originally some clans or tribes living on the fringes of the Greek civilization who didn’t speak the language, and were therefore insular and self-reliant, and probably annoying.
Decadent; pretty much what I said above.
It must have been very difficult to maintain a sense of cohesion and attachment to a civilization as it got bigger in those days. It’s not like anyone could see or hear Caesar every night on the telly. Everything becomes only as good as the guy in front of you, who is vaguely representing an abstract and distant authority.
Barbarians seemed to have bonds of purdurable toughness, and looked each other in the eye a lot. Barbarian and decadent are two ends of a circle I think.
The Persian method of raising boys strikes me as very different from the Spartan approach, though I'm not sure we've got accurate accounts of either of them. The Spartans didn't give the boys enough food so they had to steal from surrounding people to survive. The Persians gave enough simple food and enforced rules against stealing. I'd expect Spartans and Persians to have very different behavior.
Even if the education systems are mythical, people affected by the myths could be expected to behave differently.
I'm interested in the relationship between luxury and successful societies. In her Deadly Education series, Novik has four levels-- survival, comfort, luxury, and excess. I think excess includes both luxuries beyond what one can enjoy, and destroying value as proof one can afford to.
It's at least plausible that the higher levels of luxury and excess being common in the upper classes are indicators that competition in the upper classes has reached a point where it's weakening the society.
The situation is complicated by what I think is a common human desire to spoil other people's fun, so there's a claim that anything much beyond survival is excessive, but maybe if that claim is toned down to that there's such a thing as too much consumption, it makes sense.
I am very far from an expert on the relevant history, but I'm confused by your confusion about the origins of the Persians. As I understand it, the Persians were not the same as the Medes, but they were part of the same cultural milieu (similar language, similar religion). And the Medes had already built a powerful empire. I understood that the Achaemenid empire can in some senses (and not in others) be thought of as a successor to the previous (Median) Iranian empire. To me it sounds similar to other instances of dynastic change or regime change in history.
Are you similarly confused by 'Who Even Were the Macedonians?', who seemingly grew from nobodies to Alexander the Great in two generations, similar to your description of the Persians? As the Macedonians were part of a wider (Greek) cultural sphere, so I assume the Persians were part of a wider (Iranian) cultural sphere. But maybe I am off base here.
Interesting to contrast the story involving Croessus with Timon of Athens, who gave lavishly but when he ran out of money could find no friend to succor him.
> Cultures whose leaders spend time in physical reality tend to get different norms from cultures whose leaders spend time in social reality
I wonder if this has something to do with the blue/grey tribal split. Most of the people I associate with the grey tribe have careers or interests that involve working with Stuff over People. Not always physical Stuff, just areas where reality trumps public-relations. You can't cajole a compiler into accepting ill-formed code, any more than you can argue a bridge into not collapsing.
I'm a bit late to this, but James C Scott talks a lot about the dynamic between settled societies and "Barbarians" in his book Against the Grain. I'd love to see Scott or a reader do a review of that
When trying to understand someone's moral and philosophical outlook,their religion could be important.
Cyrus's niceness , particularly towards the Jews might be explained by his Zoroastrianusm -- but is very difficult to say, because early Zoroastrianism is so historically murky.. Zoroaster's dates could be as early as 1500BCE, or as late as Cyrus's own time. Early Zoroastrianism was monotheistic (bitheistic Manichaeism was a later development )- so it's surmised that Cyrus may have sympathised with them for that reason.
The tables were turned when persia/Iran was Islamicised, and the unconverted Zoroastrians fled to countries like India (and Zanzibar, where the modern world's most famous Zoroastrian, Freddy Mercury, was born).
Which are different, but also very similar (both mention “We educated you to deceive and take advantage not among human beings but with wild animals, so that you not harm your friends in these matters either; yet, if ever a war should arise, so that you might not be unpracticed in them.”). "There are no coincidences", says Scott. So ... how? How amazingly unlikely this review is unrelated to the Psmith one?! (I like Scott:s better. The other has the fine Tai-Pan thing, though.) - Or I over-read sth?
The section about the training of boys reminds me a lot of Confucius. Who put a lot of emphasis on the idea of scholarship and training to develop virtues, including hunting, though that was less emphasised than the literary side. In a pre-modern society where you expect to have her educary ruling class it makes sense too care a lot about their habits and their virtues. Because you have little other leverage.
There's some similarity in that both of them were responding to periods of great political instability, and were trying to reconstruct order from that, drawing on the authority of a previous era. Confucius was more of a broad appeal to the principles of The Virtuous Past, rather than focusing on a single figure the way Xenophon does. (Though ironically Confucius himself became that figure in later centuries.) I guess xenophon would have had less degrees of freedom, given some of his contemporaries would remember the real Cyrus, but also those memories of his success would make it more appealing.
Also Confucius is describing more of a steady state culture of virtuous scholar bureaucrats raising the next generation. Cyropedia, from this summary, seems to imply that Cyrus was uniquely virtuous and that those sort of virtues cannot easily be sustained.
Isn’t it a bit circular to say that non-decadent societies are impressive because when they occasionally succeed it’s despite their lack of wealth? Rugged warriors beating a state with “higher per capita GDP….proto-industries producing high-quality armor, swords, and (eventually) gunpowder weapon[sic]…libraries full of books on generalship dating back to Sun Tzu and beyond…meticulous records that could be used for taxation and drafting” is impressive precisely *because* it’s weird for a state with that much civilization and wealth and writing to lose a military conflict.
They win far more of these conflicts than we should expect, if there is nothing impressive about them to adjust our expectations.
Yeah, but there's less chance of the conflict even really becoming a conflict *unless* the barbarians have a good chance of believing they might actually be successful in beating the civilized state.
Only a few people are going to write about all the times when the civilized state effortlessly crushed the hapless barbarians, no-one's going to write about all the times when the barbarians huddled together and the hothead son of the king goes "Is this the year when we roll into the plains and throw the weak decadent city folks off their thrones and loot their lands?" and the wiser and older king goes "Well, obviously not, there's 20 000 of us and 20 million of them, no matter how tough we are they're going to kick our ass if we try, we'll just spend this year raiding the weaker tribes for cattle as usual".
Related to this, I was recently thinking about a Twitter claim arguing for police abolition with the argument that the police are useless anyway because look at all the serial killers where the police completely dropped the ball multiple times allowing them to kill and kill and kill. It was pointed out that if the police don't drop the ball and catch potential serial killers after only one kill then by definition they're not serial killers and won't feature in serial killer lists and podcasts as examples of proper police work...
...but even this would diminish the police efficiency, since you obviously would not see at all the cases where the police presence or a chance visit from officers who have grown suspicious for any reason deter a potential serial killer from doing the first murder or violent act that would set them on the path to becoming Night Butcher, the killer of 20 young women who all resemble his ex-girlfriend and cutting off their noses, and instead getting therapy (or secluding themselves into the forest or whatever).
> no-one's going to write about all the times when the barbarians huddled together and the hothead son of the king goes "Is this the year when we roll into the plains and throw the weak decadent city folks off their thrones and loot their lands?" and the wiser and older king goes "Well, obviously not, there's 20 000 of us and 20 million of them, no matter how tough we are they're going to kick our ass if we try, we'll just spend this year raiding the weaker tribes for cattle as usual".
This is pretty much what Nurhaci said, but things worked out better than he expected.
Sure, but still, the reason we remember him is because he tried, whereas those who didn't try obviously don't get remembered.
I'm also reminded of another point: frequently the "Fremen mirage" is presented as barbarians just sweeping the pampered civilized people out of the battlefield since the civilized people have grown so soft they are no longer accustomed to any form of warfare.
However, just as often the problem is just about the opposite; the civilized state is riven with hardass generals who spend their time engaging in costly foreign wars or fighting each other, and when the barbarians come, its those wars that have led to a lack of manpower, and some of the generals will outright ally with the barbarians for a chance at more power through that avenue. Of course, the point about barbarians being more unified and the civilized people lacking that unity still stands.
A probably incomplete list:
Akkadian Empire - Sargon of Akkad - Probably city-state dweller, but limited information exists - Not Fremen (probably)
Egyptian Empire - Multiple emperors, city-state dwellers - Not Fremen
Hittite Empire - Multiple emperors, steppe dwellers at least initially - Fremen
Achaemenid Empire - Cyrus the Great - Fremen
Macedonian Empire - Phillip II and Alexander the Great - City-state dwellers; Phillip II had a military upbringing, Alexander had a noble upbringing
Roman Empire - Julius Caeser - City-state dweller, rural upbringing
Nanda Empire - Unclear; historical accounts lean towards the first emperor being the son of a barber, who may or may not have been captured by bandits for a time before taking over the band; I'm leaning towards Fremen upbringing
Maurya Empire - Also unclear; leaning towards city-state upbringing
Han Empire - Gaozu - Peasant upbringing
Islamic Caliphates - Broadly Fremen upbringing
Mongol Empire - Broadly Fremen upbringing
Ottoman Empire - Fremen upbringing
Mughal Empire - Fremen upbringing
Edit: Cat sat on my keyboard and posted before I had finished, but this is good enough.
A Fremen upbringing among the leader(s) appears to have strong correlation with success at empire-building. But, looking over the list, the secret ingredient may be -just not growing up in court-, particularly in some kind of structured extended kinship structure, and having some kind of opportunity for a meritocratic rise despite this - so the real advantage of a Fremen upbringing may be the relative meritocracy. Even if the Fremen group isn't particularly meritocratic within-group, the large number of groups represented by the Fremen lifestyle means that one good chief can take over all their neighbors, so there's kind of an intragroup meritocracy in action.
Which kind of leans into Scott's hypothesis that the real secret is "having friends you can trust", or perhaps having an upbringing which permits you to have friends you can trust - which absolute wealth wouldn't figure into in and of itself, but relative wealth would definitely do. (So - it's not necessary to be an ascetic to get the advantages of the Fremen upbringing. Only to not be so wealthy that your upbringing is tainted by being surrounded by sycophants.)
> or perhaps having an upbringing which permits you to have friends you can trust
So, HBO's "Succession" would be a (negative) example of this in (in)action?
I think this is very significant as well. Trust, common purpose, affection. Those are powerful.
“Not growing up in court” would seem to be a key part of King Arthur’s story. (I mean, yeah, fiction, but it suggests that the idea is out there.)
Yes, thats why the right way to measure military power is not battle wins but control. So, what do you make of the china numbers?
Old time raiders probably fare about as well as modern time robbers. Any robber, or small gang is highly likely to be very successful for a very short time. You or me, or anyone walking outside in the morning can be surprised by an armed gang, beaten, murdered, they could invade our homes, take what they want, burn the rest. This could go on for days ... until they meet their comeuppance, at which their careers would be over for a very long time.
Playing hit-and-run on fringe farming communities would be very successful for a gang of mounted archers, especially since they're not maintaining anything other than their horse-tack and tents. They're neither farming, nor producing anything. Instead, they eat what they steal, they collect whatever coin they can carry, have their lackeys transport slaves and livestock back to safer camps. In and around an agricultural community, the farmers can't keep a spare horse to chase down any potential bad guys. Once the bandits discover the officials are going to do something about them, they pack camp and skedaddle out, being 100% mobile, they can easily escape any standing army.
This is probably why the Romans were so successful, they didn't keep a standing army in Rome, they kept private armies roving the frontiers of the enemy lands. Raiding, constantly expanding the empire.
The settlers of the American West driving big heavy wagon trains, had a particularly hard time crossing the deserts, big numbers died, most ended up abandoning everything in the Nevada Desert. Unlike Lewis & Clarke 50 years prior, who parked their boat in the Missouri River, and traveled on horses to The Pacific Ocean, then back to the Missouri River, and boated back to St. Louis. They only lost one man on the entire two year trip—likely to appendicitis—and that was in the first few weeks.
Likewise General Fremont, mounted, traveled across the west, traced all up and down Spanish California, crossing The Sierra Nevada thrice, was kicked out by the Mexicans, traveled north to Oregon, received a message to attack, rode back south, overthrew the Mexican Government in California, freed the native slaves, established The Bear Flag Republic—six days later it becomes The California Republic, later a state.
I think the lesson is: Highly mobile soldiers can win many small battles, sometimes topple governments.
> they kept private armies roving the frontiers of the enemy lands
To nitpick, I don't think the legions (in the Republic) were "roving". AFAIK, they always had a particular purpose. It's just that Roman leaders, intentionally or not, almost always made sure that there was a purpose or two every year. Sometimes allies would ask for help, and sometimes Rome would be attacked, and the rest of the time they'd pick a fight with someone. But your point still stands in that the armies gathered, went out, fought, came back, and disbanded, ideally bringing back more wealth than they lost. As opposed to standing armies which consume wealth, and often indicate that the overall situation is bad enough that the lack of an army would consume even more wealth. (That is, you'd get your ass kicked if you don't close the legion gap.)
right. acoup is comparing the societies... if a barbarian society has lower gdp, etc. then you must factor that in. organizing society to produce wealth should not be handicapped against you, its the whole point!
Perhaps factor in population in the same way?
Kinda...
I don't want to stretch this too far but if you look at barbarism vs civilization as a sliding scale and you're looking for European barbarians...you should probably look at the Germans.
Like, in 0 AD, under Tiberius, the Gauls have all been unified under a centralized Roman power and the Germans are disunited tribes of savages that are, frankly, too savage and violent to be tamed.
And in 1700 AD, ya know, things change...but the French are under an absolute monarchy and the Germans are ~400 squabbling principalities, principalities which can and have held their own against the French and other large, powerful states for hundreds of years.
And that's weird, right? Like, the French are this highly centralized state with colonies across the world and Versailles and big fancy things, why can't they just roll over these anarchic Germans? Why can't the Russians or the British?
And, like, there's better examples of this but if I start talking about the Liao and the Jin and the Song...people aren't as familiar with that. But that's the core thing. You've got these...more barbaric, more anarchic societies which seem like they should get beat up by large, centralized states and yet the often hold their own and it's weird. That discrepancy, I think, is what people are trying to grapple with.
>principalities which can and have held their own against the French and other large, powerful states for hundreds of years.
No, not really. Europe had just seen several centuries of warfare mostly consisting of bigger powers, including Sweden with its few million pop, basically walking across Germany at will, looting and killing and fighting each other. It has been argued that the memory of these times led to several complexes in German nationalism that would be manifested powerfully in the first half of the 1900s.
Still, what probably contributed rather more to German disunity than any inherent barbarism was simply the bad graces of living in a state-form where the Pope, the most powerful man in Europe, had a special interest in preventing the formation of an united state or having an Emperor rise up to become too powerful.
Why did the Pope care more about preventing centralization in Germany than in eg France?
It's been a while, but as I recall, it had to do with the (Holy) Roman Emperor nominally being of equivalent or possibly superior status to the Pope, vis-a-vis the entirety of (Western) Christendom. If the core of the Empire could be kept disunited, the Emperor couldn't really do much, and the Pope could go on being the supreme authority. Compare to the eastern empire, where the empire stayed united and the Patriarch was, politically speaking, a second fiddle. (But a very important second fiddle!)
Also, while the empire was disunited, a lot of power accumulated in the hands of bishops, who sort of took over the administrative aspect of Roman government, and so an important question was "who controls the bishops". (See also, Henry VIII of England.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investiture_Controversy
A particular low point was when the Pope excommunicated the Emperor, who had to wait outside a castle gate for three days in a blizzard while barefoot and wearing a hair shirt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Canossa
This doesn't sound right.
I mean, other than the Swedish thing, this is...basically Machiavelli's analysis of Italy and Italian city states. Is the Pope keeping Italy and Germany down?
And yeah, I'm sure there was lots of warfare on German land but..."walking across Germany at will, looting and killing"? Who? The fact that I'm sure lots of people fought on German land also describes...Italy and the Byzantines and England and maybe France, that southern border with Muslim Spain was always spicy.
This is exactly my thought; the greater wealth, population density, technology, access to trade, and sophistication of institutions is exactly *why* a "decadent" urban population has an advantage. Still, one could argue the advantage is not as large as it might seem. Others brought up selection effects (both in terms of when the Fremen pick a fight, and in terms of which fights get recorded). I've enjoyed the podcast *Fall of Civilizations*, and a few things have stuck out to me.
One is that we don't often have details of ancient battles, and so we may not really know why it actually was won or lost. But also, clever tactics and new inventions can take you a long away, even against a numerically superior force. The Romans were notable for this, for example against the superior naval prowess of the Carthaginians and against Hannibal's elephants. Doubly so if the opposing leader is incompetent, as was often the case when the king was likely to be sociopathic and nepotistic--taking charge himself or appointing an incompetent friend.
Two is that the difference between "decadent civilization" and "savage barbarian" is probably not as distinct as one might think. Many old empires fell to up-and-coming new empires, who themselves had already established trade, cities, temples, wealth, etc. There might have been some build-up of cruft and corruption over time, but this doesn't mean that "barbarians" are beating empires, just that regression to the mean exists.
Speaking of corruption, third is that empires tend to deal with plenty of internal issues of their own that I wouldn't really call "decadence." For example, the Khmer empire dealt with internal instability partially as a result of the *more* austere Therevada Buddhism becoming more popular than the gaudy, decadent Hinduism and other forms of Buddhism (not directly as a result of the austerity, but as a result of the religious conflict and loss of trust in leaders). The Maya city-states ran out of land and encountered extreme drought. The Babylonians faced over-salted farmland from repeated silty floods. The Inca lost their leader (possibly to Spanish disease) and dealt with a resulting civil war before encountering the Spanish in person. Many empires suffered due to simple incompetence, and it's a lot easier to destroy than to build.
Basically, building a large, complex, wealthy society in ancient times is hard, and requires a lot to go right, and if any of those factors change, the society can be greatly weakened, having nothing to do with its inhabitants being "weak."
> Two is that the difference between "decadent civilization" and "savage barbarian" is probably not as distinct as one might think.
That was one of acoup's points in the Fremen Mirage posts - in most cases, the "barbarians" that conquered "decadent" civilizations were simply the next-least-decadent-and-civilized civilizations around, who occasionally acquired advantages over their slightly-more-civilized neighbors.
One claimed reason for the Mongols’ success is because they had a strategy of brutally annihilating victims who refused to surrender, while being very gracious and hands-off with conquerees who surrendered right off the bat. Sounds a little bit like Cyrus!
I can provide some support from a different quarter for the idea that Cyrus took a relatively benevolent approach to his subject territories. Weavers, Scribes, and Kings relates that before the Persian conquest, Babylon was notionally ruled by a king known to us by his biblical name of Nabonidus, who was the son of an immigrant to Babylon and felt keenly patriotic toward his mother's home city. He didn't care for Babylon at all.
One rather shocking way in which he expressed his distaste for Babylon was that he left it and went to live in exile in the desert. He left his son in charge, but a major religious festival -- the new year celebration -- which called for the participation of the king just didn't happen for many years.
One notable thing that Cyrus did after assuming power in Babylon was hold the new year festival. He did this even though he didn't live there and there was ample precedent for not doing it.
It's unsurprising that a new king might want to pick up free legitimacy this way, but it still represents a strategy of staying in power by having people want you to be there.
I heard (poorly sourced, sorry) that most of our knowledge of Nabonidus comes from historians writing during the reign of Cyrus and his successors, who were heavily encouraged to make him sound terrible.
Argh, I just spent a while responding to this, and the page reloaded and I lost the comment in progress.
Short summary: according to the book I've been referencing, Nabonidus was the subject of many waves of very hostile propaganda, this started well before Cyrus was any kind of threat to Babylon (but continued after Cyrus had taken over), and the foundational claim that Nabonidus spent ten years in voluntary exile ignoring his own empire is backed up by convincing evidence, including the record of the new year festival, his own royal inscriptions, and excavation at the location where he said that he was. None of those three types of evidence is subject to the desire of other people to make the king look bad, unless you believe that the royal inscriptions were forged.
My read, based on this single pop history source, is that Nabonidus was not as bad as propaganda eventually portrayed him (for example, I don't see much reason to believe that he lost his mind), but the reason for all the propaganda casting him in the most negative light imaginable is that he was a terrible, godawful king.
Does this successful-clique logic apply to the United States or more specifically the Founding Fathers?
Were they much of an early clique? My impression from the Washington biography is they mostly only met around the time they were already planning to start the rebellion (or later). Washington and Franklin didn't go to high school together or anything.
One successful clique that *does* come to mind are the Bolsheviks. Sure, they started to splinter and factionalize very early on after taking power (and during this process, but they were kept together still by the expectional leadership of Lenin), but Stalin managed to prune out the splintering elements through ultraviolence and fused the rest together by fear. Once the party started getting complacent and ran out of belief in its own mission and worth, the whole situation was quickly upended, though even this happened more as an internal factional takeover than by an outside force entering.
Yeah. The standard authoritarian regime origin story is a military officer with a group of hardcore loyalists, who use that to take over a larger more divided group
I think possibly more on an individual level? Washington had his own clique of officers who he trusted which made him a very effective general. But their overall success required cooperating with other cliques
The word “note” appears a lot out of context in the quotes from the books.
Thanks - seems like I did an overly-hasty copy-paste.
It's not that barbarians are strong, but that extended civil wars, military coups and tax revolts make empires weak.
Mysteriously, barbarians fail to conquer empires that enjoy peaceful succession and obedient provinces. Yet suddenly, barbarians become very good at taking over empires when those empires have had multiple emperors succeed by war against their predecessors, half their provinces in tax revolt, trust no generals for fear of coups, et cetera.
You see this pattern in the fall of Rome, in the Islamic conquest of half the Byzantine Empire, and the fall of multiple dynasties in China.
If you want a barbarian victory, give them a neighboring empire whose citizens no longer pay taxes, or whose armies spend half their time fighting each other.
If you want a barbarian failure, give them a neighboring empire whose citizens pay their taxes and whose ruler doesn't fear his own generals.
If you think that "barbarian virtue" comes into it, you need to explain the mysterious coincidence of virtuous barbarians with periods of extended imperial tax revolts and civil wars.
If you think that "ruling class decadence" comes into it, you need to explain why, as Devereaux points out, the exact same criticisms kept being made by Roman critics of their decadence for centuries, on and through the very height of the empire's success, with no correlation to the time when Rome fell.
So long as "decadence" didn't interfere with peaceful succession and tax-paying in Rome, the empire defeated the barbarians, reliably. Once the civil wars got ruinous enough and the generals untrusted enough, no amount of heartfelt Christian reform could long forestall the barbarians' triumph.
More precisely, barbarians have one key advantage: they don't need taxes to set up an army, because everybody is a part-time raider or bandit anyway. So as long as a barbarian zone can find a decently charismatic leader to rally everybody to raid the Big Rich Neighbor, they can put together a big force on small notice.
This does the barbarians little good if the Big Rich Neighbor has their military-fiscal act together, since, as Devereaux notes, a professional military of a settled empire can easily outfight barbarians on the defense, and often though not always on the offense too.
But if the Big Rich Neighbor's tax system collapses, or the emperor stops trusting his generals enough to allow them to raise armies, or the generals' armies fight each other instead of the barbarians... well, then your charismatic barbarian leader has a once-in-three-centuries opportunity.
(BTW, nearly all famous barbarians are famous because they succeeded. There's a reason that's fame-worthy. Rome subjugated and assimilated an absolutely ridiculous number of barbarian nations in its thriving years, and only professionals remember all their names.)
So the "Marxian history via SSC/ACX" version of "good times create weak men, weak men create hard times" is something like:
"The rate of burning social capital in the fires of Moloch to obtain relative advantage in internal power struggles, will eventually exceed the rate of replenishment of social capital. Social capital is used to counter existential threats, but once the level of social capital sinks low enough that not even the best available leader can counter the current existential threat, there occurs a transformation of society to create a synthesis between the existing society and the threat itself."
Its probably more like: Our fathers (hard men) defeated the barbarians, now we have easy times, so we beat the swords into plow-shares (became weak men), grew lots of food, had time for leisure, dancing, family, arts & learning. A group of highly mobile mounted archers raids our peaceful kingdom, now its back to hard times. If we survive, we abandon our farming, beat the plow-shares back into swords, become hard men, defeat the barbarians.
As I stated above, probably the Romans were so successful, is that the Senators employed private armies, who raided the neighbors for profit, but in doing so, also kept a safe border for The Roman Empire, and furthermore, they expanded the empire. 700 years for The Western Empire is a pretty good run.
That sounds like the standard interpretation. But, and perhaps my locality bias is showing here, I think the true vice of peaceful civilization is political infighting.
That is, my picture of the political situation in late Imperial Rome is more about praetorians, backstabbing, and civil war, rather than "too much dancing and art". But I do think it's somewhat on point about leisure, per se. I think it's possible to get out of practice at dealing with existential threats. And I think if modern America had to fight WWII every 50 years, there'd be a lot less performative moaning about who counts as "literal Nazis".
So is "decadence" just the same thing as "moral mazes"?
I feel like the word decadence is too often used and too little defined, but is decadence just a state in which an organisation's ability to deal with the external world becomes atrophied as internal status competition becomes the primary activity?
Maybe? I haven't read the book, just some of Zvi's writing on it. It sounds like "moral mazes" is about how to navigate the effect from the inside, in businesses, while "decadence" is more about criticising the effect from the outside, in societies. But the effect might be similar? Also Zvi wrote this comment about simulacra levels:
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/the-four-children-of-the-seder-as-the-simulacra-levels/#comment-8043
So riffing on the simulacra levels, maybe it's something to do with advantage for agents shifting away from making the external world suit your goals, to navigating the pre-existing external world, to making the political world suit your goals, to navigating the pre-existing political world. Once you move away from conquering and improving the land around you, to manipulating neighboring states, to creating internal political coalitions to get things done, to manipulating existing political coalitions because it's too hard to make new ones, it's all over. Invading barbarians don't care about Byzantine chariot teams. And maybe it's all over by the 2nd stage, where you can no longer competently go out and remake the world, and instead have to resort to playing your neighbors off of one another.
(A failure of this set of analogies is that it's assuming an ancient empire or a modern superpower; the first stage doesn't really fit a balance-of-power scenario, or a minor power. So it needs re-working.)
This sounds a lot like the theory of collapse that Joseph Tainter advances, where "social capital" is replaced by "social complexity". The idea is that there are diminishing returns to social complexity, and when some crisis arrives, the increasing social complexity needed to solve it can even be net negative, leading to an "overhang". And then coming back to a "simpler" society actually liberates resources.
I am not sure it is the best analysis, but it is interesting.
Hm. I could easily buy a version of that where the complexity ossifies and turns into an overhang, reducing the ability to deal with new threats. I think that's going to be the real problem with climate change. Humanity won't go extinct, and there's arguments that overall the world would be better suited for humans if it were a bit warmer. But we've built up a lot of civilizational capacity around the climate range of the last few centuries, and we seem to be bad at handling that sort of change. Coastlines shift, currents change, tundra thaws, islands vanish, farmland changes, species die out or retrench, and California still won't change its water rights system.
> But before that happened, the Romans conquered hundreds of barbarian tribes in the process of taking the entire Mediterranean region and holding it for hundreds of years. The score is still settled states 100, barbarians 1. And this is a typical record - look at China, the Middle East, etc, and you will find a similar pattern.
> Grant that settled states beat barbarians most of the time (for example, by Devereaux’s numbers, China was only ruled by barbarians for 13 - 24% of its history).
Modern Chinese view their premodern history as consisting mainly of five major dynasties (Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing). This would cover basically the period from 600 to 1900. (Obviously, there is more history before that, but it's viewed as belonging to a period that is different in kind.) Of these roughly 1300 years, roughly 300 each are assigned to the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing, and the Yuan last for an unimpressive ~100. There are also periods where no one is firmly in control, which (here) get lost to rounding errors.
That's barbarian rule for a stylized 400 out of 1300 years.
But then again, even where someone is firmly in control, exactly what they are in control of may shift. The Song dynasty is divided into the Northern Song (controlling the north and the south) and the Southern Song (just the south). During the Southern Song period, the north was ruled by... barbarians, the Jin dynasty of 1115-1234.
How do we count those 100 years? Are the barbarians getting 500 out of 1300 while the Chinese get 900 out of 1300? Do we say it's 500/1400 vs 900/1400? Should we weight it by the Chinese population ruled by each regime?
This problem of simultaneous Chinese / barbarian rule (of different parts of China) gets much worse if you want to look farther back in time.
To sum up, Deveraux's ballpark figures there look defensible if low, but the idea that the score is civilization 100 to barbarians' 1 is ridiculous. Barbarians inflicted major defeats on settled states all the time, and held power outright for a very large minority of history.
And then, think about how often China was forced to pay tribute to its barbarians. When that happens between two states, we call it a win for the state that forces the tribute. Why are we calling it a loss for the barbarians when they force the tribute?
> Why are we calling it a loss for the barbarians when they force the tribute?
Hm. "Force" might be the key: who decides on the transfer of wealth?
As a possible counter-example, wasn't the British Empire largely net negative in resources, after a certain point? (Not to mention Kipling's "White Man's Burden".) And yet they gained something from it, a certain je ne sais quoi which is decidedly absent in the modern UK.
And the Chinese empire, in its various incarnations, had a semi-regular habit of giving back more in gifts than they got in tribute from their neighbors. There seemed to be a sense of "if you make language noises acknowledging us as the center of the universe in all respects, we will make your culture appear pitiful by giving you more wealth than you can bloody well imagine".
> And the Chinese empire, in its various incarnations, had a semi-regular habit of giving back more in gifts than they got in tribute from their neighbors.
From what I read, the Emperor would overpay for tribute. But at the same time, tribute missions invariably included a lot of contraband [direct trade between the mission and the locals being illegal] that they sold in China without first giving it to the Emperor. So the 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑡 loses money on the tribute missions, but it's not so obvious that the 𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑖𝑟𝑒 does.
> "Force" might be the key: who decides on the transfer of wealth?
The barbarians do. It isn't like US foreign aid. Here's a conversation I had which should be illustrative of the modern Chinese view of how this kind of thing went:
[me] 你说中国给北方付钱，叫进贡 [You said [when] China paid money to the north, that is called "paying tribute"]
[me] 皇帝能不能用别的词？为了保全面子？[Could the emperor use another word? In order to save face?]
[me] 进贡是不是比较丢脸的事情？[Isn't paying tribute a fairly embarrassing situation?]
[friend] 但是没办法。。。 [But there's nothing you can do about that...]
[friend] 不进贡就要战争 [If you don't pay the tribute, you have to go to war]
[me] 我的想法是，政府可能必须付钱 [What I'm thinking is, the government may have to pay the money]
[me] 但是不用形容钱为贡吧？[But there's no need to describe the money as "tribute", right?]
[friend] 到了清朝，就变成赔款了 [By the Qing dynasty, it became "reparations"]
[me] 可以说“我们两个国家是好朋友，我们作为老大需要照顾好他们”什么的？[Could [someone] say "Our two countries are good friends, [and] we as the elder brother must take good care of them" or whatever?]
[friend] 这个。。。 你的想法很好 [Uh... that's a really good idea]
[friend] 但是，我觉得战败方，怎么能觉得自己是老大。。 [But I think, the party that loses a war, how can they believe that they are the elder brother..]
[me] 我以为中国总是觉得自己比附近重要点？ [I thought China always felt that it was a little more important than [the countries] around it?]
[friend] 被打败后就不会这样想了 [After being defeated, [you] can't think like that]
I believe the Napoleonic wars completely beggared England.
> yet they gained something from it, a certain je ne sais quoi which is decidedly absent in the modern UK.
For sure: This fortress built by nature…an island identity is strong.
There's also the sinosization issue. The first generation to conquer a dynasty might be barbarians, but the next is nearly indistinguishable from the previous regime. And it normally takes several generations to re-establish a larger Empire
> There's also the [Sinicization] issue. The first generation to conquer a dynasty might be barbarians, but the next is nearly indistinguishable from the previous regime.
You could make this argument for the Manchus, and it would work pretty well in some areas and not well at all in others.
You couldn't make it for the Mongols.
The Moral Mazes analogy is a good one. Empires can suffer parasitic infighting to a degree that barbarians can't: how do you connive at tax exemptions when there are no taxes? The same organizational infrastructure that makes an empire strong (regular taxes, professional armies) creates new ways to 'defect' and parasitize (tax exemptions, military revolt).
So why does it look to Xenophon like "decadence"? Because elite defection is contagious by imitation. The more nobles have tax exemptions, the more will seek them; the more generals try military revolt, the more generals will seek to try - and the more emperors will seek to preemptively disempower or assassinate them.
This isn't a purely ancient problem, by the way. What's the best predictor of a coup d'etat? How many prior coups that country has recently had.
Why not agree with Xenophon, then, and call it decadence? For two reasons.
First, because barbarian tribes are just as treachery-prone as civilized empires; the famous leaders were famous in part because they had enough charisma to forestall their allies' fission long enough for the next conquest to keep people sweet.
Second, because an empire's tax norms and military-obedience norms don't seem to correlate with more personal virtues. It's hard to call the late Roman Empire less "virtuous" on a personal level than the early one - if anything, Christianity made at least attempting personal virtue vastly more important.
But we should grant Xenophon this: any successful state must have a norm of cooperating with authority rather than parasitizing or rebelling against it, and that the breakdowns of these norms past a certain point become cultural, self-perpetuating, the way that the psychological threshold for tax evasion is lower among Italians than Americans, and the threshold for shooting someone with a gun is lower among Americans than Italians.
But that's not because Americans are more inherently conscientious than Italians in a general sense, or Italians more inherently pacific. "Decadence" misleads us into looking for general vices among an empire's elite, where we should instead look for specific emerging parasitic norms.
(Was it "decadence" that let Hitler take over Germany, and "virtue" that made postwar West Germany so much different? No, but the Weimar norms of emergency government gave him an opportunity he exploited, and the backstop of American power prevented any similar erosion after the war. Just because the Romans and Babylonians are further away from us is no excuse to say "ah, they became decadent" when we see the flaws in that answer for Germany.)
I think also decadence has unfortunate moral character and connotations. One thing modern Western society has proved is that the instinct to enjoy nice food, and to defect in prisoners dilemma situations, are not particularly correlated. And if anything a bit of material decadence makes people more comfortable In taking pro-social risks.
Since you mentioned the supposed Amorite conquest of Babylon, it's the perfect time to bring up something I've been meaning to mention in an open thread. This is a quote from Weavers, Scribes, and Kings:
> By 2000 BCE, Ur-Namma's dynasty in Ur had lost its grip on Sumer. A number of factors led to its decline. Scribes later blamed this loss on the arrival of a new group of people, the Amorites, who supposedly disrupted the peace, but scholars have discounted this.
> Amorite was a Semitic language that began to spread throughout Mesopotamia around this time; it was the native tongue of a group of people who may have originally come from the west. But they had lived in Mesopotamia long before the end of the Ur III period and had not invaded or suddenly arrived. A king of Ur went to the trouble of building a long wall between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers to try to keep the Amorites out, but it didn't work. They were already too integrated into Mesopotamian society for a wall to have made any difference at all. Over the next few centuries, kings with Amorite names and Amorite ancestry led many Mesopotamian kingdoms, notably in Babylon, where the most prominent king was named Hammurabi. We will return to him later. The Ur III kingdom collapsed for more prosaic reasons, one of them being that it continued to be impossible to hold together, for any length of time, large groups of people who were spread over a wide area.
As best I can parse this, Amanda Podany is saying that
I. At this point in history, several different Mesopotamian kingdoms left records complaining that they had been overrun by Amorites;
II. One of those kingdoms went to the effort and expense of constructing major military fortifications to hold off the Amorites; and
III. Shortly afterward, the rulers of these kingdoms had been replaced by Amorites; but
IV. This is all just a big coincidence, and there was no Amorite invasion.
If there is a charitable way to read this, I'm not seeing it. It appears to make as much sense as arguing that Mexico's loss of Texas to America couldn't have been related to the arrival of Americans there.
Who were the Amorites?
Numbers 21 describes the Israelites' defeat of "Sihon king of the Amorites", following which Israel settled in Amorite territory (in trans-Jordan) and drove the Amorites out. The writer refers to a now lost "Book of the Wars of the LORD" and quotes a poetic fragmant, from which we can conclude that the story of the Amorite defeat is ancient.
We find the term "Amurru" in Akkadian and Sumerian texts, but that simply means "the West". From the perspective of Mesopotamia, the Levant is to the west, so in some cases Amurru seems to have been used to mean the whole of Syria and Israel/Palestine. But in other cases, it referred to a specific polity, which you might see marked as Amurru (or "the Amorite kingdom") on maps. ("Amurru" also referred to a deity, although it is now frequently doubted that the Amorites actually did worship a deity of that name.) The kingom of Amurru was north of the Orontes, so it is hard (but not impossible) to argue that these were the same people who appear in Numbers 21.
There was a semitic language which we call "Amorite", which is known mostly through place and proper names recorded in other languages (e.g. Deuteronomy 3:9). But this raises a problem: how do we know that the names come from a specific language? When does Amorite separate from other Northwestern Semitic languages? Is it truly distinct from Ugaritic?
So, to get to the point of your comment, what do we conclude from the spread of Amorite (i.e. some Northwestern Semitic language) in Mesopotamia during the late 3rd and early 2nd millennium (including the appearance of Amorite names in king lists)? It could be explained by an invasion of Amorite speaking people (whether or not originating from the polity called Amurru), but the evidence of such an invasion is missing from the archaeological record. Another possibility would be peaceful migration and/or cultural penetration.
If the writer you quote is saying that there definitely wasn't an invasion (which isn't clear from the passage quoted), then I think that pushes the point beyond the scholarly consensus. But conversely, it would be wrong to say there definitely was an invasion. The state of the evidence is currently inconclusive.
It's perhaps obvious, but I think it worth stressing, that if there was an invasion, it wasn't by the same people mentioned in Numbers 21 so continuing to refer to them as "Amorites" is confusing.
The robot has this to say:
The concept of an "Amorite invasion" has been a topic of debate among historians and archaeologists. The main points of contention include:
* Lack of Direct Archaeological Evidence: There is a notable absence of direct archaeological evidence clearly pointing to a widespread, violent invasion by the Amorites. Such evidence might include widespread destruction layers in cities or significant shifts in material culture that could be distinctly attributed to an invading group.
* Evidence of Peaceful Assimilation: Some evidence suggests that the spread of Amorite influence in Mesopotamia and surrounding regions might have been more gradual and peaceful. This could have involved migration, intermarriage, and cultural assimilation rather than military conquest.
* Historical Records: While ancient texts, including those from Mesopotamia, mention the Amorites, they often do not provide a clear picture of an invasion. These texts sometimes portray the Amorites as foreign rulers or as integrated into existing societies, but they do not unanimously support the idea of a large-scale military invasion.
* Evolution of the Term "Amorite": The term "Amorite" itself evolved over time and may have referred to different groups or a cultural-linguistic identity rather than a single, cohesive invading force.
In conclusion, while some scholars have proposed the theory of an Amorite invasion, particularly in the context of early 2nd millennium BCE Mesopotamia, there is no consensus on this point. The evidence can support multiple interpretations, ranging from violent invasion to peaceful migration and cultural assimilation. The topic remains an area of ongoing research and debate in the field of ancient Near Eastern studies.
Incidentally, I suspect that this all stems from an error in the post. I doubt that Scott really meant to refer to the Amorites since (a) the first Babylonian empire was famously founded by Hammurabi (which is an Amorite name), so it's not as if the Amorites took over a pre-existing empire, (b) the usual Amorite invasion account takes them to be a state-based people, so they don't fit the pattern and (c) the Amorites are not recorded as occupying any particular hill-territory. I wonder if Scott intended to refer to the Kassites.
Rome did aggressive anti-christian campaigns, then a few generations later their emperors were all Christian. But it would feel weird to say that the Christians conquered Rome. In the same way Rome conquered Judea
You can't become an Amorite without being born one.
Regarding IV: she isn't saying there was no Amorite invasion at all, just that it happened centuries before Ur III even rose, so it doesn't explain its fall.
> It appears to make as much sense as arguing that Mexico's loss of Texas to America couldn't have been related to the arrival of Americans there.
Given the above, it's more like arguing Mexico's loss of Texas couldn't have been related to the arrival of, I don't know, Apache.
> she isn't saying there was no Amorite invasion at all, just that it happened centuries before Ur III even rose
That isn't present in the quote I pulled. Are you getting it from somewhere else?
Yes, the quote only says "But they had lived in Mesopotamia long before the end of the Ur III period" instead of "before the start"; but e.g. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Amorite gives the same dates I've seen elsewhere, with Amorites appearing c. 2400 BC and Ur III dates of c. 2112–c. 2004 BC.
It does say "they were believed to be one of the causes of the downfall" of Ur III but I think this "were" is consistent with the quote; some post-Ur III records say so but the modern historians don't believe that.
>I posit that the Empire’s citizens chose to join Persia in a free and fair election; I call this the Median Voter Theorem
I am not sure whether to groan or applaud.
I was waiting for a Median pun for the entire paragraph and was not disappointed
I don’t understand why everyone thinks Cyrus was so great. Any would-be emperor has a 50/50 shot of overtaking the Median Empire.
iswydt
What are the odds that the two best book reviewers on Substack would review this book within a week of each other? https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-by?r=1417y&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Thanks, this is great!
Oddly enough, at the part about "how did Cyrus manage to conquer the Medes?" I was thinking it might be something like the Mongols.
The thing is, when we say "barbarians", we have this image in mind like Conan the Barbarian: clad in skins, rough and simple, tough and good at fighting, very strong.
That's not so much the historical truth. The Mongols may have been barbarians (to the Chinese) but they had their own culture and society. They had leaders, warbands, and internal politics: Genghis Khan got his start by having his family abandoned after his father's murder because he was too young to push his claim as heir and their tribe left them behind. He had a real struggle to survive, but he managed, and then slowly starting gathering power, making alliances, and taking back leadership, then fighting with other tribes and conquering (or losing to) them. It didn't happen overnight, and while it may have seemed that suddenly out of the West this horde of barbarian horsemen overthrew Chinese rule, it was more chipping away bit by bit, gaining territory, consolidating power, until he was in a position to overthrow the Jin Dynasty, then over time his armies and successors kept expanding and conquering.
The Vandals in North Africa were also a similar tribe being pushed west by the invading Huns, fighting with the Romans, settling in Spain, being driven out of there and arriving in North Africa.
I bet Cyrus and the Persians were much the same; he didn't come out of nowhere, and the "hill tribe without cities" may not have had cities, but that doesn't mean they had nothing, they presumably had some sorts of settlements, major trading centres, and so forth, and by chipping away over time, as vassals and mercenaries then taking over the rule you were supposed to be working for, Cyrus founded his empire (because the Medes weren't just lolling around on silken cushions and taken by surprise, they were fighting other wars and were probably not all that dissimilar to the Persians in their origins).
I wouldn't say that Cyrus was being nice/kind so much as being prudent and clever; making friends and allies he could bind to himself by personal indebtedness and loyalty due to his clemency and lack of looting and pillaging meant he had greater assurance that once he turned his back, they wouldn't be queuing up to stab him in it and he could safely move on to the next phase of conquest and assimilation. Though that doesn't mean that he couldn't also have preferred to be merciful when possible.
William the Conqueror had a similar trajectory. Started as a young heir of questionable legitimacy, and slowly consolidated and expanded his power by exploiting opportunities, manufacturing claims, and outright conquest. By the time he "conquered England"/"defeated a rival claimant who was spreading disinformation about the succession procedures", he was really really good at what he did.
The scope was smaller, and he didn't establish a stable succession, and he only questionably counts as a barbarian, but other than that...
He also picked the perfect time to launch his invasion/'only turning up to get the inheritance I was rightfully promised'; after Harold and his forces had been fighting invading Norwegian forces and had won, but before they could rest and recover, they then had to take the field against a fresh new army.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stamford_Bridge
You have to wonder how many "hard barbarians overcame decadent city-dwellers" had victories as a result of "the decadent city-dwellers' armies were exhausted after years of constant warfare".
If it's internal warfare, or internal political squabbling that leads to an intentional weakening of the armies, I'd count that as evidence of decadence. But not if it's from constant external threats; that's just bad luck or good enemies.
Like Gondor in LotR. You can see a bit of decadence in Denethor, where he takes his eye off the ball (so to speak) and worries about Stewards vs. Kings. But overall, even though Gondor's armies are weaker than they used to be, it's a result of constant external warfare, plus an overall decline in "civilizational capacity", which may be caused by resource drain or by some sort of mystical effect.
Ah, yes. How true Deiseach. The importance of coincidences. Always neglected in the telling of world history...If the wind had blown in the other direction across the Atlantic those fateful weeks in September 1066, William the Conqueror would have reached England from Normandie (he had been ready to sail for weeks) before Harald the Hard Ruler (Hardrade) arrived from Norway.
Meaning that Harold Godwinson would first have fought William at Hastings (East Sussex). And then whoever of them won that fight, would have had to march across the land to Stamford Bridge (Yorkshire) to fight Harald and his newly arrived Norwegian Viking troops, rather than the other way around.
There is little doubt that Harald would have beaten the exhausted troops of whoever won at Hastings (Harold or William). As Norwegians tell this story, if it had not been for the direction the wind blew in those fateful weeks, everyone in Great Britain would now speak something akin to Norwegian (rather than French), and 800 years later as the Nor-British conquered the rest of the world Norwegian, rather than English, would be today’s global lingua franca. A bitter thought for a small language community of course, but what can you do when you are up against those who have more luck with the wind than you do.
Luck, the true-born child of coincidences, is the most underestimated actor at the world stage.
Of course, a Nordic Britain might have been so different that it wouldn't have conquered the world at all. Maybe Spain or Italy would've industrialized first in that timeline, and the Mediterranean Romance languages would be dominant.
you must allow small language communities to dream;-)
Britain was partly Nordic -- the Vikings conquered a chunk of the north, the Danes most of the East. And the Normans were kind of Nordic themselves.
Britain's "choice" was between Nordic and Frenchified Nordic, and either alternative was pretty much by definition going to be predisposed to occasional wars of conquest delivered by sea.
And Britain's geography gave whoever was there an enormous advantage in the field of world conquest and empire-building, once people got oceanic navigation figured out. Only Spain had any real chance of competing with them on that front, and even they were at a disadvantage.
> Cyrus made his school friends into officers and satraps, and was always confident in their competence and loyalty. This sounds similar to the story of Alexander the Great and his generals, making me think this really was a big advantage in those days.
Alexander's generals were his drinking buddies because they were his generals, not the other way around. Just the standard VIPs hanging out with other VIPs, like in any other culture that has VIPs. (Perhaps relatedly, Alexander's friends didn't have enough camaraderie to keep the empire together after Alexander's death.)
But several of Alexander's generals/drinking buddies were his buddies from childhood on—Ptolemy, Perdiccas, and (I think) Lysimachus, for example.
Another beautiful article from Scott Alexander. So unlike mainstream media. I learned much. He models curiosity and independent thinking. This is why I send my monthly tribute to Scott!
Xenophon is kind of awesome, in a "we came, we saw, we kicked their asses", reactionary aristocrat way. I haven't read the Cyropedia, just Anabasis ("There and back again"), his Socratic dialogues, and some of his History. He seems to be one of those writers where everything they encounter turns into a demonstration of the fundamental correctness of their worldview. But at the same time, he's unsubtle enough about it that it makes it easier to see the subtle biases of his contemporaries (by our scale), like Herodotus, Thucydides, and most especially Plato.
This is cooperation being stronger than selfishness in the long run. It's why multi-cellular life exists, why social animals evolved, and why zero-sum thinking is so destructive.
"Decadence" is a reversion/capture by zero-sum thinking. Small minded people get into positions where they can only see their own advantage and chew up the free energy that could have contributed to the growth of a stronger whole.
Barbarian invaders would not stand a chance against a state that is operating cooperatively. But they can easily exploit the cracks created by zero-sum thinkers.
Highly recommended reading from Scott's old SSC blog: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/
*gets on soapbox*
Bret Devereaux does not understand Chinese history and he should have left it out of his analysis. We have an entire new branch of history, called New Qing history, focused specifically on understanding Manchu thought under the Qing because, well, all the important government documents and writings were written in Manchu, not Chinese, and so it's only been recently that some Western and Eastern scholars became sufficiently fluent in Manchu to read and interpret them.
And while the field is still new, it's hard to read something like Mark Elliot's "The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China" and not think that the Manchu's believed...at least parts of the "Fremen Mirage" and actively created laws and social customs specifically to preserve their..."Fremen" heritage. And it's really bad to reference an area to support your thesis when the final dynasty, with their view of all Chinese history, would have explicitly rejected your thesis.
And it's not like his references to the rest of Chinese history are much better. It's not like steppe horsemen just appeared and disappeared one year, they were kinda always there and a significant factor for every dynasty, 'cuz it's not like the Chinese military ever had a sterling record against them.
This is not to rip on Devereaux too much, it's unfair to expect anyone to be deep in the historical literature of every region on Earth but...if you don't know that much about a region, just leave it out.
This is your regular reminder of my pet petty complaint every time that sequence of articles gets referenced.
Four things can all be true:
1. Horse nomads were a serious threat to any premodern empire whose fiscal-military setup broke down.
2. Both premodern nomads and premodern imperials professed to venerate their elders, and so liked to attribute these organizational breakdowns to imperials' failure to honor ancestral ways.
3. But the fiscal-military breakdowns and internal strife of empires, and whether they reorganize in time to stave off barbarians, are not actually well predicted by personal virtues or the amount of obsequious ancestor veneration.
4. Likewise, the military strength of empires often (though not always!) rests on fiscal and logistics systems that are utterly orthogonal to barbarian ways and virtues of war.
I think Devereaux agrees that all of the ancient people involved thought the Fremen Mirage was true, he just thinks they were all wrong and believing it for self-serving purposes.
I also don't think he believes the steppe horsemen just appeared; if my summary of him sounds that way, it's my fault and not his.
Nah, this is a much older complaint than this post. I read Devereaux's Part IV (https://acoup.blog/2020/02/28/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-iv-desert-power/) and got a lot of nerd rage and every time it gets referenced on a forum I get grumpy.
Tres cosas:
#1
Devereaux:
"In Part III (‘a‘ and ‘b‘) we asked – if this Mirage isn’t a useful analytical tool for understanding history or conflict (modern or pre-modern, as we’ll see in a moment) – why do we have it? We found this mode of thinking emerged largely out of the ‘decadent’ societies’ own self-criticism and self-definition: the myth was never about the Fremen at all, but about the settled people who fought them, a mix of nostalgia, deflected political criticism and a deep concern present in seemingly all societies that proper, martial masculinity – true manliness – was being steadily eroded by the times."
So Devereaux thinks that "Fremen" is primarily a rhetorical tool for cultural self-criticism. Cool, that makes sense and is very probably true for the Romans. That is not how the Manchu/Aisan Goro/Bannerman conceptualized themselves. They very clearly were aware and concerned about Sinicization/getting soft at the beginning of their empire and, if Mao Haijian's "The Qing Empire and the Opium War" is any guide, they didn't think they'd lost their manliness/virtue by the 19th century, they thought it was their trump card against the British.
#2
"1636-1912: Qing Dynasty. While not Han Chinese, the Manchus were largely not nomads, but agrarian peoples who had been settled for some time."
I want to be clear here: this is semi-true, the Manchus were not pure nomads or steppe hunters. But this is also an empire that specifically banned Han migration into traditional Manchu or Mongol lands specifically to prevent widespread urbanization or agriculture (fengjin zhengce). It's a society that generally prohibited bannermen from civilian occupations. Maybe this isn't the perfect "nomad" society but...this is simply not comparable to the Ming or the Song. This is like saying the Iroquois and the Canadians are the same because neither of them are pure nomads. It's...funky.
#3 As for the steppe horseman just appearing, I mean something a little different. Like, watch this map of China over time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdHkY3XYHKA
Look at some of that contested territory: look at Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan...Vietnam. There were always tons of people living in modern China who either were never under the control of the dynasties or were only temporarily under the control of the dynasties but...all those people kept living when the dynasty retrenched, sometimes in states of barbarism, sometimes in highly structured societies, and often in between. That's what I mean by they were always there, Devreaux uses the term "China unified under an agrarian, non-nomadic state." for most dynasties and, like...no. If you were in that core Chinese area it was always stable agrarianism but, like, you can't read the history without noting all these weird border areas like Tibet which...ya know, aren't nomadic by and large but they're also not rice farmers.
Again, not to ding him hard, history is hard but...surprise, surprise, Chinese history does not fit in well to Roman rhetorical devices. The only reason I think he's touching it is, well, everybody knows the Mongols but...don't do a whole section on China if you're a Roman and Greek history guy.
Thanks.
I confess I’d mostly known about Cyrus as “the world’s first non-Jewish Zionist”: the righteous king who unexpectedly let the Jews return to Israel after the Babylonian Exile, and who Jewish history has fondly remembered for that for 2500 years, and who Harry Truman (well-versed in the Bible) consciously took inspiration from when he decided to recognize the State of Israel in 1948.
This post helps fill out the picture, showing Cyrus’s role in Jewish history as just another consequence of his, for his time, extreme generosity and liberality of spirit.
Can someone give a convincing account of the Taliban's overthrow of the more numerous, better equipped, more urban ANDSF that does not sound like "hard men conquered the decadent?"
You're absolutely right: the Taliban victory is a perfect modern example of what the ancients would have flagged as barbarian virtue beating decadence. The real story is subtler: it's not that being employed by Kabul made you cowardly, but it meant that bravery didn't pay.
The US-backed folks were, up until the last moments, in competition with each other for a share of the vast American funds, and in consequence were rewarded based on their relative forces available, not their absolute civilian territory controlled. So it was always best to let somebody else's units do the fighting against the Taliban, keeping your units available to pressure your rivals.
Meanwhile, the Taliban lieutenants got glory and rank for, well, actually bringing people over to the Taliban. So once any tribe switched to the Taliban, their leaders' promotion incentives were straightforwardly to induce additional surrenders by either fighting or negotiation.
In other words, the American-backed forces, split by rivalries for the fixed pot of American money and with no obligation to deliver conquests, were incentivized to make sure someone else took any losses fighting the Taliban, and so collectively avoided fighting. Meanwhile the Taliban, with no vast pot of money to count on, demanded actual progress from their subordinates and got it.
The Americans treated the Kabul government as a unit that would defend its own existence (an approach that worked fine in South Korea, to be fair). But the factions in Kabul were factions, and once handed a functionally unconditional pot of money by the Americans, as opposed to the de facto pay-for-performance setup of the Taliban, they correctly saw their medium-term paycheck danger as not the Taliban, but each other.
The individual Afghan warriors fought just fine; many switched sides in either direction at multiple points. But the incentives at the top were different.
The Americans could have solved the problem the way the British did in colonial India, by having separate pots of money doled out to multiple leaders based on performance, forcing them to actually compete by going after the Taliban. But that would have put America a hair's breadth from being a colonizer itself: creepy and organizationally unfamiliar terrain that both Defense and State preferred to avoid.
In sum, the Taliban won not because its fighters were harder -- they were often the very same people! -- but because its incentives were aligned. It turns out more money makes your side weaker, not stronger, if money is doled out more for internal leverage than external progress.
Thanks. This is the sort of comment I was hoping for, and it's pretty interesting.
But I can't help but think that your analysis of the incentive structures is consistent with the corrupting influence of money and luxury on the martial virtues.
Were the Kabul government to steel itself against venal influence, would it have defeated the Taliban? Perhaps Xenophon's ideas about Cyrus's virtue and success are correct.
I'll half-agree:
Yeah, there's an alternate universe where a truly charismatic leader in Kabul got a virtuous circle going, knocked everyone's heads together and saw to it that the money went to actual hard workers whether or not they were "on his faction." This is the military version of the "reforming, results-driven CEO takes over," and it sometimes really does work. George Washington, Ulysses Grant and Ramon Magsaysay arguably all illustrate aspects of this.
OTOH, the "decadence" model makes it sound like it's a split between "martial" and "indolent" personnel, when these were mostly the same people and culture groups on both sides, just with very different promotion/pay incentives. What's more, the great driver of the factionalism wasn't past luxury, but past division: by 2019, Afghanistan had been at civil war for forty years! So it's deceptive to talk of virtuous men beating vicious ones (they were the same men, switching sides) or of men made factional by a history of peace (it was a history of grinding war).
Overall, you could say the whole country had lost any culture of unity, which created the opportunity for the Taliban's better incentives to outweigh Kabul's better funding.
The virtue model does get a certain pessimism right: it's hard to generate charismatic leaders or organizational reforms to order. Rome went through multiple major reconstitutions, and that's part of its longevity -- but in each case only after decades of nearly fatal civil war.
(PS. Scheidel, in fact, suggests the argument that Rome *would* have fallen more utterly to the barbarians, and perhaps sooner, if it had had as much exposure to horse nomads as China. (Scheidel, _Escape from Rome_.) In other words, part of Rome's greater success against barbarians than China or Babylonia was that Rome's adjacent barbarians in the West were mostly footmen and so "easy mode". A rickety empire will do better against charging sword-armed Goths than against galloping arrow-shooting Mongols. Much of the historical differences between Rome and China may come back to that accident of geography -- China borders the Mongolian steppe, but Rome bordered the central European forests.)
Maybe the American lack of focus is a sort of decadence?
Suppose that, for some reason, Mike Tyson became convinced that if he beats me in a fight enough times, he'll get a free pet unicorn. Every time we meet, he beats me to a bloody pulp, but then gets confused when the unicorn isn't there. Eventually, he realizes the unicorn doesn't actually exist, and decides there's no point in continuing to fight me. Would it be reasonable for me to summarize this situation by telling people "despite my physical disadvantages, my virtuous masculine hardness has allowed me to triumph over the soft, decadent Tyson?"
Now replace "Mike Tyson" with "the US", "me" with "the Taliban", and "free pet unicorn" with "Arab country that shares America's core values"...
I think you'd need a subplot about how Tyson contracted out some of the fighting to one of your neighbors, who only did well because Tyson would sub in if you ever looked like you were winning. And then Tyson got distracted by rumors of unicorns on the other side of the planet, and it turned out that your neighbor never learned how to roll with a punch.
No, it wouldn't, but I asked about the ANDSF, not the USA.
Oh, my bad, I assumed this was about the US because the "decadent" side in these narratives is usually a major empire.
If we're talking about the ANDSF, I agree with other comments here that their backgrounds weren't different enough from the Taliban to bear on the validity of the Fremen-mirage narrative one way or the other.
That's a very good analogy!
Pedantic nitpick: Afghanistan is not an Arab country. Muslim != Arab.
I don't think he was talking about the US; he was talking about local regime that the US backed.
Which is a bit weird in a different way. It's hard for me to think of the American-backed regime in Afghanistan as a "decadent civilization" - I'm not sure it counts as a separate "civilization" from the Taliban at all.
One word: aasabiyah.
I'm not sure that Taliban were, as individuals, essentially "harder" than the other Afghan forces. If you wanted to find "barbarians" in this conflict, the various warlords practicing premodern customs like bacha bazi would come closer than the Taliban, who have frequently been seen as a particular variety of a modernizing force (if a brutal one with many ideological features we usually do not associate with modernity) in the specific Afghani context.
Sorry, my previous response was flippant and not helpful. I'll try to explain a bit more, but first a couple more flippancies to get out of my head:
* It's like when a necromancer gets injured and their skeleton army collapses.
* If you've read Timothy Zahn's original Star Wars trilogy, it's like when the Emperor died and the Imperial forces fell apart because they'd grown dependent on his use of battle meditation.
Anyway: Empirically, there were no serious challengers to the Taliban when we went in. We spent about 20 years trying to create a force that could challenge them, but we failed. IMO, we failed because we don't understand how to do that, at either a theoretical or practical level. It might not even be possible to do in a reproducible way, at least in a foreign country.
What methods were we using to bind the ANDSF into a unified force? Money, desire for power, foreign political systems, secularism, the approval of international organisations? Whatever they were, they didn't work once we left. It was all empty words and ink on paper, insufficient to motivate them to fight and die for ... what? Whereas whatever bound the Taliban into a unified force had already proven itself sufficient to forge a national government out of nothing, and furthermore had kept them going through 20 years of occupation by the global superpower. And I bet everyone on the ground knew this in their bones, and predicted what would happen, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But maybe if we'd stuck it out for twice as long, for 40 years, maybe then it would work. Maybe 60. Maybe once we got a generation or two of Afghanis who had never known anything but American occupation, and had gained experience with a functioning civil government, and who had grown to enjoy and value the freedoms that they would lose under the Taliban.
Thanks, Moon Moth. Given my comment history, I can't object to flippancy. :)
Originally, I asked the question because, stripped of details, the Taliban's victory over the ANDSF seems to pattern-match the 'hard men beat the decadent' archetype—rural versus urban, with Kabul's leadership (allegedly) fleeing to the Gulf States with money, despite the ANDSF having better equipment and outnumbering the Taliban by something like three or four to one.
Maybe it's a strong case of Ibn Khaldun's concept of asabiyah.
But since this event happened recently, close observers know many details. I suspected these details might tell a story that weakens or contradicts the oversimplified idea of hard versus decadent.
The point is that we are in a much worse state with respect to ancient history--we have few details of the Scythians, for example. If the Taliban/ANDSF doesn't match the archetype, I downgrade my estimate that it is true of ancient people.
I try to make a case, in a different thread above, that "political infighting" is the true vice by which decadent civilizations can be known.
I'll suggest that three choices when faced with an attacker are fight, run, or switch sides, and that a major part of what makes people "hard" (assuming that this is a coherent concept) is a willingness to keep choosing the first way. Maybe it's one of those counterintuitive game theory things where having more choices can lead to worse outcomes on particular measures. So maybe the question isn't so much "why did the ADNSF give up?" as "why didn't the Taliban ever give up?". In this sense, "hard" is a fake explanation (there's probably a rationalist term for this, maybe that it doesn't have "gears"?). It's a word that refers to the process as a black box, but gives no insight into the mechanism, and thus lacks detailed predictive power.
I don't think anyone serious would claim that this is always the only explanation. At most, it's a thread in the tapestry of history, and if it can be noticed that it often appears in certain types of situations, then perhaps there's a relationship.
And yeah, it's important to treat ancient sources critically, noticing who the author and audience are. Not just names, but their context, in their society, their expertise and their biases, and what they thought the purpose of the writing was. (It's also important to do this with non-ancient sources, including all modern political content. It can be very disappointing to see historians abandon all their professional skills when it comes to modern politics.)
"Maybe once we got a generation or two of Afghanis who had never known anything but American occupation, and had gained experience with a functioning civil government, and who had grown to enjoy and value the freedoms that they would lose under the Taliban."
Ah, you mean like the modernisation programme in Afghanistan that reached its peak and then decline in the 1970s?
The major problem has been "more urban" - if Kabul is becoming 'the Paris of Central Asia' but the hillfarmers are still ploughing with oxen and enmeshed in tribal webs of relationships, then the further you go from Kabul, the less your urban army is going to achieve. They don't have local relationships, their loyalty, if any, is to the central government which may be hugely unpopular, and there's nothing there to maintain it all once the Western forces withdraw their support and backing.
The Soviet invasion and then the Western backing of the Taliban didn't help matters either. The Taliban had a coherent strategy and philosophy all along about what they wanted, intended, and believed in; the modernising side swerved depending on was the king in power, was he overthrown by his left-wing cousin, was that cousin now assassinated, was it a pro-Communist Soviet-backed government in power or a pro-'democracy' Western-backed government in power, and oh look the Westerners are pulling out and leaving us holding the baby.
Unless I've missed it in history the barbarians very rarely had huge amounts height of weaponry and funding from a nearby powerful nation-state. The Taleban were not in any way a self-sustaining force without weapons, funding, and a safe place to hide in Pakistan. As well as support from other regional actors.
If you want ancient analogy it would be more like when Rome would bankroll one side of a succession dispute. On the implicit understanding that date would be a de facto Roman subject afterwards.
I believe China is kind of a weird case here. My understanding is that the ruling bureaucracy was always super worried about generals taking over and so deliberately kept the military weak. Sometimes they were just kept too weak, and some Barbs got in.
I think decadence theorists would classify that as a subtype of decadence, and hardly one limited to Imperial China. I've heard the same accusation against eg Putin.
That's a good point.
I was under the impression this was an organizational memory of the An Lushan rebellion, and not the case prior to it.
That wasn't my understanding but I'm not super confident my understanding was right.
“Machiavelli said that it is better to be both loved and feared, but if you can only have one, be feared.”
…that’s the part everybody learns. But it is only half of Machiavelli’s advice. He goes on to say: “But above all, you must make sure you are not hated.”
…Because if you are hated, you can never sleep peacefully at night. And there might be an assassin behind every tree.
So, Machiavelli says, how can you achieve being feared without being hated?
Actually, it is easy: You must make your rule predictable. If people will know in advance under which circumstances you will come after them, torture them, take all their belongings & wives (for example if they conspire with your enemies), and under which circumstances you will leave them in peace (just mind your own business and never engage in politics) your subjects will fear you, but they will not hate you.
This is the first, and arguably still one of the best, arguments for a Rechtstaat – and seen from a purely self-interested ruler’s point of view.
It may seem from you review that Cyrus lived according to this principle. Since his reputation for being “nice” seems rather similar to being “predictable”.
Who knows, maybe Machiavelli got the idea from Xenophon.
> You must make your rule predictable. If people will know in advance under which circumstances you will come after them, torture them, take all their belongings & wives (for example if they conspire with your enemies), and under which circumstances you will leave them in peace (just mind your own business and never engage in politics) your subjects will fear you, but they will not hate you.
I feel like this explains a lot about the Chinese Communist Party.
Agreed. Machiavelli solves a major decision problem (how to be feared while avoiding being hated) for all autocrats, including Chinese autocrats. Enlightened autocrats introduce the Rule of Law, and stick to it. Not-enlightened autocrats allow their arbitrary will to rule their decisions, thereby risking being hated.
Machiavelli is silent on a related decision problem as seen from the point of view of subjects: How to reduce the danger that a ruler slides from being enlightened to being not-enlightened across time. Since in an autocracy, there is no-one around with power to interrupt the slide.
The main role of democracy is to solve this decision problem on behalf of those who are subjects of a ruler. "Democracy" defined as elections being held at more-or-less regular intervals, that create institutionalized uncertainty as to which of aspiring rulers that will be in charge after the election: Hence providing the ruler with a self-interest to stay enlightened. Or alternatively, giving subjects an institutionalized ability to replace him, if he is not able to control the oh-so-human temptation to take whatever he wants, when he wants, because he can. (I.e. the risk of he becoming a self-restraint-is-for-pussies Callicles, Socrates' formidable opponent in Plato's dialogue Gorgias.)
The main problem for Communism, including Chinese communism, has always been how to put in place an alternative mechanism (to democracy) to prevent a slide from an enlightened to a not-enlightened ruler. For some years, is seemed as if the "gentlemen's agreement" in the Chinese elite not to stay in power longer than max 10 years (2X5), served as an alternative mechanism. But Xi broke this gentlemen's agreement when he extended his rule at the last Party congress to 15 years, thereby indirectly opening up the possibility to be ruler-for-life.
We'll see what happens as he grows older and gets gradually more drunk on his own power, boosted by all the yes-men that surround such a ruler. Will it gradually gnaw away on whatever self-restraint he still possesses?
> "Democracy" defined as elections being held at more-or-less regular intervals, that create institutionalized uncertainty as to which of aspiring rulers that will be in charge after the election
Tangentially, just last night I wound up watching my favorite episode of "Yes, Prime Minister", "Power to the People", which had a few things to say about the parts of government that side-step this uncertainty. ;-)
Best sitcom ever!
Yes!
My model for a while has been that the "decadence/barbarism" axis - one where every society claims to be on exactly the right level, unlike those fops/savages next door - is real, useful, and fundamentally about how much you live in socially constructed versus physical reality; at extreme levels of physical reality you can't build an effective civilization because all the people with guns notice they could just take over and then they do, and at extreme levels of socially constructed reality the Emperor is incapable of hearing that any nation with better weapons than his exists or that his plans have failed, because everyone agrees the Emperor is perfect, and so all his strategies operate according to the ancient law of "garbage in, garbage out." It's nice to see you inventing it independently.
A nice analysis.
Thank you.
Has any civilization ever been at the too high level of physical reality?
Possibly, any society that's gotten to the point of being called a "civilization" already has a moderate amount of socially-constructed reality?
Sure. "Private property," "rule of law," "loans," and "democracy" are all socially constructed and require a certain level of Taking Rules More Seriously Than Physics to pull off. A lot of third-world countries are suffering from overmuch focus on physical reality and insufficient belief in the imaginary thing known as a state to make it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
... But also, in general in history, I would say that when you're at the too high level of physical reality, you aren't one civilization, you're two hundred at 0.5% the size of the civilization that's your neighbor, because you don't have the (socially constructed) belief that other people will cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma when it doesn't serve their interests. For this set of things, I would gesture at tribal societies that can't build any social structures larger than the kinship group:
- You'll note that pre-Mohammed Arabia basically consisted of a bunch of small tribes people quarreling with each other in the desert that was the least valuable bit of dirt around; the more valuable bits belonged to an empire that could build a workable state. Then Mohammed unified everyone with Islam and off they went.
- The history of various steppe empires that exist solely by the ruler's charisma and then fall apart in a generation or two because all the loyalties were wholly personalistic, instead of founded on (socially constructed) institutions. (Also other empires, see Alexander the Great.)
- - Two of the three Mongol empires (the Ilkhanate of Persia and the Yuan dynasty collapsed around a hundred years after they were founded, my history of the Yuan dynasty blames the inability of the central government to control the nomads once the charismatic rulers were gone; the third was the Golden Horde, based on the steppe.
- - The Caliphate slightly collapsed like that (it lost Spain and North Africa was kind of fuzzy) but remained about the size of Persia At Its Maximum Extent for centuries, having something to hold it together other than Family and Hero in its religion.
- Afghanistan has failed to ever build any workable society that didn't immediately collapse into If We Take Their Stuff It Will Be Our Stuff once the charismatic leader was dead. Afghanistan is also fantastically dirt-poor. These facts aren't unrelated.
I think something that complicates the dichotomy is that the skill set/ virtues that make for a successful conqueror are different from those of successful ruler of civilization. History is full of examples of very successful generals and conquerors who failed to hold the Empire together, or even keep up basic day-to-day logistics. Past a certain scale you need to be good at dealing with social realities to succeed. So the challenge becomes combining that with enough feedback on reality to make good decisions. (E.g. the emperor's clothes, rituals and court etiquette are not objectively important, and an emperor who thinks they are fails. But they can be practically important for persuasion, maintaining legitimacy, handling disputes, etc.).
Right, agreed. I'm not saying one is better or worse than the other; they have different advantages and disadvantages in different situations and civilizations can fail or succeed in either the physical-reality or social-reality direction. But I think the axis is real, in that emphasizing one usually means downplaying the other.
Do the Conquistadors pattern-match sufficiently to the "small band of Fremen barbarians taking down a much larger empire"? Admittedly they had a technological advantage, which the barbarians usually don't, but otherwise they followed a very similar playbook.
I see Conquistadors more as the Death Star but that’s just me.
"War of the Worlds", except the disease working the other way?
May be.
I think you could argue that the Mongolian horse archers were a technological advantage. Just not one that fits into our traditional ideas of a tech tree.
Also possibly analogous inlet Cortez only succeeded because the vassal states of the Aztecs use the opportunity to rally against them. A lot of the cases of barbarians conquering larger civilisations are them coming in on one side an existing political divide, and tipping the scales.
Barbarian and decadent are interesting words. They have so many connotations to me, that muddy the plot.
Barbarian; thick, rough rug-headed men who pillage and rape and destroy what is beautiful and good.
Decadent; decaying, degenerating, indolent, a slave to sensual pleasures with no higher aspirations or even appreciation …losing one’s connection to the thing that sustains you.
So I went and looked up barbarian, just to clear my head.
Barbarian: Originally some clans or tribes living on the fringes of the Greek civilization who didn’t speak the language, and were therefore insular and self-reliant, and probably annoying.
Decadent; pretty much what I said above.
It must have been very difficult to maintain a sense of cohesion and attachment to a civilization as it got bigger in those days. It’s not like anyone could see or hear Caesar every night on the telly. Everything becomes only as good as the guy in front of you, who is vaguely representing an abstract and distant authority.
Barbarians seemed to have bonds of purdurable toughness, and looked each other in the eye a lot. Barbarian and decadent are two ends of a circle I think.
Caesar
Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yong Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
Absolutely
The Persian method of raising boys strikes me as very different from the Spartan approach, though I'm not sure we've got accurate accounts of either of them. The Spartans didn't give the boys enough food so they had to steal from surrounding people to survive. The Persians gave enough simple food and enforced rules against stealing. I'd expect Spartans and Persians to have very different behavior.
Even if the education systems are mythical, people affected by the myths could be expected to behave differently.
I'm interested in the relationship between luxury and successful societies. In her Deadly Education series, Novik has four levels-- survival, comfort, luxury, and excess. I think excess includes both luxuries beyond what one can enjoy, and destroying value as proof one can afford to.
It's at least plausible that the higher levels of luxury and excess being common in the upper classes are indicators that competition in the upper classes has reached a point where it's weakening the society.
The situation is complicated by what I think is a common human desire to spoil other people's fun, so there's a claim that anything much beyond survival is excessive, but maybe if that claim is toned down to that there's such a thing as too much consumption, it makes sense.
I am very far from an expert on the relevant history, but I'm confused by your confusion about the origins of the Persians. As I understand it, the Persians were not the same as the Medes, but they were part of the same cultural milieu (similar language, similar religion). And the Medes had already built a powerful empire. I understood that the Achaemenid empire can in some senses (and not in others) be thought of as a successor to the previous (Median) Iranian empire. To me it sounds similar to other instances of dynastic change or regime change in history.
Are you similarly confused by 'Who Even Were the Macedonians?', who seemingly grew from nobodies to Alexander the Great in two generations, similar to your description of the Persians? As the Macedonians were part of a wider (Greek) cultural sphere, so I assume the Persians were part of a wider (Iranian) cultural sphere. But maybe I am off base here.
Interesting to contrast the story involving Croessus with Timon of Athens, who gave lavishly but when he ran out of money could find no friend to succor him.
Maybe it's different lessons applicable to different situations? Like "just do it" vs. "think before you act".
I have a fun hobby if asking people what the lesson is of “a rolling stone gathers no moss”. Is moss good or bad here?
I think it’s non-judgmental. Just an observation.
Maybe, but almost everybody replies as if there were a moral — they just don’t agree on what it is!
The lesson is clearly that "Dylan" is a cooler family name than "Zimmerman". ;-)
> Cultures whose leaders spend time in physical reality tend to get different norms from cultures whose leaders spend time in social reality
I wonder if this has something to do with the blue/grey tribal split. Most of the people I associate with the grey tribe have careers or interests that involve working with Stuff over People. Not always physical Stuff, just areas where reality trumps public-relations. You can't cajole a compiler into accepting ill-formed code, any more than you can argue a bridge into not collapsing.
I'm a bit late to this, but James C Scott talks a lot about the dynamic between settled societies and "Barbarians" in his book Against the Grain. I'd love to see Scott or a reader do a review of that
You’re in luck.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/
Thanks! Apparently, that slipped my mind, as I've been a reading Scott's blog since about 2013.
When trying to understand someone's moral and philosophical outlook,their religion could be important.
Cyrus's niceness , particularly towards the Jews might be explained by his Zoroastrianusm -- but is very difficult to say, because early Zoroastrianism is so historically murky.. Zoroaster's dates could be as early as 1500BCE, or as late as Cyrus's own time. Early Zoroastrianism was monotheistic (bitheistic Manichaeism was a later development )- so it's surmised that Cyrus may have sympathised with them for that reason.
https://www.thecollector.com/zoroastrianism-persian-mythology/
OTOH, Cyrus was religiously tolerant in general.
The tables were turned when persia/Iran was Islamicised, and the unconverted Zoroastrians fled to countries like India (and Zanzibar, where the modern world's most famous Zoroastrian, Freddy Mercury, was born).
Two days before this review, at one of Scotts fav sustacks came: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-by
Which are different, but also very similar (both mention “We educated you to deceive and take advantage not among human beings but with wild animals, so that you not harm your friends in these matters either; yet, if ever a war should arise, so that you might not be unpracticed in them.”). "There are no coincidences", says Scott. So ... how? How amazingly unlikely this review is unrelated to the Psmith one?! (I like Scott:s better. The other has the fine Tai-Pan thing, though.) - Or I over-read sth?
The section about the training of boys reminds me a lot of Confucius. Who put a lot of emphasis on the idea of scholarship and training to develop virtues, including hunting, though that was less emphasised than the literary side. In a pre-modern society where you expect to have her educary ruling class it makes sense too care a lot about their habits and their virtues. Because you have little other leverage.
There's some similarity in that both of them were responding to periods of great political instability, and were trying to reconstruct order from that, drawing on the authority of a previous era. Confucius was more of a broad appeal to the principles of The Virtuous Past, rather than focusing on a single figure the way Xenophon does. (Though ironically Confucius himself became that figure in later centuries.) I guess xenophon would have had less degrees of freedom, given some of his contemporaries would remember the real Cyrus, but also those memories of his success would make it more appealing.
Also Confucius is describing more of a steady state culture of virtuous scholar bureaucrats raising the next generation. Cyropedia, from this summary, seems to imply that Cyrus was uniquely virtuous and that those sort of virtues cannot easily be sustained.