I mean, for instance, you can say Larkin was a miserable sod and a misogynist or whatever, but people say worse things about Kipling, and isn’t this (from August 1974) just richer and funnier and more moving too? …
The Life With A Hole In It
When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
_But you’ve always done what you want,
You always get your own way _
— A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that’s been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I’ve never done what I don’t.
So the shit in the shuttered château
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay) . . .
Life is an immobile, locked
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world’s for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you’ll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Oh havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly. Years.
He seemed an obvious choice for “Last 50 years, better than Kipling on a not very good day”, and indeed there are many such cases in his (conveniently chronological) collected poems…
I take it that “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg doesn’t rate very high in these parts. I think it’s rather good. But it’s more than 50 years old now that I think about it. So is Kipling though..
Because it's one of my all-time favorites. Nemorov, who wrote it, was alive til 1991, so I prob could have found something within the 50 year span by him. But -- I didn't really think Scott would engage around this anyhow. so just went with my favorite for the pleasure of seeing it up someplace where some will probably read it. Do you like it? Entirely agree with you about later poetry. It falls off a cliff into the dump some time in the 70's. A while ago I subscribed to poem-a-day from Partisan Review, and I just loathe most of what they send. After a while discovered that looking at the date one was written was an excellent predictor of whether I'd hate it or not. After the 70's a bunch of it is prose. Just prose, not free verse. And generally about very prosaic things. WTF? And yet last night when I was hunting around for something, looked up 3 poems I love, one by Berryman, one by Lowell and this Nemerov one, and all were just a few years too early to meet the 50 year cutoff. Yeah, I think you're right that Scott knew enough to say the last 50 years and not the last 60 or 70. He never talks about poetry, but he must read some.
Perhaps. Luckily we have the option of combining what's good about the present with what was good about the past... at least if we can ever get past the silly boo trad yay trad arguments and into the details.
There’s no “perhaps” about it. What % of modern Westerners would give up modern medicine, electricity, running water, the internet, social media, contraception, etc. in return for 19th century social organization and gender norms? It’s got to be in the single digits.
Really? Things like this just seem to be deliberately misunderstanding people for cheap points. You know perfectly well virtually nobody talking about tradition is talking about the absence of technology. And interpreting someone saying the past was better as making a statement about technology is as ridiculous as interpreting someone saying Scandinavia is a better society as making a statement about climate.
Can we try for at least a tiny modicum of intellectual charity?
Our esteemed host wrote this classic post on his old blog on how technological progress goes hand in hand with social changes, such that it is unrealistic to hope for, say, 1800s-style social organization with 2200s-level technology, highly recommended:
I'll grant you that many of the trad people seem to want to go back to the 1950s, not the 1800s or earlier. So, in that case, we're talking running water and electricity and cars and antibiotics, but no internet, no social media, and much lower levels of material consumption than today (e.g., a lot smaller houses). How many trad people would take that trade? A lot more than would go back to the 1800s, I'm sure, but they wouldn't be happy about it.
This seems like it applies to state based societies, but maybe Sam is referring more to clans and loose tribal affiliations. They might have myths of an idealized past, but I imagine they might have done a lot more "just doing stuff" to create traditions than you refer to here.
Small-scale societies generally change very slowly, so there isn't as much tradition to return to. If you're a hunter-gatherer and your ancestors have been hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years, nostalgia for traditional cultural mores and old style of architecture probably doesn't make much sense.
If there are events that cause a significant change to the culture (e.g., loss of technology, economic shifts), you'd expect to see more nostalgia for a seemingly remote tradition. Or, if a small-scale society gets conquered (or even just exposed to modern economies), this may cause a dramatic shift in mentality that longs for traditional folkways, but at that point, they're essentially absorbed into a different society.
It's the other way around. Tradition is usually justified through an idealized past, up to and including literal worship of the ancestors. This can still be observed in almost all traditional cultures, and in particular hunter-gatherers.
Fast-changing societies have largely abandoned this behaviour since it's maladaptive in the modern environment, and only a residue of our propensity towards nostalgia remains.
The relevant difference is that it's not a concrete nostalgia -- it's remote and intangible. It's not like "let's revive classical ideals of architecture according to the works of Vitrivius" or "let's return to the gender roles of the Jane Austen era" but more like "we don't eat carp from the lagoon because the Water Mother forbids it."
It's exactly the opposite. Myths aren't just stories people told their kids for fun, it was the main way of passing on their traditions. And since this was a time when behaviour barely changed over centuries, it means that "all our forebearers have done things as we do now, and this is good" was all the justification needed to do things. Once state-based societies came around, things got moving much faster, which means that people had to find new justifications. Clans and tribalistic societies were absolutely obsessed with their ancestors, to the degree that thei majority of their religious customs are often categorized as just "ancestor veneration/worship".
I like this very much. I have a model (in the sense of theoretical physics) I've been trying to work out, but I've been struggling. I'm going to build the model I think Feynman would've built, and luckily I never got around to reading any of his actual papers (in my defense, I'm a mathematician and not a physicist).
Care to discuss it (here or elsewhere)? I'm guessing it has something to do with the phrase "dynamic entropy"?
(I didn't quite -disprove- my own model, but I did manage to prove to myself that the best mathematical understanding of my model I have yet to construct doesn't result in the behavior I was expecting, at least without some extremely unprincipled modifications.)
In fact, I am always amazed how much of "tradition" was deliberately crafted in the mid-19th c., when governments were trying to tie together their countries into one single nation, and so came up with, say, the idea of having a national anthem, etc.
It's not only related to government, but also to ethnology becoming interested in local believes and cultures in the XIX century. For example, a lot of what we know about Slavic believes comes from whatever was able to be collected in the late XIX century, as there is very little original material left (or was created at all in the first place).
This. One thing that sticks in my brain is that at the start of the 19th century, much of "France" didn't actually speak "French" - Occitan was pretty common in southern France, and then the French kingdom also had border areas that spoke German. There was an aggressive push to standardize a national language across the country.
Exactly! Not to mention the push to invent public holidays, the push to craft the figure of the Gaulish ancestors (who, by *pure coincidence*, were of course enemies of the German peoples), the push to give everyone in the country the same schooling, etc., etc.
That's another good point too. The fake tradition was often not pushed just randomly, but in a spirit of domination. Kids got punished all over South France for speaking "patois", and their ancestral language was nearly eradicated. Fake tradition is not only literally fake, but sometimes has quite totalitarian roots.
On the other hand, as far as the languages are concerned, the totalitarianism seems to have but sped up the inevitable. In a modern state, a single language is just higher-entropy (<https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/>); you can see it by looking at what happened in other nation states which didn’t take such totalitarian measures. Only independence (<https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/occitania-the-country-that-never>) seems to be able to preserve the native language long-term, and only if it is achieved before any significant language shift has taken place. For example, Portugal gained its independence (or rather, halted and reversed the process of losing it) in time; Ireland did not.
To further illustrate how doomed a language generally is once it starts losing ground, there are currently no less totalitarian policies trying to revitalize some of those languages, and failing miserably. People already used to speaking the national language don’t appreciate having their ancestors’ language shoved down their throats any more than said ancestors liked having the national language forced on them; probably even less, since, at least, the latter were acquiring a means to communicate with more people, throughout their nation state. Add to this the fact that people from other parts of the nation state have every right to move and settle there, and they have even less reason to tolerate the imposition of a language neither they nor their ancestors ever spoke.
Counterpoint to the last part: multiple ex-Soviet countries have the Russian-speaking population share rapidly declining, even if the native language majorly lost ground previously.
Fair enough. What countries are those? I’m guessing the Baltics; mostly, Estonia and Latvia.
Okay, I suppose independence can reverse a language shift which has made some progress if the formerly dominant language undergoes a massive loss of prestige, which seems to have happened to Russian. I still think it’s unfair to force Estonian or Latvian on local Russian speakers, but I guess noöne will seriously support this cause, especially if Putin’s regime has appropriated it.
Lithuania, Moldova (except for Transnistria) and western Ukraine seem to fall easily in the “not enough language shift before independence for it to continue on its own” category. And Belarussian seems to be unambiguously going the way of Occitan, Breton and Gaelic.
I’d say the law that independence is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for an indigenous language to survive long-term stands firm. I doubt we’ll see any similar surprises in Western Europe, or the Americas, or Australia. Languages in the process of dying will continue to die; English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese probably won’t lose any ground as national languages, but if they do, it’ll be to one another. Or maybe the use of English as an international language will grow to the point that national languages are irrelevant, but a lot of people won’t like this.
I’m also curious about this, I understand that what are considered dialects in China can be at least as different from each other as say different Romance languages, but I hadn’t heard of linguists having to invent a new term because of it.
Because that never happened. Victor Mair, though, is very proud of his personal effort to have varieties of Chinese labeled "topolects", calquing the native Chinese term, rather than "dialects". Use of that term signifies political alignment with him; it's not a scientific concern.
In linguistics, no distinction is drawn between "languages" and "dialects" in the first place - pretty much the only thing they have to say about "dialects" is a pithy saying about the lack of a difference - so no need can have arisen to replace the word "dialect" with anything else.
>In linguistics, no distinction is drawn between "languages" and "dialects"
This seems like a mistake to me. As a german speaker, there is quite a clear line between them. German dialects all use the same spelling (and on occasions, an artificial pronounciation based on that spelling). They pronounce things differently but maintaining a fixed offset - so, if one dialect borrows a word from another, they dont pronounce it in the most similar way their phonetics can realise, they maintain the relative sound changes. New sound changes usually affect all dialects insofar as they are applicable, again maintaining the offsets. For these reasons, learning to understand a different dialect is a matter of days. People also do not usually learn to speak a different dialect - instead, everyone speaks their dialect and understands each other. From what I can tell a similar if less intense thing is going on with english internationally, though they seem to call this "accents" rather than "dialects". It certainly seems plausible that analogous cases in logographically written languages are different enough to deserve their own word.
Of course, if you ignore all that and look only at a momentary snapshot of spoken language, then arguably the berlin dialect is no more different from dutch than from the swiss dialect. But that is not "more scientific", and the emphasis on it to the exclusion of the above is exactly the kind of politicing it accuses the opposition of.
Mostly it has to do with the "historical linguistics" aspect, which is somewhat distinct from the modern Chomskyan project. Calling all languages "dialects" is all very well and good, and quite egalitarian. But then what happens when you start tracing derivations, the way taxonomists trace back birds to dinosaurs? The term "dialect" takes on a new meaning, with a preposition: "dialect of ___". And the CCP has very strong views on what the correct answer is. They do not want to hear the sentence, "The ____ dialect of Chinese isn't actually Chinese.", for any definition of "dialect" or "Chinese".
Depends on what you mean? My go-to example is that the "state of Israel" refers to a geopolitical entity, but the "nation of Israel" refers to the Jewish people as a whole (more or less).
> but the "nation of Israel" refers to the Jewish people as a whole
That seems more like a fixed idiom that doesn't relate to the meaning of the words in the phrase. Like how the governmental districts of the United States are called "states" despite the usual meaning of that word, or how the districts of France are called "departments".
A "nation" referring to a collection of people would be the sense that differentiated a "nation-state" from a "state", but in the modern language "nation" and "state" are synonymous.
In the United States, we have weird definitions of both those terms, but not all the rest of the world follows our usage, especially not before US dominance after WWII. I think historically it's mostly that "state" was already taken, and so when a grouping of states was proposed, "nation" was a good term to refer to it. Since, as the justification goes, we're all one people regardless of the geopolitical entity we happen to inhabit, right? It goes right back to the Latin, "natio".
The term "nation-state" specifically refers to a modern type of state, distinct from multi-ethnic empires or tiny fragmented principalities. It's a state that encompasses the land occupied by a single people: only that land, and all that land. Leading to things like the Anschluss, and the Schleswig-Holstein question, and what happened when the Ottoman Empire transformed into Turkey. And why "Kurdistan" is such a dangerous concept.
In the French usage, I thought that's just an older version of the word, based in their own language? It's a similar derivation to "partition". But actually, we have the older usage too - that's where our "department" comes from, right? It's like "subdivision", which at the moment, to me, primarily refers to a real estate arrangement. ("real" "estate"; interesting usage of words...)
"1. A people who share common customs, origins, history, and usually language
2. A rather large group of people organized under a single usually independent government."
And some other stuff. But only the secondary definition requires that the nation be a political entity. The word you're looking for is "state", or possibly "nation-state" which refers to the intersection of 1 and 2 above. And it is common to say "nation" when we mean "nation-state" and the context is unambiguous, but it's also common to say "nation" and mean just its traditional, primary definition.
By the first definition, Germany isn't a nation: there's still a lot of differences between East and West Germany. (Or before WW2, there were lots of differences between Catholics and Protestants. They almost never intermarried.)
Similarly with any county with some minorities inside.
That's what propaganda is for! Cultural indoctrination, public schools, taking children away from their parents and teaching them that they are all one people, not members of a loose band of regions. That they all speak a single language, not whatever barbarous and backward dialect their village elders speak, and especially not what *those people* across the river (or the mountains) speak. That their allegiance is to the state and people as a whole, and not their clan or tribe or village or region. One folk, one realm, one leader... Oh, wait.
Germany's been struggling for the last 200 years (post-Napoleon?) to pull this off, while I know barely anything about the inner workings of the German government, it would not shock me if there were some post-WWII arrangements that were deliberately designed to keep "German nationalism" from happening. (Some of which may have been subverted by the incentive to display a tame and successful half-Germany as a trophy during the Cold War.)
[X] is a nation if you'd be comfortable saying [Xian] is an ethnicity. Or if [X] is the United States of America, because some people have problems using "Americans" as an ethnic identifier for political reasons.
But the wikipedia page "Demographics of Germany" gives the major ethnicity as "German", 71.3% of the population, no separation of East or West. Similarly, the major ethnic group of Russia is given as "Russians", Sweden "Swedes", etc. By comparison. the major ethnic groups of Singapore are "Chinese", "Malay", and "Indian"; there is no recognized Singaporean ethnicity. And the main ethnic group of Monaco is "French".
I am as amazed as you. I am a Northern German living in Bavaria, and the local custom of Lederhosen is an invention of the 19th century, created by educated people to have a fictional traditional dress to support their idea of Bavarian nationalism. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lederhose#Geschichtliche_Entwicklung, (Maybe use e.g. Google Translate).
None of the Bavarians seem to realize the history of the Lederhosen, but ironically, they can now rightly say that is the Bavarian traditional dress, with over a century of history behind it. It's just that they believe that it came from peasants further in the past, instead of intellectuals living in towns in 1883.
I've heard similar things about "traditional Highland dancing" which is purportedly the traditional dances of the Scottish people but are basically imported French court dances mixed with French ballet.
Tartan kilts definitely do not have a very long tradition in Scotland (both kilts and tartan patterns and cloth date from around 1700, no earlier). And clan tartans are later still; 19th Century.
Once the Jacobites and any Scottish rebellion for a separate nation were safely quashed and long finished, it was allowable to romanticise the past and the 'traditional Scottish elements' such as tartans etc. in the 19th century by the English, once they were the winners. And a lot of that 'traditional element' was invented then, as the most appealing to the tastes of the time.
Something similar earlier in Ireland with Sydney Owenson and her novel "The Wild Irish Girl" which harked back to a romantic past, though in her case it was in the service of nationalism (though I think it's safe to say it's unlikely there ever was an Irish female name 'Glorvina').
That didn't stop the book being a runaway success, and the songs she wrote (new words to existing Irish airs, something also done with great success by Thomas Moore) being hits in the drawing rooms of English society.
Indeed, all this reminds me of the current trend in land acknowledgements: you can enjoy evoking the romantic past of those you have beaten, once you're safely in possession as the victor and there's no chance of you being dislodged.
You wouldn't need to, a "traditional" tartan is a bog-standard 2-2 twill. You can do it with four sheds without bothering with the expense of a Jacquard loom. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twill)
Plaid is pretty easy and cheap to weave, since it's just (ideally) equal stripes in the warp and the weft. Everything I've heard says that the Scottish Highlands did have plaids before the 18th century, they just were local patterns and not formalized. Which makes sense, because really...it's just fancy stripes. Everyone figured out stripes.
This is like how we are currently witnessing an undifferentiated "country" culture forming in the US, with e.g. West Virginians wearing cowboy hats and Alaskans picking up a drawl. It also includes big trucks for men, short denim shorts for women, and "country dancing," including line dancing, which is more or less from 70s disco rather than any more rustic roots.
Did we read the same article? It says that Lederhosen were peasant work clothing for a long time, then lost ground to wool pants, and were then nationalistically revived right around when they otherwise died out.
It says that peasants used trousers made from leather for a longer time.
However, Lederhosen as used as a Bavarian word refers to a very specific style: short trousers, about knee-length, suspenders, usually made from deer skin and such. Your average biker or cowboy-and-indians reenactor does not wear Lederhosen, he wears leather trousers.
As the wiki says, even in 1909, the bishop of Munich declared Lederhosen to be immoral. That was not about the fabric, it was about grown men wearing short trousers.
Im austrian, I know what they look like. The article says:
> Während sich bei der städtischen Bevölkerung nach der Französischen Revolution lange Hosen durchsetzten (→Sansculottes), erhielt sich der von der französischen Culotte abgeleitete Schnitt bei der Landbevölkerung als praktische Arbeitshose
Culottes being a style which ended right under the knee with high socks, which is how the old Lederhosen are, though today you will find about an equal amount ending a bit over the knee.
The wiki says that the culottes were the basis for leather trousers with legs of varying length, depending on the style of the times. While it says that after the French revolution, longer trousers became fashionable in France, but not for the workers outside of France, there is little indication that there was anything Bavarian or Austrian about this style - the article even features a picture of what we might call Lederhosen of 1791, almost 100 years before the birth of the new tradition - but it is from Lothringia, which the caption says is where this style was worn primarily during the earlier 19th century.
So yes, short leather trousers existed in Bavaria before the establishment of the Lederhosen tradition, but at least according to the article, they did so more in other parts of Germany. The Bavarian and Austrian Lederhosen as an autochthon tradition that separates these regions or cultures from others was an invention of the late 19th century, based on primarily nationalist ideology. See also https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracht_(Kleidung)#Die_Entstehung_der_Volkstrachten.
But in some cases, particularly Germany but also Italy, new traditions came before the government. The relationship is complicated, and is also tied to scientific and historic research (the entire field of linguistics arose in this millieu for example).
The invention of a shared Italian identity, which I believe was underway in mid-nineteenth-century Italy (to be fair there was some shared history to draw on...), but not in the way in was in Germany (or Scotland for that matter). I'm going on secondary sources here, and pretty general ones at that, so can't actually name texts, rituals etc sorry so happy to be corrected.
You're correct, although it depends on what one means by "Italian identity".
By the 19th century Italians had been calling themselves Italians for many centuries. Which shouldn't surprise you; read anything written in the early modern era and you'll notice that the French, the English, the Spanish, all called Italians "Italians", so naturally Italians also called themselves Italian. There was also a common written language, Italian, which by the 16th century had become the written standard all over Italy (mostly replacing Latin), and therefore a shared literature. So the notion existed, but before the romantic nationalist zeitgeist of the 19th century it was only one of multiple nested identities. For example, a person would have been Florentine, Tuscan, Italian, Catholic and Christian, and before the era of nationalism it wouldn't have been so clear that "Italian" was the most important of these, or that Italian states must unite, or that it's unacceptable that an Italian state is part of a "foreign" empire.
It is true that in Italy the causal direction goes
nationalism -> political unification
not the other way around.
I note that a common mistake foreigners make about Italy is to think the Italian language was not important before unification or had not been codified. That is not the case, in fact if anything the chain goes:
shared written language -> nationalism -> unification.
It's possible to argue that this nationalism was "imposed from above" not in the sense that it was promoted by the government (I mean, obviously it was, but only after unification) but in the sense that initially it was only believed in by a "bourgeois" elite, the ones who wrote all the nationalistic poetry and novels of Romantic era Italian literature. The elites who struggled for unification. In Italy there was for decades a huge communist party, so such a view is likely to be framed in Marxist terms.
I had thought that there were multiple local and regional dialects of "post-Latin", but the Florentine dialect wound up becoming the most influential due to its literary usage (especially by Dante), and so it formed the basis of the modern Italian language? But was that happening before the push for nationalism?
I hear from foreigners all the time that there was supposedly no standard Italian language until the unification of Italy, and only at that point the dialect of Dante was “chosen” as the standard, presumably by the government.
That notion can be disproven instantly by opening any book printed anywhere in Italy before unification.
EVERYTHING was already in the dialect of Dante!
For example, these are two of the earliest newspapers in Italy (look at the dates), neither is from the region of Dante (Tuscany), and yet it’s all in the dialect of Dante (Tuscan, also known as Italian):
Nearly everything that was written anywhere in Italy, was written in that dialect (Tuscan aka Italian), roughly from 1500 on. Books, newspapers, personal letters, bureaucratic documents. It was the official language of every pre-unification state. It was the dialect in which people who were taught how to read and write, were taught how to read and write. So much so, that the question of how many Italians knew Italian back then is often treated as equivalent to the question of how many were literate.
It’s a bit simplistic to blame Dante alone. It would be like saying that Elizabethan literature is just Shakespeare.
Around the early and mid 1300s, in Florence, there was a golden age of literature in the local vernacular (“Tuscan”). The most influential Florentine writers from that era are Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca (Petrarch). Those three are known as “the three crowns”. Of the three crowns, Dante is probably the one whose style would be imitated the *least* by later writers.
Then, for about a century, starting a little after the great plague, literature in Tuscan remained in the background as the fashion was again to write in Latin. Although even in that period there were non-Tuscan authors writing in Tuscan. That is, Tuscan was already the main competitor of Latin.
Then, roughly from the late 1400s on (perhaps due to the spread of printing?), many more major writers show up who were writing in Tuscan instead of Latin, and they were from all corners of the peninsula, not just Florentines who would have been native speakers. It made sense for them to write like the three crowns, so they’d reach an audience as wide as possible.
Examples of major writers from around 1500 who wrote like Tuscans but were not Tuscan: Jacopo Sannazzaro (1457-1530) was from Naples; Baldassarre Castiglione (1478-1529) was from Lombardy; Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) was from Emilia. Probably these names say nothing to you, a non-Italian, but they are major milestones of Italian literature.
I’ve described how the transition looks when you look at *literature*, but during the 1300s and 1400s Tuscan was also becoming the standard used throughout Italy by merchants and bureaucrats.
By the 1500s, Tuscan had become the dialect in which both literature and bureaucracy were written everywhere in Italy, and therefore the most prestigious and formal. Very soon it was called “Italian”, a word that for centuries would be used interchangeably with “Tuscan” (in relation to language). Note that the word “Italian” never refers to the other dialects, such as Lombard, Venetian, Emilian, Neapolitan, Sicilian… no, only Tuscan is Italian, whereas Neapolitan is just Neapolitan.
Throughout the early modern era proper style in Tuscan = Italian evolved and was debated by writers, as was the case in English as well (and still is the case, can I split an infinitive or not?), but to say that pre-unification Italian had not been “codified” or “standardized” or didn’t count as “Italian” because there were style controversies, is the same as saying that English was never “codified” or “standardized” and didn’t count as “English” before Strunk and White.
Latin continued to be used for scholarly purposes (as was the case elsewhere in Europe, think of Newton), but otherwise, I can’t stress enough that pretty much EVERYTHING written in the early modern era was in Tuscan = Italian.
Or at least, that’s how it seems when you read anything written back then. I wanted to know how big a qualifier I must add to that statement, so I tried to figure out how much literature in other dialects exists. The truth is, very little (it was the exception not the rule), but the little that exists easily gets blown out of proportion because it’s interesting to scholars and regionalists.
For example, I had heard several times that the famous playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) is a milestone of literature in Venetian, which made me believe he had written a lot in Venetian, even though all I’ve ever come across by him is in Italian. But I’ve just checked and it turns out he wrote only 5 plays in Venetian versus about 130 in Italian and 24 in French. But so little exists in Venetian, that those 5 plays stand out.
Another Venetian, the famous Casanova, wrote two poetic translations of the Iliad; one, covering three quarters of the original work, in Italian; the other, covering only one third, in Venetian. In preface to the latter translation he says, paraphrased: “why would I do something as weird as translating Homer into Venetian instead of Italian? Because I’d rather be the best poet in Venetian than the worst in Italian”. And obviously he writes that preface… in Italian!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And that one, too, is considered a milestone of literature in Venetian.
Another work that comes up is the Tale of Tales (1634), a collection of fairy tales for children. Supposedly a masterpiece of literature in Neapolitan. But it’s in Neapolitan because it’s for children. And it did not have much resonance (no, it did not influence Perrault as some think). Contrast with the hugely influential works written in *Italian* by renaissance authors from *Naples*, such as Arcadia by Sannazzaro (which popularized across Europe the setting of “Arcadia”, see Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia for example) or Jerusalem Delivered by Tasso.
Of course other stuff in the dialects exists, but what I mean is — it may not have been *literally* everything when I say everything was written in Italian, but, in practice, yes, *everything* was written in Italian, anything else is an exception that confirms the rule.
There’s no understanding the creation of Italy as a state without understanding this. I won’t bore you with an account of the unification (unless you ask), but it wouldn’t have happened if the ideology of Italian nationalism had not spread in the 1800s throughout the educated classes. This required that those classes *already* have a common language and literature. Otherwise they would hardly have felt like a nation.
I understand this is counterintuitive if one is used to language standardization coming top down from the government. But it’s interesting that it can happen the other way around. Language standardization led to political unification in this case.
The other dialects, by the way, still exist, some still very widely spoken, some dying and only spoken by rural elders. Foreign linguists usually call them “languages”. This baffles most Italians, since most of us think of Venetian or Neapolitan (both still widely spoken) as “dialects” rather than “languages” and not in the same category as Italian, but something else, an inherently informal way of speaking (I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just that this is how most of us think).
Foreigners tend to think that Venetian or Neapolitan are like Quebecois or Catalan. That is, a minority language relegated to lower status by a more powerful majority, and whose speakers might feel resentful because of it. But nobody in Italy sees it that way. Nobody feels that Italian is imposed from outside. Political regionalism exists, but it isn’t really fueled by linguistic resentment. If any region seceded from Italy, it would continue to use Italian, like San Marino. If you're from an area where dialect is still spoken along with Italian, you'll typically see the two respectively as your own native *informal* speech and your own native *formal* speech, and therefore complementary. This perception is deeply ingrained and ancient.
I'm not sure that the relative decline in use of local dialects in favor of Italian happened because of unification. Perhaps mass schooling and mass media would have caused that shift to happen more or less in the same way if Italy had not unified. Italian was already too deeply entrenched as the formally correct way of writing and speaking in all part of Italy, and therefore it's what would have been taught in schools (and was already taught in schools, before unification).
A nitpick — for simplicity I have treated “Tuscan” and “Italian” as interchangebale, but it’s obsolete usage. Today, we call “Tuscan” the way people speak informally in Tuscany and “Italian” the neutral, pan-Italian variety. During the early modern era, the two words were synonymous, which made sense, since the two varieties are relatively close, since latter is based on the former.
See, this is actually what I got out of the Kriss piece. Not that 'inventing tradition' is intrinsically bad, but it would be good to be more honest and self-aware about it, since some of these traditions or interpretations thereof have major political or social consequences.
It is good to have perspective, but at the end of the day you have to swim in the pond you’re thrown into, don’t you?
People will always find something to bond around. Could be a football game or high mass, or both. it is particularly hard to cut through the noise these days. The volume and the pace of it is daunting.
So the "traditions of old" are just the traditions which happened to be prevailing in the 19th century when people decided to codify them by writing them down. This gives me an idea for a general sort of model for this whole thing:
1. For thousands of years, traditions come and go, being preserved or modified by each successive generation, and this is fine
2. The mid 19th century comes along and everyone decides to write down their traditions and talk about how important and local and national and traditional they are. Now the traditions are fossilised forever at this exact point in time.
3. The twentieth century rolls around and people get bored of their grandparents' traditions as they always have, but now that they're codified and woven so heavily into the structure of society they can't just softly evolve any more. Traditionalists insist that we preserve the traditions exactly as they are. Modernists say no, all tradition must burn and we must start again and live in purely rational cubic houses eating protein slurry.
4. A hundred years pass and we're largely still stuck in the same place, except we know that the cubes and the protein slurry are bad.
And meanwhile the actual living traditions, as in the lowly basic sense of what we do and copy from each other without necessarily thinking of it as formal "tradition", never stopped evolving, because that's what they do. That's how we got from 19th century music to jazz, rock, rap and EDM and whatever else we're listening to.
Or maybe these things carried on a little longer before getting stuck, and thats why we've got the "stuck culture" thing everyone talks about where 2024 is just 2008 with better computers
Jazz remained super creative and vibrant from the 1920s to the 1960s, when it stalled and suddenly became about worshipping the greats of the past instead of doing your own thing. Rock died later. So did techno. Hip hop is probably dead. Nothing is emerging to replace them.
>Jazz remained super creative and vibrant from the 1920s to the 1960s, when it stalled and suddenly became about worshipping the greats of the past instead of doing your own thing
Yeah, look what happened to all that great music written for Castrati for instance..
Things have a natural life, and then they are buried, or turned over to the taxidermist and hung on the wall. Occasionally they are reinvented to great effect.
I pretty much stick with Miles and Cannonball, but the Dead Brothers do a cool retake on Dixieland.
I Iove The Pogues’ take on Irish Trad but Deisach might come after me. 😆
I will admit The Pogues precisely because they're not trying to represent themselves as Authentic Traditional Performers, they translated the influences into the new idiom of rock music. They were also witty enough to be able to do pisstakes, see "Planxty Noel Hill" as the 'proper traditional music' response in their spat with Noel Hill:
""Planxty Noel Hill" refers to Noel Hill, a renowned traditional Irish musician who, at the time of the release of the band's second album, Rum Sodomy and the Lash, claimed that The Pogues were disrespecting the whole Irish music tradition. Planxty has come to mean something akin to "cheers", though its use in the song's title is insincere. On the first Pogues tour of Ireland, some members of the band participated along with Hill in a panel discussion on Irish radio, during the course of which Hill described the music of The Pogues as a "terrible abortion" (the incident is described in and the quote is taken from "The Lost Decade")."
Besides, it's great fun to belt out their tunes 😁 Whisper it, but I had a cassette tape (yes, that long ago) of "Peace and Love".
>Things have a natural life, and then they are buried, or turned over to the taxidermist and hung on the wall. Occasionally they are reinvented to great effect.
Along the same lines (particularly the taxidermist), I occasional refer to "<tradition> revival" as "<tradition> exhumal". :-)
Around here most of what I hear in cars speeding by are latino beats, with a distinct synth drum pattern of 3-1-2-2, which as far as I can remember came to prominence about a decade ago or so.
EDIT: Looked it up, it's called the "Dembow" beat.
It's a live argument in traditional/folk music; how much do you evolve naturally before you've evolved right out of any connection to the tradition and are instead copying the broader culture? Versus how much fossilisation sets in when you try to preserve the traditional music/songs/dance as something that is not a speeded-up version to rock'n'roll to?
There's nothing wrong with speeded-up rock'n'roll versions, they're great fun - but they're also not the tradition as it exists.
It's rock'n'roll (or maybe punk) versus the art song drawing room performance version, with the living tradition falling between two stools and being ignored.
My own view is that English folk music has evolved so much, it's now really left-wing social commentary in large part and little to do with the rustic origins (or even the big city origins). Contemporary folk is an odd beast, to my ears at least. There's nothing wrong with writing new songs about the people and causes of today, that's what an awful lot of the traditional folk music is about after all, but there's something in the delivery of such as Kate Rusby that just grates on me.
I think I agree with you. It is a constant process and when you’re in the river going with the current it can feel like nothing is moving. Tradition is just as fluid as the process underlying it but on a longer cycle. There’s lots of really silly ones but you never know.
Part of it I think is the average 17th century person, no matter where on earth they lived, would not have any idea of a lot of other cultures. some people might’ve had some transient experience of exoticism, something you see in a glass case for instance, or at a fair. Others might not know a culture beyond the village next to them. Clearly, this is not true today. Identity becomes hard to preserve when it is such a crowded field, so more extreme demonstrations manifest themselves.
Are there any New Yorkers here who remember the three or four old Puerto Rican men that rode around the East Village on souped up bicycles with Puerto Rican flags flying from the monkey bars and a boombox playing mamba?
Traditions get written down when they're dying, when nobody really performs them anymore or the last people who remember how and why it was done die.
Then of course, no longer being living, they become fossilised and "we've always done it this way, it can be done no other way" when revivalists and re-enactors use the written texts as to how to perform them.
> Traditions get written down when they're dying, when nobody really performs them anymore or the last people who remember how and why it was done die
Not always, sometimes they just get written down when somebody thinks to write them down.
An example of a recently-fossilised tradition in Australia is the Democracy Sausage. Sure, you've been able to buy a sausage (in a slice of white bread, with optional sauce and onions) outside most polling stations on election day for many decades, but nobody ever talked about it as a *thing* -- sausage sizzles are common at all sorts of community events. But then in 2014 someone labelled it a "Democracy Sausage", and the name caught on, and all of a sudden instead of just being a thing that happens it's an Important Australian Tradition that we buy a sausage when we go to vote. It's an Observed Tradition, instead of an unobserved tradition, and now it's somehow worse.
They also get written down whenever someone wants to write a story in a setting where those traditions are relevant, e.g. Jane Austen and Regency England.
It's not just a matter of them being "written down" for the first time, since writing goes back much longer than that. The 19th century saw the rise of nationalism, with rulers promoting traditions in order to forge new national identities over previously divided lands.
But the nineteenth century did not invent the invention of traditions. We can see rulers attempting this by decreeing new festivals over a millennium before Christ. We see this in the written record.
I'd argue that it's actually easier to change tradition in the modern world rather than preserve it, and that traditionalists are likely a common issue across history. To back up that point, please note the nineteenth-century collections of traditions don't generally mention Father Christmas, but he seems to have his own holiday nowadays.
That's very true. When people were struggling to assert their 'national identity' against governments that lumped them all in together and treated the mixed population as 'some animals are more equal than others', they were doing so in order to prove that they had a culture and civilisation before the conquerors came along to graciously bestow such upon them.
That meant a lot of cobbling scraps together and when you couldn't get the scraps, you made it up.
Geoffrey Keating in the 17th century compiled the Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (The History of Ireland) as a rebuttal of the English claims that the Irish were a bunch of muck savages until the Norman conquest and finally a superior people arrived to civilise them:
This involved going back to the literal creation of the world and tracing Irish culture down the centuries, which clearly isn't history:
"It begins with a preface in which Keating defends the honour of Ireland against the denigrations of writers such as Giraldus Cambrensis, followed by a narrative history in two parts: part one, from the creation of the world to the arrival of Christianity in the 5th century, and part two, from the 5th century to the coming of the Normans during the 12th century.
It depicts Ireland as an autonomous, unitary kingdom of great antiquity. The early part of the work is largely mythical, depicting the history of Ireland as a succession of invasions and settlements, and derives primarily from medieval writings such as the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Dindsenchas, royal genealogies and stories of heroic kings. The later part depicts the Normans as the latest of this series of settlers."
This even started in the 12th century with Gerald of Wales, writing the propaganda-cum-defence of the Norman invasion as being to civilise the Irish and bestow true religion upon them. So when cultures have been repressed and destroyed, there's often not much left to reconstruct, so you fill in the gaps as best you can.
I think for the American context you can see this with revivals of Native American culture; some of it is building on existing tradition and lore, but there's a lot of room for the romantic dreamers to come along and create their own version of "what the Natives were like in the past before the colonisers arrived" which has little to no relationship to reality.
People didn't sit around and discover the need to invent an anthem. Before streaming there was TV & radio in bars, Before that, people sang in bars, they sang when they worked, they sang when they walked and soldiers sang when they marched.
Go read War & Peace, when the Russian army moves out, the order is for singers and castanets to the front.
Many of Lewis Carroll's parodies of the verse Victorian children were expected to memorize are remembered and quoted by people who have never seen the things he was parodying, and may not even know they existed.
I'm certainly fond of "You Are Old, Father William" (which my wife likes to quote to me), but I also like "How Doth the Little Crocodile." The second verse, about the owl and the panther, is brilliant, with its truncated ending that leaves a space for the child hearing the story to shout out "... eating the owl!"
Martin Gardner, who used to write for Scientific American, produced The Annotated Alice, both of the Alice books with extensive notes. I've owned a copy for decades. Amazon has listings for it. Among other things, it has the French and German versions of "Jabberwocky."
Gardner's Annotated Alice is excellent, recommend. Might be a good future book review for someone. Gardner also did an annotated version of Caroll's The Hunting of the Snark.
Yep, I came here to mention Weird Al. And the trope formerly known as the Weird Al Effect, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParodyDisplacement, which has many examples, including *many* from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on the Literature subpage, such as "Let's pretend" at the time meaning "Let's deceive".
The bit in the post reminded me of "White and Nerdy", his parody of Chamillionaire's "Ridin' Dirty". The original was a huge hit in its own right, but Chamillionaire has said in interviews (and his acceptance speech when he won a Grammy for the original) that he thinks the Weird Al version was better.
Ern Malley might be a better example - it was intended as a Sokal-type hoax, but people like the fake poetry of the style being satirize better than anything the perpetrators of the hoax ever wrote in their own style.
"A celebrant dressed up as a green agricultural deity figure, paraded through the street, and then got ritually murdered."
Given all the people who have been murdered as part of rituals in the past, I don't like this usage of "ritually murdered". You should put quotes around "murdered", like the wikipedia article on Jack in the Green which uses "'slain'".
I can't believe you would threaten my family* like that.
(*Note: As I writer, when I write "threaten my family" I mean "mildly criticize me". I don't tell you how to write, so no one had better tell me this is confusing or inflammatory!)
*gasp* Bed? Did you just assume TonyZa's sleeping arrangements? How do you know Tony doesn't use a futon? Or a hammock? Come on, how insensitive can you get?!?
Especially for Sam Kriss who has always written in a fairly dreamlike manner. His long form writing isn't a rationalist attempt at easily digestible evaluated facts but something far more ambiguous.
If someone is among the first people to read something on a blog, sees a passage which was confusing or misleading to them, and thinks it will be confusing to other people, then I think it is totally justified to recommend a change or addition. I'm not sure why this would be bad...?
So are you saying that the use to which Enigma objects would lead people reading this to believe that yes, every year in Hastings a man is genuinely for real killed in a public ceremony?
If so, I think we've got bigger problems than merely being confused or misled!
The original one with Christopher Lee, yes, and loved it; it's a magnificent mess and skewers all sides - the pagan freedom of Summerisle is just as much a trap as the society on the mainland, because their beliefs and sacrifices won't, in fact, restore the agricultural bounty that - probably - the first Lord Summerisle obtained by using up whatever fertility was in the soil to get the amazing harvests. He burned through the resources of what is an isolated island, in his arrogance that he was a 'scientist' who understood such things, and the society he created to enable that is now doomed because his grandson truly believes the fake traditions he crafted.
Haven't seen the remake version because I don't know what they can do to make it better or different.
The remake is worse, as expected. There's also a sequel (not sure if it's just a book or was also made into a movie) in which the next years harvest also fails and Lord Summerisle does the right thing and has himself burned in the next wicker man.
My favorite story is seeing the original movie in a theater where there was a bunch of probable neo-pagans in the audience - they were loudly laughing and cheering during the horrific ending and getting weird looks.
Also - the soundtrack album (for the original) is excellent.
Maybe because I'm in England but I thought the context firmly established this was make believe. Unless you believe the original Wicker Man (or Midsommer Murders I guess) to be a documentary I think we can safely assume public ritual murder in the UK is simulated.
I remember as a kid reading a book which mentioned Guy Fawkes Night traditions and coming away confused about whether the guy that got burned was a real guy or not. The question played on my mind for some time, which is why I still remember it now.
The ambiguity is built in though, as it's an effigy of a real person. It is at heart a repeated execution of a Catholic traitor (which if those us more important is an interesting question...) as an act of public homage to the existing order (despite the fact that was destroyed by two civil wars and a revolution in the next century). The idea that this is the real person and not some abstract representation is important to this.
The literal words are still the wrong words. If I read the phrase "The English have a custom where they bake a pie in their toilet and eat it", even though the probability of that being true is extremely low, I'm more likely to conclude that the author is lying or mistaken than I am to conclude that "toilet" is meant to be read as a make-believe toilet that is portrayed by a baking dish.
My objection is to the phrase "ritually murdered" being used to describe a non-murder during a ritual. It's just one data point ... I'm sure others have used it this way and see no problems with it, maybe because they think rituals are make-believe anyway? I think that too, but to me, a ritual just means a rite, a ceremonial practice, as opposed to a practice done freely, and is completely orthogonal to whether something is metaphorical.
I'm curious: if he just said the man was "murdered" at the end, not "ritually murdered", would you have had a problem with that? Or would you have understood equally well that it was meant to be simulated?
As someone who has read more than anyone should about folklore, Mummers plays, Morris dancing, Calusari, Kukeri etc. the phrase "ritual murder" is common scholarly jargon.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are saying that someone reading the sentence "A celebrant dressed up as a green agricultural deity figure, paraded through the street, and then got ritually murdered." would genuinely think that a real person was really killed in public by a mob and nothing is done about it, there are no arrests or investigations or charges, no, this is what Modern England is like, it's legal or at least acceptable to have a big ceremony and perform a ritual sacrifice?
Even I don't have that bad an opinion of the English. Someone who thinks "The Wicker Man" was a documentary needs a lot of looking after and should not be allowed out in public on their own.
"(I)f he just said the man was "murdered" at the end, not "ritually murdered"... would you have understood equally well that it was meant to be simulated?"
Well, you know, given the whole GREEN AGRICULTURAL DEITY, IN PUBLIC, PARADING DOWN THE STREET IN BROAD DAYLIGHT, PART OF A CEREMONY, yeah, I think I might just possibly feebly grasp that meaning with my few and meagre wits.
Also there's the other important question: with all the ancient sites in Britain why would we do our ritual murders in the streets of Hastings? That's just bad manners. You don't even fight battles at Hastings (that was at nearby Battle).
I literally addressed this point with an analogy in the comment you are replying to, and you in no way addressed the substance of my point. Namely, that I won't ignore the meaning of someone's words just because it is unlikely ... instead, I'll conclude the person is mistaken.
Words mean things.
Or do they? Helicopter vanguard brazen crack clipper nut warden. Salami train porcupine. Toast.
Your analogy was not very pertinent; it may be possible that there is some strange new craze for baking pies in toilets (probably a TikTok challenge).
But if you honestly think it is possible to read a description of "someone dressed up as a fertility god parades down the public street and then, in an organised ceremony, is really for true killed, in an English town, in this year" then I submit you have a very odd view of England.
Picking the strained interpretation because you want your quotation marks is not supportable. We know what modern day England is like, and that even today you can't commit murder in public in the view of hundreds of witnesses in a public place and expect nothing to happen to you with regards to the police or the law.
Now, maybe if this was a report on Papua New Guinea, it might be possible to wonder "hey, is there some obscure Stone Age tribe still doing things like this today?" But Hastings in 2024?
Did you watch "The League of Gentlemen" as an accurate documentation of rural English life?
Would you like clarification of "Then everyone drank and partied and had a good time"? Did Scott mean a birthday party? Was 'the good time' everyone had that they got new watches? What did they drink - water? petrol? orange juice? sulphuric acid? If he doesn't explain it all in detail, then just because it's unlikely doesn't mean that they didn't drink sulphuric acid!
There was no reference to "modern times" in the paragraph in question:
"There were hints of this in Sam Kriss’ otherwise-excellent article about a fertility festival in Hastings, England. A celebrant dressed up as a green agricultural deity figure, paraded through the street, and then got ritually murdered. Then everyone drank and partied and had a good time."
But even "murdered" in quotes shows the horrid, horrid word! Let us adopt the decent obscurity of an earlier age, and use dashes to only hint at the gory term:
"Ritually m_________d" is much better, do we not all agree? It allow the free play of fancy so we can choose to insert a word of our own preference as to the fate of Jack; "minded" or "mulched" or "monitored" or "measured" or some more pleasant term, for those too tender-hearted to be able to bear the very association of ritual sacrifice in effigy with the too-too-solid throat-cutting of the past.
Ha! I misunderstood Scott's language (it took me maybe 20 seconds to work it out). But I also misunderstood your comment as being about political correctness instead of clarity.
Yeah ... it's more like, it belies a childish worldview from someone who has lots of fun doing fake ritual murders, to the point where "ritual murder" to them is most likely to refer to a fun simulated activity, whereas the truth of the phrase is different.
An analogous thing would be if someone only knew about the Spanish Inquisition from the monty python sketch, and started using the phrase "Inquisition-like" to describe things as being harmless, not actually performing any torture at all. It's not that it's politically incorrect, but that it's historically illiterate.
Yeah I was actually surprised when reading that Vercingetorix was ritually garroted, he's actually garroted instead of whatever symbolic things that should be done
Feel like you just could have written a book review of Bloom’s “Anxiety of Influence,” which every English major used to have to read from like, 1975-1985. Now every English major doesn’t have to read, at all.
I wish we could apply this to armchair Internet philosophers. "Describe one unique feature of your thought." "How do your views differ from a generic example of your school?" "Name one thing you believe that a typical person in your time and place would not choose to believe solely in order to maintain their circle of friendships?"
> Name one thing you believe that a typical person in your time and place would not choose to believe solely in order to maintain their circle of friendships?"
Do you mean by this to intentionally behave in untruthful ways?
(“Untruthful” does a lot of work here I know.)
I cannot imagine pretending to like a certain kind of music just so I can hang out with a few fellows who
like that kind of music, for instance.
Of course, if I lived in a world where my friends could turn me into the Gestapo, that might change my thinking. I guess the moral of that is to really know who your friends are.
No! I mean that people need to be individuals. ("Freedom is the only way!") Or, well, they don't *need* to be individuals, but if they want to be artistically or philosophically interesting, they do. Or, well, they can still be interesting without being individual, but they certainly have to have the insight necessary to look around them and see beneath the surface of what's going on. And if that doesn't reveal something about themselves to their inner eyes, then I suppose that can be interesting in itself.
I don't think it's "pretending", really, just ... often the reason why people like things, is because other people around them like the same things, and there's a contagious enthusiasm and a sense of camaraderie. But if you separate the people, and let them all have a similar experience individually, and then have them state a reaction, you can sow the seeds of discord. Suddenly they'll have stated an opinion that wasn't vetted by the group. Suddenly they become aware of the pressure, and face the choice of whether to hide or go boldy forth, and if the latter, whether to back down from a challenge or whether to continue onwards. (Sometimes I'm practicing that latter thing on ACX, picking a position and making a case for it, regardless of my own opinion. Not here, though.)
> if I lived in a world where my friends could turn me into the Gestapo
According to Hannah Arendt, this worked both ways. Normal Germans who didn't make waves and went along with the current opinions of polite society, rapidly succumbed to Nazism. But even Gestapo, when posted to countries (like Denmark) where there was principled resistance, became unreliable because they went native. The theory is that they weren't used to disagreement, to having to justify themselves, and to arguing with peers that they respected, and so when faced with steadfast resistance, they crumpled and gave in and started subverting the Holocaust.
>don't *need* to be individuals, but if they want to be artistically or philosophically interesting, they do. Or, well, they can still be interesting without being individual, but they certainly have to have the insight necessary to look around them and see beneath the surface of what's going on
True enuff. Let who you are be the person you want to be.
Interesting. What year do you think the cutoff for the various humanities is? i.e., if I am interested in learning about literature, after what year can I ignore literary criticism?
Even by the time that Bloom writes “Anxiety” (1973), his kind of literary criticism is seen as pretty old-fashioned. So somewhere in the late 60’s, maybe early 70’s. I like Barthes and Sontag, but as the 70’s go on most literary theory becomes bad political theory.
It seems that being mentally healthy requires some tension between respect for the value of what came before while being open to the possibilities of what could come. I think this is part of the left/right distinction. Finding any kind of value in the past is a reminder of things like, constraints and the propensity of man to foolishness: inherently consvervative ways or thinking. Left wing movements have generally focused more on how we ought to, and must move forward. Right wing movements have generally been more focused on preserving good things from the past, sometimes at the cost of preventing good changes.
Actually maybe this could be simplified as, “respect for the past makes much more sense if you think value is real, rather than purely socially constructed.” If value is purely socially constructed than anything can be beautiful if enough intellectuals deem it so. Honoring the past implicitly challenges the power of intellectuals to define the “true” values now.
Economists will tell you that value is a social construct. If someone else has something you value, and you have something they value more than the thing they have, trade is possible and beneficial. That's how free markets create wealth from whole cloth.
This doesn’t make it a “social construct”so much as “has a socially transmitted component”. If it were a pure social construct, people could just agree they were all wealthy and then they would be.
What's wrong with believing that you are wealthy? The value of something you possess is entirely of your own decision. If, in your own mind, you have everything you want, who is to gainsay you?
The problem is when you starve to death. Which is the point: there is actually objective practical value to things (like food and clothing and shelter), even if how much we subjectively value them is societal.
My kid saying he’s hungry and my inability to feed him would gainsay me. My brother asking for help and my inability to help him would gainsay me.
Yes, I am indeed aware that “subjective theory of value” is indeed a thing. But there is nothing subjective about, ie, the need to keep my body temperature regulated. Nor is there anything subjective about the need for controlling flows of energy if i am going to do this reliably.
Denying that our computation of value comes from psychological judgements is of course an error. So is denying that if a group values something, soon others will as well. But I think it’s also mistake to imagine that value is merely some purely mental phonemena. Economists tend to agree that revealed preference is a thing. I would say that the ability to exert force along a distance - ie work - is the only thing that reveals and thus communicates true value. The vector along which true value is transmitted is the exertion of force.
Values communicated in other forms are, I think, just symbols pointing to the intentional expenditure of energy.
Subjective but not arbitrary. Crucially, if you value something, anyone who cares about you will value that thing. Including negative cases where they wish to gain power over you by controlling that thing.
That sounds like the opposite of a social construct, as the whole basis for trade is that value is individually subjective as opposed to socially agreed.
Your value for something is subjective, but if you wish to trade it with someone else, then you need them to agree that it's more valuable to them than something else they already have. Hence the "social construct" requirement for trade.
nah, I think you're confusing subjective value with price. value is socially constructed insofar as it gets aggregated into a single price across a market. But for an individual, their subjective valuation doesn't necessarily depend on what anyone else thinks, and therefore is not socially constructed. The difference between the subjective value and the market price is what generates economic surplus, which is what makes the trade positive sum and thus motivates the trade.
Value is neither something that exists independently of a mind's motivation nor something determined by social consensus. It's just how desirable something is to a particular terminal goal- which means that relative to that one terminal goal, value is objective, but relative to different terminal goals, the value will be different.
Individual people have various terminal goals, as do animals, arguably some collectives, and eventually AGI. As a society, we have various social technologies like laws, deontological moral commitments and social rituals which mitigate the problems caused by all of those terminal goals competing with eachother- ideally turning zero-sum competitions into positive-sum cooperation. Deontological morality, for instance, prevents collective action problems by getting people to precommit to ignoring their individual incentives in certain situations- in the long term, allowing those people to get a lot more of what they value from comparative advantage.
None of that is something that's subject to the whims of the elite- you value what you value objectively, and different social technologies will objectively give you more or less of it. At the same time, however, those social technologies can be improved. There's still an enormous amount of what you and I value that's lost to pointless red queen races- zero-sum games that could be positive sum.
If we want to make and preserve that progress, we're going need to see things clearly- to understand our values as something particular to us; one side of a negotiation, not the imperative center of the universe.
That might be a universally convergent instrumental goal, along with things like a need for time or a need for existence, but instrumental goals and terminal goals are still two very different things. Most agents want energy in order to promote some specific thing, not for its own sake.
Do you think it matters how much of human activity is about terminal goals vs convergent instrumental subgoals?
Like, suppose the economy consists mostly of “getting primary energy, turning that into compute and transport”, with some small fraction going to meeting human biological needs, like food etc.
If that were true, wouldn’t it make more sense to view the pursuit of mechanisms for advancing instrumental goals (free energy and the ability to deploy it either to run code or move stuff around) as being independent and in a real sense “objectively good for all rational agents” rather than “mere artifacts of human desires?”
Most of the activity in the economy isn't going into maximizing energy use- if that was the only thing we cared about, we'd all be living in maximally spartan barracks inside of vast power plants, devoting all of our attention to increasing the power output, and then expending that power in some maximally efficient way, like releasing it as heat. Instead, we're very willing to create and use less energy if it means that the energy goes into things we actually value for their own sake- like having pleasant lives, doing signaling competitions, and so on.
At the limit, if any agent were given a choice between having infinite energy that could only be used to harm the things they value and having no energy, they'd choose the latter. In the real world, lesser versions of that tradeoff are ubiquitous. Watching a movie leaves you with less control of energy than saving the money; buying a large, comfortable car leaves you with less control of energy than buying a very small but equally reliable car; letting your daughter play and enjoy childhood leaves you with less control of energy than making her work in a sweatshop. In all of those cases, you're consuming energy to get something- not as a means to have more energy later, but because you value that thing for its own sake.
More control of energy is valuable, but depending on an agent's terminal goals, other things can be more valuable. If you want to figure out what best promotes what everyone in a society values, therefore, "more energy" is very insufficient.
Well, they'd still need to use some energy to cause their death. But maybe an agent with the terminal goal of not using any energy would count- they would need to use a bit of energy to decide to stop thinking, but that wouldn't really be a intentional decision, so calling it a convergent goal might be a stretch.
If u thought value is "real" instead of subjective I wouldn't be more prone to searching for it in Ancient Rome. I think naval engineering is "real", but that doesn't inspire modern engineers to recreate the Roman Trireme. Instead they resort to the scientific method. As you would when you're analysing a "real" phenomenon.
Fun Fact: This is literally the origin of the terms left and right wing - In the early part of the French Revolution the national assembly ended up naturally sorting itself in physical space according to how much each figure wanted to preserve old institutions or enact radical change, with the former ending up by chance on the right and the latter on the left respectively.
Billy Collins, Mary Szybist, Kathleen Raine, Grace Paley….
….you know where a good place to start might be is the popular “Good Poems” anthology curated by Garrison Keillor. It’s a mix of older and newer poems but plenty of excellent ones from the past 50 years for sure.
I saw “the lushness of it” by Mary Szybist the other day, and liked it. Though if someone doesn’t like modern poetry, I wouldn’t expect them to like it!
Well, it managed to convince me there's some value in the non-rhyming format; ending lines in an expression of half a thought does have an evocative effect that basic prose wouldn't.
On the other hand, "Keep on floating there, cradled, unable to burn." Fruit never expires, indeed.
I’ve only read one Billy Collins’ poem - “The Lanyard” - but I liked it. I think that disqualifies it though. It’s too “Life in These United States”. I have no opinion on whether he’s a hack, but I’m aware of the charge.
He could be much less of a hack and he’d never escape the label.
I also like the Vaudeville aspect of M*A*S*H and if we ever go back to having broadcast TV, and I have a working TV which I don’t currently - I could see watching it with my supper. TV trad style. Or after the ten o’clock news.
Thank you, and everyone, for the many suggestions, will explore.
The funny thing is, it was Garrison Keillor's NRP poetry feature that did the most work turning me against modern poetry. There was this "poem for the day" thing he did, and I often caught it during commute. And - every time it left me with this sense, like, I was listening to crappy pompous prose read out loud. There was neither rhyme nor rhythm to any of these, and it felt like a bunch of words strung together to create some pretense of deep meaning, but there was really none. I was, like, I want Dr. Seuss back! Green Eggs and Ham to spare the misery.
The term "modern poetry" usually refers to poetry from the early 20th century, represented by poets such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, etc.
Sorry, none of these. For example, Ms. Bishop writes:
"Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.[...]"
And this is what I want to do with it:
"Although it is a cold evening,
down by a fishhouse
an old man sits, a-netting,
his net, a dark purple-brown.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and eyes water.[...]".
And Andrea Cohen's piece is a wonderful short story, excellent prose, really:
"I’m tired of meaning, says the tortoise to the hare, who agrees. The lions and crows don’t disagree, and the snake chimes in: It would be better if we didn’t have to moonlight as morality lessons.
Exactly, says the chicken. I’d like to let loose once in a while, I’d like to stretch my wings, she says.
Yes, says the fox. You should get out of your pen more, says the fox. You should let me help, says the fox, opening the latch to the evening.
It was a fine evening and a fine conclusion they were coming to, thought the fox, helping the chicken out of her feathers."
Fantastic! But why it's called a "poem" eludes yours truly.
But - good prose doesn’t good poetry make. These two things are supposed to be different. Maybe i have an old-fashioned view of poetry, I expect at least one of the two: rhyme or rhythm.
I have to say, looking at how you have it written out without the line breaks, it doesn't really look like good prose. Good prose style doesn't put, "says the fox" three times in a row like that. Any prose editor would change that. I think something about the line breaks turns that un-stylish, bad prose repetition of "says the fox, says the fox, says the fox" into something very different. Rhythm is more than just repetition, and it can happen along axes other than syllable count or syllable emphasis position.
Hah! This conversation was just happening a couple days ago, and today a sorta ACX-adjacent art/aesthetics nerd published this post on "Poetry's return to form": https://www.ruins.blog/p/poetrys-return-to-form
I'm not putting this forward as an example of "Here is some poetry I say are good and you should like it," but "Hey, this guy says these have been constructed with more 'old-school' goals--including meter and rhyme--and can be usefully analyzed with more of the standard old-school tools than ...what is usually the case for most current poetry!"
This post is awesome, it's like the guy looked into my head and expressed my thoughts about poetry 100X better than I possibly could. And then this:
"The celebrated poetry of our day is stupid, asinine, humiliating, sterile, laborious, ugly, treacherous, posturing, insulting, worthless, destructive, licentious, false and an all around affront to decency and greatness. And when it is not busy being a grotesque monstrosity, it addresses us as naked propaganda, not even having the courtesy of making itself comely."
"it’s by a Victorian Brit" - a strange way to describe Lord Macaulay. The term 'Brit' is borderline offensive, and should be laid to rest. Macaulay should be described as British or Scottish.
I hadn't heard that the term "Brit" is offensive. It is a shortened version of a word, which is common with disrespectful terms https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/is-libby-a-slurhtml but that's also a general feature of language over time.
Some people use it as a slur but for a word used as a slur to actually be offensive the people it is aimed at have to actually be in a position where they will see it as offensive. I don't know many fellow brits who would take it as a slur and instead I often hear it used to self-describe! The only place I've heard it effectively used as a slur is in Ireland where when used as a slur it would be aimed at an Irish person to imply that they are too pro-Britain or anglicised.
Can confirm, am a Brit, would use the term in jovial contexts, don't find it offensive. "West Brit" might be offensive to some Irish people in some contexts, but it's a different term.
The colonies were mostly in place before 1704 (Act of Union creating the United Kingdom) so you were actually colonised by the English. Canada is the British colonies...
While my late wife and I moved to South Carolina in late 2020, I still have no idea how typical people here regard the term "Yanks" as a term for all USAians, by people outside the USA...
Is there any analogous term in European nomenclature for the winners of some 19th century war in Europe that is similarly extended to include the losers of said war?
"Yankee" is a flexible term that basically means "someone culturally closer to rural New England than me and/or you", for all possible speakers. For non-Americans, yeah, it means all Americans. And most Americans understand this and are OK with it.
I also would be interested to hear of analogous terms for other groups.
Why is it that shortened descriptors of ethnic/national origin are inevitably thought of as slurs? Such as Jap/Japanese, Jew/Jewish, Black/African American. They are perfectly serviceable as shorthand and mean the exact same things. Is there a slur effect that increases the less syllables a descriptor has?
> This is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me
I really would love to hear specific examples of arguments for being "trad" that you had in your mind when writing this. Most arguments for being "trad" that I hear are from people who want to argue to roll back recent progressive changes in society. In this context I think it is fair to point out that the past they want to go back to wasn't as great as they imagine.
The example I gave was people supporting 1950s nuclear families. If you don't like nuclear families and you think that 1950s families were actually bad for the people in them, that's a fine argument. But instead I hear people say:
- "Not all people in the 1950s had nuclear families"
- "Nuclear families were only characteristic of a brief period in the 19th and 20th centuries and aren't the most traditional possible family structure"
- "The 1950s also had other bad things, like racism, so liking their family structure is racist"
The people I hear supporting 1950s nuclear families are people who are opposing all other sorts of families, describing them as inferior to 1950s nuclear families and often proposing legal discrimination against people not in 1950s nuclear families.
The first two are perfectly reasonable arguments for saying "you can't get back 1950s society by forcing everyone into 1950s nuclear families because that's not how the 1950s worked" and the last is an argument for "and you maybe don't want to get back 1950s society anyway".
If "supporting 1950s nuclear families" means doing so as an aesthetic choice that people can make, then that's very different from supporting them by taxing everyone else to bribe people into living in them.
'The first two are perfectly reasonable arguments for saying "you can't get back 1950s society by forcing everyone into 1950s nuclear families because that's not how the 1950s worked" '
Only the first argument is about that. And "not all"-arguments are typically missing the point.
In such cases it is important to be open, clear and specific about your critique. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but since you would like a 1950s family, I'm going to assume that you'd also like to force the rest of society to return to the 1950s with respect to gay rights, (...whichever other things you intend to critique...). But actually at that time, (...your critique...)." By being explicit about the assumption, you'd make it easier for people to deny the assumption is correct, and therefore avoid derailing the conversation.
doesn't seem to hold, thus I am a progressive in this area, or even dare I say a radical: to the guillotine with all who do not uphold honest standards of argumentation! (Knowing that my turn would inevitably come, as I am weak and at times succumb.)
It's not all that relevant whether the traditionalists in question are arguing for pressuring/coercing people into nuclear families, or merely advocating for them as a voluntary choice. Either way, if they make the argument that they worked well in the 50s, then it's a relevant counterargument if the 50s didn't actually work like that, otherwise it isn't. If they are arguing for pressure/coercion, that just makes the stakes of the debate higher.
I don't want a 1950s family in particular, I'd take a 1940s, 1970s or other period family of the majority at the time which was: two parents, married to each other, generally had the children within marriage, both parents are the parents of those children (save in the case of adoption or stepchildren).
Not everybody wants that, not everybody likes that, not everybody would thrive in that. But we shoved that notion of the family out in the name of progressive change, and surprise surprise, it didn't work out to be all gumdrops and lollipops. The people most in need of the support both to be in that institution and support for that institution had the foundations knocked away from underneath it; meanwhile, the liberals pushing for Fwee Wuv ended up going the traditional route of "get married before having kids, don't have kids by multiple partners, don't get divorced".
We've talked on here about consistency in views with regards to other posts, so I'm going to go right ahead and be that monster: yeah, some family structures *are* inferior. Johnnie and Susie live with Mommy and Daddy who are not married, and they get on just fine? I'm glad, but I do think it would be much better if Mommy and Daddy were married.
Gay marriage? Eh, as civil marriage, sure, right now it's no worse than straight marriage. That's down to the mess we've made of straight marriage by chipping away at it, and yes I think it would be good to roll back some of those changes.
So to sum up: do I want to go back to a time when all gay people were in the closet for fear of being Mathew Shepharded? No. But I maybe wouldn't mind some rollback on Pride all over the place for June, and certainly the Drag Trans Queens For Toddlers stuff can go away without me weeping salt tears over it.
Expanding on the above: Pride parades where everyone marches and is plastered with rainbows? Sure, why not, every special interest group gets their parade time. Seventy different flags* for the ever-increasing sub-sections of 'queerness', plus puppy play and kink on display for kids? You can stuff that right back in the closet.
If you can tell me, with evidence of any sort, that this photo is a fake I would genuinely be very grateful and glad to hear that:
> meanwhile, the liberals pushing for Fwee Wuv ended up going the traditional route of "get married before having kids, don't have kids by multiple partners, don't get divorced"
I don't think this is true. Yes, the people who are most elite went that route, but elite!=progressive.
I'm not talking about current day progressives, I do mean liberals. Like the woman I love to hate, Ivana Bacik. (Well, I don't hate her, I just got tired of seeing her mug on the news all the time back in the 80s).
"Bacik's policies have been described as liberal and social democratic; In 2004 she was described as "Labour's queen of political correctness" in an Irish Independent opinion piece."
Made her name, back when she and I were of an age (or at least around five years of it) as a student radical out of - of course - Trinity College. From a background that I think the current acronym to describe is PMC (Professional-Managerial Class); became the president of the students' union at Trinners, was on the tea time news often agitating in favour of abortion.
Got her law degree, went on to have a career that has culminated in her being the current leader of the Irish Labour Party (a lot of student union officers do seem to take that as the first step on the cursus honorum to political life) and is married, to a man, and they have two kids in perfect cis heteronormative patriarchal traditional style.
Most of those amenities are cheap enough now that they're over the hump of economies-of-scale. What we need is an LVT, to pop the bubble of real-estate speculation. Not many people can afford houses at all when modest-sized vacant lots cost more than a decade's pay.
At least in the most expensive areas, the price of housing is primarily a function of the NIMBYist cartel, not the actual cost of construction or materials. (And you can't roll back wages, anyway, so only the "materials" part is particularly relevant).
The best argument I've heard for older social organizations is David Brooks' "The Nuclear Family was a Mistake," which basically argues for extended families living together, or very close to each other. It doesn't argue that everyone was happier, exactly, but that we've traded up for more privacy an autonomy at the expense of built-in fallback systems that come with, say, having lots of cousins around to baby sit.
That seems to make sense, but the brute fact is that collectively speaking, we *have* made the trade. Society gave lots of people the choice, and the ability to afford each option, and people largely opted to stop living together as large extended families. As long as we keep the choice open, I don't care either way - if a number of people start deciding to live together as extended families again, more power to them! But pointing out that something is somehow "better" is pretty toothless when people are clearly and freely making the opposite choice.
Eh, put a free unlimited cocaine dispenser in front of people and you'd find that a few months down the line a large portion of them are addicted to it. They all made the free choice (at least initially) to take the cocaine but that doesn't tell you anything about the relative merits of being a cocaine junkie vs not being one.
Yeah that's what we seem to be doing to ourselves with social media for example.
I don't think it works for major life decisions like nuclear vs extended vs alone vs poly or whatever though, because you do that for decades on end and you're not particularly hijacking your dopamine system in the process, so any random time you should be able to take some alone time and evaluate your life choices. People seem to do it!
Sure, the proliferation of free cocaine dispensaries (also known as superstimuli) is a decent metaphor for the modern world, but nobody has a good idea yet of how to deal with it. People haven't really moved past the "just ban it" universal remedy idea, which doesn't work that well in practice, for both real and metaphorical cocaine.
Okay but it totally does? Way less people do cocaine than would if cocaine was sold at gas stations. Weed legalization has definitely made people smoke way more weed.
The good argument against prohibition is that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, not that there's no juice.
The happy medium is that you live in a nuclear family but within a short drive to your parents and siblings. Then you marry someone from the same general area so you can also live near their parents and siblings. You don't all need to live together in the same house
I would love to have my parents nearby, but I don't really want to live with them. And when my kids are grown up I would love to have them close by, but wouldn't want to live with them either.
Yeah that sounds like a cozy and reasonably practical arrangement for all concerned. But, just to continue the argument, how far would you go to ensure that? If you happen to really like someone whose family is 1500 miles away, do you go "sorry dear, it's not going to work"?
Or, assume you do just as you say... and then your kids grow up and one of them makes her life in Singapore. It happens!
My point is, we're not going to roll back the practical consequences of having a modern standard of living, and ease of travel is just one of them. (Unless we have a truly huge economic crash that does it for us, of course...)
The problem is that that ties you down to a specific area and its job market, which means making a lot less money than you could be, or in particularly bad cases, having no decent jobs available at all. People don't just move around for shits and giggles.
Seriously are people so far removed from not having the choice that they've forgotten that living with extended family is a f*cking nightmare?? Just trying inviting yout parents to stay with you and your spouse for two weeks...you'll be climbing the walls by day 6 and remember. This is funny to me that people have such a romanticized to view of the past (though really they just wish they had more free babysitters). I know many people who had an active criteria in choosing a spouse that they didn't want to marry someone whose parents lived in the same state...too many arguments about what the families are doing for holidays, too many hurt feelings to negotiate, too many opinions.
The average US household size in the 1790 census was 5.7, down to 2.6 today. But if we eliminate single-person "households", it goes from 5.9 in 1790 to 3.2 today.
Which is significant, but I'm pretty sure most of the variance is in the number of children. In a world where the average women has 7 children, 3.8 of them surviving to adulthood, a 5-6 person family is not one in which the grandparents have moved in (or never left). Multigenerational families under one roof were always in the minority.
>As long as we keep the choice open, I don't care either way - if a number of people start deciding to live together as extended families again, more power to them!
I think there is a collective action problem here. If there are a bunch of advantages of parents and both of their kids live within a short drive of each other, but if the advantages degrade a lot as soon as any of them moves away, this only works if _all_ of them agree to it. And a lot of people in careers with opportunities that aren't uniformly spread across the country have very strong incentives to move where the jobs are.
It could be that living close together with one's clan has good and bad sides and the bad sides are slightly stronger. E.g. women living with their in-laws having more heart-attacks [needs a reference].
I guess it's that there's lots of unsubtle disadvantages (personal conflicts, lack of freedom) and subtle advantages (stability, more hands to help) that calculating the trade off becomes difficult.
The main societal benefits to smaller family units aren't privacy and autonomy but a more dynamic economy a la the themes in _The Weirdest People in the World_. If cousins don't leave home, they can't move to the place where their skills will be most valued.
That may be a benefit of not having very strong norms *against* leaving your extended family, but what fraction of families have even one member with a specialized enough profession that they can't all find a decent job in the same city?
The norm these days is adult children moving away (at the latest when they marry/cohabit with a romantic partner) even if they stay in the same town. There are plenty of large extended families all living in the same city, but apart.
It's not at all about finding a *decent* job. The difference between finding a decent job as a software engineer in Indianapolis and a great job as a software engineer in the Bay Area could be literally an order of magnitude of productivity.
Perhaps, but my point stands that the number of people who move for such reasons is (I think) much smaller than the number of people who just move out to a separate home in the same (or a nearby) town because that's the norm/to get privacy and autonomy.
Tightly woven social structures are a response to a precarious existence where you need friends to avoid dying after every poor harvest. There's a reason they tend to go away when societies get richer.
That's the thing, right? The thoughtless "I can show you what an idiot you are for thinking that" statement.
"On Blueberry Hill was the number one song - for two years! in the '50s" was always my thoughtless bleat. I have long ago let that one go - because the '50s don't get much idolization anymore and because it is incorrect, I think.
The one I still hold on to is against the fascination with the 1964 New York World's Fair.
You feel bad you missed standing in line on a blacktop in August for three hours just to see a dishwasher?
They left me home for some reason (Mom and Dad and brother Felix).
There's much less of an incentive to hold world's fairs in a world where you can just go on Youtube and see as much as you want about life in other countries at any time from the comfort of your own house.
If Emmanuel Todd is to be believed, the nuclear family was *the* family structure throughout our hunter-gatherer past. Yes, it was "undifferentiated", meaning that sometimes there were multiple generations of adults, sometimes there was polygyny, and sometimes there was matrilocality (the new family living with/near the "wife's" family), and usually there were kin nearby, but it was dominant, he says.
It's also the defining feature of northwest European family systems, that he claims gave rise to the renaissance, the enlightenment, and the industrial revolution.
The "I Love Lucy"/"Jetsons" nuclear family is the Hollywood form, of course, and is as much like actual families as Hollywood criminal forensics is like real criminal forensics.
The baby boom did indeed happen. In our lower-working-class, first-ring suburb of an industrial urban center, most kids had both parents - I can't recall any who didn't. Most children also had siblings; I can't think of a single only child. In the US, more children were born in 1957 than in any other year (apparently), so you had an entire generation having kids at the same time, most of them (statistically) with dads around. That is the nuclear family; I don't understand the confusion or the debate.
"Nuclear" is the label for a family structure in which a household consists of an adult couple and their children only. Other family structures, the great majority until quite recently, are some form of patriarchal (couples live with the husband's father (and probably mother)) and/or polygamous; and these days, single-parent. (Matriarchal exists but is rare.)
The debate is members of the woke elite saying "the nuclear family is not necessary for the well-being of the children", and experts saying, "yes it is", and the woke saying "people who had nuclear families were racist/sexist/X-phobic so that proves nuclear families are bad". The Flynn effect has reversed very fast and very far.
These "other family structures" have never been the majority in US history, unless you count singles and DINKs as "families" in which case they are probably more common *now* but not historically. I've posted the statistics elswhere in this thread.
I keep forgetting about the parochialism here. That's not very interesting, though. The interesting questions are, why did other family structures become dominant in the Old World; are there other as-yet-untried family structures that result in psychologically well-adjusted, healthy children (to a greater degree than those in use); do we want those novel structures; and how do we create and maintain and reinforce them?
"Nuclear" seems like it got distorted somewhere in this thread (and elsewhere?) to mean isolated from other family and neighbors - I'm not sure that was ever the case (concerning the historical definition).
That would be the neolocal nuclear family, in which upon marriage, the new couple forms a household in a new location.
Neolocality arose in parts of northwestern Europe (maybe other places, but there): England, the Paris basin, most of the Low Countries. Its creation was made easier in those places by the custom of sending teenagers to work as waged servants in other (normally wealthier) households. The teenagers saved their wages and married when they had enough to form their own nuclear household. At that decision point, they could move away from their families if they heard wages and conditions were better elsewhere. (They'd already been away from their families for some years by that point, too; so it was easier to leave them again.)
This is considered to be a friction-reducing mechanism for the industrial revolution, helping to explain why it happened where it did. (It also acted as a control for fertility: when wages were low, it took longer to save up enough to form your own household, and less time when wages were high. Women's age at marriage varied from 22 to 28 under this system, much older than in typical Asian family structures in which women were married as teens irrespective of economic conditions.)
Re neighbors, neolocality as a custom both depends on and reinforces high degrees of trust among unrelated people, those very same neighbours. So that was another way in which that family structure helped along the complexification of societies and the industrial revolution.
It all depends on the context of the argument. Often it goes like this:
Simplicio: it would be better for poor black people / the lumpen proletariat / incels to live in 1950s style nuclear families.
Sagredo: Not all people in the 1950s had nuclear families. Specifically, poor black people / the lumpen proletariat / incels didn't generally live in those types of families in the 1950s, either. There are forces preventing them from forming such families.
Simplicio: Marriage should be between one man and one woman because that is the natural family unit. As it says in the bible...
Sagredo: Nuclear families ... aren't the most traditional possible family structure. Most people would have lived with a large extended family that helped with raising children and so on. Many people did not have their own biological children. And of course outside of Europe there were many other family structures.
The third one is a bit difficult to demonstrate in a short dialogue, but if the thing they're complaining about isn't literally racism but rather oppression of women, homophobia, discrimination against nonmarital children and so on, I think it's pretty clear how that connects to idealising the nuclear family.
<i>Sagredo: Not all people in the 1950s had nuclear families. Specifically, poor black people / the lumpen proletariat / incels didn't generally live in those types of families in the 1950s, either. There are forces preventing them from forming such families.</i>
Don't marriage and legitimacy statistics indicate that the vast majority of both poor black people and the lumpen proletariat did actually live in nuclear families during the 1950s? Obviously incels by definition weren't living in nuclear families, but there seem to have been far fewer incels back then as well.
<i>Sagredo: Nuclear families ... aren't the most traditional possible family structure. Most people would have lived with a large extended family that helped with raising children and so on.</i>
Nuclear families were the norm in England since at least the 1200s. Maybe they're not as "most traditional possible" as, say, a hunter-gatherer band, but 800 years is plenty traditional by any reasonable metric.
Since traditions dating before the 19th century would have almost all been local, it's not surprising that the version we see is from the 19th.
For example, yes there were Christmas celebrations before then. But they differed by region, and "region" is pretty small because almost nobody could visit any place more than a couple hours walk away. The exceptions (the rich and the nobility) wouldn't change things much as they had their own celebrations (while they might participate in whatever local ones they happened to be in).
In the 19th though, you did start to see lots of people moving from place to place. The traditions would have rubbed up against each other and sort of melded.
Some of these would have been artificially boosted, but much less than many think. The Santa Claus we know yes was made up by a company. But it became popular because people liked it better than whatever local one they had. You only have to look at the way people reject other attempts at changing tradition, i.e. ones they don't like better, to see this.
As for nationalism (or rather nation-building), the older tradition was to look to the local authorities. If you remove those, they must be replaced with something. If you don't come up with something national (that people will accept), other local authorities will rise. And you might not like them.
An even more fun example of a Christmas tradition made up by a company is that in Japan, it is traditional to eat KFC on Christmas (dating to the 1970s).
Perhaps some actual Finns can correct me if I've got this wrong, but I understand that Santa Claus in Finland is now visually indistinguishable from the American red-suited Santa that we all recognise, but he still goes by his old name of Joulupukki - Yule Goat - harking back to when he was a more wild, horned and hoofed entity.
Similarly, S:t Lucy celebrations - do you have that in Finland as well? - are kinda weakly theoretically connected to the saint cult and to old traditions, but in every way that matters, it's a 19th century construction to invent a tradition.
Yes, St. Lucia celebrations are done in Finland, but they're sometimes considered particularly a Finnish-Swedish tradition. Like it happened in my completely Finnish-speaking school in Eastern Finland but was pretty subdued.
It's not be necessarily that they liked the global Santa better than their local Santa traditions, it's just that the global Santa is louder. And if you tell your kids that Saint Nicholas wears a bishop's hat in green and your kids tell you that they saw on TV that Santa wears a red and white outfit then this is something that you have to resolve.
In Germany these days, they have a confusing fusion of the local and global traditions where St Nikolaus comes on the 6th of December and Santa Claus comes on the 24th.
Why is it "louder"? There are a number of things that are pushed extremely hard, but still don't make it out of their local market.
E.g. NFL, and football in general. There's a *lot* of money there, but they've struggled to get any traction at all outside of the US and Canada. Canada has the rival CFL, but there's not nearly as much money there. I suppose the money in Europe is in soccer.
The global Santa appears to be genuinely popular, as in it shows up in places where it's not pushed. Admittedly, a fellow who's perpetually jolly and gives you "free" stuff is often popular for obvious reasons.
Some of the stuff around Santa though may not make it to some places. When I was young there was the "photos of the children with Santa" thing, which was a lot of effort.
I don't know if that ever made an impression in Europe. It's still here, but I think photos in general aren't as much of an ooh-aah thing as they used to be.
Or for that matter, the whole "bad kids get bad presents", e.g. lumps of coal seems to have gone out of style. People take what they like and leave the rest.
I think what's very important here is to understand that different cultures have radically different relationships to their own pasts. It's only at the end of the 18th C. that many European cultures start to think about themselves in a truly historical sense. Things like the figuration of time in progressive models, or the thinking of articulated historical periods as important to our own understanding of ourselves are radically new.
The very architectonic terms of this debate are ones of an historical culture which is stumbling towards trying to have a rational relationship towards its own past. In the scheme of things, understanding ourselves in an historical frame (instead of eschatalogical, cyclical, transcendental, mythical) is a NEW idea. We're just figuring it out. But we stand in a different relationship to the problem than the Victorians did, if subtly.
Claims about tradition are ALWAYS somewhat constitutive--they to some degree invent the past they want to inherit. But they are also bound to a past, like it or not--culture isn't really something you get absolute free choice in--except perhaps (one must nod towards TS Eliot) "with great labour." I am causally and historically bound to a certain broadly-European tradition that limits the way that I can reflect upon it--the tools I'm given to "invent" tradition are ones given to me by a tradition. It might even be most precise to say that traditions determine the means of their own misapprehension.
Koselleck's "Futures Past" and Löwith's "Meaning in History" are good books on this topic (and I suppose so is Hegel in his own obscure way).
“the thinking of articulated historical periods as important to our own understanding of ourselves are radically new“. I dunno. Marcus Aurelius specifically refers to The Age of Trajan and the Age of Augustus as now belonging to a legendary past. He was placing his own time in historical context, and using it to highlight the transitoriness of existence.
The basic sense that stuff happened in the past--or that it was different than our present--does not constitute a historical sense. When we talk about modernity having a historical consciousness, we are looking at a consciousness that understands what happens in our age as a product of previous ones in ways that don't fit into mythic narratives.
Ovid or the book of Daniel have eschatalogical topoi of a decline from the Golden age--all the pastoral genre plays with this. Plato's Timaeus situates ancient Egypt as an intermediary between the present and myth. Aboriginals in australia understand the present in relation to the "dream time." The medieval period generally saw historical events as essentially a period of cyclic, often meaningless events in a fallen age that were comprehensible only in light of eternity.
The point is that these narrative structures are mythic--they do not pertain to actual historical relations--and basically any events can be narrated within them (take a look at how someone like Glenn Beck understands history--his narrative structure is mythic). Historical consciousness is one which tries to develop narratives structures that emerge FROM events they describe and are not externally imposed. If you look at early 19th C. literature's discussion of history, you see a radical confusion with how to conceive of the historical moment it inhabits. The French revolution has disturbed the old meaning-making frames of history--and trying to fit it into paradigms of eschatology or apocalypse don't actually work to describe what happens. In the wake of the revolution, European consciousness has to look at a couple really interesting problems:
1.) It is obvious that something pretty radical happened in France with the fall of the ancienne regime. People, citizens in a new sense, have a control over history that no-one assumed before. It's not a stretch to say that a new KIND of political consciousness is produced.
2.) Trying to figure out how the French revolution happened is a PROBLEM for history. It turns out that our old narrative structures are wrong, that we don't live in an eschatological frame, and that humans have control over their destiny. We seem both to be a product of our history, and our history seems to have control over us. Our old categories for thinking about history (cycles, ages, eschatology, the book of the world, anagogical, spiritual, mythic), which seemed to be transcendent, didn't actually account for the actual historical happenings, which means those frameworks aren't timeless and eternal, which means they come from somewhere. Our very frameworks for understanding history themselves are historical.
Every civilization has had an understanding that the past is different. Every culture understands the present in light of the past. Not every culture has a responsible way of understanding how present perspectives EMERGE from the past, how our frameworks of interpretation are not transcendent to history, or how consciousness (i.e. a particular way of understanding things) is historical (that is, doesn't stand over-and-above, detached, from the present age). These are uniquely modern problems.
> When we talk about modernity having a historical consciousness, we are looking at a consciousness that understands what happens in our age as a product of previous ones in ways that don't fit into mythic narratives
Well Hegel seems to believe in a supernatural force of progress. Despite you saying it twice I’m not sure how modern historians are so radically different from, say late Roman historians on early Rome.
The book of Daniel seems more like a parody or subversion of the Golden Age trope. The descent from Gold, to Silver, to Bronze, to Iron (in chapter 2) occurs among the pagan kingdoms who have conquered the Jews, not the Jewish people. And the "Golden" empire (Babylon), far from being a source of nostaliga, is the empire that sacked the Temple and deported the elite Jews. From the Jewish perspective of Daniel, these same pagan kingdoms are all depicted as freakish monsters (chapter 7) while the human(e) figure of the Son of Man represents a future Messianic era, not a past "Golden Age" in the standard sense.
Chinese civilization has historically been very into its own history. Maoism changed things, with movements to destroy tradition, but more recently they've promoted Confucianism.
People into the beginnings of the early modern period didn't have a great sense that the past was different to the present beyond a seemingly quite vague sense that at very early dates there were fewer people and that the Romans had something loosely reminiscent of democracy at some point.
I agree that cultures place different values on history. What I disagree with is that European cultures are new to this phenomenon. If you (as you do in another comment) exclude mythic or cyclical history or chronicles (which do not explain events) then Europe has the oldest. Thucydides is about 300 years older than Sima Qian. If you don't then the oldest is the Middle East but Europeans had access to this tradition and used it for over two thousand years.
I'm aware of this revisionist idea. But it relies on dubiously treating the 18th/19th century romantic revisions to history (which were real revisions) as the invention of history itself rather than another revision in an ongoing process that dates continuously back to at least Greek times and arguably back to Egypt and the Middle East. For example, in order to sustain this argument you have to explain that the debate between the Ancients and Moderns (a 17th century phenomenon) did not involve "real" history. Of course, they believed many silly things. But so did people in the 19th century and today. The load bearing distinction between "real" historical relations is arbitrary in a way that's obvious if you poke at it even a little. And there's often a lot of special pleading.
Sure we can define "history" however is conceptually useful. The general argument is that it's conceptually useful to define a "historical consciousness" and associated modern concepts of history with the abandonment of transcendental categories for understanding the past (every preceding historical debate was a debate about the proper transcendental category) in favor of understanding our very categories as historical. If you read through the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, the most conceptually advanced development is the recognition that different ages prefer different things from their literature: it's on the cusp of the recognition that our very conceptual categories are historical, but it has no way to understand that. It's actually a remarkable gap in the thought. It's almost there, but not quite.
From the perspective of philosophy of history, critical historiography, and intellectual history, what happens is monumental enough that it represents a fundamental break (though one that takes hold only slowly) with the past modes of historiography.
As an analogy, is Aristotle's work on biology "science"? If you're trying to look at it from a perspective of "how do frogs work," you can argue that it's as much science as Darwin. But if you're interested in basic conceptual assumptions, the assumptions--practical and methodological--that Darwin is making are so different, that there's not much philosophical value in talking about a pre-Galilean science.
If you want to define history as "literature that attempts to talk about the past," you'll get a lot of continuity in the same way as "biology is trying to figure out how frogs work"--but that definition is useful in some contexts (the long history of trying to figure out how frogs work is amazing!) and less useful in others (galileo's intervention in methodology and philosophy of science was world-changing). In this context, where we're talking about historically varying concepts (tradition, representativeness, etc.) in an irresponsibly transhistorical way, I'll push for the value of understanding "history" as something that emerges with a conceptual revolution in the late 18th C.
German differentiates between "Historie" and "Geschichte," which would probably be a terminologically useful intervention in English.
I don't deny the basic trends you mention, but in terms of specifics, let's take the Herodotus-Thucydides-Xenophon tradition. It seems obvious to me that the "historicity" shows up with Herodotus, who is mostly trying to describe rather than explain. Thucydides is almost perfectly modern in his understanding, IMO. And then with Xenophon we can see the transition into a tradition which seeks to use history to convey other lessons. Some of the classical successors, especially in Rome, are closer to Thucydides, but more and more are dominated by the desire to impact moral guidance, or elucidate grand theories of the world, etc.
The debate between the Ancient and Moderns was not primarily about literature. It was about the nature of history and, in order to support their version, each side constructed competing narratives, sought to establish new facts, and argued who was correct. In the end, the moderns won which laid the groundwork for the Whiggish traditions that would follow. (You even have some basic class analysis with some of the Moderns claiming the Ancients were serving the interests of landlords.)
I suspect you are using a non-standard definition of historical and you're locating it in the 19th century to associate it with a specific ideology. And certainly if you define historical consciousness in the Marxist sense then, while there are some precedents, it doesn't show up until Marxism as a concept develops. I'm aware that such historians tend to define what they do as history and everything else as not history. But I think this is like the idea that they are non-ideological scientists who have discovered some objective advance in the field: something of a pose rather than anything supportable by objective evaluation.
History is not, and cannot be, an empirical field. History is inherently unobservable. So reasoning by analogy probably fails in this case. There is no historical equivalent of the frog we can reference.
More to the point: I have yet to meet someone who argues as you do with a valid definition of history that starts when they want it to. Most often the definition is circular. So what do you mean by history?
>But actually, the Hastings festival dates from 1983. If you really stretch things, it’s loosely based on similar rituals from the 1790s. There’s no connection to anything older than that.
I was skeptical of this, because 1790 doesnt sound like a time the english would invent quasi-pagan rituals. I looked at the original article and Im not convinced. Big human-like figures made from plant material are quite old and found in many spring celebrations across europe. When dickens describes it as new, it is likely just *new to London*, brought by some of the many people moving in from the countryside during that time, rather than newly invented by londoners. He then writes:
>Everyone else might enjoy the summer, but for sweeps it’s the lean season, since no one is really using their fireplace any more.
which seems strange to me as well. People used fire to cook, and they wouldnt have done all of that outside in the summer, especially in a big dense city. Be more willing to disagree with Kriss about ancient history!
Generally I wouldn’t. There’s a fire within of course but that’s true of a lot of things, like a kiln. Anyway even if the stove were connected to a chimney, rather than a flue that exits the wall or has done other form of egress, the chimney sweep is still out of work for the rest of the chimneys.
I'm sorry, but this kind of lazy, uninformed, presentist skepticism annoys me. It's easy enough to find out the facts before you put fingers to keyboard.
What’s uninformed about my answer? Why do you think that chimney sweeps wouldn’t be out of work in summer in the era in London?
For that matter what’s “presentist” about dickens saying that chimney sweeps were out of work in summer?
I’m a man from England who has lived in London and knows the history pretty well.
You may be right and chimney sweeps were as busy as ever in summer because of …. Whatever unarticulated reason you didn’t articulate, but I doubt it. Please reply with your beliefs, because as the moment all we have there is an attack on the argument but none of your own.
I agree that they would have less work in summer (if nothing else, because the fire wouldnt burn all day). I was just surprised by the interpreted claim that they would rarely have a fire inside.
There were far more chimneys in houses than most people would now realise, as once central heating came in, many were removed as unsightly. Here’s an example where the chimneys are intact.
This isn’t flats or apartments (in the modern sense), it’s one house - but all the bedrooms were connected to chimneys so as to heat them.
This is where London’s famous smog and soot covered buildings comes from, not industrial chimneys - they did exist in 19C London but the industrial chimneys were high and the smoke dissipated or was blown away.
In this photo of London’s skyline you can see, in the bottom right there are buildings with 8 chimneys in a row encased in a brick block, each one is presumably connected to different fireplaces at different levels. It looks like 32 chimneys for 4 houses.
At most one of these would be for cooking, and possibly none of them because stoves could often have a different flue system, exiting out the wall and up through the eaves.
This still seems like a rich phenomenon, even having multiple rooms was not standard. And did these stove flues not need sweeping? That said, the idea of chimneys as primarily for heating other rooms was new to me. Thanks.
1790 is exactly when you'd expect to see the English inventing quasi Pagan rituals? It's the very beginning of English Romanticism, which would really take off a couple decades later. For example, The Ancient Druid Order was started in 1781, and they're just one of the larger and longer survived examples of a pagan revivalist group that got started during this period.. This is the period where modern Neo-paganism starts to develop, for a whole bunch of reasons.
The Order of Druids has little connection to them outside the name, and said Romanticism was a niche literary movement. The green man ritual is a public procession, which there where neither the numbers nor the religious tolerance for.
Be more willing to disagree with Kriss about objective reality in general. He's a hugely entertaining writer and very funny, but he can be extravagantly full of shit sometimes.
"Morrocco" and "Morroccan" refer to the modern-day country, so it feels strange to me to use the terms in relation to (Neo)- Moorish architecture, especially since this style is associated with Al-Andalus, (Moorish or Muslim Spain in the Middlle Ages).
BTW reading back the piece I think my comment is a bit dumb, because I realize people using the "wrong"(according to me) name is an illustration of the fact that most traditions are made-up phenomena, so the exact geographical location of the architecture one tries to imitate is not that important.
> I’m not recommending that people lie and invent fake genealogies for what they were going to do anyway.
I am. I like the *aesthetic* of the appeal to ancient mores more than the other standard approach of manufacturing some novel moral principle out of whole cloth.
I'm currently visiting Japan and enjoy visiting Shinto shrines. Many (most?) seem to trace their roots back a thousand years or so and many (most?) seem to have special traditions specific to that particular shrine.
It seems that often the shrine completely burned down at some specific point in history (like 800 years ago or something) so they lost a lot of information about things but they have kept up with the traditions without knowing why exactly they are doing it. (The famous anime Your Name revolves around this plot, and I have seen many shrines tell nearly the exact same story)
A Japanese friend tells me that Shinto is actually based on Jewish traditions from the lost tribe and there is a whole cottage industry speculating about that, which is a whole other rabbit hole.
As part of the negotiation of local identity that produces local traditions, local historians in England used to build up the importance of their locality by assuming a monastery from the English church's Golden Age (pre-Vikings; also a myth) stood there until it was destroyed by Vikings, who conveniently also destroyed all the records. Current historians can't identify any monastery that definitely stopped functioning as a result of a Viking attack (although don't rule out the idea), but the invented traditions of a destroyed church and martyred monks and nuns gave antiquity and history to a place that was otherwise unremarkable. I think the same process seems to be in play in the Japanese temples: the creation of an older history through the creation of a tale of a break in historical continuity. The antiquity of the shrine may itself be an invented tradition, tied in with others.
No. The bishop and relics of St Cuthbert didn't leave after the 793 sack, and only left about 860-870, and the sculptural evidence shows a clerical community likely remained there throughout the tenth century. The 'destruction' of Lindisfarne was probably very disruptive but not long lasting. Further north Porthmahomack in northern Scotland was burnt during this period (I said England above advisedly) but there's no evidence that it was Vikings rather than a local dispute or someone dropping a candle, and that's the closest I know to definite evidence.
There's a theory that Vikings wouldn't destroy monasteries because that would mean they couldn't come back and get more from them which is unprovable but should be remembered.
I've seen neither, but more recently I recall people saying that The Orville was the best current Star Trek show (there have been more Trek shows since I heard that though).
The Orville isn't really a parody of Star Trek like Galaxy Quest is. Its comedic but its more "Star Trek with Seth McFarlane contractually obligated to inject humour" than Galaxy Quests loving parody of Star Trek and Trekkies.
If you read history you will soon notice that people frequently started new things by making preposterous claims to be returning to even older traditions. You find this in Greek discussions of lawgivers, in the Tao, in every generation of politicians etc. etc.
But "people have always invented pseudohistory to justify what the wanted to do anyway" doesn't make it the right thing to do, either pragmatically or morally. It doesn't hurt if we're talking about art styles or fertility festivals, but when it comes to making big decisions about society or lifestyle there are other ways, more honest, and less likely to lead us into making mistakes by haphazardly combining our desires, little snippets of decontextualised history, and various myths that have grown up around history into a romantic utopia built on the specious lie that it could work because it worked before (1. it hasn't really worked before and 2. Even if it had, the circumstances don't exist now).
The Green Man is harmless so that fact that it's a pseudotradition is harmless.
Moorish revival architecture is harmless (if an aesthetic crime - I hate it) so the fact that its practitioners completely misunderstand the principles of Andalusian Islamic architecture and design is harmless.
But people fight and die over rituals and symbols in some contexts (religious, nationalistic/patriotic) or make public policy based on an idea of 'tradition.' So it behooves us to be interested in the provenance of our symbols and 'traditions,' whether they actually represent real historical experience or real accrued wisdom of the ages or whether they were encouraged or created wholecloth to further someone's agenda.
Without intending to be glib or nitpicky about it, how is "the ancients didn't faff about with appeals to myth and tradition, they just did stuff" as posed by Sam Kriss not just a different flavor of appealing to a mythologized tradition?
Perhaps, but that isn't necessarily a problem. One way to defeat a certain ideology us to show that it is self-contradictory. For example woke people say you should (preferentiall) listen to minorities. If is an objection to wokism then to point out most black people don't hold very woke views on a variety of issues. Likewise; if it's true that the ancients dispiced looking to the past for answers, a modern looking for the past for ideological guidance would be self-defeating
Unfortunately, that only works on an ideology that values consistency. Wokeism follows in the steps of its intellectual forebears from a century prior — Marxist Russian revolutionaries — in being almost gleefully contradictory, because nothing matters more than The Revolution. Witness just how how familiar and modern this description of Russian _intelligents_ (pro-revolutionary intellectuals) sounds:
> What is more, the very tactics the revolutionaries condemned became acceptable when the revolutionaries themselves used them. The argument that comes naturally to liberal-minded people—what if the shoe were on the other foot?—was rejected in principle. For an _intelligent,_ there is no other foot.
>
> In Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, when young Veronika criticizes revolutionaries for doing just what they condemn, her intelligentsia aunts are shocked. Why,
>
> > the unfeeling girl was equating the oppressors of the people with its liberators, speaking as though they had the same moral rights! . . . Let him [the _intelligent_] kill. . . . The Party takes all the blame upon itself, so that terror is no longer murder, expropriation is no longer robbery.
For one! I think most adherents of even woke ideology want to think to of themselves as consistent (call me naive)
For two; even if the woke don't accept our demands for consistency, we outsiders can still judge them based on it.
For three; I was only bringing up wokism for the purposes of illustrating the principle. As long as at least the traditionalists care for consistency, Kriss's argument is still valid (though maybe not sound).
To be fair, the notion of an ineffable Mystery at the heart of a totalizing evangelical ideology is *totally* a product of the last 2000 years of European tradition.
Sure. See my quote elsewhere in this comments page, where Chesterton points out that when you break a religious system's hold on society, it's not just the vices that get turned loose and cause damage, but in fact the virtues get taken out of context and cause even more damage than the vices.
Which, of course, is the same point Jesus made in his condemnation of contemporary Jewish religious leaders in Matthew chapter 23. In verses 23-24, he condemns them for their exacting care towards payment of tithes in even the smallest matters, which, he says, while a good thing that should not be "left undone," was still wrong because they were neglecting "the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith."
One of my favorite examples of a parody becoming iconic is The Eiger Sanction, the first novel by Trevanian. He was a film critic and professor who wrote a parody of a thriller movie.
I think another aspect of this psychology is that if you've got an idealized prototype in mind, it is easier to achieve than if you just want to be generically good. In computer science terms it's the difference between convex optimization (which is easy) and non-convex optimization (which is hard). Basically with a prototype, you have a clear distinction between what is an error vs intended/unimportant, so you can just go fix each error with priorities based on cost/benefit instead of having to deal with uncertain hypothetical value.
But also, the prototype has to be realistic. I guess that's part of why people argue about historical cultures so much, as any actually existing culture must be realistic. This probably puts a challenge to your just-a-pointer view, but maybe not a huge challenge since e.g. with food safety we have more wealth and technology so it's obviously realistic to have idealized Indian food.
Convex and non-convex. "Convex" roughly speaking means that you have a single hill you want to get to the top of (or valley you want to get to the bottom of). It's the convexity that makes optimization easy, so the hard type is just called non-convex.
Part 1: The past gets compressed by survivorship bias. We remember all the good songs/movies/architecture, forget the crap, and compare yesterday's best to today's average. This leads to,
Part 2: "we need to get back to a time when we did things right!"
Also, I'm pretty sure the Roman republicans looked back to ancient Greece as their guide.
I don't think the early Roman Republic was really aware of the existence of Greece - when Republican Rome was founded in 510 BC, most of what we think of as "classical Greece" hadn't happened yet!
You really like the Iliad that much, as poetry? I find it historically interesting and it’s a fun expression of a pretty alien mindset, but it’s very repetitive and all over the place as a poem, at least to me (though I am no sprig of Ares).
Never read it in the original Greek, but I hear it has moments that are quite clever. For example, Achilles shoots his bow and the sound is similar to a bowstring twang or something. Anyone here read it in the original who can confirm/correct this?
Interesting article, but it's not arguing what you cited it for. It's arguing that modern architecture is uniquely (almost intentionally?) ugly, and that this is not a characteristic of older periods. It would be odd to see someone, for example, arguing that most buildings were as impressive as the Pantheon. The article isn't arguing that. It's arguing that modern architecture is going through an ugly phase, and that hypothesis cannot be refuted by appealing to survivorship bias.
It isn't arguing that survivorship bias doesn't exist, or that it has no impact on what architecture survives. That would be obviously false. Same with movies, TV, pop music, etc. There's a lot of bad techno, power ballads, disco, etc. Nobody listens to it, even if it used to be played on the radio. There's good stuff that got forgotten, to be sure, but any look backward compresses decades of effort into a single memory.
I'm not sure how you're saying this doesn't argue what I'm citing it for. It's arguing against the claim that modern architecture is only worse because only the prettiest buildings of the past survived, showing that even where we have representative samples unaffected by survival bias, the same pattern is present.
His argument: Modern architecture is uniquely ugly.
[Counterargument: no it's not, that's just survivorship bias at play. There were plenty of ugly buildings in the past, you just don't remember them.]
His response: look at these old photos and find me anything half as ugly as modern architecture. Some of the buildings were plain or simple, but they weren't intentionally ugly.
You cited this in reply to an appeal that survivorship bias exists, and it colors how we favorably view the past as enriched for producing really GOOD stuff. He's not arguing that survivorship bias doesn't exist, nor is he arguing that it doesn't influence whether we think of past periods as 'better' because we compress decades of effort into one side of the ledger and compare it to a single year of effort on the other side.
Are you arguing that survivorship bias doesn't exist? Are you arguing that there's no selection at play in what gets preserved in art, music, literature, philosophy, and yes architecture? I'm highly skeptical of this claim.
It seems to me that the position in your original post was the “survivorship bias proves that the past was not as good as we think it is.” I believe Scott’s replies were basically “actually, even though survivorship bias exists, it is still entirely possible that elements of the past were, on average, better than elements of the present. For example, *most* buildings from the past are better than *most* buildings from the present, when we take a representative sample from each.” Survivorship bias existing and the past being better than the present are not mutually exclusive.
> But also, where is the modern poem as good as the Iliad?
On one hand, yes. On the other hand, I suspect this is largely simply because we don't write our sagas as poems anymore. Where is the ancient poem as good as The Stormlight Archive?
I'm not really sure architectural aesthetics is the same as social traditions.
(Also, that article appears to be pretty sure of itself as to what is beautiful and what isn't. I'd bet they'd list a few "beautiful" things I'd think are not, and list a few "ugly" things that I'd think are not. Much like your two examples of synagogues: I like the modern one better. The moorish style is too ornate and symmetrical for my tastes; the modern has cleaner lines and a well-balanced asymmetry, at least from the angle in the photo.)
Yeah, it's funny how often when someone posts photos of "look how ugly these new buildings are compared to old ones", I find myself thinking "the new one actually looks nicer".
As someone who loves old movies and watches a lot of Turner Classic Movies, I can testify from personal experience how wrong anyone is who thinks the 1930s and 1940s were nothing but "The Maltese Falcon," "The Wizard of Oz," "His Girl Friday," and "Stagecoach." This is so even without getting into the A-picture/B-picture divide. I love me old screwball comedies, but I can attest that for every "Bringing Up Baby" or "The Palm Beach Story" there are many tiresome efforts like "Theodora Goes Wild." Even a film like "The Wizard of Oz" looks a lot less special when you discover that the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion are just mugging their way through the same hoary old vaudeville riffs that litter so many other films of the period. (Imagine an "Oz" made in the 90s that starred Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, and Adam Sandler. Audiences in 1939 were watching the equivalent when they went to see their "Oz".)
Realizing that the past was a lot less special than you thought, because you've looked upon the works that didn't survive, doesn't make the good stuff any less good. If anything, I appreciate better how rare and wonderful a film like "Casablanca" is -- that's a movie that is somehow both infinitely better than other 1940s melodramas while also only being about a 10% improvement on them. (It's that 10% that somehow makes the infinite difference.) It confronts you with the fact that the qualities you thought made those great old movies great (rare personalities; clever writing; the "cool" that culturally distant places often possess) is usually irrelevant. Their greatness lies elsewhere.
This is a slight sidestep; it's not poetry per se. But when you think about the cultural role that the Iliad had in the time of Homer, it's a decent fit-
I think Lord of the Rings is, in fact, probably as good as the Iliad.
"where is the modern poem as good as the Iliad?" I think this, and comparable style of questions ("who is the modern writer who is as good as Shakespeare?""), are misleading. When we hear the word "Illiad", we don't think only of the particular poem, we also hear, overlapping, the meaning "one of the greatest poems of all time". Which is to say, that "Iliad" as two concurrent meanings, as does "Shakespeare" So saying that *any* contemporary work is the equal of the Iliad ends up sounding like a contradiction in terms. If you compare someone modern to Dickens or Austen, you're comparing to "one of the greatest novelists ever". People dismiss you out of hand even if (maybe especially if!) they haven't read the older works.
The Romans fancied themselves descendents of Troyans (yes those Troyans). I think that shows they had an affinity for the Greek tradition very early on.
Depending on what source you're thinking of, I would caution against taking early Imperial commentary about either Rome's history *or* Rome's past view of its own history at face value. I love the Aeneid as much as anybody, but it's pretty clearly another example of rewriting the past for "modern" purposes!
As a parent who enjoys story time for its own sake, and knowing you're also a recent parent, allow me to recommend the instant classic "Bea Wolf" - a modern-day retelling of Beowulf that's a vast improvement on the original (with pictures!). Two of my favorite passages:
"Heidi got forth Eamglay, blade of legend, born before safety standards, blast-forged of asbestos and broken glass. She lashed the lock, loosing a storm of pups." Meaning puppies, lol.
Speaking of adults: "The shushers, scolders, scrapers of screentime, the grade-givers, unglad but grinning: red in pen and eye. The fiends who fib with food! Feasting on celery fouled with cottage cheese! "Cheese boats" they style these arks of sorrow! What snakes!"
I think "poem" is a wierd category for art that introduces more confusing than clarity to one's thinking.
The right reference class for the Illiad is not poems but long-form narrative fiction. The Illiad is 200k words long and only adopts poetuc forms as a mnemetic aid (it was originally transmitted orally). So for example, I think that the manga "Berserk" is really deep and good. (Particularly the "golden age" arcI havven't read the Illiad but got really bored by the Oddesy so I am not hopeful.
Shakespeare's sonnets on the other hand are lyrical poetry, it uses peotic form for deliberate aesthetic effects. A sonnet typically contains a mere 100-120 words because they are designed to maximize _density_ of effect. Lyrical art today is dominated by musical lyrics. I myself am not a great music listener, but from what I gather, actual music fans fund a lot to love in music lyrics today.
To the extend "poetry" has died, I suspect it is because would be poets found it easier to employ their talents in other, newer mediums. Comic weren't invented yet in Greece and most people couldn't even read. Music obviously existed in Shakespeare's time, but the lack of recording technology made the relation we have to music today impossible.
What is left of poetry is wierd people doing experiments with it that can't be done in music. It has almost nothing to do with the poetry of old.
I know this isn't causally related, but it feels like 'shrinkflation' hit lyrics as well. Sure, good lyrics are harder to create than a jumble of cliches, but that's a timeless issue with songwriting. Meanwhile, is it just me or are there fewer verses (and shorter verses) in the average pop song than in the past? Feels like they just repeat some catchy beat in the chorus - and not even the whole chorus, but just one or two phrases - instead of getting some real substance to the song.
I remember in the 90's friends would have to work to memorize the fast-paced lyrics of songs from Savage Garden or Barenaked Ladies or whatever. Has that all gone away, or did it migrate over to something like country rap?
I have a similar objection to complaints about the falling quality of "paintings". There is still plenty of good illustrated art out there, including photo-realistic stuff. It is just not made with literal paint on a canvas, because that is not the state of the art technology for illustrations anymore.
Although I agree with Scott that modern architecture sucks, I can't help but draw the analogy that contemporary complaints were made of nearly every recent revolution in art. Whether it was the absurdists, impressionists, or cubists, they were all told by contemporary audiences their new stuff was ugly or unimpressive, only to be later celebrated.
I'm not saying every movement is later appreciated, but maybe it's difficult for contemporaries to admire an artistic movement? Perhaps this also contributes to the perception that "the past was better", because we're too busy complaining about what future generations will view as revolutionary.
Maybe today there's broad agreement that the Cybertruck is uniquely ugly, but future generations will see us as having lived during the time when bold, creative advances in automobile design like this were created.
As opposed to the decades-long trend of every car looking exactly the same with minor differences. And indeed, once a major trend is set and accepted, everyone else follows suit in the new 'safe' design aesthetic, leading to a new period of 'boring' also-ran designs that copy what was done before, thereby ushering in a sense that "in the past they did new and innovative things, but today everyone copies and regurgitates past genius".
Despite all the complaints about the Star Wars prequels, I will say this: George Lucas was trying something new. We can see what happens when people stop trying new things, by looking at the Star Wars sequels.
<i>I don't think the early Roman Republic was really aware of the existence of Greece - when Republican Rome was founded in 510 BC, most of what we think of as "classical Greece" hadn't happened yet!</i>
Even before the Classical period (which is usually held to have begun around 480, so just a few decades after the foundation of the Republic) Greece had an advanced and influential civilisation, including in Rome itself, where, e.g., the late regal/early republican temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was built in the Greek style. Granted they weren't really "looking back", because this was all contemporary, but the early Roman Republic was very much aware of and influenced by Greece.
> But also, where is the modern poem as good as the Iliad?
I'll take a break from defending Shakespeare against Hananianism, and quibble with this. Widespread literacy fundamentally altered the role of poetry in society. As well to ask who the greatest swordfighter in the world is. (Would they put it on a business card?) There will never be an Illiad again, not as long as our civilization endures. As with Shakespeare, Homer had an early mover advantage, and the world has changed and grown in ways that baked their superiority in. Was Abraham truly the objectively best patriarch?
Anyone have a perspective on the question of how widespread illiteracy was, and when?
I recently read that phonetic spelling was common on signs and in other limited areas. People learned the alphabet and could work things out just fine. Most who had learned their letters could spell their name. If you were really smart, you could spell it more than one way.
Then the intelligentsia started enforcing standardized, non-phonetic spellings that made it impossible to read without formal education. Suddenly it wasn't enough to just know your letters, you had to be able to 'read' to understand what was written.
At least, that's one story, and I'm not sure how far it goes, or to which period(s) it applies. Anyone have more insight on this question?
I think the problem with standardized spellings was that they were for one particular dialect, and became frozen in time, and then traditional. (And then started warping the language toward the spellings.) Plus, England went through the Great Vowel Shift shortly afterwards (we'd be a lot better off if spelling hadn't been standardized until afterwards). Like, the "e"s weren't silent, once upon a time, but we've been stuck with those spellings for the last several hundred years.
I think Arabic is like this today: almost no one except TV announcers and clerics can actually generate speech in "standard Arabic", but most can understand it when spoken, and read it, and maybe even write it. Although the writing is somewhat hampered by not connecting directly to their local vernacular. I think it'd be like if we had to do our writing like this:
Regarding dialects, before us peasants got rich enough to travel, and before mass media, people's dialects differed wildly, even over small geographical distances. One of my favorite movie scenes ever:
The modern poem as good as the Iliad is a novel, or a movie, or a TV series.
Art forms go out of fashion and then they die completely. You can't write a good epic poem these days, there's no living epic poetry tradition to fit it into. You can't write a great symphony either, not build a great Moorish revival building. If you try any of these you'll just create a self conscious aping of the past
The only way to write a good epic poem nowadays would be to create a whole new tradition of epic poetry. This would initially be terrible aping of the past but eventually would become its own tradition in which good work is possible. I don't know how to persuade thousands of people to write bad epic poetry for fifty years though.
This is a very good comment and also puts one in mind of the great dig someone made about Southey's epics: "They will be remembered when Homer and Virgil are forgotten—but not until then."
There's an image on the internet I can't find anymore where Hitler thinks to himself that he'll never be as great as Napoleon, Napoleon thinks he'll never be as great as Caesar, Caesar thinks he'll never be as great as Alexander, and finally a very satisfied Alexander just thinks about how awesome his horse is.
"If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed."
Traditionalists often don't just refer to some (real or fake) past as a pointer to describe what they want, but they also use it as an authority: "If it worked well for so long, if it's what most societies converged on doing, it must be the right thing to do".
That argument doesn't hold water anyway IMO: conditions have changed, there is no reason the same customs should be optimal today as were decades, centuries or millennia ago. But it's another counterargument if the past wasn't even actually like they describe. (Or even if it was like that in some times and places, but not in many other times and places.)
Depends on the conditions. No matter how much the world around us has changed, human nature hasn't, and people ignoring this and hubristically claiming that "things are different now" have caused quite a bit of harm in modern times.
The degree to which human nature can be molded by circumstances is one of the underdiscussed fault lines between conservatives and progressives.
I'd like to say that examining past societies, good and bad, can provide evidence for the natural law. But natural law thinking doesn't seem to be something that twenty-first-century people can be argued into or out of, unlike the ancients. Score one for the pro-circumstance folks, I guess.
>No matter how much the world around us has changed, human nature hasn't
Partially agreed, but partially disagreed. Average serum levels of fluoxetine are not what they were before 1970, nor of sildenafil what they were before 1998. It has been claimed that the internet and cell phones have reduced our average attention span. (Writing from the USA), our average weight is heavier than it was a century ago. Our very bodies have noticeably, albeit neither catastrophically nor paradisically, changed.
Incentives are still incentives. Short term and long term memory are still memories.
There are some exceptions for the very recent and well documented past. I grit my teeth that it takes us longer to build a nuclear power station than the whole Manhattan Project took.
Well as written, in the general case I would agree with Scott. In the specific case of made up British Druidism - with its hostility to actual history and its incoherent disavowal of Christianity - I’m tending to side with Sam.
In the case of architecture specifically, it made me wonder: when you read 19th c. architectural magazines, you see that: 1. A *lot* of the standard architect training was just "here’s that cool Roman monument, please make a drawing of it. Then make another, until you know that building very well." (to the deep annoyance of some, then more, architects who were starting to notice that comfort, and making buildings fit for their purpose, or even paying attention to construction methods, were all way more important than just learning good models by rote and always wanting to make everything symmetrical). A surprisingly large number of books that purported to help you or your architect design your house started with fifty pages on the evolution of the typical house from the Neolithic to the present day. ; 2. You also see that, at least in some cases, what they knew of the styles they were imitating was more or less "here’s an illustration taken from the Tales of a Thousand Nights", "Here’s a cool building I saw when I was vacationing in Rome", etc. So, imho, there was much more of a *story*, with the accompanying visual imagery, associated with architectural features than if they’d said "Oooh, I really like that shape" or "this house is sturdy and cheap to build". So, the prompt the architect used imho *wasn’t* "How did the Moroccans do it?", it was more "the people the Torah talks about lived in the Middle East, I want to feel like I’m among them"
I don’t know how relevant this is to the post’s main point. Probably not very much.
"It is traditional, Archchancellor" said Ponder reproachfully. "Although I might go so far as to say that not observing it has now, alas, become traditional"
"Well that's fine, isn't it?" said Ridcully, "if we can make a traditional of not observing another tradition, then that's doubly traditional, eh?"
I read in "The Battle for Christmas" how the Victorians basically invented or borrowed all the "traditional" Christmas celebrations because their own tradition (of going house to house singing and demanding liquour) was considered too boorish.
Though not -40, surely, due to the Gulf Stream? A quick Google suggests that all-time record lows around London are in the positive single digits F (negative teens C). More typical winter temperatures are in the 30s F (close to zero C).
Scotland is colder, but still much warmer in the winter than most of Canada.
Going house to house singing - carol singing -hasn’t disappeared at all. Not outside cities anyway. And carol singers often do end up getting a few drinks at the end. Often at the rectory. Victorian Britain did bring in the Christmas tree though. A decent addition.
If I recall my schoolin' correctly, the Iliad and the Odyssey were essentially fictional stories of Mycenaean Greece meant to inspire people during the Greek Dark Ages that followed the late Bronze Age Collapse and remind them of a more glorious past; a Golden Age, if you will. These stories continued to inspire people even after the Dark Ages ended and Athens and Sparta began their rise to prominence, and they continued to think of Mycenaean Greece as the golden age of Greek civilization. Seems like another important data point for the "idealizing the past can be helpful/useful."
I guess the logical question, then, is when does idealizing the past become pathological or something to be resisted? Because I must say I don't care for narratives, for example, like the one where Lenin was a swell guy and the Soviet Union would have been some kind of wonderful if only he'd lived longer and found somebody not named Stalin to succeed him. You could think of plenty of other such historical revisionist claims: Germany's stab in the back in the 1920's, the Lost Cause mythologizing of the American Civil War, the myth that the Wehrmacht's hands were clean and it was all those nasty SS guys doing the killing on the Eastern Front. Or consider the 1619 Project, which seems to be aimed at reframing the American Revolution as an attempt to establish some sort of breakaway white supremacist slave empire because Britain was turning too cosmopolitan. I think the motives of the people pushing these narratives are fairly obvious, and I consider each of them to be rather malign, and I can't help but think that there is also a danger in letting people with decent, pro-social motives mess with the historical record, too.
The problem is when people arguing Chesterton's Fence have an incorrect picture of what the past was actually like. That's the real problem with "fake traditions" that Scott ignores.
"It's still better than any poem of the last fifty years, fight me."
Okay! "Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg" is a poem by Richard Hugo that was published in 1980, so it makes the cut. I think it is better than the poem you excerpted here.
I'm not Scott, but I'd take the Lays of Ancient Rome any day. Their power is pure, and they're easy to memorize, so at any moment you can throw some ringing syllables out to entertain yourself and any other listeners. Aubade is just depressing.
Well, there's no accounting for taste, but I can at least account for mine! When you say that the strengths of the Macaulay are easy memorization, ringing syllables, and entertainment, I think I agree, but that's just another way of saying it's a narrative poem with a simple rhyme scheme. I think there are way better examples of the form: "Kubla Khan," "The Cremation of Sam McGee," almost anything by Tennyson or Browning or Kipling. The meter of the Macaulay is ragged at times—"And a long shout of triumph", "And the broad flood behind", "Nought spake he to Lars Porsena"—and there are a number of half-rhymes ("given/heaven"), all of which would be less of a problem if the poem had other merits.
But my main reason to prefer Larkin to Macaulay—and this may be the most relevant to today's post—is the Macaulay doesn't strike me as *true.* Especially the part Scott quoted: it just seems like empty sentiment to me. I can believe that a Roman would think that in the old days all the Romans got along and there was no class conflict. And I can believe that Macaulay could relate to that rose-tinted view, just as everyone above a certain age can. But what is missing is any kind of critical view of the topic. By critical I don't mean that one has to dismiss it or attack it, but more in the sense of critical faculties: that there should be some examination of the feeling, some consideration of what it is and why one feels it. Sticking with Larkin, he has quite a few poems with a nostalgic tint: "Going, Going" (https://www.thepoetryhour.com/poems/going-going), "Annus Mirabilis," (https://allpoetry.com/Annus-Mirabilis), "MCMXIV" (https://allpoetry.com/Mcmxiv). None of them are ironic or anti-nostalgia—"Annus Mirabilis" is a bit funny but the other two are totally sincere—but they all capture something *about* that feeling. They're curious about it; they aren't just unthinkingly voicing it as Macaulay is. (Larkin also looks at the feeling that things will keep getting *better*, in "High Windows" (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48417/high-windows) and "Next, Please" (http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/philip_larkin/poems/14537), with a similar level of curiosity.)
If Macaulay's story or descriptions were more unique that could be a kind of truth ("what the eye seizes as beauty must be truth" as Keats said), but to me they're pretty average.
And I can account for mine! "Aubade" is full of big words that spoil the rhythm of the art, and long, dull, dry sentences to evoke a long, dull, dry mood -
> Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
> Making all thought impossible but how
> And where and when I shall myself die.
> Arid interrogation: yet the dread
> Of dying, and being dead,
> Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
"Arid interrogation" is exactly right - it's dry, it's dusty, it's dull. And it's academic. (Obscure adjective and a five-syllable word.) Macaulay does everything with plain, simple English - there's exceptions, like "trysting", that are deliberately archaic, but :
> East and west and south and north
> The messengers ride fast,
> And tower and town and cottage
> Have heard the trumpet's blast.
> Shame on the false Etruscan
> Who lingers in his home,
> When Porsena of Clusium
> Is on the march for Rome.
That's proper nouns, single-syllable words, and a small number of exceptions ("messengers", "cottage," "trumpet", "lingers,") all of which fit the mood of the story. "The messengers ride fast -" people are doing things. The poem is perpetually specific, in a way that Larkin's work isn't; Macaulay is describing things happening, in a specific place, with specific people. His story is fundamentally about people, who exist within the world of the story, doing things, in a way in which Aubade is about the author being in despair.
> But what is missing is any kind of critical view of the topic.
Yes, and that's one of the many reasons why I like it better - what I meant by "pure." It shows instead of telling. The man who saw the first sunset saw a greater beauty than anyone who's read a dissertation of the beauty of the sunset; a pure tone is more beautiful than two tones set to form a discord. A critical view of a topic separates the reader from events; it's the difference between watching a movie and hearing someone describing the plot of a movie, the difference between reading a thrilling adventure and reading the TVTropes page summarizing a thrilling adventure. Or, to quote Scott's review of Jordan Peterson, and Scott quoting David Foster Wallace:
> This is the General Prophetic Method. It’s easy, it’s old as dirt, and it works.
>
> So how come not everyone can be a prophet? The Bible tells us why people who wouldn’t listen to the Pharisees listened to Jesus: “He spoke as one who had confidence”. You become a prophet by saying things that you would have to either be a prophet or the most pompous windbag in the Universe to say, then looking a little too wild-eyed for anyone to be comfortable calling you the most pompous windbag in the universe. You say the old cliches with such power and gravity that it wouldn’t even make sense for someone who wasn’t a prophet to say them that way.
> The next literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.
The Lays of Ancient Rome are good because they aren't ironic. Like the Lord of the Rings, which I am a fan of (and Scott is a fan of). There are two characters in the L-R who exhibit ironic detachment, and they're old men (or, an old man and an old angel) driven to madness and despair by their belief in their own superiority over the rest of the world and in their looking on evil two long. This is not a coincidence. I don't think ironic detachment is good for art, and I really don't think it's good for me.
Edit - And I'll add one final point: I don't think poetry is for reading to yourself. The two purposes I've found for poetry - where it is actually better than just reading a book - are to memorize it so you can recite it at any circumstance where it is socially appropriate (such as silently, to yourself, in the dentist's chair) and so sweep up others and yourself in the flood of prose - or to listen to it recited by someone with the right knack for it.
This is, perhaps, why when a friend got together a poetry night with a 500-word cap, I had trouble finding anything that fit. She was looking for a different definition of poetry than I was - she wanted something clever. I want to be swept away by the flood. I suspect you may also be looking more for cleverness than for power?
We clearly have different visions for poetry, and that's okay—wonderful, even!—but I do want to quibble with a couple things. I'm going to echo you in quoting the full first stanza of Macaulay:
East and west and south and north
The messengers ride fast,
And tower and town and cottage
Have heard the trumpet's blast.
Shame on the false Etruscan
Who lingers in his home,
When Porsena of Clusium
Is on the march for Rome.
I find the first half of this to be doggerel, frankly. (The second half is fine.) The meter is shot to hell—the first line is four beats and ends on a stress, while the third, which it's matched with, is three beats and ends unstressed. More importantly, what you find specific I find comically unevocative ("fast," "have heard"—I picture nothing here). Compare all that with this stanza from Browning's "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," which uses specifics and (partly thanks to the use of a steady meter) actually sounds like riders in a hurry:
At Aerschot, up leaped of a sudden the sun,
And against him the cattle stood black every one,
To stare through the mist at us galloping past,
And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last,
With resolute shoulders, each butting away
The haze, as some bluff river headland its spray.
In general I'm surprised to hear you defend the Macaulay on the grounds of "show, don't tell", not just because the action is often told rather than shown, but especially because the emotional beat we're arguing about (the Rome of old) is told and not shown: it's just a guy saying how Rome used to be. To me what Larkin does is much more "showing" an emotion than what Macaulay does: Aubade is *about* the feeling of restless fear of death, and it shows us that feeling (indeed, I feel it too). "Going, Going" is *about* the unease of the death of pastoral England and it shows us that feeling. Watching Macaulay watch someone be crankily nostalgic does nothing to show me what that feeling is like; I have to take his word for it, basically.
This is also why I'm surprised to hear you talk about "ironic detachment" in Larkin. I mean I already said that I don't think any of the poems I mentioned are ironic, "Aubade" least of all. Irony would mean, isn't it funny or silly on some level that I feel this way; irony would be a comfort, but he doesn't avail himself of it. I think what you're referring to as ironic detachment is what one could call self-consciousness or self-awareness, but there's nothing inherently ironic about regarding oneself, if it's done earnestly.
On Larkin's word choices, you're right that "Arid interrogation" is trying to evoke the feeling you say, and I can't blame anyone for not wanting to meet him there, but in the bit you quoted, "the dread/Of dying, and being dead/Flashes afresh to hold and horrify" is quite straightforward, with simple Anglo-Saxon words, fresh verbs, and even some alliteration. "The anesthetic from which none come round" chills me every time and can certainly not be called technical (yes "anesthetic" is many syllables but it's a familiar modern concept); same with "Postmen like doctors go from house to house." Anyway, if you want simple and evocative language, you truly can't do better than "This Be the Verse." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse :-)
"I suspect you may also be looking more for cleverness than for power?"
This I have to object to strongly. I find all the poems I've cited to you highly powerful; I am moved by them. I think by "power" I mean something like "emotional and intellectual impact," and you mean something like "sound." In which case I'm chasing my form of power and you're chasing yours.
I quite like "The Cremation of Sam McGee," and I'll agree with you that Kipling's best work is better than the Lays of Ancient Rome (though I'm less impressed by Tennyson and Browning than you are - they're good, but either people have been recommending me the wrong ones or I think they're overrated) - but Kipling died almost eighty years ago, and I haven't found any new Kipling.
> I don’t think it would be any more meaningful if someone had dug up some thousand-year-old seagull fetishes from a nearby field. It’s powerful simply because of what it is. Invention, just doing stuff, is the nebula that nurses newborn gods.
This is wrong. Dead wrong. Human beings are notoriously resistant to new ideas, particularly when they do not have immediate, beneficial practical applications. One of the key strategies of rhetoric to persuade people to act is to phrase your cause as something that binds everyone together, and nothing is more useful in this sense than shared history and tradition. The reason that everyone cites ancient tradition even if something is in fact new is precisely because it's effective to do so.
If you want a striking example of this you might look at the Pentateuch. That is the rock around which the Jewish faith and identity are formed, and it is in essence (to the lay atheist) a book that tells a story that is at least partially apocryphal about the origin, struggles and shared destiny of a group of people. And one of the purposes of the book is absolutely political: to create the legitimacy of the claim of King Josiah of Judah to the greater territory of Israel, by establishing that the two peoples were one in the past, and were always meant to be one whole. It is a justification of political authority that goes back all the way to the creation of the universe.
Whether it is false is not especially important. False things bring people together as well as true ones, and at a certain point it ceases to matter. If you brought up archaeological evidence today that the exile of the Jewish people in the desert is almost certainly not factual, do you think you would destroy the Jewish faith and identity? Would you wish to?
You cite the past in order to get people in the present to act in order to attain a future you envision.
Fair enough, but I don't think the two sides are as much in contradiction as you say. People bond over shared narratives, we've always done it, I also do it and it's fine, it's part of basic human nature and how culture is threaded together.
We also have a kind of collective endeavor of evidence-seeking, and sometimes evidence appears that happens to clash with some cherished narratives. It has happened many times, look at all the philosophical and religious opposition that arose to the discovery of Darwinian evolution, but also look at Einstein's qualms over quantum mechanics for a subtler example.
I don't think the two approaches particularly owe anything to each other. If someone were to dig up evidence that some particular bunch of people did not get lost in the desert some 3500 years ago, it would be cool information to know, and it would be a good sign of a lively culture with a curiosity for things if their finding became at least a popular book and a TV series or two. And it would be a bad sign if people refrained from publishing it for fear of damaging Jewish culture, or conversely, if people used it to throw shade on it. But of course the mere information itself wouldn't destroy the Jewish faith and identity; they have many centuries of shared history besides that to bond over, including plenty of recent struggles. Why is that even a question? Nobody is asking to destroy anyone's identity around here as far as I can tell.
For that matter, you can bond over a shared narrative without literally taking it to be true. I think cultures are slowly coming to understand that its safer to do it this way, because in today's multicultural and connected world, you can't reasonably expect everyone else to handle your cherished myths with gloves anymore.
Festivals, religions, rituals etc are sometimes based on ancient tradition but all cuisine is fake, no national dish would be recognisable to people 150 years ago and that is fine.
Salmon Sushi clearly represents something about the essence of Japan and it's culture despite being invented by Norwegians during the Clinton administration, that is part of the absurd magic of the world and human culture.
P.S. All Thai food is invented by politicians as part of a high modernist national branding effort.
>Gastrodiplomacy, also known as culinary diplomacy, involves a country using food as a means of globalizing and gaining international influence. This was something Thailand was particularly skilled at. In 2002, the Thai government launched the Global Thai Program, a diplomatic initiative with the aim of increasing the number of Thai restaurants worldwide. The state provided training programs, grants, and information to Thai investors who wanted to open restaurants abroad. As part of this campaign, Pad Thai — a dish with virtually no cultural history — was positioned as Thailand's national dish and pioneered a culinary campaign funded by the Thai government with 500 million baht ($15 million USD). The government believed that the project would contribute to agricultural and food exports, while also producing foreign income from overseas transactions of goods and services. It worked. Thailand's cuisine has become a global phenomenon as a result of the project.
Our preference in the synagogue example, and other examples in architecture and related fields, may have more to do with our taste for symmetry, ornamentation and detail, and use of natural materials than a vague sense of attachment to the past. Setting aside the "why" for such tastes, and other recursive "whys". At some point architecture moved to minimalism and asymmetry.
In areas that actually "matter" -- life and death, important aspects of day to day living, rather than aesthetics, there is much less general nostalgia. Almost no one is nostalgic for the age of surgeries without anesthesia, or mathematics without algebra, or transportation with horse and buggy.
I think most also have a preference for textures - smooth is boring, in buildings, clothing or things. Even beautiful minimalistic furniture must have wood grains or other features to add details at some scale.
I think this fails to recognize that past times have probably been much more static than later times. Accordingly a higher percentage of what they did would have been 'default' and taken for granted, rather than being either a conscious act of imitation or deliberate innovation. This suggests that to an extent, the model of people in traditional societies living in the moment, as it were, is more correct than Scott indicates. The existence of myths or legends in those societies that vaguely connected the present to the past doesn't really change that.
I'm glad you brought up the Roman example, because pre-modern societies were -always- doing the whole "pretend our reform or change is rediscovered Ancient Wisdom because these are mostly conservative, agrarian societies and the idea of progress or change for its own sake would be seen negatively" schtick (see also Plato's "Ancient Athens").
> And it’s still better than any poem of the last fifty years, fight me.
I can think of lyrics to several Pink Floyd songs more recent than June 1974 that are way better poems than that, sorry.
> The right is a different New York synagogue, by an architect who was “just doing stuff”.
Not all architecture “just doing stuff” is that bad, though. Gaudí was very much *not* explicitly working off any picture of anything earlier! People even call his style "modernism"!
> Some popular art was written by people trying to parody a style they didn’t like, and ending up doing it better than any of the real practitioners
(I assumed one of the examples would be "Song 2" by Blur, which was intended as a parody of pop punk but ended up more successful than anything they did in earnest.)
(and there are weird cases such as the Illuminatus! trilogy or "Prisencolinensinainciusol", which are not only way better but also *earlier* than what an uninformed reader/listener would guess they're parodies of)
Prisencolinensinainciusol is not really a parody. It’s attempting to sound like English sounds like to non English speakers. Also it’s of its day, sonically.
An artist who is part of a tradition or inspired by one is working within something much bigger than themselves. The one who is "just doing stuff" is just doing it for himself and his ego. Hence the traditionalist will end up with something more inspired and creative.
Even an artist who is not trying to do so will be inheriting plenty of tradition, unless they're into some kind of absolute primitivism, which probably also became a tradition by the time the second person borrowed the idea from the first.
The question as I see it is, how honest is the artist in their acknowledgement of what is and what isn't traditional within their art?
It may not be the intention, but Scott's piece comes close defending intellectual dishonesty because "it works".
Is Scott moving away from tech-worshipping rationalism? Or is this attitude somehow consistent with it?
It's worth noting that an obsession with innovation and invention and progress and change is one of the defining features of the West. An interesting thing about, say, Indian philosophy is that there were all these commentaries on the Sutras and the Vedas that were doing *new philosophical work*...but presented their original ideas as actually not original but derived from the original ancient texts. That gave them legitimacy; originality would not have.
We're unusual in embracing the opposite. In everyone *wanting* to be seen as original and new. In conceiving of every decade and every generation as being "the best time in history"- or the worst time in history, but never merely continuous with the past.
I think this unusual hatred of the past is baked into our culture and has been for a long time (which is precisely why things like revivals are actually interesting and noteworthy and even revolutionary) and explains so much about the quirks of our society.
It's been said that "there are two great fools, the one who says 'this is old, therefore it is good,' and the one who says 'this is new, therefore it is better.'" I think in our day we're beginning to realize why the second fool is so foolish.
>"there are two great fools, the one who says 'this is old, therefore it is good,' and the one who says 'this is new, therefore it is better.'"
There are _certain_ areas where the second fool is actually making a pretty good guess. Specifically, in areas where our technology, particularly our instruments, have been consistently improved over time, the accuracy of a recent measurement is very likely to be better than the accuracy of an older one.
Rømer and Huygens's measurement of the speed of light in 1675, matching the currently used value to within 30%, was a triumph for their day. We _have_ gotten systematically better at measuring it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light#History
It is rare to _lose_ the ability to measure something to a given degree of accuracy, so our ability to measure typically improves with time, though, of course, any given attempt at a measurement might contain a blunder.
> An interesting thing about, say, Indian philosophy is that there were all these commentaries on the Sutras and the Vedas that were doing *new philosophical work*...but presented their original ideas as actually not original but derived from the original ancient texts.
Yes, they did plenty of that, I've read my fair share of it, and it can be quite funny. The Tibetans have a form of commentary called "chen drel" or annotationsl commentary, where the new text includes the full text it's commenting on, syllable by sillable, and inserts its explanations in between. It's pretty crazy to read and keep track of what both texts are saying at once.
I can't vouch for the overall effects of this kind of culture though. After centuries upon centuries of putting words and ideas into the mouth of past figures who never said them, the sad result is a tradition that enshrines plenty of delusional ideas about its past, and has no way to honesty look at the mess they've made, let alone attempt to untangle it.
I remember one pretty egregious case of chen-drel where the commentator brazenly added a "not" before the original verb, literally suggesting that the original author meant the opposite of what he said.
EDIT for context: I really appreciate the Indian intellectual tradition and its surrounding offshoots; it's specifically because they have plenty of good philosophizing and lots of really interesting things to say, that we modern-minded people find it rather irritating when their historical self-view is full of inaccuracies!
> I remember one pretty egregious case of chen-drel where the commentator brazenly added a "not" before the original verb, literally suggesting that the original author meant the opposite of what he said.
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
That's true regarding social institutions (to a limited extent: try fitting polyamory and group house orgies into that framework). But I meant the aesthetic side. Appreciating and valuing the beauty of old things is almost the polar opposite of "make new artificial things as fast as possible" that the tech community runs on.
>I think this unusual hatred of the past is baked into our culture and has been for a long time (which is precisely why things like revivals are actually interesting and noteworthy and even revolutionary) and explains so much about the quirks of our society.
Any estimate of when this happened?
I have a completely speculative wild guess:
Gutenberg's press made making copies (comparatively) cheap. Perhaps novelty increased in value _in comparison_???
The increased rate of technological change and information exchange made it more clear that progress was actually possible.
Historically, even when major innovations occurred (e.g. the spinning wheel), they took long enough to diffuse that it wasn't obvious to any one person that revolutionary change was occurring.
Many Thanks! Could be... So do you expect that the value put on novelty increased more-or-less smoothly as the industrial revolution took hold? Or as average transportation speed increased?
Many Thanks! You may be right. (Some people - how large a fraction?) believing that progress (can? often does?) occurs is not quite the same thing as valuing novelty in general, which was the point in ascend's comment that I was speculating about.
I meant to reply to this and didn't get around to it (and had to think about it). I think the standard answer would be the 18th century Enlightenment, from which the idea of "social progress" comes I believe. Of course that whole process of rejecting tradition was built on several previous such processes, mainly the Reformation and the Renaissance. The latter (and yes involving the printing press) is probably the ultimately correct answer: it was itself contingent on a lot of particular events (the Mongol conquests opening up the East-West trade routes for a while, the Black Death overturning the social order and having weird complex economic effects that helped stimulate artistic/intellectual patronage, and the Ottoman invasions driving classically educated Byzantine refugees into western Europe) but once it happened, it arguably set off a volatile but inevitable chain of events leading to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. I'm sure all this can be heavily disputed though.
On the other hand, I'm somewhat inclined to think it's a natural result of the individualusm that the West is particularly defined by (going right back to ancient Greece in some ways, and being a much more central part of Christianity than of other more collectivist religions). A society of individualism is just going to lead to individuals doing their own thing, inventing things and making their mark, and is much harder to structure around solemn tradition than a more collectivist one. So, it at least some sense, anti-traditionalism is baked into the DNA of the West, but required prosperity and global dominance to really manifest.
Many Thanks! Yeah, it is complex. I wish I had a nice graph for how likely punishment for saying "What the King said is wrong." was as a function of time. I have no such graph. And, of course, I'd like to have similar information about various contributing factors, which I also don't have. ( And this isn't _quite_ the same thing as valuing novelty, but more a matter of how much individualism was accepted as a function of time. I _do_ agree that accepting individualism is a necessary precondition for accepting novelty. If every potential innovator gets hammered down, there can't be much novelty. )
Traditions can persist for millenia. For example the european Venus statues of the Paleolithic were made and used by the Cro-Magnon peoples for at least 24 000 years.
From wiki:
"the Venus of Hohle Fels dates back at least 35,000 years to the Aurignacian era, and the Venus of Monruz dates back about 11,000 years to the Magdalenian."
I like to know how fake things are. I grew up doing English and Anglo-American folk dancing and music, revering things that were collected in the 1920s as "authentic" and "traditional." Some of this is about who can do the thing - as a teenager I felt pretty strongly that only men should do the Abbots Bromley horn dance. It's genuinely ancient; one of the antlers used in England has been carbon-dated to the eleventh century. But knowing more about how flexible traditions have been over time made me more relaxed. (In this case Americans have standardized a dramatic theatrical version, while by the 20th century the residents of Abbots Bromley UK were doing it to tunes like "Yankee Doodle" and "Pop Goes the Weasel".) Once I realized stuff like that, I felt ok with innovations like . . . . women doing the dance too. I assume that my kid yelling "That's my mommy!" when she recognized me under the antlers is more or less similar to what's been shouted by children in the original English village for centuries.
One song about woo origin stories about Morris dancing, which I can't find the full words to:
One of the things I enjoy about the American "Christmas Revels" is how they feel free to muck around with the bits of stuff they have, and try to create new traditions as they go along. It seems, I dunno, traditional. :-)
I mentioned reading about Calusari and Kukeri in another comment here, they are both "Mummer" traditions in Romania and Bulgaria respectively. The scholars say Calusari is a direct descendant of the cult of Diana from Roman times (Romania is named after Rome and their language is Romance not Slavic), and the Kukeri are a direct descendant of the cult of Thracian Dionysus. So - living traditions that are actually ancient. The similarities between these and Morris dancing are numerous and striking - solo dancing rather than circles or lines, bells on the costumes, associated characters like the hobby horse, death and resurrection skits, fertility rituals, etc. So I was quite surprised to find out that Morris dancing is not similarly ancient, but in fact dates to the (yes here it is again) 19th century.
Thanks for this. Seems like newer knowledge than when I researched it decades ago. Wiki says "Boxing Day 1899 is widely regarded as the starting point for the Morris revival." - that's likely what I was seeing back then.
(writing from the USA) Re Lost Cause and 1619 Project, my _least_ favorite use of history, accurate or inaccurate, is exhuming old grievances. While there are _many_ aspects of law that I dislike, I solidly endorse statutes of limitations.
"Sometimes I have attempted a rather bold metaphor, but have seen that no one would accept it if it came from me (I am a mere contemporary), and so I have attributed it to some out-of-the-way Persian or Norseman. Then my friends have said that it was quite fine; and of course I have never told them that I invented it, because I was fond of the metaphor. After all, the Persians or Norsemen may have invented that metaphor, or far better ones." - J.L. Borges, This Craft of Verse, p. 73.
Also, Scott is being entirely naive about the heritage of architecture like the modernist synagogue. Architects working in that style are looking at Bauhaus traditions, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Adolf Loos, etc. It is a novel tradition, but still a referential practice, iterating on previous innovations while retaining certain core features viewed as essential to a shared tradition. And finally, this demonstrates something of the shallowness of the tradition-fetishist, if only because Alexander places this beautiful synagogue (the B'Nai Among synagogue) in NY rather than its rightful place in St. Louis, MO.
To be fair, I don't think Sam Kriss's "people doing stuff" excludes building on the past, recent or not. The distinction he's trying to make is this kind of normal "people doing stuff", versus exaggerating the past into some kind of unchanging ideal.
I loved the Sam Kriss piece, and this rejoinder is quite nice, too. I'm delighted to see this back-and-forth between two authors I admire very much, in very different genres. Thanks, Sam, and you, and Substack!
As for the "just doing stuff" vs. "looking back at an idealized even-further-past" - it's always going to be a complex mix, though, innit. In the midst of trying to idealise, there are some bits that we just do, and they become a new and strange whole. I think the point Kriss was making was that you can't ever assume that just because a thing has the tag "traditional" attached to it that it harks back further than about 1 generation. We may well be trying to copy someone who was trying to copy someone who was trying to copy someone who was... but along the way, every copy was imperfect, and so every element of any copy may only be one turn of the screw old.
But I don't think the topic was good poems of the last fifty years, I think it was the very best poems of the last fifty years. And since Ginsberg's "Howl" is older than that, what the very best are isn't obvious to me. Is it to you?
No, I have no idea what is 'the best.' I'm only a casual reader of literature, without the breadth or the expertise to make judgments. My working assumption is that I'm missing out on the best because I'm not into hip hop at all. That genre represents such a massive outpouring of rhythmic words, including entirely new technical-artistic concepts like flow, that expect much of the best in the last few decades has come from there. Whether the best is really the names we know like Kendrick Lamarr or Childish Gambino, or some other more obscure artists, I have no way of knowing.
Slam poetry, too, includes real gems. I don't really have a feel for how to judge them or which will last, but I can see pieces like that Koyczan and Talyor Mali's one about teachers sitting in anthologies 20 years from now.
Past that, I am at the mercy of those who read more than me, and write googlable anthology lists.
I strongly agree with you about Hip Hop. I suspect the best poets leave poetry for songwriting because it is more competitive. And "Hamilton" is just utterly amazing.
Also I love your Tang poetry translations! I can't read the originals so I'm missing out on most of the complexity of the work, but what little of it I get is lovely. Subscribed. 😀
I don't quite understand one thing: why is the past special in this regard? The urge to paint with bold colours and ignore aspects of reality for aesthetic or inspirational reasons applies laterally and contemporarily, too, with stereotypes and idealisations of every kind: local and religious identities, gender, even things like corporate cultures, sometimes for good but mostly for ill.
If the point (as suggested by the bit about laundering present-day ideas as returning to past) is to smuggle some reactionary takes around without rising too far above the parapet, then a) it's inherently a bit shabby and dishonest; and b) does the past even retain the kind of authority anymore that would make this an effective tactic?
My super uninformed take is that the reason the "older" synagogue is more appealing is that its materials look more like that natural environment we evolved in.
Also uninformed, I like that it emphasizes the height more. There are quite a few modernish skyscrapers I also like, for proportion and height reasons.
I think some of the reaction against deconstructing fake tradition comes from the threat that like, allegedly "real" traditionalism poses to some people.
I'm not one to go after like, dishes and architecture (and I love a good Tikka Masala", but I will get up in arms when people wistfully say things adjacent to like "I just want traditional families to come back, and for things to be like the wonder years" or similar. That past is made up. It's like wishing for the time of king Arthur. It's fine as long as you realize its a wish.
Who is threatened by "traditional families"? Unless you mean gays, in which case I would say traditional family can mean a lot of things beyond that...
Also, an aversion to traditional family can seriously threaten a lot of people.
I could maybe say "perceived threat" to be a bit more fair.
There is a lot of effort expended trying to "resurrect" or "restore" traditional structures that didn't exist in the first place, and the fact that they didn't suggests it might not be as good of an idea as people think.
Imagine you meet someone wistfully longing for a quasi-arthurian era when monarchs had absolute power and everyone respected them and thought they were divinely ordained and there were never any civil wars or anything. There are lots of objections you can lodge against such a system but the primary one is "that era never existed and may be unachievable."
There's an easy enough answer to that one: "...and how did King Arthur's story end?" The tragic end of Arthur's saga is almost as famous as its beginning.
Well, here's the short version: Arthur's great successes as a king and a warlord ended up not amounting to all that much when his shortcomings as a husband led to a love affair between his queen and Sir Lancelot, the greatest among his knights, because once Arthur found out what was going on, he is honor-bound to see them both executed for their treachery. Guinevere is arrested, Lancelot escapes and runs off, raises an army, and comes back for her, and the ensuing civil war weakens Arthur enough that a third party is able to assassinate him and usurp the throne.
Funny thing,Theodidactus, we did have real times that existed where people had two-parent families where the parents were married.
They didn't always work. But a lot of those marriages and families did work.
The new way doesn't always work either. There are a lot of unhappy people after divorces, or never married and their long term relationship broke up, or they can't get a long term relationship, or they can't get a date, or why don't guys want to date single mothers?
There's no one perfect system, but some things work better than others. Yeah, it's easy to look back wistfully at the past and idealise a time you never lived in, but it's also easy to look forward wistfully to the future and idealise a time you may never see, where the tyranny of "gotta get married to have sex, if have sex gotta have kids, if married can't get unmarried" is all done away with. New ways, new problems.
The trick is, and it's a very difficult trick, keeping the good parts that did work and carrying them forward, and integrating them with the good parts that do work of the new systems.
Well you said that you get in arms when people say they want them to come back.
Traditional families aren't a forgotten ideal like traditional architecture though. They're still the default in well behaved middle class circles. When I say I want traditional families to make a comeback I'm not reaching after some mythical past, I'm just saying that I want other kids to enjoy the same kind of stability that my kids do.
> when people wistfully say things adjacent to like "I just want traditional families to come back, and for things to be like the wonder years" or similar
In my experience, that's mostly a polite way to say "please stop hurting me".
By itself, no. But it's never by itself, no one exists in isolation. It's the result and cause and mediating step for a vast sweeping social change that denigrates a large group of people and everything they value. One person burning a tiny bit of coal isn't a problem, but once everyone does it we get global warming.
Scott's two arguments -- that "Tradition" is not some blanket endorsement of everything about the past, and that pretense has always been part of tradition -- can be combined, and moreover combined with a third argument, to wit that, Um Actually, there have been (and are) traditions that really do maintain real continuity over long stretches of time by being very intentional about it (as well as being influenced by some measure of pretense). The little genealogy in the middle of this post -- the bit of "current traditionalists look to the Victorians, the Victorians looked to the renaissance & the middle ages, the renaissance looked back to Rome & Greece, Rome & Greece imagined a golden age in the distant past...," is exactly right. But I would add that it is not just fake tradition that is traditional. *Critiques of tradition* are also traditional. In those traditions which I have attended to the most (which, caveat lector, is not saying very much) -- that is, traditions regarding spiritual discipline and prayer -- there is inevitably, alongside many stern warnings to not just go mixing it up on your own whim, and to guard against "novelty," and so on, a little counter-theme that says: "do not rely solely on tradition!" This is found in Buddhist sutras that insist the claims are verifiable and *must be verified* by the individual; in Christian monastic writings (and indeed the New Testament), warning that you can do all the prostrations or repetitions of prayer you like exactly as they have been handed down, and fail to "get it;" and so on. On the other hand: these traditions are also characterized by being intentional and unbroken -- until they aren't, of course. They are very focused on master-to-disciple transmission. Chains of Hadith need to be rigorous and reliable at every step; the Talmud records rabbis teaching the teaching they received from their teacher, etc etc. Once this central cord is broken (and all it takes is a generation), that is gone. If other things have been preserved -- cultural forms, architecture, texts -- then those who were sufficiently sensitized to the tradition to eventually feel its loss, will attempt, and perhaps be able with some success, to "reconstruct," and if they find some remnants of actual transmission, a few masters & disciples who survived the deluge, the phoenix may arise again. To some extent this is "just doing stuff," but in a way that attends to or is oriented by the strong ("subconscious"?) force of vision that Scott and Sam K are both referring to here, and it probably turns out that when you are thus guided, you do well to attend also to how others have done it.
Love it. I think we are entering an era when people have internalized the shared wisdom inherent in numerous faith traditions and are seeing that they are actually rigorous epistemic guides.
“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
A while ago I wrote a similar argument about retrofuturism. I think there's a failure mode, when making predictions for the future (e.g. in science fiction), to try to make it sound more futuristic by removing references to the past. But in fact the future is always some combination of new innovations and various older influences, and since those older influences can be very aesthetic or otherwise attractive, it's a mistake to try to avoid them. It makes our predictions less inspiring.
I don’t get it. “The people of the past weren’t trying to return to some idealized history” doesn’t make any sense as an argument against traditionalism even if it was true.
Of course people in the 1950s weren’t looking back to an idealized past, because *their* past wasn’t ideal! Their present was!
Well, your premise (that at a certain period things were ideal) opens up the "do you think people in India all get enough to eat" critique. If the idea is that the 50s really were preferable, then arguments against that premise are fair game.
I’m not claiming that the 1950s are ideal myself, just that that’s presumably what traditionalists believe.
IOW, “people in the past didn’t want to return to an ideal past” only makes sense as an argument against traditionalism if you define traditionalism as “the belief that, regardless of what time you are living in, things were better in the past” rather than the more plausible “the belief that, at the present moment in history, things were better in the past”.
Other than the Amish and similar folk, I don't think many people actually want to go back 100% to something in the past, and certainly there are no big political movements that want that. Instead, lots of people want *some specific things* to go back to the way they were in the past, while others stay as they are now or improve further. Someone who thinks US sex roles were better in the 50s than now isn't in general proposing to do away with computers or MRIs, they're proposing some changes to specific stuff they think got worse. (Though it may be that technological change they like makes this impossible--at a guess, sex roles were guaranteed to change once the pill became widely available, for example.)
This is not always the case, but a lot of times there's more "just doing stuff" to traditions than we know. As Donald Kingsbury famously put it, "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was."
Agreed. There is also a third possibility: That the problem that the solution was for was a problem for _some_ people, say lords who wanted to keep the serfs _firmly_ under their thumbs, and wished to suppress a peasant revolt, and the peasants who wished to revolt had a rather different set of preferences about the matter. It is still illuminating to find out what _was_ the problem that a tradition was a solution for...
edit: One other thing... Even when the _stated_ problem justifying a tradition _is_ preserved and known, it may not be the actual reason that a tradition carries an advantage. If there is some ritual with three parts, each with esoteric, mystical justifications, but it just happens that the second part of the process happens to minimize the odds of getting cholera, then the traditional _justifications_ may be pure noise, but one part of the ritual might actually be valuable.
> In the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It’s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that.
I don't think this is true. People often use the age of a practice to argue for its goodness, either through a "Secret to Our Success" style cultural evolution argument or the Lindy effect. If the nuclear family was a very temporary phenomenon, or was dependent on some class of people not having nuclear families, then these facts undermine the argument. In fact, it's unclear why someone would even bother referencing the past in defense of nuclear families unless they thought there was some rhetorical benefit in doing so.
The Indian food example doesn't sit well with me. The stakes of someone liking Indian food are so low and personal that a respondent who launches into a debate about the true nature of Indian food is obviously being an ass -- just let them enjoy the food!
My impression of arguments about tradition is that, while they are sometimes about such matters of personal preference, they are more often about how we should collectively structure our society, a topic with much larger stakes for more people. In such cases, traditionalists are often not just using the past as a source of inspiration, but also as a claimed authority. And it is quite reasonable to respond to a claim that "if only we did X, life would be better, like it was in the past" with a response that, actually, X didn't yield such great results in the past.
I think the myth of the American cowboy may be one of the most dramatic contrasts with reality.
Although I've never specifically researched it, it's pretty obvious the adventures of movie and TV cowboys tell us more about popular culture in the 1930s or 1950s, the Great Depression and the Cold War, than the American West of the late 19th century -- as boys' adventure novels of the 1860s or the original 'Westerns', dime novels of the 1880s, romanticized an earlier time.
For example, Deputy Sheriff William M. Breakenridge's 1928 book 'Helldorado' (Houghton Mifflin / Riverside Press) tells quite a different story about Tombstone than novelists, film and TV directors; and Robert F. Dykstra's 'The Cattle Towns' (Alfred A. Knopf, 1971) tells us more about cowboys than Larry McMurtry and Randolph Scott.
Sure. Eastwood updated his cowboy for postmodernism. But nearly all his other cowboys are of the mythical genre. The squint alone is gold. Doctorow's western, 'Welcome to Hard Times' breaks the stereotype as well, and then there's the Cohen brothers' Buster Scruggs. But these are all quite different from the films made from about the 1920s to the 1970s.
And, apparently, gold miners in boom towns drinking champagne because whiskey and spirits could be watered down, but if you open a bottle of champagne, that's it, you can't water it down and reseal it and recreate the "pop!" (allegedly):
I mean, you do mention it, but the mfk Renaissance was an attempt to revive civilization by larping a few ancient greek and latin texts after some Byzantine scholars started teaching greek and latin well agian, and it turned out pretty ok.
When I was at university, I enjoyed participating in the "Time Ceremony", held each year when the clocks went back.
It was only in my final year that I discovered that the ceremony, rather than being a tradition from time immemorial, had in fact been invented as a joke by some students in the 70s.
> “Here is my, Scott’s, utopian vision of the good” is a hard sell. “Why don’t we go back to how the Romans did this?” is a little easier. Even if it was only three Romans, one time, and what they did was only vaguely reminiscent.
> I’m not recommending that people lie and invent fake genealogies for what they were going to do anyway.
These are in contradiction. You're acknowledging the usefulness of lying (or being incorrect) and then saying it's a useful tool that makes it easier to convince people but then saying that people shouldn't do it after an essay singing its praises. You even end on a note of how that's the standard method of getting things done.
This reads a lot like an endorsement of lying. And lying in a way that can have catastrophic consequences. What is the principle here? Because it seems like the end state is that you and your opponents both invent fake histories and then battle over who gets to tell the "real" one. This is a common thing, remarked upon by men from Napoleon to the first Emperor of China. But I'd hope there's something here beyond "this works to cynically maximize power so let's use it."
I agree with your message but note the line about "even if it was only three Romans one time and what they did was only vaguely reminiscent" as a way to get around a hard sell. The reason I ask what's the principle would be is because "good" is somewhat a matter of opinion. And without limiting opinion history becomes something to manipulate for subjective ends. Which it might already be but that's often with a heavy dose of lying.
I'll take a stab at this. I think things that are clearly over the line are lying, making up new lies, and inventing history. But on the acceptable side is taking inspiration from the fragments of truth and lies that we have, and distilling that into an ideal that we can use to move forward.
In general, I think this is how our bio-neural-net brains work. When presented with incomplete information, they fill in the gaps with what are now called "hallucinations". When presented with a lot of random data, they call forth a pattern that could hold it all. When presented with a bunch of examples, they extract an inner pattern from those examples.
If what someone had was a few poems and some pictures, maybe their brain came up with an ideal of what Roman Courage was like. The ideal probably has as much to do with what their idea of modern courage is (or isn't) as it has to do with the sources. It would be incorrect to say that that's how *historical Romans* viewed courage, although lots of people, being imperfect, make that mistake all the time about all sorts of things. But "Roman-inspired" is a perfectly fine description. A lot of "X-inspired" stuff is crap, but a lot of everything is crap. It's probably no worse than some of the weird neo-Celtic feminism Goddess-worship stuff that was going around in the 1980s thanks to Marion Zimmer Bradley.
So my issue with this is that things can be more or less correct. For example, I was talking with someone about Cicero and they insisted that Romans were stoics who avoided pleasure and sought pain to make themselves stronger. This is wrong. I was able to point out that in his "On the Purpose of Good and Evil" Cicero's argument is actually that you need the wisdom to understand which painful things make you stronger and which pleasurable things make you weaker. And that if you avoid all pleasure or all pain you will not achieve eudaimonia. He does argue against avoiding all pain but he also argues against avoiding all pleasure.
So in some sense it's correct that Cicero argued against being overindulgent and advised people to seek out pain to improve yourself. But only in a wider argument that includes the importance of proper (but not improper) pleasure. One of these interpretations is more correct.
Now, the other person might say (and say truthfully) there is some instrumental use to them in the less correct argument. They can say their ideas are "Cicero inspired." And they can argue it's better for the modern world. But that argument is begging the question that it's better. If history's primarily value is in instrumentally being useful, largely apart from the truth of its claims, then it becomes nothing more than a battleground. Which is what it is. But I don't like that and I don't want to like that.
I agree with what you say. But ... I feel like there's something I can't quite articulate, here, and maybe that's because it's just an illusion in my head.
Maybe it's that part of being in a living tradition is being able to point to a set of things and say "we do these things in part because these are the things we do", and an intelligent person will acknowledge that the traditions do in fact change over time, continually adding and discarding things. And there can be a distinction between the formal outlines of the practice that we attempt to preserve exactly, and the parts that are emphasized and used today, and part of the value of the distinction is that it allows us to go back to the historical record and bring forward ideas that have fallen out of practice. Kinda like a seed bank.
And inevitably, not everyone will have that perspective, or have the knowledge that makes the perspective work, because most people just want to get on with whatever in their life they think is important. And that's where people like you come in, perhaps?
I feel like there are a lot of people these days who are searching for something to ground their life in, and one of the things they turn to is imaginary simplified history, which give them the feeling of being part of a whole that they don't get elsewhere in their lives.
This returns to my initial point though. It is a defense of lying. It's the noble lie of Plato but that's still a lie. I don't deny lies might be useful. And maybe you or Scott want to argue for this particular use. But you should grapple with the problems of that position.
My criticism of the original argument (Sam Kriss's) is that there's a smuggled assumption. Traditions is invented (true) therefore it's fake (false). Or perhaps they argue it's infinitely changeable or arbitrary or unimportant. That is a non-sequitur. In what other context do we accept that something being invented means that it's arbitrary or artificial? Your computer is invented. Is it arbitrary? Is it fake? No, it's a real computer. It does something. And if you start changing things about it it might stop doing those things. Tradition does not need to be a lie to give people a sense of purpose.
Is it cool now to support the dynast politics of the Congress party and it's (33 ?) partners who cobbled together to oppose Modi? I'm also fascinated that it is now cool to oppose this man who has revolutionized welfare in India.
Money actually reaches the poor. All of it. Or do you oppose Modi because he wants to do away with caste and is low caste himself (teli, or oil pressing caste)? This is why many Hindu elites oppose him.
Sure he plays identity politics (but he has some prominent Muslim supporters too) but who doesn't play identity politics nowadays? His opponents do so in ugly ways. Modi's welfare schemes benefit religious minorities too, by the way.
I'm tired of Westerners superficially calling him fascist. He forced every Indian to create a bank account so money meant to help them actually reaches them. He's also great at making sure the poor spend it on intended schemes (build a home or get a gas cylinder instead of wood burning stoves, build a toilet, etc). Shouldn't ppl who think about Effective Altruism be his super fans?! Crazy crazy world.
I didn't read the bit about Modi being fascist as Scott's actual belief, but rather as the sort of line that the sort of critics he's talking about frequently pulls out, which Scott seems to find obnoxious.
I did think that too. That maybe he was mocking what you're expected to say about Modi. But it's the only politically correct opinion for sure - the opinion permitted by the NYT, WaPo end of things as well as maybe MAGA (who hate him because he's made mass conversions to Christianity harder in India - a lot of it happens under the cover of fake NGOs).
It's refreshing that he doesn't care for political correctness or that he cares for it in this context?!!
But I think he shares a certain anti-Modi bias with the NYT. Maybe because he's a rationalist and Modi is religious. Hinduism is a very liberal religion though - it doesn't believe it has a monopoly on the truth.
Scott's positions can sometimes be politically correct, even though that might not be his goal. In other words, I think his positions on Modi are rather boring.
An effective altruist should take a serious look at how Modi has succeeded so hugely in making welfare for the poor work so well in a massive, diverse and complex country. Just throwing around words like fascist, is silly.
Of course, both the people celebrating fake ancient traditions, and the people (like Sam Kriss) pointing out that those traditions are fake and complaining about lionizing of the past, are both following the well worn paths of tradition. This debate has always been present, and is itself an ancient tradition.
so i don't think i'd want to argue for the idea that no one should ever take any influence from the past, and that until the late nineteenth century no one ever did. (not least because the last piece i published on here involves borrowing forms from fourteenth-century vision books and sixteenth-century pamphlets. lying and inventing fake genealogies is basically my entire practice as a writer! ) tbh, i don't think that's what i was really getting at in the essay. as i wrote, just before the bit you quote:
"Tradition says that all images are immutable and the meanings of all symbols are naturally determined. A leaf must signify the exact same thing, whether it’s in Hastings or Hyderabad, now or three thousand years ago. Tradition pretends to be a respect for the past, but it refuses to let the past inhabit its own particular time..."
i'm definitely not saying that painters, poets, and architects were always 'just doing stuff' and have never referred to their predecessors. when i argue against 'tradition,' this is what i'm arguing against: the notion that symbols are fixed and eternal rather than contingent and conventional, and therefore the way people did things in the past was natural, while any deviations from that are artificial and should probably be discarded. it's possible that no one holds this position as strongly as i'm arguing against it, but i do think some implicit version of this underlies a lot of what you could call folk folklore studies. it's not just the green man; a lot of people are absolutely certain that (for instance) easter is a pre-christian germanic fertility festival, which it absolutely isn't, because the image of an egg is somehow inherently pagan. more pressingly, it also seems to animate a lot of the trad right, who often identify eternal cultural forms with whatever people were doing immediately before the jews invented modernity some time around 1965. for someone like jordan peterson, a disney film from 1960 is part of the same deep cultural current as a book of hours from 1060, but a disney film from 2020 is not. obviously whenever societies have come up with basically arbitrary conventions, they've preferred to think of them as eternal absolutes; i guess for the purposes of that piece though i was more interested in the truth.
I followed the link and read the whole "green and growing" piece. I loved it as much as I love Scott's writing--which is saying a lot. But I wonder about the "just doing stuff" idealization of the past. This itself seems to follow the Rousseauian tradition of longing for some lost, innocent state that allowed humans to enjoy life before writing, property, language, agriculture, the state, thought, or whatever else it was that a person wants to say ruined us. The same attitude of course inspired the nineteenth-century inventors of "pagan" traditions (and Frazer, in his way: I don't think contempt could explain that prolix, lifelong obsession, and it does seem that he dropped that scheme at least somewhat in the third edition--see the discussion in Josephson-Storm's brilliant _The Myth of Disenchantment_). It seems to me simply part of the post-infant human condition that spontaneity and "just doing stuff," like inspiration, are hard to come by. Habit is sometimes a good substitute (and can make a place for more inspiration). But I suspect the person who made the lovely gull-idol had *something* in mind when they were doing it, even if it was just wonder at gulls.
Since you don't allow comments on your substack, I'll say it here: I massively enjoyed your last piece. It had me laughing the whole time, while at the same time bringing up uncomfortable questions about how we interpret the things that happen to us as if we were the main character of the story.
And btw, as someone who spent years learning Tibetan culture, congrats on your characterization of Tibetan stuff, the guy who pronounced his consonants like a rube from the borderlands was hilariously on-spot.
"A leaf must signify the exact same thing, whether it’s in Hastings or Hyderabad, now or three thousand years ago."
Sometimes a leaf is just a leaf, but sometimes if I see carvings of leaves in Hyderabad from three thousand years ago, I can understand why the person did that and have some idea of what was meant by it.
The cool green shade of foliage dappled by sunlight is a common trope be it in rainy Ireland or sun-blasted Hyderabad (if Hyderabad is sun-blasted, I don't know).
Sometimes a leaf just being a leaf *is* an immutable image for our ancestors and for us.
There's a post on Tumblr I just read today where someone is talking about holding a 500,000 year old hand axe and connecting with it and the person who used it because they know today how to use such a thing.
If something works, it lasts. Be it tradition or fake tradition, there's a reason the people around you were chanting for the sacrifice of the green man. Some things resonate with us and in us, like a plucked string. Green leaves are just leaves, but they're not *just* leaves.
"I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.
It's right-handed
I am right-handed
There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly
I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.
There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.
I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.
A homo erectus made it
Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.
Who were you
A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?
Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?
Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?
Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?
Who were you?
What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?
What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.
Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?
Or has it always been divine?
Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?
Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.
The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.
Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?
I'm not religious.
But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine
I'm not sure what an egg could be a symbol of if not fertility but in any case the smug Easter-revealers* - admittedly tedious at this point - are perhaps pleasing themselves by saying merely that Easter was so placed in the spring so as to slot into or compete with a pagan fertility festival.
*And the fourth of July was the fifth. Or the fifth was the fourth? And Columbus was stupid, etc. And Jesus' birthday may be some other time of the year lol. In fact we "know" it's not the 25th of December, Anno Domini. The latter's my favorite because it comports well with my chief alienation from humanity, the attachment people have to "birthday".
"a lot of people are absolutely certain that (for instance) easter is a pre-christian germanic fertility festival, which it absolutely isn't, because the image of an egg is somehow inherently pagan"
God be good to St Bede, if he could have seen what the folklorists, 19th century weavers of new "traditional ancient national culture", anthropologists, New Agey types and Wiccans and neo-pagans and what you will did with his mention of Eostre, I think he'd have decided "Screw it, nobody cares about this particular small Saxon tribe anyhoo" and left it out of "The Reckoning of Time".
The Easter Bunny is traceable to March hares, and eggs I suppose because of customs around decorating eggs when the Lenten fast was over and flesh meat could be consumed once more.
Making stuff up out of whole cloth, with zero constraints, rarely leads anywhere interesting. Music, literature, visual art, architecture, games. Creativity really only arises when you’re working within constraints, testing the boundaries, can I change this element while keeping this other element fixed. Even improvisational forms like jazz generally stick to a scale or a key or theme. The past is a source of templates to be improved on. Similarities to evolution by natural selection are intentional.
I've heard that said about work in the sciences too. I'd guess that a mathematician say instead: "Your work is both good and original, but these parts are disjoint."
However, problems happen when the fake tradition is an implicit attack on someone else, or otherwise is used to make fake claims about something that's still around. This is the biggest reason to complain about fake traditions that isn't just "I hate everything my outgroup does" and Scott is severely understating it here.
I think this misses the reason that these arguments are being made? When trads argue for a return to tradition, they often say things like "this was selected for by hundreds of years of cultural evolution, therefore it's good for civilization, be mindful of Chesterton's fence", etc. In that context, it make sense to reply "actually many of your traditions were invented whole-cloth in the 1950s."
If you're arguing that traditions are good and worth respecting because they've withstood the test of time, then it matters whether they're actually old or not.
I dunno it really seems like a lot of self-identified trad people are making a much stronger-than-aesthetic argument, something like "the past was good and we should do this so we are happy like the people in the past were" such that it's a correct response to go "actually the past sucked".
Moorish revival style may be pretty and pleasing and you don't have to accept any of the moral judgements of either the moors or the people who came up with moorish revival style to appreciate.
Traditional marriage structures on the other hand encode actual moral and practical considerations of the past, which result in actual concrete outcomes in daily life and should in fact be analyzed a bit more deeply!
>Moorish revival style may be pretty and pleasing and you don't have to accept any of the moral judgements of either the moors or the people who came up with moorish revival style to appreciate.
Generally agreed, though it might be disquieting if e.g. one of the architectural features was originally designed to expedite carrying out a stoning...
I think there's an important distinction to draw between idealizing an aesthetic tradition and idealizing a social tradition. Someone who says "I like Indian food" is unlikely to advocate for adopting Indian laws or economics to encourage Indian food. Someone who builds a synagogue in an idealized Moorish architecture is unlikely to advocate for adopting the social structures of al-Andalus. But someone who says "I like 1950s family structures" is likely arguing that we should change our laws and social structures to encourage those.
A fake Jack-in-the-Green parade doesn't meaningfully harm anyone else. But changing laws to discourage women from working outside the home does.
But now we've swung round to "Everything in the 1950s was awful all the time, all the families were miserable, nothing worked and everything sucked" and that's just as false and idealised a view as "The 50s were perfect".
"But changing laws to discourage women from working outside the home does."
What counts as discouraging? Giving homeschool parents the same amount of tax money per child that a public school gets, is that discouraging women to work outside the home?
I'm not going to get into an argument about specific policy proposals. My point is just that idealized aesthetic traditions are mostly harmless, but idealized social traditions are not.
I think you have to actually engage with the person and his beliefs to determine that, or it's super easy to just attribute everything bad to your outgroup.
"I like Indian food" doesn't mean "I want to live in an Indian cultural immersion program," it means "I like the food available to me that comes with the label 'Indian food' on it." Anyone who pretends not to know this is just being a troll.
The difficulty is not with the use of pointers, the difficulty is that these claims are often (in fact) literal - not just "I want life to be like the fictionalized, idealized version of the 1950s as seen on Leave It To Beaver and similar", but "The 1950s was actually like that for most people and things have gone horribly wrong." Such claims (were they true) would have strong implications regarding policy, and are often used to support bad policy that would supposedly restore the previous golden age. Nothing wrong with being inspired by stories of the past, or using them as indicators for values, but this is a small minority of RETVRN-style claims, and the standard form of them are much less wholesome.
I do have some "How did we lose the knowledge or ability to do this?" concerns, mostly on variants of cost disease and related problems. E.g. Why does it now take us longer to build one power reactor than the whole Manhattan Project took?
> Why does it now take us longer to build one power reactor than the whole Manhattan Project took?
Well for one thing, the Manhattan Project didn't build any power reactors. You'd be better off using reactor construction in the 70s as your point of comparison.
Many Thanks! True, the Manhattan Project used reactors for plutonium production, with the power from the fission process discarded.
> A reactor built by Argonne National Laboratory produced the world’s first usable amount of electricity from nuclear energy on Dec. 20, 1951, lighting a string of four light bulbs.
The Shippingport atomic power station, which delivered power to the electrical grid, started construction on September 6, 1954 and
> The first electrical power was produced on December 18, 1957 as engineers synchronized the plant with the distribution grid of Duquesne Light Company.
>Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and in 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. Georgia Power now estimates the total cost of the project to be more than $30 billion
So, in summary, we went from taking 3 years to build a nuclear power plant in 1954-1957 to taking 15 years to build a nuclear power plant in 2009-2024. Not good!
I think that using the past as an enabling fiction both to inspire new ideas and to legitimate them, is fine, but I think this piece is too dismissive of the second argument it raises. Sure, people in the past looked farther back, but they also did many things just to do them, and many of the things that we look back on with nostalgia were done originally for different reasons.
I think it matters if people built a fence to keep in a bull, and now we want to keep the fence around after dairy farming has been outlawed. Maybe the fence will be a spur to new invention: we will come up with new uses for it. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it's original purpose was different: that should inform how we think about its uses now.
"Ah, you must be a [central member of worst group ever to ensure that policy]."
Perhaps it's like those"primitive" societies that tell outsiders that everyone is equal and there's no property, but it turns out that in practice there's a rigid hierarchy and strict rules about who is allowed to use - or even touch - objects and land.
Or perhaps people who claim to support ideals like "rationality" or "faith, hope, and charity", but who in practice only live up to those ideals a relatively tiny bit more than everyone around them.
Yes, yes, only physical reality matters, blah blah blah. But the ideals we subscribe to, and the stories that we tell ourselves about why we do what we do, are also important. Especially if we want to understand our fellow humans and influence them. And maybe envisioning a better world is the first step toward bringing one about, rather than just "randomly doing stuff" like a blind idiot (god).
What work is the "looking at the past" doing, if you can get it so wrong and come up with something so good? It seems like either there is something accurate about these perceptions, or people are just doing something good and associating it with an old thing that's actually unrelated.
Also, if everyone is looking back at a previous era, but that era is also looking back at an even more distant past... it's hard to put into words, but it feels to me like this also doesn't make sense. If this "modern traditionalist" went to an actual Victorian and started gushing over how great their time was, would their response be "of course we're great, why wouldn't you copy us"? Or would they be more like "What? No, we're just a pale imitation of the Renaissance and ancient Greece." ?
If the latter, why look at Victorians at all? Why not just look directly at ancient Greece? And if the former, why can't we improve on them the way they improved on what came before?
I guess this is a perfect example of how the supposedly "rationalist" community has stopped caring one bit about whether something is true or a fabrication, let alone what it means for something to be true. Truth gets boring after a while, fake stuff is fine and no-one should call it out as fake, as long as it helps get things done or creative juices running, and we can move on to endless discussions of ethics and "shoulds"!
Sorry but I'm not on board. I enjoy fiction and the powers of fantasy as much as anyone, but when I'm thinking about some real-world claim, my first and main question is how literally real it is. The Scottish festival is *cool* and I'd be happy to attend if I lived anywhere near, but I much prefer to read Sam about how its origins are fake, than some fluff piece about its imaginary ancient pagan roots.
The worst is, I don't think there's even a real contradiction here! Novelists and all kinds of professional fiction wranglers have been able to extract inspiration from more or less idealized past epochs, exotic foreign lands, and prior fictions and myths. They know how suspension of disbelief works, and we can all do it if we've ever been able to enjoy a work of not-strictly-realistic fiction. We can get inspiration from stereotypes and idealizations without mindlessly buying them as true!
I don't exactly get angry either at people "looking backwards fondly at some idealized past as a guide to future whatevers". Fair enough, find your inspiration where you can. But I get *even less angry*, and indeed nod quite approvingly in the general direction of someone who just shines a torch and explains the actual history of things, and how it differs form the popular narrative.
The prototypical argument here was one person saying they like "Indian food" and another going on a rant that ended by calling a politician fascist.
Isn't there a place for saying "yes, I like this, this seems fun and good, I want my kids to be able to try this", without on the one hand being forced to sit through a rant about how everything you like is bad and problematic, or on the other hand coming up with some bullshit about how ancient Indians 20,000 years ago were cooking identical aloo tikka masala and it's been the beating heart and generative core of the subcontinental civilization throughout the subsequent millennia?
Well yes of course there's plenty of space between! I'd say it's basic manners, you don't want to be a literalist bore when someone is talking poetically, metaphorically or just vaguely. If you like tikka masala, you just like a dish, it's quite irrelevant whether it's a recent invention or comes straight from the Atharva Veda!
EDIT: I also don't see either Scott or Sam arguing for more impromptu "rants that stuff is bad and problematic", in fact I'd guess that both of them dislike such rants.
Really gave me a strange and pleasant tingle to hear so many familiar place names and street names. Elm St., Hillhouse Ave., Beinecke Plaza and of course A. Bartlett Giamatti. My years there were mostly good. Do you remember yours fondly?
I never even attended. But it was a day of drunks and craziness. An inflated bladder ball was somehow handed over to the undergrads —
I think it was quite large, like maybe 5 feet in diameter — and then the colleges competed all day for the thing. This involved a lot of plotting and planning and diplomacy and lies, mostly that rather than running around in a mob on a field grabbing at the thing. One of the years I was there JE deliberately de-inflated
the bladderball — sort of a
3-D version of cutting thru the Gordon knot — and won. But the other colleges didn’t take that well, and all year you heard chants of “JE sucks” and came across JE Sux graffiti. Then JE took recenge on one college — what for? I dunno —
It it had something to do with the college’s response to the deflation of the bladderball. So people from JE set up a device that poured over people exiting the dining hall after breakfast a mixture of 2 chemicals, one of which smelled like shit and one like vomit. Device was in the rafters and the foul smelling acids damaged toe finish on the rafters and they had to be replaced.
Back when life was simple and fun, & all you had to figure out was how to deliver the butyric acid
The Ken Burns documentary about Country Music makes a similar point about that genre. No matter how far back you go into the history of Country Music or its roots, the music was always about idealizing a simpler past time; "Traditional Country Music" was never the genuine article in a purist sense, rather *pretending to make traditional American hillbilly music* is all Country Music ever was from the beginning. It's role-playing all the way down.
I suppose the question is "how fake is role-playing?" I say it's a spectrum. The image of the old south presented in minstrelsy, for example, is deliberately deceptive. On the other hand imitation is a really important way of learning, so if "imitation is fake" we're stuck.
I don't think a building designed by the standards of an architectural movement in favor of ugliness is a good example of "just doing stuff". They weren't trying. If you tried, you might still draw on elements of a few traditions for inspiration, combine them with your own ideas, and get something that looks good, without conforming to any tradition in particular.
Since it's come up a lot in the comments, I'll point out that the nuclear family has been the norm in England since at least the 13th century, if not before. (Hence, probably, why our words "mother", "father", "brother", "sister", "son" and "daughter" all derive from Old English, but our words for "aunt", "uncle", and "cousin" all had to be borrowed.) It might not be the traditional arrangement for every society, but nor is it some unstable modern construct that only existed for a few decades in the early 1900s like a lot of people seem to imagine.
This matches my map of the world very well. I tend to associate this with stories of fake inventions that made someone else surge to beat them by the knowledge that it is possible (where StarCraft came from) or how the overwhelming belief by the English in the Ancient Rights And Liberties Of Englishmen Dating Back To Anglo-Saxon Times (probably false) provided one of the two cornerstones of modern democracy, along with idealistic liberals looking back on their vague concept of the Roman Republic and saying "it worked once, let's do it again."
Surprised not to see mention here of "Ossian", the made-up ancient Celtic bard whose purported poems, actually composed by an otherwise undistinguished 18th C Scotsman, were hailed as the equal of Homer's and played a huge role in 19th C European Romanticism and nationalism. The most traditional of fake traditional sources, perhaps?
As an example of fake tradition inspiring great art: I learned about Ossian because Brahms wrote several achingly beautiful choral settings of Ossianic poetry, e.g. "Darthulas Grabesgesang" and the "Gesang aus Fingal".
I think taking it as "yes we know it's all made up but let's have fun with it" is the best way to go there, and I think the Welsh might be on that track now:
We dodged a bullet on this kind of thing in Ireland, in the early Celtic Revival and independent statehood days, there were a lot of efforts to establish 'genuine Gaelic culture' but most people were either authentically poor and starving on the land and couldn't be bothered, or were living in towns and didn't want to go around in saffron kilts.
It was beautifully satirised by Flann O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen in "An Béal Bocht/The Poor Mouth" published in 1941.
‘There was a man in this townland at one time and he was named Sitric O’Sanassa. He had the best hunting, a generous heart and every other good quality which earn praise and respect at all tirnes, But alas! there was another report abroad concerning him which was neither good nor fortunate. He possessed the very best poverty, hunger and distress also. He was generous and open-handed and he never possessed the smallest object which he did not share with the neighbours; nevertheless, I can never remember him during my time possessing the least thing, even the quantity of little potatoes needful to keep body and soul joined together. In Corkadoragha, where every human being was sunk in poverty, we always regarded him as a recipient of alms and compassion. The gentlemen from Dublin who came in motors to inspect the paupers praised him for his Gaelic poverty and stated that they never saw anyone who appeared so truly Gaelic. One of the gentlemen broke a little bottle of water which Sitric had, because, said he, it spoiled the effect. There was no one in Ireland comparable to O’Sanassa in the excellence of his poverty; the amount of famine which was delineated in his person. He had neither pig nor cup nor any household goods. In the depths of winter I often saw him on the hillside fighting and competing with a stray dog, both contending for a narrow hard bone and the same snorting and angry barking issuing from them both. He had no cabin either, nor any acquaintance with shelter or kitchen heat. He had excavated a hole with his two hands in the middle of the countryside and over its mouth he had placed old sacks and branches of trees as well as any useful object that might provide shelter against the water which came down on the countryside every night. Strangers passing by thought that he was a badger in the earth when they perceived the heavy breathing which came from the recesses of the hole as well as the wild appearance of the habitation in general.’
The hypothetical guy who likes Indian food isn't making any particular claims about long standing tradition (he probably knows Chicken Tikka Masala is a British/Pakistani innovation).
On the other hand, "paganism" often claims historical roots which, as this article points out, often turn out to be not nearly as old as claimed.
I think many of the pretension accusations are proxies for other, truer objections, since attacking someone's hypocrisy or lack of authenticity is much more socially effective than attacking their values directly. "You're evil" is kinda lame; "you're a poser" actually stings.
It doesn't help that fans of artificial tradition rarely acknowledge it as just a pointer, for the same reason.
Speaking of Muslim Spain, it's about time current Spain reclaimed its cultural heritage... Ibn Arabi was at least as important a thinker as e.g Ramon Llull, but hardly anyone in Spain has heard of him.
This just seems like literally the same argument you had against dogwhistles, where you were somehow shocked that somebody who likes a very unpopular position might try to hide that from the masses while still communicating it to their side.
If somebody is arguing for "1950's family structure", what they are actually doing, 99% of the time at a minimum, is arguing against civil rights, and we really don't have to pretend otherwise.
Well damn it, I was going to keep out of this, but sorry Mark, you drew me in.
"When someone is arguing for traditional family structure, what they really mean is I'M A FASCIST YES I LOVE HITLER".
I think I have been on here a time or two arguing about I really would like if we could go back to the idea that a family is two parents, married, who have kids and they didn't necessarily have the kids old enough to be ringbearers when Mom and Dad decided to get hitched. Bonus super plus they are the mutual parents of the kids, not "mom's kids by her three previous boyfriends and dad's kids by his two babymommas".
If that makes me a raving Hitler lover - well, no, I don't love Hitler. What I hate is seeing kids getting destroyed by fuckwad 'parents' who prioritise their own wants, needs and desires over being adults and buckling down to raising their children with attention to the wants, needs and desires of the kids. No, Dad has to dump his family because he is called to be a musician. Mom fools the social worker that her current partner is a domestic abuser because she's angling to get a better house and she needs the bleeding-heart to back her up on "but she's only a poor single mother". [And before anybody thinks I'm making that up, those are only two of the real-life examples from my time back in social housing, so go suck a lemon].
But yeah, that means I'm arguing against civil rights. You got me. I want all the black people back in the cotton fields.
Tell me, what is it like to be 100% right 100% of the time about every single social issue? It must be lovely never to have one shred of doubt that you are on the right side of history and the values you happen to have rattling around in your skull this minute are the only possible correct take on anything.
In case anyone hadn't noticed, yes I'm pissed off about this. Maybe there are dickhead Americans who do want to turn back the clock, but not everybody who thinks 'we threw the baby out with the bathwater' is secretly sizing up Hugo Boss uniforms and polishing the ole jackboots.
Listen, if you heard "arguing against civil rights" and immediately assumed that meant "overthrowing democracy", that's on you. There's plenty of room for someone to be wrong, and then even more room for someone to be an awful person, without being literally fascist.
"If somebody is arguing for "1950's family structure", what they are actually doing, 99% of the time at a minimum, is arguing against civil rights, and we really don't have to pretend otherwise."
Since I am an idiot simpleton who is too stupid to understand that In Fact The Past Always Sucked In Every Way, please clarify for me what you mean by "civil rights" and how that is tied up with traditional family structure.
See, I'm not seeing how you get from A to B there. Civil rights = democracy, okay. Would like fewer broken families = against civil rights, not getting that.
99% at a minimum says would like fewer broken families = 99% at a minimum against civil rights = against democracy = really are fascist. How you get 99% as your estimation, please show the working.
In exactly the same way I don't have to pretend that people talking "1950's family structure" aren't actually talking about something else, I don't have to pretend like you have no idea what I mean by civil rights. Please be a troll somewhere else.
Deiseach is rightly ticked off but not at all a troll.
Unlike her, I am American. I initially took your comment about civil rights to refer to racial equality, and in that context your original post looks pretty incoherent. Unfortunately, there really are a lot of people who argue that way: "If you oppose me on this issue, that can only be because you are broadly against truth and goodness."
On further reflection, I take your use of the term civil rights to refer to acceptance of homosexuality, gender transition, and the like. Opposing those things is indeed normal among supporters of the nuclear family, but that's not the primary motive you seem to believe. Social conservatives do in fact care about the health and flourishing of families in their own right and not as some sort of pretext.
You dropped a smirking little remark about dogwhistles and 99% of people really being some sort of anti-civil rights.
What do you mean by civil rights?
Jim Crow laws?
Sodomy laws?
Anti-drug laws?
The marriage ban?
You could, for all I know from your bon-mot there, be referring to "It is my human right to get blasted off my face as and when I like and no state or power has the right to forbid me or make that illegal".
I realise that there are some people in American, and sadly now over here in Europe as well, politics and social movements who are what is called the far-right and white supremacists. Let's throw in Christo-fascist while we're at it, that seems like a term you might like, given your certainty about the sort of people who are socially conservative.
What I'm saying is that this is like Scott's example about Indian food.
"I wish society would encourage traditional marriage more"
"Oh, so you're saying you want to go back to the days of lynching black men and persecuting gays and marital rape is legal, do you?"
"I just like stable families!"
Because I've seen, and continue to see, a shit-ton of broken families in the jobs I've had, and we are not living in the new paradise of "once free from the constraints of the Bad Old Days when the Church ruled with a heavy hand, all will be happy happy joy joy".
I'm willing to accept gay marriage is legal. I just want more relationships involving people having kids to *be* marriages, not "we shacked up, we had a kid, we broke up, we moved on to new partners, rinse and repeat".
Yeah, I know that won't prevent relationships breaking down. But we've thrown away the anchor and now the ship is drifting loose. Maybe anchors are, in fact, a good idea?
"If somebody is arguing for "1950's family structure", what they are actually doing, 99% of the time at a minimum, is arguing against civil rights, and we really don't have to pretend otherwise."
Oh, and I wasn't around for the 50s, I was born in the 60s. I'd be quite happy with 70s marriage structure, it's the *structure* I want, not any particular era. But that's okay Mark, you know that I *really* mean "women, gays and minorities are sub-humans with no rights" at least 99% of the time I say that, yeah?
I'll just chime in to tell you that you are the archetype of toxic and hateful discourse, and that you are the *exact* reason for all of the distrust, polarisation, and general bad will in our society.
I can't even compehend the nerve of making a ridiculously broad accusation, giving no reasons for it or even explanation of what you meant, and then when specifically asked for an explanation not only *still* refusing to give one but telling the other person it's their fault for not knowing what you meant!
Tell me: do you feel good about yourself? Do you like it when people make baseless accusations against *you* and don't even explain them when asked? Do you appreciate being told that when you say you're concerned about civil rights, that that's really just a way of saying you're a satanic pedophile who supports terrorism and loves to kill babies? Do you enjoy that? Do you think that kind of discourse is healthy and kind and conducive to social harmony?
If not...maybe consider treating other people with the same fucking respect you'd want for yourself.
Admittedly this is an American based infrastructure with an American author but even there it’s possible to imagine that there might be other people posting from other countries from time to time. It’s possible that deiseach - who is Irish I believe - is pro the 1950s nuclear family and uninterested in returning to the status quo of America in the 1950s in other respects. In fact Americans can make that distinction as well.
In any case your response is to be very specific (and parochial) about a general issue.
Having recently read the ACOUP series on Sparta, I feel like Brett would have a field day with this post.
There were several Greek authors who wrote about how great Sparta was, and their fine military tradition. These Greeks were writing centuries after the supposed golden age of Sparta, as in their time Sparta was either an irrelevant regional power or essentially a theme park for Roman tourists. So they were idealizing the past. And this continues to the present day. The US military uses the Spartan lambda logo in places, and the Halo video game series called their super soldiers that fought aliens Spartans.
Except Spartan society was pretty awful, and they were marginally competent at military affairs. Their battle record was close to 50/50 and they had serious logistical issues operating out of their own territory. Philip II of Macedon would wipe the floor with Sparta. Supposedly the Spartan society was structured to raise fierce warriors, although in reality it seemed to mainly function as a way to oppress slaves. Which made up a whopping ~85% of Spartan society, far more than other Greek states or the Romans. For comparison, the Antebellum South had a slave population that was roughly 1/3rd.
So why did the later Greeks think Sparta was so great? The authors whose work survives were mostly elitists using the Spartans as a mirror to write about perceived flaws with their contemporary society. Herodotus, for instance, was from a rich and connected family and he was a powerful general, so probably he was the 1% of ancient Greece. And he would write about how the Spartans were so much better, because they *really* kept the women and slaves in their place, unlike the wimpy Greeks of the Athens Herodotus lived in. Or maybe because Sparta was ruled by two kings of the just Spartan class of citizens, unlike Athens where the filthy plebs could influence the government through democracy.
The Romans had a similar cultural trope where they would write about how the barbarians were more virtuous and pure, insulated from the effeminizing influence of decadent civilization. To be clear, when Greeks or Romans talk about virtue and manliness, they primarily mean fighting prowess as a warrior. Caesar would write in his commentaries on the Gallic Wars how the tribes furthest away from Rome were the hardest to fight and the most fierce. Yet Vercingetorix would prove to be his biggest challenge, and the Arverni were one of the closest tribes to Rome that had borrowed a lot of Roman tactics and institutions! Tacitus would write about the fierce German barbarians, despite never having met one or traveled to Germania. Yet Arminius, the mastermind behind the ambush of Varus' legions in Teutoberg Forest, was taken at a young age and raised in Rome!
We can also see in hindsight that all of these Roman authors writing about the sad decadence of society and lamenting about superior barbarian manliness were completely wrong. Their writings predate the best centuries of military power by the Roman state, and the biggest threats to Roman rule were the barbarians that were most like the Romans. So I think it is completely valid to point out that people idealizing the past are often imagining a fantasy that never existed, and believing in baseless lies. In the example of Sparta, trying to emulate their romanticized society would in fact make things objectively worse for everyone who had to live through it.
The ACOUP series on Sparta is strongly coloured by the author's dislike of the Spartans. In particular, his sections on "Spartan Battle" and "Spartan Ends" are extremely misleading, and his treatment of Herodotus, both here and in the "Fremen Mirage" series, is absolute garbage.
It's pretty clear that Devereaux is biased against the Spartans, but saying his analysis is garbage without offering anything else is lazy and not persuasive.
From the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC, the Athenians adopted a strategy of avoiding pitched battle with the Spartans, instead withdrawing into Athens itself whilst the Spartans ravaged the Attic countryside. This indicates that the Spartans already had a formidable military reputation – so much so that the Athenians didn’t even think it worth trying to fight their army – so if we want to find out how the Spartans got this reputation, we need to look at the period before 431.
Fortunately, Devereaux has a big list of battles involving Sparta; the battles taking place before 431 are as follows:
<i>494 – Battle of Sepeia – Victory over the Argives
480 – Battle of Thermopylae – Defeat against the Persians (Coalition)
480 – Battle of Artemesium – Draw/Defeat against the Persians (Coalition), Naval Battle
480 – Battle of Salamis – Victory over the Persians (Coalition; Minimal Spartan involvement), Naval Battle
479 – Battle of Plataea – Victory over the Persians (Coalition)
479 – Battle of Mycale – Victory of the Persians (Coalition)
4?? (early) – Battle of Tegea – Victory over Tegea (Hdt. 9.35.2)
4?? (early) – Battle of Dipaea – Victory over Tegea and Arcadia (Hdt. 9.35.2)
457 – Battle of Tanagra – Victory/Draw over Athens and Argos (note: effects undone within the year due to heavy Spartan losses which result in Spartan withdrawal. With the sack of Gythion, Thuc. 1.108.3-4, war ends in a draw)</i>
So, that’s a total of seven victories, one draw, and one defeat. If we exclude the naval battles, both of which had minimal Spartan involvement (although this is only pointed out regarding the victorious battle – I wonder why that might be), we’re left with six victories and one defeat, a win rate of 86% -- very high, and easily enough to explain how the Spartans got their reputation, particularly because the sole defeat was a glorious last stand against overwhelming odds.
So, how does Devereaux claim that the Spartans only had a win rate of around 50%? Quite simply, because the Spartans suffered a precipitous decline after the Peloponnesian War and started losing most of their wars. But this isn’t exactly a novel observation – indeed, it’s exactly what the primary sources say happened! Devereaux’s battle list doesn’t prove that ancient authors were wrong about Spartan military prowess, it proves that they were right.
Now, before we get onto the whole “Herodotus memed everyone into thinking the Spartans were great when they actually sucked” argument, I’d like to consider Devereaux’s statements about Spartan logistics, Spartan strategy, and Spartan diplomacy. Regarding logistics, Devereaux sneers at “their almost comical inability to sustain operations in Attica during the Peloponnesian War”, adding that “They are two days – on foot! – from a major friendly trade port (Corinth), and they run out of supplies.” Except we know that Sparta could maintain armies abroad, because they did – in Asia Minor, Attica, northern Greece – before, during, and after the Peloponnesian War. Unless we suppose that the Spartans somehow forgot about logistics for these particular invasions of Attica, but remembered them at other times, we can say that supply difficulties weren’t dictating how long the Spartans spent ravaging the Athenians’ fields. Devereaux says that “Thucydides is in several cases (e.g. Thuc. 3.1.3) explicit that what causes these armies to fail and disperse back home is that they run out of supplies.” However, the referenced chapter of Thucydides doesn’t actually say this. What Thucydides actually says is that “After staying the time for which they had taken provisions, the invaders retired and dispersed to their several cities.” Contra Devereaux, there’s no indication that the invaders wanted to stay longer but were prevented by supply problems; it’s more plausible, given Sparta’s elsewhere-documented ability to send armies further afield and for longer periods of time, that they first decided how long they wanted to spend in Attica, and then took as much food as would be necessary.
As for Spartan strategy, again Devereaux sneers at them for their Persian War plan of “find a choke-point, fortify it and hold it indefinately [sic] with a hoplite army”. It’s difficult to see what other strategy they could have employed on land, however. The Greeks were superior in heavy infantry to the Persians, but greatly inferior in cavalry, so fighting in open terrain would just have resulted in them getting outflanked, surrounded, and destroyed. The only hope the Greeks had of beating the Persian army in battle was to find a place where their flanks would be secure and try and bait the Persians into attacking head-on. Did such a strategy severely limit the Greeks’ options and make it difficult for them to win unless the Persians obediently went along? Yes. But the problem wasn’t that the Spartans were too stupid to realise this, it was that Greece lacked the pasture to raise enough horses to match the enemy cavalry, placing them at a military disadvantage against the more balanced Persian army.
(Incidentally, Devereaux misrepresents Herodotus when he says that “the Battle of Thermopylae is often represented in popular culture as an intentional delaying action, but it was nothing of the sort – Herodotus is clear that this was supposed to be the decisive land engagement (Hdt. 7.175”. Herodotus says that Thermopylae was supposed to be the *site* of the decisive land battle, but he also says that the force with Leonidas was just an advanced guard, with the main army to follow along soon, and that the battle occurred sooner than the Greeks were expecting, Hdt. 7.206. Devereaux misrepresenting Herodotus will be something of a theme.)
Finally, we have Spartan diplomacy. Devereaux says that Spartan diplomacy was bad, as evidenced by the fact that their allies kept turning against them. But the same could be said of basically any Greek state. Athens ended up alienating its own allies and the rest of Greece with its empire-building, resulting in its defeat in the Peloponnesian War. (It then established a second empire, and managed to alienate its allies *again*. Learning from past mistakes was not a virtue of Greek statecraft.) Thebes, which finally broke Spartan power at Leuctra, ended up losing its hegemony soon afterwards. Macedon, being stronger than any city-state, was able to exert more control, but even it faced constant rebellions in Greece. It wasn’t until the overwhelming might of Rome came along that the region was finally pacified. Greek city-states of this period were strongly competitive, hard short memories, and tended to intensely resent anything that suggested inferiority or subordination to another city-state. This all made achieving hegemony a very tall order. Sparta wasn’t successful at this, but neither was anyone else, so we don’t need to appeal to any special defect with the Spartans in particular to explain their failure here.
Anyway, I’ve got to get ready for work now, so I’ll wrap it up here. If anyone’s interested in reading more of my ramblings, I’ll try and get up a comment later on about Herodotus and his portrayal of Sparta, the Greeks in general, and the barbarians.
So, we’ve seen that, during the period in which they actually acquired their reputation for military excellence, the Spartans are recorded as winning far more battles than they lost. We don’t really need to look any further to explain how they got their reputation – they were good, and people noticed they were good. But because Devereaux has smushed together the Spartan record from all different periods to make the Spartans look bad, he’s left with the problem of how these allegedly incompetent people came to be so hyped. His answer is that ancient Greek authors with an ideological axe to grind, starting with Herodotus, made up the Spartan reputation for fighting, and everyone since has just uncritically followed their lead.
Now, there are several problems with this theory, aside from the fact that it’s an attempt to answer an entirely self-created problem. The first is that it overstates Herodotus’ influence. Yes, he was widely-read and influential, but he was never the final arbiter of Greek historiography – Thucydides, for example, quite plainly criticises him on the very first page of his History of the Peloponnesian War. (Incidentally, Thucydides had fought the Spartans during this same war, so he’d be in a position to know if Herodotus was full of BS about their fighting skill.) Even if Herodotus had had some narrative or ideological reason for portraying the Spartans as a bunch of super-soldiers, then, there’d be no reason for everyone else to go along with him.
Secondly, the chronology doesn’t really line up. As mentioned earlier, the Spartan reputation for military prowess evidently pre-dates the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. But Herodotus was writing after the outbreak of this war, which he mentions (Hdt. 7.137, 9.73). Even if we suppose that parts of the Histories were released earlier, before the war began, we’re still left with an implausibly short amount of time for a part-finished work of history to convince the Athenians that the Spartans – whom they have fought, and fought alongside, multiple times in living memory – were super-tough soldiers when in fact they were nothing of the sort.
Thirdly, it misrepresents the contents of Herodotus’ work. Devereaux, following Hartog, says that Herodotus is really writing about Greece all the time, and that his portrayals of barbarians are just intended to provide a foil to the Greeks, a literary “other” to help produce a sense of shared Greek identity and culture. Contrary to what Devereaux strongly implies, this is not actually an uncontroversial position among scholars (indeed, when I studied the topic a few years ago, I had the distinct impression that most historians would reject it), and with good reason, because Herodotus is quite happy to highlight points of similarity between Greeks and barbarians. He’s quite happy to say, for example, that the Lydians’ customs are almost identical to the Greeks’ (1.94), that some Greek customs have found favour amongst the Persians (1.135), and even that the Greeks copied most of their religion off the Egyptians (2.49, 50, 52). Nor, contra Devereaux, is there a dichotomy between brave Greeks and decadent, unwarlike barbarians. There are plenty of Greeks on the Persian side (9.31 etc.), the rebellion of Greek Ionians against the Persians is a complete failure due to the Greeks’ laziness and indiscipline (6.12), the Greek army sent to sack Sardis runs away as soon as the Persians fight back and subsequently ends up being defeated (5.101 f.) and the Greek navy almost flees in panic before the battle at Artemisium (7.183, 8. 4, 9). Meanwhile the Persians at Plataea show themselves no less valiant than the Spartans, though they are worse-equipped and less well-disciplined (9.62). As for Sparta specifically, Herodotus explicitly highlights their similarities in custom to the Egyptians (6.60) and even the Spartans (6.58-9). So much for Sparta being the ideal embodiment of Greekness, in contrast to the alien Persians!
So, that’s why I say that Devereaux’s treatment of Herodotus is garbage: it’s an implausible solution, to a non-existent problem, which is inconsistent with the actual text of Herodotus.
And finally, I’ll just respond to a couple of points which I don’t think are in the “Spartan Mirage” series, but which probably owe their origin to Devereaux’s blog:
<i>Herodotus, for instance, was from a rich and connected family and he was a powerful general, so probably he was the 1% of ancient Greece.</i>
Herodotus was no doubt from a rich and connected family (he’d have to be, to do all that travelling), but I’m not aware of any evidence that he was ever a general, or even that he had military experience. The usual belief, as far as I’m aware, is that he was a merchant, as evidenced both by his wide-ranging travels and his interest in the goods produced by each country. The Spartans, of course, were famously down on trade and money-making, so it’s unlikely that Herodotus’ background would make him over-prejudiced in Sparta’s favour.
<i>And he would write about how the Spartans were so much better, because they *really* kept the women and slaves in their place, unlike the wimpy Greeks of the Athens Herodotus lived in.</i>
Spartan women were notoriously liberated and even (gasp!) influential in political life, so if Herodotus believed that women should be chained to the kitchen stove he picked the wrong city-state to idolise. And I’m not actually aware of any ancient author, even among the pro-Spartan ones, who praises their treatment of the Helots. Mostly they either gloss over it in embarrassed silence, or else try to explain it away, like when Plutarch argues that the krypteia must be a later corruption of the original Spartan constitution, because surely Lycurgus was far too humane and benevolent to countenance such brutality.
<i>Or maybe because Sparta was ruled by two kings of the just Spartan class of citizens, unlike Athens where the filthy plebs could influence the government through democracy.</i>
Herodotus does quip that an Ionian ambassador found it easier to hoodwink 30,000 Athenian citizens than a single Spartan king (Hdt. 5.97), but he also says that, after establishing democracy, “The Athenians accordingly increased in power; and it is evident, not by one instance only but in every way, that Equality is an excellent thing, since the Athenians while they were ruled by despots were not better in war that any of those who dwelt about them, whereas after they had got rid of despots they became far the first. This proves that when they were kept down they were wilfully slack, because they were working for a master, whereas when they had been set free each one was eager to achieve something for himself” (Hdt. 5.78). In other words, he’s really not some kind of democracy-hater who thinks the great unwashed should be kept far away from politics.
Interesting. And kudos for following up with some solid information. My response to you was a bit short, and I see that you were simply under time constraints rather than doing an unsupported drive by.
Devereaux's conclusion was two fold; the Spartan society was actually brutal and awful, and this didn't even have the consolation of creating great warriors. Evidently the Spartans were quite militarily capable until after the Peloponnesian War, although that still leaves a long time period where they were not competent. His first point was largely correct, no? Especially regarding the hereditary plots of land given to the ruling Spartitiate class, and how this was consolidated into fewer and fewer families until the system basically collapsed. Life as anyone other than a Spartitiate - so 95% of people in Sparta - sounded notably horrible, even relative to other states in Greece at the time.
Oh yeah, Spartan society was pretty brutal, and under a Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance type scenario I'd probably choose literally any other ancient Greek city-state instead. Though despite the constant threat of Helot uprisings, Sparta did manage to stave off revolution and civil strife much more successfully than most other Greek city-states, which were usually riven with internal conflict. Maybe the reason was simply that the Helot threat forced the Spartiates to stick together for self-preservation, IDK, but I think it's understandable that, to an observer from another city-state, Sparta would seem (even if misleadingly) like some kind of beacon of order and stability.
Right. And for context, the "Fremen Mirage" that Devereaux is arguing against, is the theory that brutal societies (whether internally or externally imposed) produce badass warriors what can whip any pansy "civilized" army in any fair fight. Which, OK, needs some serious pushback. And since many proponents of this theory use "Look! At! Spartaaaa!" as their primary argument, Devereaux pushes back aginst that hard.
But Sparta really was a brutal society that really did produce badass soldiers who could whip just about any other army of the day in any vaguely fair fight that didn't involve e.g. being flanked by cavalry on open ground. And then they got tripped up by demographic collapse due to their brutal notions of racial purity. But until then, they really were a data point in favor of the theory Devereaux wants to tear down.
He'd have been better off pointing out that one data point is not enough, and that correlation is not causation, the early Spartans may have been badasses for reasons other than their brutality.
Pretty much this, yeah. Re: Sparta, I think a better argument against them would be that, whilst Spartan society produced some very tough soldiers, it was also very brittle. States like Athens, Thebes, and Macedon were able to recover from some pretty severe beatings (extending, in Thebes' case, to being completely destroyed by Alexander and then being reconstituted several decades later), because a large portion of their inhabitants were invested (emotionally, economically, politically) in the continued survival of the state. With Sparta, on the other hand, the vast majority of the inhabitants were Helots who only participated in the Spartan system out of fear, so once the Spartiates became too few to keep them in line the system fell apart irrevocably.
Re: the "Fremen Mirage", I feel like the term conflates two different positions. One is that people from primitive societies are all a bunch of Conan the Barbarian types who can fight off ten pencil-armed "civilised" weaklings at once. The other is that hardship is character-building, and that people whose lives are too easy and comfortable will lack the strength of character necessary to maintain an advanced society. Certainly there are similarities between the two positions, but there are also important differences, and I get the impression that Devereaux's Fremen Mirage series spends most of its time arguing against the first view while the people he's trying to refute generally believe something closer to the second.
I think you are mischaracterizing the objection people have to the RTVRN crowd.
It's not that they want to RTVRN; the objection is "You have political prescriptions or moral values I disagree with, and you are laundering them as wanting to return to tradition rather than what you REALLY want, which is (BAD THING of choice)"
In that context, it really does matter what really happened when and why.
When I hear trad in the american context, I don't think tradition. I mean, I'm Traditional as fuck! I RTVRN at least three times a day!
To give my full creds:
I shave with a straight razor, I do woodworking with hand tools only, I grow as much of my own food as is practical 100% from local inputs with no mechanical aid, I have a stone and mud oven made 100% from stuff I dug up in my own acreage, I make my own soap from lye and fat, I heat my home with a wood fire and cool it with hopes and dreams, I just bought a scythe blade from the 1800's which I am going to restore and then fit to a snath I made myself to mow my lawn, I get my water from a 1900's cast iron and stone well that I dropped a sub pump down, but I have a hand pump on there also just for kicks, and 1000 other things.
None of those are Trad.
Hema isn't trad, Pankration isn't trad, SCA isn't trad, a dude who wears period appropriate clothing and uses period appropriate gear and goes into the mountains like Lewis and Clark is not Trad.
When people dog someone for being trad, it's because they suspect the the 1940's aesthetic is a motte for women not being allowed to open bank accounts without their husbands permission; which is why the attack is "You don't know shit about this thing you profess to love, because you don't actually love it."
Hey, congrats on your chosen lifestyle, it sounds really interesting that you'd chose to do those things, why don't you blog about it.
And a small request: we're not all plugged into trendy Twitter / X / TikTok / whatever, it would be helpful to give some explanation of the movements your reference. The googles tells me that Hema and SCA are related to swordfighting, but the only "RTVRN" I can find seems to be some GPS-adjacent network, which is probably not the one you're talking about.
On (1), this misses the whole point. The problem is not that someone wants a 1950s-style nuclear family for themselves; the problem is that the people in question want to enforce it for the whole of society. In that light the problems of the 1950s are quite significant: trying to fit everyone into the same box means chopping off appendages, and stuff like suburban sprawl was never actually sustainable. Similarly, it's one thing to like Indian cuisine, another thing to restructure our agricultural industry around copying India; trying to go back to the agricultural practices of an idealized past is literally what Pol Pot did, to genocidal effect. Moorish revival works because it's an aesthetic only; if you try to engineer a building using the materials that 11th century Morocco had, then at best you'll have an 11th century Morocco quality of house; if you aren't an expert on historical Moroccan construction, you'll end up with a pile of rubble.
On (2) - yes, human nature means that it's often convenient to believe innovations are a return to the traditional past. But there's a whole principle of truth-seeking that says to avoid this type of convenient lie, and at the absolute least to avoid lying to yourself. And in general, I'd argue that modern culture is far too hesitant towards social innovation of any kind, and this has left us stuck with a wildly dysfunctional society - the whole anti-progress stack. There's value in celebrating innovation for its own sake.
I guess it needs to be said... Props to Scott for pointing out Jethro Tull's album Thick as a Brick, it's old stuff by now and the style is long out of fashion but its still seriously good stuff, and quite a fun one to listen to.
I bring up that “Indian food is Indian aristocrat food” only in reply to “Indian food is so much better than English food” and talking about peasant English food.
I think it's an excellent parody of a kind of poem I dislike, but although it has some great moments (from ages when time was unfashioned // from days when the stars were not fashioned), I'm not sure it's actually better than the style it's parodying. I'd say e.g. that Poe's 'The City in the Sea' is similar in style and theme but better in execution: https://poets.org/poem/city-sea
It is very like Poe. What would be interesting is if anyone has a parody of Swinburne, who sometimes could parody himself, having such a facility for verse that once he got going, he could churn it out by the yard without stopping.
This reminds me of Chesterton's parody of poets on the theme of "Old King Cole":
The problem with this is that it is only marginally more overwrought than the rest of Lovecraft, so the effect is much less if one is applying that context. Someone who hasn't plodded through the collected voluminous prose of HPL is likely to experience it differently.
Re: if you're interested in the history of British traditions, the great scholar is Ronald Hutton, and his great book is Stations of the Sun. He's weird! I think he's a practicing Druid. But also very fair about both the novelty of most of the things we find "traditional" and the okayness of that.
One example he finds is that something--I think the practice of drinking from the Wassail bowl--was described as new sometime in the 1500s, and then "ancient and traditional" or whatever 80 years later. <--all factual claims in this paragraph are placeholders. I don't have the actual book in front of me to check.
One reason to like actual traditions is that they can embed some kind of accumulated wisdom. Like, if Catholics have been praying the Rosary in front of a statue of Mary for like 1500+ years, there is probably something that works well for a lot of people in that practice. If gangs and tribes and armies have always done some kind of hazing/initiation rite to their new members, again, maybe there's something load-bearing in that practice that has some benefits we don't necessarily understand.
The difficulty is that some part of those traditions may just be noise--it's done this way because this is the way it's done. Some may be adaptive for some past environment but useless or harmful now--norms about women being excluded from combat make a lot more sense when the combat is with swords than when the combat is via drone-fired missile, for example. Because we're trying to benefit from accumulated experience and wisdom that's not spelled out in words, it's often hard to be sure which parts of the tradition are load-bearing vs useless vs outdated and harmful.
To the extent I want to benefit from accumulated experience and wisdom in tradition, though, I definitely want something that's actually come from many generations of people doing it, rather than something that was invented as a marketing gimmick in the 80s and stuck around.
> Kriss: Tradition is fake, and invention is real.
Objecting to things as "fake" is bullshit. Human social and cultural behavior is often referential, and the referent is often something abstract or affective. This is perfectly fine!
Such behavior can be good or bad, depending on its effects, including how it relates socially and culturally to other things. But that must be evaluated on its own merits, not simply by labeling it "fake."
There's no way the average Indian eats "a few bites of flavorless rice daily", is there?
I'm not objecting to the "rice" part. Certainly the diet is mostly grains (rice or wheat depending on area). The rural poor's calorie intake is 70% grains, and 8% processed foods many of which are grain-based. [1]
I'm somewhat objecting to the "a few bites" part. The poorest Indians eat only 1640ish calories/day, an amount that'd make me scream from hunger pangs. About 1100 of those calories come from grains [1], which works out to over 800g of cooked white rice[2] daily: hardly just "a few bites".
I'm strenuously objecting to the "flavourless" part. 1–2% of the calorie intake of all groups (rich and poor, rural and urban) is spices. Look at the everyday food of any Indian family [3]: there's one plate of plain rice in there, all others have spices or sauce or a side. Even the very poorest family have some jars of powdered spices [4] or some chillies [5].
Your example dialogue would still stand if it had a perfectly accurate description of the average food in India: most people (including yrstruly) who like Indian-restaurant-in-the-First-World food much prefer its very rich, complex, copious, only moderately spicy, and overall Westernised cuisine to the typical everyday food of an Indian family. So I'm not sure why the "um, actually, 'Indian food' should mean food typically eaten in India" character needs to be wrong about this part.
Can vouch that a cheap place for a quick meal in South India, in a random village far away from tourist-land, will typically serve you a huge pile of rice, plus a good serving of really spicy pulses and vegetables to go with it. Not "a few bites", and certainly not flavorless.
The human tendency to invent fake history is a problem, because the fake history is generally simpler and more straightforward than the present crisis, and therefore it inculcates an attitude that the present is uniquely bad. Whereas there've always been problems, people have always been infighting and backstabbing, and yet we've somehow made it this far. Which implies that learning actual lessons from actual history could be useful in helping us navigate the present in the same manner as in the past. But this is actively hindered when people come up with stories about how everything was great and we live in a fallen age in the latter days of the law.
Which all seems fairly accurate, except that history is not a curve going ever upward. Sometimes bad things do happen, and metrics fall back, and we need to stop that from happening. Civil wars do break out. Democracies do fail. Rivers run red with blood. What do things look like shortly before those disasters happen? (Aside from people being convinced that the past was better than the present, of course.)
I always feel compelled to chime in that SMAC is pretty much an unofficial adaptation of Frank Herbert's "The Jesus Incident." From the manual section on inspirational fiction: "A speculative and philosophical tour de force by my favorite science fiction author. You'll probably have to search the used bookstores for this one, but it's well worth it. My favorite science fiction novel ever. A clear inspiration for the story of Planet." The chapter intro quotes for "The Jesus Incident" are very reminiscent of the scientific discovery quotes from Alpha Centauri. Seeing the Bible attributed as the "Christian Book of the Dead" blew my mind in sixth grade...
>Some popular art was written by people trying to parody a style they didn’t like, and ending up doing it better than any of the real practitioners
There's a long list of "iconic" songs that were actually written as Weird Al-esque style parodies.
Blur's "Song 2" is taking the piss out of grunge/alternative, The Beatles' "Back in the USSR" was written to satirize the Beach Boys, etc. They ended up capturing the era better than most of the serious stuff.
OK, Scott, I'm gonna fight you about the poem. The Victorian Brit poem is pretty good. The rhyme and meter are perfect, the train of thought is very clear, and there are some very nicely turned phrasings, my favorite of which is And the Tribunes beard the high/And the Fathers grind the low. And by expressing his take as a poem instead of a paragraph, the poet accesses that magical thing that happens when we hear something in rhyme and meter or set to music: Something about the shapeliness of the thing makes its content seem truer and more important than a prose summary. Sort of like it's a golden tablet.
I don't think it's meaningful to compare this poem to one without rhyme and meter, & of course not many good poets have been using conventional rhyme and meter schemes in the last 50 years. But a few have, and below of one of my favorites. I think it's better than the Victorian Brit's because it delivers more, on more channels. It too is a commentary on what people are like. But it packs much more emotional punch, including a fery substantial dose of shiver, and there is lots more to enjoy about the language -- many ways of putting thing that are novel but apt: "they prized themselves emparadised," "the moon's bony light" and of course "his hugely grinning head."
I must confess, though, that this poem was published in 1962, so is from a bit more than 50 years in the past. But have a heart. I could have used some other Nemerov that's later, but this is my favorite.
I think it's misleading to say that societies have always glorified their past. It's true, but a lot of the things we admire about past societies were not produced by their average members, but by their innovators (and even when these innovators drew inspiration from the past, they still moved things forward in some way).
So it's fair to say, if you admire the Victorians, stop being glued to the past; go explore, like their leaders did.
In the 1830s and 1840s in England especially, people looked at the then present condition of the poor and the average and thought that this was worse than it hd been in the past. (They had no question that the wealthiest quintile were better off than anyone ever had been.) If the better parts of the Middle Ages weren't ideal, and thus not to be idealised, the Victorians had a sense that they were in some respect better than the early Victorian period.
I am assuming that the Victorians we are admiring are the likes of Dickens, lord Shaftesbury and Ruskin. I think it was at least partly because of them, and even more a widespread admiration of them that the late Victorian era was much better. By the end of the Victorian era, the do gooders were talking about the "submerged tenth" who had not yet received real benefit from modernity - a great improvement over more than half.
ARRRRGH. Okay, here we go. Scott's inherent niceness prevents him from seeing something really dark.
"Trad" doesn't mean what you think it means. It is an abbreviation of "Traditionalist", which is a specific school of thought started by Rene Guneon but mainly developed and spread by Julius Evola, the famous black magician and Fascist. Not fascist as in, "Dude, the Dems/Reps are, like, totally fascist!", but as in Kicked-Out-Of-Mussolini's-Party-For-Being-Too-Extreme, Criticised-The-Nazis-From-The-Right Fascist. As in, the most invoked guru of modern fascist movements and chaps that have way too many norse runes in their twitter profile.
So, yeah. Fascist.
In the idea of "Traditionalism", there is a kind of holy revelation to different peoples way, way back in time, and the Tradition is handed down as an initiatory revelation. Yes, this is perfectly analogous to Plato's magical World of Forms. This is why there's a lot of argument in neo-fascist circles about whether or not Christianity is the "Vessel of the European Tradition" etc.
The practical upshot of all this is that it doesn't matter if a tradition is invented or inauthentic, since to Traditionalism, the tradition as actually practiced by people living long ago is inauthentic - or, rather, "decadent". The Traditionalist aspires to embody the true tradition of primal revelation, and since this does not in fact exist, this means in practice making stuff up.
This is a useful illustration of the power of ideas. The ideas of an obscure italian whackjob are now dominating discussion on substack and X. C'est la vie...
I can sympathise with people who want the Mass in Latin, but the old days weren't that glorious because of lack of lay understanding. I don't sympathise with the people who are "everything since Vatican II, and maybe a chunk before that, is heretical and false and you are all, from the pope on down, going to Hell unless you convert to my particular understanding of faith and practice".
I mean, there *has* been a ton of watering down both lay piety and liturgical practice, and it wouldn't be any great harm if we revived some of the high view of the sacraments and liturgy. Benedict was my pope on this, but he was indeed trying to row against the current. I'm happy that the liturgy is in the vernacular and the priest faces the people to celebrate the Mass, I also want people to genuflect before the tabernacle and treat the Eucharist with a heck of a lot more respect and belief.
Most of the time I've seen the word in use, "traditionalist" just means "someone who wants to preserve/revive traditional ways of doing things", much as "rationalist" just means "someone who wants to be more rational" rather than "someone who subscribes to the school of philosophy originating with Descartes which holds that we know about things through innate ideas".
Sure. But that's the point. Many people who have never heard of Kant - and many more who have never read him - say stuff like "It may be true for you, but it is not true for me".
There are many documented cases of people wanting to preserve/revive traditional ways of doing things from literal millennia before Julius Evola's birth, so I'm not clear what point you're trying to make.
That's an interesting side of the debate! I'm not quite sure that every reference to "tradition" in modern internet discourse necessarily refers to the so-called Traditionalist movement of Guenon and Evola in the early 20th century, but I guess some influence is probably there.
So yeah, about these people. To make some sense of the Traditionalists, first we need to talk about their predecessors, the Perennialists, so fasten your seatbelts. For context, by the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, Western culture had had a really good look at the Eastern cultures and religions, and a number of people had come away suitably impressed. Put this together with some older purely Western trends like Deism, Universalism and Transcendentalism, old philosophical ideas like Neoplatonism, a bit of mystical Christianity and random bits of Occultism, and you get all sorts of syncretic developments, the most famous of which was probably Theosophy. And once the high walls of traditional monotheistic exclusivism had been breached, some more philosophically minded people looked at all this, and proposed the relatively simple theory that there was a common, transcendent, intuitive and experiential reality at the core of all the world's major religions and spiritual systems. This idea was called the Perennial philosophy, and FWIW, in its most minimal incarnation, I think it's basically true. The famous book that presented it to the world was a 400-page tome by none other than Aldous Huxley. In Huxley's own words: "The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds."
Perennialism had a pretty good reception initially, it clearly strikes a chord, but it quickly started receiving piles of criticism from all directions. Scientifically-minded thinkers called it recycled woo; it was quickly pointed out that it was a poor match for most Indigenous religions, and the representatives of the major religions didn't appreciate the implicit dismissal of their specific belief systems and cherished narratives. Rather than finding some common minimal ground, it was widely interpreted as imposing uniformity from the top; you can find modern well-grounded criticisms of that aspect in the works of Jorge N. Ferrer.
Alas, powerful but simple ideas tend to not stay simple for long, becoming instead convenient props for people's agendas. And the Spirit seems to attract gatekeepers faster than cow shit attracts flies. Soon enough you had Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and probably a few others arguing that their respective religions were the best place where the perennial Real could be accessed. And so, step by step, the discussions around Perennialism were less and less about the common minimal core, which was clear enough to everyone involved, and more about the conditions for accessing it, and how hard and rare they actually were. Here's where things go off the rails, and you start hearing of rare initiation lineages, the scarcity of true transmission, etc. After a while, a bunch of honest-to-God self-avowed fascists had hijacked the entire conversation, and turned what was originally an egalitarian idea of simplicity and individual seeking in a spirit of intuitive abundance, into its exact opposite: a sinister, collectivist, authoritarian project of civilization-level spiritual gatekeeping. The only good thing I can say about them is that they were honest enough to give their project a new name, "Traditionalism".
late 14c., tradicioun, "statement, belief, or practice handed down from generation to generation," especially, in theology, "belief or practice based on Mosaic law," later also of Christian practice, from Old French tradicion "transmission, presentation, handing over" (late 13c.) and directly from Latin traditionem (nominative traditio) "a delivering up, surrender, a handing down, a giving up" (also "a teaching, instruction," and "a saying handed down from former times").<
Are we talking about the same thing here? I feel like I am watching a snake eating its own tail.
Perhaps the phrase “a relic of the past” is closer to the truth
Relic n.
(Snip) The general sense of "remains, remnants, that which is left after the loss or ruin of the rest" is attested from early 14c. The meaning "something kept as a souvenir, a memento" is from c. 1600. By 1590s the word had developed its weakened sense of "anything made interesting by its association with the distant past." By 1580s as "surviving trace of some practice, idea, etc.;" hence relic of barbarism (by 1809) "survival of a (bad) old custom or condition."
also from c. 1200
Also makes me wonder; if it’s such a modern imposition why is the word for it so old?
I heard Clifton Chenier on the Cerys Matthews blues show recently - a nice musical connection. TWYM is a beautiful little song about parenting and I sing it to myself regularly.
There's a hint of unreliable nostalgia in that song too - life as a travelling salesman, moving from state to state sounds awful! But the not the way he sings about it.
Careful: Kriss is looking for someone to beef with at the moment, and seems to have given up on Curtis Yarvin.
Also, I think he’s wrong to oppose tradition to invention, and you’re wrong to defend it primarily as a device for laundering invention. Isn’t the true counterpoint that neither, actually, could exist without the other?
T S Eliot, writing about “free verse” (a category he didn’t think really existed): ‘But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.’
Eliot is brilliant. Two things: he totally immersed himself in the classics, to an extent I don't think anyone else has had the patience for before or since. Also, his poetry is much less accessible for the average person, and that is relevant. High modernism in all the arts has put a lot of people off the arts full stop.
True; but I think the point about fixity and flux is widely applicable, including to much more accessible genres/forms/media than high modernist poetry…
Great post. This came up on an open thread recently. I suggested that c. 1850-1950, there really was a genuine effort to redistribute access to the arts to the masses, which was a Good Thing and is now at risk. But if you try and defend it, you run up against a general sense that past lives were "nasty, brutish and short".
Suppose each culture has a particular type of mistake that they are prone to making.
A modern person trying to "just do stuff" is likely to make modern mistakes.
A modern person trying to imitate ancient Rome is less likely to make modern mistakes, because the Romans they are imitating didn't make those mistakes.
And they aren't at risk of making Roman mistakes, those mistakes would be obviously stupid to anyone in modern culture.
In the case of those buildings, I think the modern mistake is not having decorative ornamentation details. And a 1100s al-Andalus mistake would be having the whole thing collapse because they didn't know the maths and engineering well enough.
> I just get angry when people make blanket objections to looking backwards fondly at some idealized past as a guide to future institutions.
But the problem is that when you use an imaginary version of the past to guide future institutions, you are pretending to have true information you're using, when actually you don't. If I use an idealized version of the 1950s household to model how a household should be, and attempt to create an institution to model it, then I might as well just be making it up - except the "1950s household" lets me pretend it's tried and true. Traditionalists constantly appeal to the fact that traditions are old, and therefore durable and presumably have a reason to exist, and can be expected to continue to exist - but if they're actually just forty years old and pretending, then it's obviously very new and prone to disruption, unexpected issues, and problems in execution.
No-one has a time machine, but there's a spectrum, no? I have a copy of Dear Newlyweds by Pius XII - a collection of talks he really did give to married people. That strikes me as a fairly accurate picture of what Catholics were at least aspiring to in the 40s/50s.
>But the problem is that when you use an imaginary version of the past to guide future institutions, you are pretending to have true information you're using, when actually you don't.
Ok, unrelated to main theme, but Scott, I've found you to be best rationalist among blogs/people I follow. I will recommend you get news about Narendra Modi/India from people who are in India and from diverse sources. Washington Post, NY Times, BBC, Aljajeera, Economists, and others have always presented biased view of India. This is not opinion Indians hold of him as reflected in the popularity surveys, nor he commands those scores because of dictatorial tendencies as reflected in sub-40% vote share recent election unlike Putin or King John Un.
It post-dates coming down from the trees and is accordingly beyond the pale.
The only true and valid way of life is to convert available chemical energy provided by geothermal processes into simple biomolecules. And none of this photosynthesis stuff - it's crass and produces decadent, ruinous free oxygen.
We all need to RETVRN to anaerobic metabolisation, we've lost our way, and everybody is just too woke or brainwashed by the pro-oxygen memeplex to even talk about it.
Life was better before organs, before organelles, before predation, before oxygen. When competition was the simple tug of ions across lipid membranes. And when cooperation was the exchange of free-floating RNA.
Traditions change continually, interweaving this thread and that. It may be technically true that Jack-in-the-Green developed in the late 1700's, but it is clear that May Day processions and celebrations contained lots of themes of greenery and foliage, relating to rebirth and fertility. As a child in rural Wiltshire I was accustomed to maypoles, morris dancers, mummers, the Green Man, and corn dollies (some of which were allowed in the church, whilst others were regarded as evil and could not be used as decoration—perhaps like their big brother, the wicker man.) Like Glastonbury, we also had our holy thorn, supposedly sprouted from the staff of Joseph of Aramathea. Relatively modern times, but the realities of the yearly cycle and the crops we depended upon were not far beneath the surface! Sixty years ago one could still climb the earthworks of a bronze age hill fort at night and hope to see the herlaþing...
Sounds like a genuinely rich experience. I hear this phrase a lot "traditions change all the time" and taken literally it seems like a contradiction in terms. If something isn't being kept substantially the same as its being passed on, how is it a tradition? Obviously various accidents can change. I hear there's a thriving Morris dancing scene where people bring it up to date but surely there is a core platonic form of Morris dancing.
Fake traditionalism is great as an aesthetic thing, but if someone talks about traditional *policy* then I think it's really important to take a hard-nosed look at what the past was actually like.
Like, if someone enjoys the 1950s white picket fence aesthetic then that's fine, but if someone says "...and that's why we should get rid of no-fault divorce, because it will let us have happy 1950s families like this," then "um actually, a lot of 1950s families weren't that happy, and divorce was a good thing for everyone in them" is in fact the correct response.
(Of course, the internet being what it is, the argument is rarely laid out in such a neatly refutable way - a more likely scenario is some guy on Twitter with a roman statue avatar posts an aesthetic picture and vaguely gestures in the direction of their preferred policy, and other people - correctly understanding the direction of the gesture - post historical takedowns of that era to gesture in the opposite direction.)
Is there a poll that could resolve this? E.g what is your favourite decade in the last 70 years? Or, in what decade was your favourite book published/film released? I believe the 2020s and 2010s would be outliers.
I looked into some Sight & Sound polls. They happen every ten years and ask critics for their favourite movies of all time. There are some changes but there is a core of movies that don't chane. But if tradition is bad maybe we should stop watching Vertigo, Citizen Kane, 2001? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Modern poetry mostly sucks, because the niche that poetry used to take is much more occupied by music nowadays. There's so much more opportunity and access to adding music to your rhymed words - why wouldn't you do that?
>I don’t have a great explanation for why I like the one on the left so much better.
I am going to guess at about 80% confidence that, adjusting for whatever needs to be adjusted between the two time periods, the one on the left cost at least 10x as much to build.
(or, at least the visible parts did, maybe the right spent a lot on solid foundations and electricity and plumbing and etc. that the left just doesn't have)
If I'm right, that may be a big part of it. It's not mysterious why a $50 kitchen knife is nicer to use and looks better than a $5 kitchen knife.
Every tradition has to start somewhere sometime when a group of like-minded people decide to celebrate, commemorate, worship, party, or mourn some event, revelation, or story. All traditions are as real as celebrants make them.
You could even argue that coming up with something whole cloth would inadvertently have elements of the past. That less interesting Moorish design still used principles of architecture developed in the past. Anyway, here's a better poem: https://poets.org/poem/self-portrait-28
Hear me out: SCOTUS just ruled that the 2nd amendment allows the confiscation of firearms from those subject to a restraining order. I'm not defending originalism, but it it strikes me as a useful analogy for this discussion. The ruling goes way beyond the founding era and references gun controls in England from the 14th century and the 17th century. Now, suppose the oral arguments went like this:
"There were gun controls in the 14th century"
"LOL people burned witches then"
"There were gun controls in the 17th century"
"LOL people used leaches for medicine then"
That would seem to miss the point. The point is (1) Targeted gun control seems like a good thing (2) there really is a long precedent for it. And that's it. There's no obligation to start using leaches again. Similarly, almost all calls for tradition in the arts or politics or whatever are targeted defences of things (1) the speaker thinks is good in themselves and (2) with some real support in the historic record. Genuinely fake traditions are possible but fraud is not an argument against faithfulness.
I, admittedly, haven't read the SCOTUS opinion(s) on this case.
It would be interesting to know if the motivation for the 14th century gun controls were or were not directly opposed to the motivations for the 2nd amendment. I would expect that an originalist supreme court justice would take any older legislation which was directly opposed by the USA Constitution as being overridden by the Constitution - but I don't know if this is or is not such a case.
Not my area, but it makes sense that discontinuities would be resolved in favour of the revolution, otherwise ze whole point of having a revolution is lost. The opinion also lists some targeted gun controls from around the time of the revolution, so in this case there's continuity. My point is a targeted historical inquiry is not a "gotcha" one way or another (1) Is this thing good in itself? (2) Is it supported in some way by History or tradition? There is room for debate in specific cases about either 1 or 2 or both but some comments seem to suggest that ANY appeal to tradition is the thin end of the wedge and we'll all be burning witches by the end of the week. But it turns out you CAN have your cake and eat it and we often do.
>Not my area, but it makes sense that discontinuities would be resolved in favour of the revolution, otherwise ze whole point of having a revolution is lost.
Exactly agreed!
>My point is a targeted historical inquiry is not a "gotcha" one way or another (1) Is this thing good in itself? (2) Is it supported in some way by History or tradition? There is room for debate in specific cases about either 1 or 2 or both but some comments seem to suggest that ANY appeal to tradition is the thin end of the wedge and we'll all be burning witches by the end of the week. But it turns out you CAN have your cake and eat it and we often do.
>It is typically the case that at any given time some trends are favorable and other are unfavorable and it is sensible to want to continue the former and reverse the latter.
Thank you. Personally I like that Lewis quote, it is simplistic but he is responding to a simplistic analogy i.e you can't turn back the clock. But real examples are better because otherwise people fill in the blanks and mix up the past with their preconscious terrors
My understanding of the argument is not gun control from the 14th century, but the idea of a surety or bond . Troublesome people were required to post a bond that would pay for any damages they caused if they misbehaved. The majority found a parallel in that and the idea of disarming someone who had created reason to believe that they were “problematic”
Many Thanks! Hmm... Personally, I would be very leary of any "troublesome people" line of argument. Why stop at disarming them? How about any number of other disempowering measures? If "troublesome" trumps 2nd amendment rights, does it also trump 1st amendment rights?
Well, there is always a slippery slope to be found isn’t there? but I think it would be hard to extend the idea of depriving someone of a means of deadly force based on a reasonable showing of the risk involved to silencing them.
This point was discussed extensively in the oral argument at the SC, which I listened to. It was a pretty good one.
I mean, they can always go around calling their ex a bitch, they just can’t shoot her.
Anyway, I was just trying to clarify the points in old common law that they relied upon in their opinion. It was an unfortunate test case in someways because the man involved really was a jackass. It was pretty hard to argue for the idea of him owning a gun .
Many Thanks! Personally, I _do_ think that "a means of deadly force" is indeed special. I'd be happier if there were a clearer retaining wall around the possible slippery slope...
>I mean, they can always go around calling their ex a bitch
and it is unclear whether calling their ex a bitch to all listeners on social media might qualify, so it may be that we are already past that level of slide down the slope. And the general criteria include
>Harassment, Second Degree means that someone has made you _feel mental or emotional distress_ by doing things such as contacting you repeatedly through verbal, written or electronic means.
[emphasis added] which is _vastly_ different from a credible threat of deadly force.
Like I said, it’s a slippery slope. If there were not slippery slopes, the Supreme Court would have nothing to do would it? Every layer along the way is kind of a tell. A man sits around with his friends at a bar and describes what a Cunt his ex was. Then a man goes home, gets on Facebook, finds a group that he knows she’s a member of and starts to post the same kind of thing. That’s a line crossed.
Then he starts saying things like you better watch your back. Or there’s no way I’m going to let my children live with you. I want my children.
He leaves her 85 phone messages a day, pleading, threatening, crying, screaming demanding…( that’s what “ harassment “ looks like)
pretend you’re the law , where would you draw the line?
It helps, at least a little, that in this case "troublesome people" is defined as a group of people who have already and through (abbreviated) due process of law had some of their other civil liberties restricted.
I think our society and our courts are a bit too cavalier about restraining orders, treating them as a one-size-fits-all default solution to "these two people keep complaining about one another". But if there's room for any sort of restraining order in our system, then there's room for at least a subset that include "hand over your guns until this gets resolved".
Many Thanks! Basically agreed. I'm a bit queasy about the, as you said, abbreviated part, but I agree that at least, as you said, a "due process of law" has been followed. And I _do_ think of access to deadly force as a special case. I mostly want to _keep_ it a special case, with no further enlargement of the set of civil liberties restricted or (in my view, worse) enlargement of the set of "troublesome people".
The problem with looking to an idealized past that never was is when people assume that if it happened in the past, it can happen in the future. Or when people long for some aspect of the past without recognizing the costs involved.
For example, a "marriage for life" culture implies a lot of people stuck in abusive relationships forever. You can't have the former without the latter, and that's a price most people aren't willing to pay any more.
But in the real world what are the chances of getting back to that culture? I get that there are post-liberals and so on but they are a fringe group - most people just want the freedom to express an opinion on traditional marriage without e.g being thrown out of the Lib Dems
I think population mobility makes it a lot harder, especially for the college educated. Me and most of my friends all live >200 miles from where we grew up, so no grandparents and aunts and uncles around to help out.
I agree. No simple answers. RETVRN ain't happening. I'm all for people being alert for 'red flags' in choosing friends or partners. But people are looking for red flags everywhere. Scott's article was partly about architecture. Are we honestly saying that building a pretty library is a segue to RETVRN?
I think part of it is that if any status is left lying around, people will try to steal it.
I've heard that "traditional" all male morris dancing was invented in the 1930s and mixed sex morris dancing is actually older.
Wicca as a "traditional" religion was invented in the 1950s. Some of its practices carried into Neo-Paganism, which is more honest. "We use the same sources as our ancestors-- our imaginations".
I was surprised to find that the cross-quarters, eight equally spaced holidays on the solstices and equinoxes and the times between them, wasn't traditional. Ancient peoples would celebrate some but not all of them.
It's interesting that older can translate to better-- it's not just time-tested, it's as though people started out with a more direct relationship with reality.
"I was surprised to find that the cross-quarters, eight equally spaced holidays on the solstices and equinoxes and the times between them, wasn't traditional. Ancient peoples would celebrate some but not all of them."
Oh, that one is a favourite complaint of mine! The majority of it is lifted from Irish sources, some are Scottish, a couple are Welsh, then they had to throw in Norse "Yule" to round it out because the native traditions in the British Isles didn't have a surviving name for the winter solstice festival, if any, due to Samhain being the bigger seasonal change. But if you're doing a consciously "opposite of the current, that is Christian, calendar" then you need a big feast to correspond to "We're celebrating Christmas only it's not Christmas".
I don't know why Litha, another Anglo-Saxon term, for Midsummer but I suppose you can fudge it all in by saying "it's all the traditions of the British Isles, not just the Celtic", but then you do run up against problems such as some of these festivals are very plainly from the Christian tradition, e.g. Lady Day
The least blood-pressure elevating explanation is that this was more or less invented by the modern (as in 1950s/60s) witchcraft tradition, working off older anthropological and folklorist studies. The "wheel" as presented is a fake tradition, as this post says.
"Aphelion is the point of the Earth’s orbit that is farthest away from the Sun. It always happens in early July, about two weeks after the June solstice,
Perihelion is the point of the Earth’s orbit that is nearest to the Sun. This always happens in early January, about two weeks after the December Solstice."
So the Southern Hemisphere is probably more 'correct' in having their summer/our winter be around the time Earth approaches nearest the sun, and same for their winter/our summer.
Many Thanks! Agreed that the Southern Hemisphere gets the effects of our orbits' eccentricity adding to the seasonal effects, while, for us, it subtracts. Perihelion and aphelion actually do move (very slowly) relative to the solstices.
>On Earth, perihelion and aphelion at one point coincided with the winter and summer solstice. But that was back in 1246, according to Time and Date. Due to something that is called orbital precession, there is a gradually opening gap between the solstices and the peri and aphelions. By the year 6430, perihelion will fall on the March equinox (March 20), according to Time and Date.
Both the spin axis and the peri and ap helions move, the former circling every 23,000 years, the latter more slowly, every 112,000 years:
>Earth's apsidal precession slowly increases its argument of periapsis; it takes about 112,000 years for the ellipse to revolve once relative to the fixed stars.[19] Earth's polar axis, and hence the solstices and equinoxes, precess with a period of about 26,000 years in relation to the fixed stars. These two forms of 'precession' combine so that it takes between 20,800 and 29,000 years (and on average 23,000 years) for the ellipse to revolve once relative to the vernal equinox, that is, for the perihelion to return to the same date (given a calendar that tracks the seasons perfectly).
A fascinating musicology book: The Modern Invention of Medieval Music by Leech-Wilkinson. When the Notre Dame school started being rediscovered in the early 20th century, there were some surprising performances involving saxophones - sadly no recordings exist. If anyone has heard any Leonin/Perotin here it will probably be a cappella because that came to be seen as more authentic than saxophones, but only because the scores are quite simple and no specific instruments are listed.
Opera got invented in an effort to replicate the ancient greek drama, where the chorus was singing. I have heard a reconstruction of that ancient singing. Opera as we know it is much more exciting.
"In the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It’s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that. Everyone knows what they mean!"
Poetry of the last 50 years: I'll bet that Seamus Heaney wrote better stuff than the cited example between 1974 and his death. Plus: a lot of Rock lyrics, like Grant Hart's stuff (A letter from Anne Marie, The Main, So far from Heaven, 2541, The girl who lives on Heaven Hill), in german language "Materialien zu einer Kritik der bekanntesten Gedichtform italienischen Ursprungs" by Robert Gernhardt and probably lots of stuff I never encountered.
I am going to have to stop you when you describe Thick as a Brick as Jethro Tull imitating a style they didn't like, as they absolutely *were* a progressive rock band and their parody was as affectionate as it was cutting. In fact they did their own version of an overwrought prog rock concept played straight with their very next album, A Passion Play.
It's a very interesting argument or a counterintuitive position, but it's convincing and establishes something important.
I would zoom in a little bit and assert that philo-medievalism, in particular, is an indispensable cultural currency which modern society should use more extensively, intentionally and seriously. It's a paradoxical suggestion, perhaps, since modern times are richer, more populous, more knowledgeable, etc. And yet there's a precedent, for Western Europe indulged in a kind of obsessive philhellenism for centuries, from Petrarch through the Victorians and beyond, and profited by it immensely. To constantly juxtapose two ages in one's imagination just seems to be very mentally invigorating. If you work at it, you can combine the best of the past and the present.
In a sense, we're already two centuries or so into a civilization-wide philo-medieval obsession. Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had it, as obviously did CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, down to the Dungeons and Dragons games that teenage boys play for hours. But we're still not very serious about it. It's still a kind of game.
What I'd like to see a resolute attempts to revive feudalism, chivalry, kingship in the medieval manner, very expansive rights of the Church, and so forth.
"This is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me. Someone points out that they like some feature of the past. Then other people object that this feature is idealized, the past wasn’t universally like that, and the past had many other bad things."
This is how most arguments about wokeness sound to me.
There's no value in tradition for its own sake. The value comes from the value of what is handed down.
As in the case of a literal patrimony: If your father hands you down some gold… the value of the gold does not derive from that your father handed it down to you, but from the value of the gold itself.
Things are not good because they are handed down. At best, they are handed down because they are good.
Practically speaking, there is the related aspect of humility (with regard to the reception of tradition)—it's not wise to pretend to know something you don't or to discard the wisdom of your elders (when it is a question of their wisdom versus one's own ignorance)—but this virtue itself (humility) derives its value from the "gold" of truth.
Socrates' wisdom was not a pose or a profession of ignorance for its own sake. It was a reflection of the relative extent and stability of his knowledge.
In the same way, we should accept traditions and perpetuate them when they correlate with something in our experience—even if that experience is the value of authority and the trustworthiness of others.
I mean, for instance, you can say Larkin was a miserable sod and a misogynist or whatever, but people say worse things about Kipling, and isn’t this (from August 1974) just richer and funnier and more moving too? …
The Life With A Hole In It
When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
_But you’ve always done what you want,
You always get your own way _
— A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that’s been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I’ve never done what I don’t.
So the shit in the shuttered château
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay) . . .
Life is an immobile, locked
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world’s for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you’ll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Oh havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly. Years.
He seemed an obvious choice for “Last 50 years, better than Kipling on a not very good day”, and indeed there are many such cases in his (conveniently chronological) collected poems…
Standing under the fobbed impendent belly of time
"Tell me the truth" I said
"Teach me the way things go"
All the other kids were itching to have a bash
But I thought wanting unfair
It and finding out clash
I take it that “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg doesn’t rate very high in these parts. I think it’s rather good. But it’s more than 50 years old now that I think about it. So is Kipling though..
Buffalo Bill ’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death
Beowulf888 cares about poetry, and likes Howl, also Coleridge and various others he's mentioned in comments here. Writes some himself, too.
I used a 62 year old poem (but admitted it) that's gorgeous (IMO). https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/fake-tradition-is-traditional?r=3d8y5&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=59634786
Because it's one of my all-time favorites. Nemorov, who wrote it, was alive til 1991, so I prob could have found something within the 50 year span by him. But -- I didn't really think Scott would engage around this anyhow. so just went with my favorite for the pleasure of seeing it up someplace where some will probably read it. Do you like it? Entirely agree with you about later poetry. It falls off a cliff into the dump some time in the 70's. A while ago I subscribed to poem-a-day from Partisan Review, and I just loathe most of what they send. After a while discovered that looking at the date one was written was an excellent predictor of whether I'd hate it or not. After the 70's a bunch of it is prose. Just prose, not free verse. And generally about very prosaic things. WTF? And yet last night when I was hunting around for something, looked up 3 poems I love, one by Berryman, one by Lowell and this Nemerov one, and all were just a few years too early to meet the 50 year cutoff. Yeah, I think you're right that Scott knew enough to say the last 50 years and not the last 60 or 70. He never talks about poetry, but he must read some.
"whereas most “trad” people want changes to government policy or society that impact other people"
Right, though I would note that the same can be said about the anti-trad people.
Perhaps. Luckily we have the option of combining what's good about the present with what was good about the past... at least if we can ever get past the silly boo trad yay trad arguments and into the details.
There’s no “perhaps” about it. What % of modern Westerners would give up modern medicine, electricity, running water, the internet, social media, contraception, etc. in return for 19th century social organization and gender norms? It’s got to be in the single digits.
Perhaps.
Really? Things like this just seem to be deliberately misunderstanding people for cheap points. You know perfectly well virtually nobody talking about tradition is talking about the absence of technology. And interpreting someone saying the past was better as making a statement about technology is as ridiculous as interpreting someone saying Scandinavia is a better society as making a statement about climate.
Can we try for at least a tiny modicum of intellectual charity?
Our esteemed host wrote this classic post on his old blog on how technological progress goes hand in hand with social changes, such that it is unrealistic to hope for, say, 1800s-style social organization with 2200s-level technology, highly recommended:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with-flesh-and-blood-but-against-powers-and-principalities/
I'll grant you that many of the trad people seem to want to go back to the 1950s, not the 1800s or earlier. So, in that case, we're talking running water and electricity and cars and antibiotics, but no internet, no social media, and much lower levels of material consumption than today (e.g., a lot smaller houses). How many trad people would take that trade? A lot more than would go back to the 1800s, I'm sure, but they wouldn't be happy about it.
This seems like it applies to state based societies, but maybe Sam is referring more to clans and loose tribal affiliations. They might have myths of an idealized past, but I imagine they might have done a lot more "just doing stuff" to create traditions than you refer to here.
Since non-state societies tend towards oral histories, they likely also had an idealized past.
We have an extremely corrosive tendency to mock everything. It's not surprising that the Greeks didn't like the Sophists much.
Small-scale societies generally change very slowly, so there isn't as much tradition to return to. If you're a hunter-gatherer and your ancestors have been hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years, nostalgia for traditional cultural mores and old style of architecture probably doesn't make much sense.
If there are events that cause a significant change to the culture (e.g., loss of technology, economic shifts), you'd expect to see more nostalgia for a seemingly remote tradition. Or, if a small-scale society gets conquered (or even just exposed to modern economies), this may cause a dramatic shift in mentality that longs for traditional folkways, but at that point, they're essentially absorbed into a different society.
It's the other way around. Tradition is usually justified through an idealized past, up to and including literal worship of the ancestors. This can still be observed in almost all traditional cultures, and in particular hunter-gatherers.
Fast-changing societies have largely abandoned this behaviour since it's maladaptive in the modern environment, and only a residue of our propensity towards nostalgia remains.
The relevant difference is that it's not a concrete nostalgia -- it's remote and intangible. It's not like "let's revive classical ideals of architecture according to the works of Vitrivius" or "let's return to the gender roles of the Jane Austen era" but more like "we don't eat carp from the lagoon because the Water Mother forbids it."
What is stuff like the Aboriginal Dreamtime if not an idealized past?
Just the opposite! Pre-state societies absolutely *worship* the past, the forebears, etc.
It's exactly the opposite. Myths aren't just stories people told their kids for fun, it was the main way of passing on their traditions. And since this was a time when behaviour barely changed over centuries, it means that "all our forebearers have done things as we do now, and this is good" was all the justification needed to do things. Once state-based societies came around, things got moving much faster, which means that people had to find new justifications. Clans and tribalistic societies were absolutely obsessed with their ancestors, to the degree that thei majority of their religious customs are often categorized as just "ancestor veneration/worship".
I like this very much. I have a model (in the sense of theoretical physics) I've been trying to work out, but I've been struggling. I'm going to build the model I think Feynman would've built, and luckily I never got around to reading any of his actual papers (in my defense, I'm a mathematician and not a physicist).
Care to discuss it (here or elsewhere)? I'm guessing it has something to do with the phrase "dynamic entropy"?
(I didn't quite -disprove- my own model, but I did manage to prove to myself that the best mathematical understanding of my model I have yet to construct doesn't result in the behavior I was expecting, at least without some extremely unprincipled modifications.)
In fact, I am always amazed how much of "tradition" was deliberately crafted in the mid-19th c., when governments were trying to tie together their countries into one single nation, and so came up with, say, the idea of having a national anthem, etc.
It's not only related to government, but also to ethnology becoming interested in local believes and cultures in the XIX century. For example, a lot of what we know about Slavic believes comes from whatever was able to be collected in the late XIX century, as there is very little original material left (or was created at all in the first place).
This. One thing that sticks in my brain is that at the start of the 19th century, much of "France" didn't actually speak "French" - Occitan was pretty common in southern France, and then the French kingdom also had border areas that spoke German. There was an aggressive push to standardize a national language across the country.
Exactly! Not to mention the push to invent public holidays, the push to craft the figure of the Gaulish ancestors (who, by *pure coincidence*, were of course enemies of the German peoples), the push to give everyone in the country the same schooling, etc., etc.
People in Gaul had been celebrating Asterix for almost thousands of years before a pair of ethnographers recorded the stories! ;-P
That's another good point too. The fake tradition was often not pushed just randomly, but in a spirit of domination. Kids got punished all over South France for speaking "patois", and their ancestral language was nearly eradicated. Fake tradition is not only literally fake, but sometimes has quite totalitarian roots.
On the other hand, as far as the languages are concerned, the totalitarianism seems to have but sped up the inevitable. In a modern state, a single language is just higher-entropy (<https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/>); you can see it by looking at what happened in other nation states which didn’t take such totalitarian measures. Only independence (<https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/occitania-the-country-that-never>) seems to be able to preserve the native language long-term, and only if it is achieved before any significant language shift has taken place. For example, Portugal gained its independence (or rather, halted and reversed the process of losing it) in time; Ireland did not.
To further illustrate how doomed a language generally is once it starts losing ground, there are currently no less totalitarian policies trying to revitalize some of those languages, and failing miserably. People already used to speaking the national language don’t appreciate having their ancestors’ language shoved down their throats any more than said ancestors liked having the national language forced on them; probably even less, since, at least, the latter were acquiring a means to communicate with more people, throughout their nation state. Add to this the fact that people from other parts of the nation state have every right to move and settle there, and they have even less reason to tolerate the imposition of a language neither they nor their ancestors ever spoke.
Counterpoint to the last part: multiple ex-Soviet countries have the Russian-speaking population share rapidly declining, even if the native language majorly lost ground previously.
Fair enough. What countries are those? I’m guessing the Baltics; mostly, Estonia and Latvia.
Okay, I suppose independence can reverse a language shift which has made some progress if the formerly dominant language undergoes a massive loss of prestige, which seems to have happened to Russian. I still think it’s unfair to force Estonian or Latvian on local Russian speakers, but I guess noöne will seriously support this cause, especially if Putin’s regime has appropriated it.
Lithuania, Moldova (except for Transnistria) and western Ukraine seem to fall easily in the “not enough language shift before independence for it to continue on its own” category. And Belarussian seems to be unambiguously going the way of Occitan, Breton and Gaelic.
I’d say the law that independence is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for an indigenous language to survive long-term stands firm. I doubt we’ll see any similar surprises in Western Europe, or the Americas, or Australia. Languages in the process of dying will continue to die; English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese probably won’t lose any ground as national languages, but if they do, it’ll be to one another. Or maybe the use of English as an international language will grow to the point that national languages are irrelevant, but a lot of people won’t like this.
This is just fascinating! As are the other examples provided in this thread. Just some grade A history trivia!
To the point that even referring to "Elsass" and "Lotharingia" is seen as a provocative political statement.
Or the question of whether Ukraine and the American South are actually "nations".
Not to mention that the discipline of linguistics had to invent a completely new term because China had poisoned "dialect".
"Not to mention that the discipline of linguistics had to invent a completely new term because China had poisoned "dialect"."
I'm totally ignorant in this; how did they poison "dialect" and which term has replaced it?
I’m also curious about this, I understand that what are considered dialects in China can be at least as different from each other as say different Romance languages, but I hadn’t heard of linguists having to invent a new term because of it.
Because that never happened. Victor Mair, though, is very proud of his personal effort to have varieties of Chinese labeled "topolects", calquing the native Chinese term, rather than "dialects". Use of that term signifies political alignment with him; it's not a scientific concern.
In linguistics, no distinction is drawn between "languages" and "dialects" in the first place - pretty much the only thing they have to say about "dialects" is a pithy saying about the lack of a difference - so no need can have arisen to replace the word "dialect" with anything else.
The classic linguistics joke about the difference between a language and a dialect is that a language has an army.
>In linguistics, no distinction is drawn between "languages" and "dialects"
This seems like a mistake to me. As a german speaker, there is quite a clear line between them. German dialects all use the same spelling (and on occasions, an artificial pronounciation based on that spelling). They pronounce things differently but maintaining a fixed offset - so, if one dialect borrows a word from another, they dont pronounce it in the most similar way their phonetics can realise, they maintain the relative sound changes. New sound changes usually affect all dialects insofar as they are applicable, again maintaining the offsets. For these reasons, learning to understand a different dialect is a matter of days. People also do not usually learn to speak a different dialect - instead, everyone speaks their dialect and understands each other. From what I can tell a similar if less intense thing is going on with english internationally, though they seem to call this "accents" rather than "dialects". It certainly seems plausible that analogous cases in logographically written languages are different enough to deserve their own word.
Of course, if you ignore all that and look only at a momentary snapshot of spoken language, then arguably the berlin dialect is no more different from dutch than from the swiss dialect. But that is not "more scientific", and the emphasis on it to the exclusion of the above is exactly the kind of politicing it accuses the opposition of.
Mostly it has to do with the "historical linguistics" aspect, which is somewhat distinct from the modern Chomskyan project. Calling all languages "dialects" is all very well and good, and quite egalitarian. But then what happens when you start tracing derivations, the way taxonomists trace back birds to dinosaurs? The term "dialect" takes on a new meaning, with a preposition: "dialect of ___". And the CCP has very strong views on what the correct answer is. They do not want to hear the sentence, "The ____ dialect of Chinese isn't actually Chinese.", for any definition of "dialect" or "Chinese".
> Or the question of whether Ukraine and the American South are actually "nations".
That is literally a political question. Nations only exist as political entities.
States only exists as political entities. Nations are cultural entities.
The con-fusion of state and nation was a deliberate part of the state-building mentioned earlier in comments.
The modern STATE of France, among other things, built a NATION of French.
I ought to re-read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle again. :-)
Depends on what you mean? My go-to example is that the "state of Israel" refers to a geopolitical entity, but the "nation of Israel" refers to the Jewish people as a whole (more or less).
> but the "nation of Israel" refers to the Jewish people as a whole
That seems more like a fixed idiom that doesn't relate to the meaning of the words in the phrase. Like how the governmental districts of the United States are called "states" despite the usual meaning of that word, or how the districts of France are called "departments".
A "nation" referring to a collection of people would be the sense that differentiated a "nation-state" from a "state", but in the modern language "nation" and "state" are synonymous.
In the United States, we have weird definitions of both those terms, but not all the rest of the world follows our usage, especially not before US dominance after WWII. I think historically it's mostly that "state" was already taken, and so when a grouping of states was proposed, "nation" was a good term to refer to it. Since, as the justification goes, we're all one people regardless of the geopolitical entity we happen to inhabit, right? It goes right back to the Latin, "natio".
The term "nation-state" specifically refers to a modern type of state, distinct from multi-ethnic empires or tiny fragmented principalities. It's a state that encompasses the land occupied by a single people: only that land, and all that land. Leading to things like the Anschluss, and the Schleswig-Holstein question, and what happened when the Ottoman Empire transformed into Turkey. And why "Kurdistan" is such a dangerous concept.
In the French usage, I thought that's just an older version of the word, based in their own language? It's a similar derivation to "partition". But actually, we have the older usage too - that's where our "department" comes from, right? It's like "subdivision", which at the moment, to me, primarily refers to a real estate arrangement. ("real" "estate"; interesting usage of words...)
My dictionary defines "nation" as:
"1. A people who share common customs, origins, history, and usually language
2. A rather large group of people organized under a single usually independent government."
And some other stuff. But only the secondary definition requires that the nation be a political entity. The word you're looking for is "state", or possibly "nation-state" which refers to the intersection of 1 and 2 above. And it is common to say "nation" when we mean "nation-state" and the context is unambiguous, but it's also common to say "nation" and mean just its traditional, primary definition.
By the first definition, Germany isn't a nation: there's still a lot of differences between East and West Germany. (Or before WW2, there were lots of differences between Catholics and Protestants. They almost never intermarried.)
Similarly with any county with some minorities inside.
That's what propaganda is for! Cultural indoctrination, public schools, taking children away from their parents and teaching them that they are all one people, not members of a loose band of regions. That they all speak a single language, not whatever barbarous and backward dialect their village elders speak, and especially not what *those people* across the river (or the mountains) speak. That their allegiance is to the state and people as a whole, and not their clan or tribe or village or region. One folk, one realm, one leader... Oh, wait.
Germany's been struggling for the last 200 years (post-Napoleon?) to pull this off, while I know barely anything about the inner workings of the German government, it would not shock me if there were some post-WWII arrangements that were deliberately designed to keep "German nationalism" from happening. (Some of which may have been subverted by the incentive to display a tame and successful half-Germany as a trophy during the Cold War.)
[X] is a nation if you'd be comfortable saying [Xian] is an ethnicity. Or if [X] is the United States of America, because some people have problems using "Americans" as an ethnic identifier for political reasons.
But the wikipedia page "Demographics of Germany" gives the major ethnicity as "German", 71.3% of the population, no separation of East or West. Similarly, the major ethnic group of Russia is given as "Russians", Sweden "Swedes", etc. By comparison. the major ethnic groups of Singapore are "Chinese", "Malay", and "Indian"; there is no recognized Singaporean ethnicity. And the main ethnic group of Monaco is "French".
I am as amazed as you. I am a Northern German living in Bavaria, and the local custom of Lederhosen is an invention of the 19th century, created by educated people to have a fictional traditional dress to support their idea of Bavarian nationalism. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lederhose#Geschichtliche_Entwicklung, (Maybe use e.g. Google Translate).
None of the Bavarians seem to realize the history of the Lederhosen, but ironically, they can now rightly say that is the Bavarian traditional dress, with over a century of history behind it. It's just that they believe that it came from peasants further in the past, instead of intellectuals living in towns in 1883.
I believe the Scottish kilt (small kilt) is a similar fabrication, if a century older: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilt#History.
I've heard similar things about "traditional Highland dancing" which is purportedly the traditional dances of the Scottish people but are basically imported French court dances mixed with French ballet.
Tartan kilts definitely do not have a very long tradition in Scotland (both kilts and tartan patterns and cloth date from around 1700, no earlier). And clan tartans are later still; 19th Century.
Sort of - the great kilt is older (wikipedia says 16th century), the thing that was new in the early 1700s was shortening it to the modern philabeg.
I believe the idea of clans having a specific tartan pattern is also relatively modern
Once the Jacobites and any Scottish rebellion for a separate nation were safely quashed and long finished, it was allowable to romanticise the past and the 'traditional Scottish elements' such as tartans etc. in the 19th century by the English, once they were the winners. And a lot of that 'traditional element' was invented then, as the most appealing to the tastes of the time.
Something similar earlier in Ireland with Sydney Owenson and her novel "The Wild Irish Girl" which harked back to a romantic past, though in her case it was in the service of nationalism (though I think it's safe to say it's unlikely there ever was an Irish female name 'Glorvina').
That didn't stop the book being a runaway success, and the songs she wrote (new words to existing Irish airs, something also done with great success by Thomas Moore) being hits in the drawing rooms of English society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Irish_Girl
Indeed, all this reminds me of the current trend in land acknowledgements: you can enjoy evoking the romantic past of those you have beaten, once you're safely in possession as the victor and there's no chance of you being dislodged.
Exactly
>And clan tartans are later still; 19th Century.
Cool! So they came _after_ the patenting of the Jaquard loom (1804) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine ? :-)
Did any of the clans implement the first version of their clan tartans as punch cards? :-)
You wouldn't need to, a "traditional" tartan is a bog-standard 2-2 twill. You can do it with four sheds without bothering with the expense of a Jacquard loom. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twill)
Plaid is pretty easy and cheap to weave, since it's just (ideally) equal stripes in the warp and the weft. Everything I've heard says that the Scottish Highlands did have plaids before the 18th century, they just were local patterns and not formalized. Which makes sense, because really...it's just fancy stripes. Everyone figured out stripes.
Many Thanks!
This is like how we are currently witnessing an undifferentiated "country" culture forming in the US, with e.g. West Virginians wearing cowboy hats and Alaskans picking up a drawl. It also includes big trucks for men, short denim shorts for women, and "country dancing," including line dancing, which is more or less from 70s disco rather than any more rustic roots.
Did we read the same article? It says that Lederhosen were peasant work clothing for a long time, then lost ground to wool pants, and were then nationalistically revived right around when they otherwise died out.
It says that peasants used trousers made from leather for a longer time.
However, Lederhosen as used as a Bavarian word refers to a very specific style: short trousers, about knee-length, suspenders, usually made from deer skin and such. Your average biker or cowboy-and-indians reenactor does not wear Lederhosen, he wears leather trousers.
As the wiki says, even in 1909, the bishop of Munich declared Lederhosen to be immoral. That was not about the fabric, it was about grown men wearing short trousers.
Im austrian, I know what they look like. The article says:
> Während sich bei der städtischen Bevölkerung nach der Französischen Revolution lange Hosen durchsetzten (→Sansculottes), erhielt sich der von der französischen Culotte abgeleitete Schnitt bei der Landbevölkerung als praktische Arbeitshose
Culottes being a style which ended right under the knee with high socks, which is how the old Lederhosen are, though today you will find about an equal amount ending a bit over the knee.
The wiki says that the culottes were the basis for leather trousers with legs of varying length, depending on the style of the times. While it says that after the French revolution, longer trousers became fashionable in France, but not for the workers outside of France, there is little indication that there was anything Bavarian or Austrian about this style - the article even features a picture of what we might call Lederhosen of 1791, almost 100 years before the birth of the new tradition - but it is from Lothringia, which the caption says is where this style was worn primarily during the earlier 19th century.
So yes, short leather trousers existed in Bavaria before the establishment of the Lederhosen tradition, but at least according to the article, they did so more in other parts of Germany. The Bavarian and Austrian Lederhosen as an autochthon tradition that separates these regions or cultures from others was an invention of the late 19th century, based on primarily nationalist ideology. See also https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracht_(Kleidung)#Die_Entstehung_der_Volkstrachten.
I agree that they were not particular to the area, except perhaps in having held on longer in the mountain regions.
But in some cases, particularly Germany but also Italy, new traditions came before the government. The relationship is complicated, and is also tied to scientific and historic research (the entire field of linguistics arose in this millieu for example).
As an Italian I'm curious to know what you're referring to.
The invention of a shared Italian identity, which I believe was underway in mid-nineteenth-century Italy (to be fair there was some shared history to draw on...), but not in the way in was in Germany (or Scotland for that matter). I'm going on secondary sources here, and pretty general ones at that, so can't actually name texts, rituals etc sorry so happy to be corrected.
You're correct, although it depends on what one means by "Italian identity".
By the 19th century Italians had been calling themselves Italians for many centuries. Which shouldn't surprise you; read anything written in the early modern era and you'll notice that the French, the English, the Spanish, all called Italians "Italians", so naturally Italians also called themselves Italian. There was also a common written language, Italian, which by the 16th century had become the written standard all over Italy (mostly replacing Latin), and therefore a shared literature. So the notion existed, but before the romantic nationalist zeitgeist of the 19th century it was only one of multiple nested identities. For example, a person would have been Florentine, Tuscan, Italian, Catholic and Christian, and before the era of nationalism it wouldn't have been so clear that "Italian" was the most important of these, or that Italian states must unite, or that it's unacceptable that an Italian state is part of a "foreign" empire.
It is true that in Italy the causal direction goes
nationalism -> political unification
not the other way around.
I note that a common mistake foreigners make about Italy is to think the Italian language was not important before unification or had not been codified. That is not the case, in fact if anything the chain goes:
shared written language -> nationalism -> unification.
It's possible to argue that this nationalism was "imposed from above" not in the sense that it was promoted by the government (I mean, obviously it was, but only after unification) but in the sense that initially it was only believed in by a "bourgeois" elite, the ones who wrote all the nationalistic poetry and novels of Romantic era Italian literature. The elites who struggled for unification. In Italy there was for decades a huge communist party, so such a view is likely to be framed in Marxist terms.
I had thought that there were multiple local and regional dialects of "post-Latin", but the Florentine dialect wound up becoming the most influential due to its literary usage (especially by Dante), and so it formed the basis of the modern Italian language? But was that happening before the push for nationalism?
Long, long before the push for nationalism!
I mean, don't worry, I'll write you a longer answer when I have the time.
I hear from foreigners all the time that there was supposedly no standard Italian language until the unification of Italy, and only at that point the dialect of Dante was “chosen” as the standard, presumably by the government.
That notion can be disproven instantly by opening any book printed anywhere in Italy before unification.
EVERYTHING was already in the dialect of Dante!
For example, these are two of the earliest newspapers in Italy (look at the dates), neither is from the region of Dante (Tuscany), and yet it’s all in the dialect of Dante (Tuscan, also known as Italian):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Genova_%28newspaper_1639–1646%29_issue_16_Dec_1639.jpg
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazzetta_di_Mantova#/media/File:Gazzetta_di_Mantova_16_Febr_1674.jpg
I could make infinite examples like this.
Nearly everything that was written anywhere in Italy, was written in that dialect (Tuscan aka Italian), roughly from 1500 on. Books, newspapers, personal letters, bureaucratic documents. It was the official language of every pre-unification state. It was the dialect in which people who were taught how to read and write, were taught how to read and write. So much so, that the question of how many Italians knew Italian back then is often treated as equivalent to the question of how many were literate.
It’s a bit simplistic to blame Dante alone. It would be like saying that Elizabethan literature is just Shakespeare.
Around the early and mid 1300s, in Florence, there was a golden age of literature in the local vernacular (“Tuscan”). The most influential Florentine writers from that era are Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarca (Petrarch). Those three are known as “the three crowns”. Of the three crowns, Dante is probably the one whose style would be imitated the *least* by later writers.
Then, for about a century, starting a little after the great plague, literature in Tuscan remained in the background as the fashion was again to write in Latin. Although even in that period there were non-Tuscan authors writing in Tuscan. That is, Tuscan was already the main competitor of Latin.
Then, roughly from the late 1400s on (perhaps due to the spread of printing?), many more major writers show up who were writing in Tuscan instead of Latin, and they were from all corners of the peninsula, not just Florentines who would have been native speakers. It made sense for them to write like the three crowns, so they’d reach an audience as wide as possible.
Examples of major writers from around 1500 who wrote like Tuscans but were not Tuscan: Jacopo Sannazzaro (1457-1530) was from Naples; Baldassarre Castiglione (1478-1529) was from Lombardy; Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) was from Emilia. Probably these names say nothing to you, a non-Italian, but they are major milestones of Italian literature.
I’ve described how the transition looks when you look at *literature*, but during the 1300s and 1400s Tuscan was also becoming the standard used throughout Italy by merchants and bureaucrats.
By the 1500s, Tuscan had become the dialect in which both literature and bureaucracy were written everywhere in Italy, and therefore the most prestigious and formal. Very soon it was called “Italian”, a word that for centuries would be used interchangeably with “Tuscan” (in relation to language). Note that the word “Italian” never refers to the other dialects, such as Lombard, Venetian, Emilian, Neapolitan, Sicilian… no, only Tuscan is Italian, whereas Neapolitan is just Neapolitan.
Throughout the early modern era proper style in Tuscan = Italian evolved and was debated by writers, as was the case in English as well (and still is the case, can I split an infinitive or not?), but to say that pre-unification Italian had not been “codified” or “standardized” or didn’t count as “Italian” because there were style controversies, is the same as saying that English was never “codified” or “standardized” and didn’t count as “English” before Strunk and White.
Latin continued to be used for scholarly purposes (as was the case elsewhere in Europe, think of Newton), but otherwise, I can’t stress enough that pretty much EVERYTHING written in the early modern era was in Tuscan = Italian.
Or at least, that’s how it seems when you read anything written back then. I wanted to know how big a qualifier I must add to that statement, so I tried to figure out how much literature in other dialects exists. The truth is, very little (it was the exception not the rule), but the little that exists easily gets blown out of proportion because it’s interesting to scholars and regionalists.
For example, I had heard several times that the famous playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) is a milestone of literature in Venetian, which made me believe he had written a lot in Venetian, even though all I’ve ever come across by him is in Italian. But I’ve just checked and it turns out he wrote only 5 plays in Venetian versus about 130 in Italian and 24 in French. But so little exists in Venetian, that those 5 plays stand out.
Another Venetian, the famous Casanova, wrote two poetic translations of the Iliad; one, covering three quarters of the original work, in Italian; the other, covering only one third, in Venetian. In preface to the latter translation he says, paraphrased: “why would I do something as weird as translating Homer into Venetian instead of Italian? Because I’d rather be the best poet in Venetian than the worst in Italian”. And obviously he writes that preface… in Italian!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And that one, too, is considered a milestone of literature in Venetian.
Another work that comes up is the Tale of Tales (1634), a collection of fairy tales for children. Supposedly a masterpiece of literature in Neapolitan. But it’s in Neapolitan because it’s for children. And it did not have much resonance (no, it did not influence Perrault as some think). Contrast with the hugely influential works written in *Italian* by renaissance authors from *Naples*, such as Arcadia by Sannazzaro (which popularized across Europe the setting of “Arcadia”, see Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia for example) or Jerusalem Delivered by Tasso.
Of course other stuff in the dialects exists, but what I mean is — it may not have been *literally* everything when I say everything was written in Italian, but, in practice, yes, *everything* was written in Italian, anything else is an exception that confirms the rule.
There’s no understanding the creation of Italy as a state without understanding this. I won’t bore you with an account of the unification (unless you ask), but it wouldn’t have happened if the ideology of Italian nationalism had not spread in the 1800s throughout the educated classes. This required that those classes *already* have a common language and literature. Otherwise they would hardly have felt like a nation.
I understand this is counterintuitive if one is used to language standardization coming top down from the government. But it’s interesting that it can happen the other way around. Language standardization led to political unification in this case.
The other dialects, by the way, still exist, some still very widely spoken, some dying and only spoken by rural elders. Foreign linguists usually call them “languages”. This baffles most Italians, since most of us think of Venetian or Neapolitan (both still widely spoken) as “dialects” rather than “languages” and not in the same category as Italian, but something else, an inherently informal way of speaking (I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just that this is how most of us think).
Foreigners tend to think that Venetian or Neapolitan are like Quebecois or Catalan. That is, a minority language relegated to lower status by a more powerful majority, and whose speakers might feel resentful because of it. But nobody in Italy sees it that way. Nobody feels that Italian is imposed from outside. Political regionalism exists, but it isn’t really fueled by linguistic resentment. If any region seceded from Italy, it would continue to use Italian, like San Marino. If you're from an area where dialect is still spoken along with Italian, you'll typically see the two respectively as your own native *informal* speech and your own native *formal* speech, and therefore complementary. This perception is deeply ingrained and ancient.
I'm not sure that the relative decline in use of local dialects in favor of Italian happened because of unification. Perhaps mass schooling and mass media would have caused that shift to happen more or less in the same way if Italy had not unified. Italian was already too deeply entrenched as the formally correct way of writing and speaking in all part of Italy, and therefore it's what would have been taught in schools (and was already taught in schools, before unification).
A nitpick — for simplicity I have treated “Tuscan” and “Italian” as interchangebale, but it’s obsolete usage. Today, we call “Tuscan” the way people speak informally in Tuscany and “Italian” the neutral, pan-Italian variety. During the early modern era, the two words were synonymous, which made sense, since the two varieties are relatively close, since latter is based on the former.
See, this is actually what I got out of the Kriss piece. Not that 'inventing tradition' is intrinsically bad, but it would be good to be more honest and self-aware about it, since some of these traditions or interpretations thereof have major political or social consequences.
It is good to have perspective, but at the end of the day you have to swim in the pond you’re thrown into, don’t you?
People will always find something to bond around. Could be a football game or high mass, or both. it is particularly hard to cut through the noise these days. The volume and the pace of it is daunting.
So the "traditions of old" are just the traditions which happened to be prevailing in the 19th century when people decided to codify them by writing them down. This gives me an idea for a general sort of model for this whole thing:
1. For thousands of years, traditions come and go, being preserved or modified by each successive generation, and this is fine
2. The mid 19th century comes along and everyone decides to write down their traditions and talk about how important and local and national and traditional they are. Now the traditions are fossilised forever at this exact point in time.
3. The twentieth century rolls around and people get bored of their grandparents' traditions as they always have, but now that they're codified and woven so heavily into the structure of society they can't just softly evolve any more. Traditionalists insist that we preserve the traditions exactly as they are. Modernists say no, all tradition must burn and we must start again and live in purely rational cubic houses eating protein slurry.
4. A hundred years pass and we're largely still stuck in the same place, except we know that the cubes and the protein slurry are bad.
And meanwhile the actual living traditions, as in the lowly basic sense of what we do and copy from each other without necessarily thinking of it as formal "tradition", never stopped evolving, because that's what they do. That's how we got from 19th century music to jazz, rock, rap and EDM and whatever else we're listening to.
Or maybe these things carried on a little longer before getting stuck, and thats why we've got the "stuck culture" thing everyone talks about where 2024 is just 2008 with better computers
Jazz remained super creative and vibrant from the 1920s to the 1960s, when it stalled and suddenly became about worshipping the greats of the past instead of doing your own thing. Rock died later. So did techno. Hip hop is probably dead. Nothing is emerging to replace them.
>Jazz remained super creative and vibrant from the 1920s to the 1960s, when it stalled and suddenly became about worshipping the greats of the past instead of doing your own thing
Yeah, look what happened to all that great music written for Castrati for instance..
Things have a natural life, and then they are buried, or turned over to the taxidermist and hung on the wall. Occasionally they are reinvented to great effect.
I pretty much stick with Miles and Cannonball, but the Dead Brothers do a cool retake on Dixieland.
I Iove The Pogues’ take on Irish Trad but Deisach might come after me. 😆
I will admit The Pogues precisely because they're not trying to represent themselves as Authentic Traditional Performers, they translated the influences into the new idiom of rock music. They were also witty enough to be able to do pisstakes, see "Planxty Noel Hill" as the 'proper traditional music' response in their spat with Noel Hill:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poguetry_in_Motion
""Planxty Noel Hill" refers to Noel Hill, a renowned traditional Irish musician who, at the time of the release of the band's second album, Rum Sodomy and the Lash, claimed that The Pogues were disrespecting the whole Irish music tradition. Planxty has come to mean something akin to "cheers", though its use in the song's title is insincere. On the first Pogues tour of Ireland, some members of the band participated along with Hill in a panel discussion on Irish radio, during the course of which Hill described the music of The Pogues as a "terrible abortion" (the incident is described in and the quote is taken from "The Lost Decade")."
Besides, it's great fun to belt out their tunes 😁 Whisper it, but I had a cassette tape (yes, that long ago) of "Peace and Love".
Not from that album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LzQOlX7Xl8
"I come old friend from Hell tonight
Across the rotting sea
Nor the nails of the cross
Nor the blood of Christ
Can bring you help this eve
The dead have come to claim a debt from thee
They stand outside your door
Four score and three"
One of their best ever performances, The Pogues and The Dubliners, "The Irish Rover":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZXnJ4UYh40
Thanks for that! It’s good crack isn’t it? I am assuming you have seen Crock of Gold?
>Things have a natural life, and then they are buried, or turned over to the taxidermist and hung on the wall. Occasionally they are reinvented to great effect.
Along the same lines (particularly the taxidermist), I occasional refer to "<tradition> revival" as "<tradition> exhumal". :-)
Yeah, if it's not alive, it's dead dead dead.
Around here most of what I hear in cars speeding by are latino beats, with a distinct synth drum pattern of 3-1-2-2, which as far as I can remember came to prominence about a decade ago or so.
EDIT: Looked it up, it's called the "Dembow" beat.
It's a live argument in traditional/folk music; how much do you evolve naturally before you've evolved right out of any connection to the tradition and are instead copying the broader culture? Versus how much fossilisation sets in when you try to preserve the traditional music/songs/dance as something that is not a speeded-up version to rock'n'roll to?
There's nothing wrong with speeded-up rock'n'roll versions, they're great fun - but they're also not the tradition as it exists.
It's rock'n'roll (or maybe punk) versus the art song drawing room performance version, with the living tradition falling between two stools and being ignored.
My own view is that English folk music has evolved so much, it's now really left-wing social commentary in large part and little to do with the rustic origins (or even the big city origins). Contemporary folk is an odd beast, to my ears at least. There's nothing wrong with writing new songs about the people and causes of today, that's what an awful lot of the traditional folk music is about after all, but there's something in the delivery of such as Kate Rusby that just grates on me.
I think I agree with you. It is a constant process and when you’re in the river going with the current it can feel like nothing is moving. Tradition is just as fluid as the process underlying it but on a longer cycle. There’s lots of really silly ones but you never know.
Groundhog Day? How did that happen?
You take a very dim view of things :)
Part of it I think is the average 17th century person, no matter where on earth they lived, would not have any idea of a lot of other cultures. some people might’ve had some transient experience of exoticism, something you see in a glass case for instance, or at a fair. Others might not know a culture beyond the village next to them. Clearly, this is not true today. Identity becomes hard to preserve when it is such a crowded field, so more extreme demonstrations manifest themselves.
Are there any New Yorkers here who remember the three or four old Puerto Rican men that rode around the East Village on souped up bicycles with Puerto Rican flags flying from the monkey bars and a boombox playing mamba?
Those were the days…
Traditions get written down when they're dying, when nobody really performs them anymore or the last people who remember how and why it was done die.
Then of course, no longer being living, they become fossilised and "we've always done it this way, it can be done no other way" when revivalists and re-enactors use the written texts as to how to perform them.
> Traditions get written down when they're dying, when nobody really performs them anymore or the last people who remember how and why it was done die
Not always, sometimes they just get written down when somebody thinks to write them down.
An example of a recently-fossilised tradition in Australia is the Democracy Sausage. Sure, you've been able to buy a sausage (in a slice of white bread, with optional sauce and onions) outside most polling stations on election day for many decades, but nobody ever talked about it as a *thing* -- sausage sizzles are common at all sorts of community events. But then in 2014 someone labelled it a "Democracy Sausage", and the name caught on, and all of a sudden instead of just being a thing that happens it's an Important Australian Tradition that we buy a sausage when we go to vote. It's an Observed Tradition, instead of an unobserved tradition, and now it's somehow worse.
And here I was thinking that I was the only one who thought that naming it had somehow made this 'tradition' worse!
They also get written down whenever someone wants to write a story in a setting where those traditions are relevant, e.g. Jane Austen and Regency England.
You also get wonderful fusion stuff like Afro Celt Sound System, or Bombay Dub Orchestra.
It's not just a matter of them being "written down" for the first time, since writing goes back much longer than that. The 19th century saw the rise of nationalism, with rulers promoting traditions in order to forge new national identities over previously divided lands.
But the nineteenth century did not invent the invention of traditions. We can see rulers attempting this by decreeing new festivals over a millennium before Christ. We see this in the written record.
I'd argue that it's actually easier to change tradition in the modern world rather than preserve it, and that traditionalists are likely a common issue across history. To back up that point, please note the nineteenth-century collections of traditions don't generally mention Father Christmas, but he seems to have his own holiday nowadays.
That's very true. When people were struggling to assert their 'national identity' against governments that lumped them all in together and treated the mixed population as 'some animals are more equal than others', they were doing so in order to prove that they had a culture and civilisation before the conquerors came along to graciously bestow such upon them.
That meant a lot of cobbling scraps together and when you couldn't get the scraps, you made it up.
Geoffrey Keating in the 17th century compiled the Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (The History of Ireland) as a rebuttal of the English claims that the Irish were a bunch of muck savages until the Norman conquest and finally a superior people arrived to civilise them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foras_Feasa_ar_%C3%89irinn
This involved going back to the literal creation of the world and tracing Irish culture down the centuries, which clearly isn't history:
"It begins with a preface in which Keating defends the honour of Ireland against the denigrations of writers such as Giraldus Cambrensis, followed by a narrative history in two parts: part one, from the creation of the world to the arrival of Christianity in the 5th century, and part two, from the 5th century to the coming of the Normans during the 12th century.
It depicts Ireland as an autonomous, unitary kingdom of great antiquity. The early part of the work is largely mythical, depicting the history of Ireland as a succession of invasions and settlements, and derives primarily from medieval writings such as the Lebor Gabála Érenn, the Dindsenchas, royal genealogies and stories of heroic kings. The later part depicts the Normans as the latest of this series of settlers."
This even started in the 12th century with Gerald of Wales, writing the propaganda-cum-defence of the Norman invasion as being to civilise the Irish and bestow true religion upon them. So when cultures have been repressed and destroyed, there's often not much left to reconstruct, so you fill in the gaps as best you can.
I think for the American context you can see this with revivals of Native American culture; some of it is building on existing tradition and lore, but there's a lot of room for the romantic dreamers to come along and create their own version of "what the Natives were like in the past before the colonisers arrived" which has little to no relationship to reality.
People didn't sit around and discover the need to invent an anthem. Before streaming there was TV & radio in bars, Before that, people sang in bars, they sang when they worked, they sang when they walked and soldiers sang when they marched.
Go read War & Peace, when the Russian army moves out, the order is for singers and castanets to the front.
Many of Lewis Carroll's parodies of the verse Victorian children were expected to memorize are remembered and quoted by people who have never seen the things he was parodying, and may not even know they existed.
Thanks, I've added this example to the post, although I don't know for sure if it should count since his poems are more obviously lighthearted.
I'm certainly fond of "You Are Old, Father William" (which my wife likes to quote to me), but I also like "How Doth the Little Crocodile." The second verse, about the owl and the panther, is brilliant, with its truncated ending that leaves a space for the child hearing the story to shout out "... eating the owl!"
I hope somewhere there an annotated Lewis Carroll.
Martin Gardner, who used to write for Scientific American, produced The Annotated Alice, both of the Alice books with extensive notes. I've owned a copy for decades. Amazon has listings for it. Among other things, it has the French and German versions of "Jabberwocky."
Gardner's Annotated Alice is excellent, recommend. Might be a good future book review for someone. Gardner also did an annotated version of Caroll's The Hunting of the Snark.
The ubiquitous Martin Gardner...
See also: Weird Al Yankovic. Just look at how many of his songs have remained popular decades after the hits they parodied faded into obscurity.
Yep, I came here to mention Weird Al. And the trope formerly known as the Weird Al Effect, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParodyDisplacement, which has many examples, including *many* from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on the Literature subpage, such as "Let's pretend" at the time meaning "Let's deceive".
The bit in the post reminded me of "White and Nerdy", his parody of Chamillionaire's "Ridin' Dirty". The original was a huge hit in its own right, but Chamillionaire has said in interviews (and his acceptance speech when he won a Grammy for the original) that he thinks the Weird Al version was better.
But the original has a verse from Krayzie Bone of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. Checkmate.
Ern Malley might be a better example - it was intended as a Sokal-type hoax, but people like the fake poetry of the style being satirize better than anything the perpetrators of the hoax ever wrote in their own style.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley_hoax
(I think this is people with the opposite tastes as you, who prefer modernism over neo-traditionalism.)
Two words:
Don Quixote.
It makes "twinkle, twinkle little bat" even more jarring, since that's the one parody where the source material is still well known today.
"A celebrant dressed up as a green agricultural deity figure, paraded through the street, and then got ritually murdered."
Given all the people who have been murdered as part of rituals in the past, I don't like this usage of "ritually murdered". You should put quotes around "murdered", like the wikipedia article on Jack in the Green which uses "'slain'".
I can't believe you would threaten my family* like that.
(*Note: As I writer, when I write "threaten my family" I mean "mildly criticize me". I don't tell you how to write, so no one had better tell me this is confusing or inflammatory!)
Someone got up on the wrong side of bed this morning
*gasp* Bed? Did you just assume TonyZa's sleeping arrangements? How do you know Tony doesn't use a futon? Or a hammock? Come on, how insensitive can you get?!?
Especially for Sam Kriss who has always written in a fairly dreamlike manner. His long form writing isn't a rationalist attempt at easily digestible evaluated facts but something far more ambiguous.
The phrase appeared in Scott's part of the prose, actually. If it were someone else's usage, I wouldn't bother commenting about it here.
If someone is among the first people to read something on a blog, sees a passage which was confusing or misleading to them, and thinks it will be confusing to other people, then I think it is totally justified to recommend a change or addition. I'm not sure why this would be bad...?
Thank you for this comment, I really appreciate it.
So are you saying that the use to which Enigma objects would lead people reading this to believe that yes, every year in Hastings a man is genuinely for real killed in a public ceremony?
If so, I think we've got bigger problems than merely being confused or misled!
You ever seen The Wicker Man?
The original one with Christopher Lee, yes, and loved it; it's a magnificent mess and skewers all sides - the pagan freedom of Summerisle is just as much a trap as the society on the mainland, because their beliefs and sacrifices won't, in fact, restore the agricultural bounty that - probably - the first Lord Summerisle obtained by using up whatever fertility was in the soil to get the amazing harvests. He burned through the resources of what is an isolated island, in his arrogance that he was a 'scientist' who understood such things, and the society he created to enable that is now doomed because his grandson truly believes the fake traditions he crafted.
Haven't seen the remake version because I don't know what they can do to make it better or different.
The remake is worse, as expected. There's also a sequel (not sure if it's just a book or was also made into a movie) in which the next years harvest also fails and Lord Summerisle does the right thing and has himself burned in the next wicker man.
My favorite story is seeing the original movie in a theater where there was a bunch of probable neo-pagans in the audience - they were loudly laughing and cheering during the horrific ending and getting weird looks.
Also - the soundtrack album (for the original) is excellent.
I also first assumed someone was actually killed, and had to read the sentence again to resolve the confusion.
Yeah same. But I needed to skim the Wikipedia article too before I realized.
Same here. I read that and was like, "wait, what?!?"
Me too, I thought it would go in a very different direction for a minute.
Same here.
Me too :-)
Perhaps the essence of murder is transubstantiated in at the last moment? Except it's not "substance", so much as "action"... "Transactivated"?
Maybe because I'm in England but I thought the context firmly established this was make believe. Unless you believe the original Wicker Man (or Midsommer Murders I guess) to be a documentary I think we can safely assume public ritual murder in the UK is simulated.
I remember as a kid reading a book which mentioned Guy Fawkes Night traditions and coming away confused about whether the guy that got burned was a real guy or not. The question played on my mind for some time, which is why I still remember it now.
The ambiguity is built in though, as it's an effigy of a real person. It is at heart a repeated execution of a Catholic traitor (which if those us more important is an interesting question...) as an act of public homage to the existing order (despite the fact that was destroyed by two civil wars and a revolution in the next century). The idea that this is the real person and not some abstract representation is important to this.
We used to have Guy Falkes bonfire every year in the Fall. It’s just a way to brighten up having to rake up the dead leaves.
I didn’t really know anything about the Real Guy Falkes until later.
The literal words are still the wrong words. If I read the phrase "The English have a custom where they bake a pie in their toilet and eat it", even though the probability of that being true is extremely low, I'm more likely to conclude that the author is lying or mistaken than I am to conclude that "toilet" is meant to be read as a make-believe toilet that is portrayed by a baking dish.
My objection is to the phrase "ritually murdered" being used to describe a non-murder during a ritual. It's just one data point ... I'm sure others have used it this way and see no problems with it, maybe because they think rituals are make-believe anyway? I think that too, but to me, a ritual just means a rite, a ceremonial practice, as opposed to a practice done freely, and is completely orthogonal to whether something is metaphorical.
I'm curious: if he just said the man was "murdered" at the end, not "ritually murdered", would you have had a problem with that? Or would you have understood equally well that it was meant to be simulated?
As someone who has read more than anyone should about folklore, Mummers plays, Morris dancing, Calusari, Kukeri etc. the phrase "ritual murder" is common scholarly jargon.
No no, Dino, you are not being adequately sensitive to the manes of the victims of ritual murder by such casual references!
That is the original reasoning given by Enigma as to why we're all terribly, terribly uncouth round these parts:
"Given all the people who have been murdered as part of rituals in the past, I don't like this usage of "ritually murdered".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are saying that someone reading the sentence "A celebrant dressed up as a green agricultural deity figure, paraded through the street, and then got ritually murdered." would genuinely think that a real person was really killed in public by a mob and nothing is done about it, there are no arrests or investigations or charges, no, this is what Modern England is like, it's legal or at least acceptable to have a big ceremony and perform a ritual sacrifice?
Even I don't have that bad an opinion of the English. Someone who thinks "The Wicker Man" was a documentary needs a lot of looking after and should not be allowed out in public on their own.
"(I)f he just said the man was "murdered" at the end, not "ritually murdered"... would you have understood equally well that it was meant to be simulated?"
Well, you know, given the whole GREEN AGRICULTURAL DEITY, IN PUBLIC, PARADING DOWN THE STREET IN BROAD DAYLIGHT, PART OF A CEREMONY, yeah, I think I might just possibly feebly grasp that meaning with my few and meagre wits.
Also there's the other important question: with all the ancient sites in Britain why would we do our ritual murders in the streets of Hastings? That's just bad manners. You don't even fight battles at Hastings (that was at nearby Battle).
Ritual murdering is Brighton nowadays, isn't it?
I was just there about four weeks ago and you’re not far off.
I literally addressed this point with an analogy in the comment you are replying to, and you in no way addressed the substance of my point. Namely, that I won't ignore the meaning of someone's words just because it is unlikely ... instead, I'll conclude the person is mistaken.
Words mean things.
Or do they? Helicopter vanguard brazen crack clipper nut warden. Salami train porcupine. Toast.
Your analogy was not very pertinent; it may be possible that there is some strange new craze for baking pies in toilets (probably a TikTok challenge).
But if you honestly think it is possible to read a description of "someone dressed up as a fertility god parades down the public street and then, in an organised ceremony, is really for true killed, in an English town, in this year" then I submit you have a very odd view of England.
Picking the strained interpretation because you want your quotation marks is not supportable. We know what modern day England is like, and that even today you can't commit murder in public in the view of hundreds of witnesses in a public place and expect nothing to happen to you with regards to the police or the law.
Now, maybe if this was a report on Papua New Guinea, it might be possible to wonder "hey, is there some obscure Stone Age tribe still doing things like this today?" But Hastings in 2024?
Did you watch "The League of Gentlemen" as an accurate documentation of rural English life?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOtpgz4L5d8
Would you like clarification of "Then everyone drank and partied and had a good time"? Did Scott mean a birthday party? Was 'the good time' everyone had that they got new watches? What did they drink - water? petrol? orange juice? sulphuric acid? If he doesn't explain it all in detail, then just because it's unlikely doesn't mean that they didn't drink sulphuric acid!
Get ready to have your mind blown, genius:
There was no reference to "modern times" in the paragraph in question:
"There were hints of this in Sam Kriss’ otherwise-excellent article about a fertility festival in Hastings, England. A celebrant dressed up as a green agricultural deity figure, paraded through the street, and then got ritually murdered. Then everyone drank and partied and had a good time."
But even "murdered" in quotes shows the horrid, horrid word! Let us adopt the decent obscurity of an earlier age, and use dashes to only hint at the gory term:
"Ritually m_________d" is much better, do we not all agree? It allow the free play of fancy so we can choose to insert a word of our own preference as to the fate of Jack; "minded" or "mulched" or "monitored" or "measured" or some more pleasant term, for those too tender-hearted to be able to bear the very association of ritual sacrifice in effigy with the too-too-solid throat-cutting of the past.
It's not about sensitivity, just clarity.
Ha! I misunderstood Scott's language (it took me maybe 20 seconds to work it out). But I also misunderstood your comment as being about political correctness instead of clarity.
Thanks.
Yeah ... it's more like, it belies a childish worldview from someone who has lots of fun doing fake ritual murders, to the point where "ritual murder" to them is most likely to refer to a fun simulated activity, whereas the truth of the phrase is different.
An analogous thing would be if someone only knew about the Spanish Inquisition from the monty python sketch, and started using the phrase "Inquisition-like" to describe things as being harmless, not actually performing any torture at all. It's not that it's politically incorrect, but that it's historically illiterate.
Yeah I was actually surprised when reading that Vercingetorix was ritually garroted, he's actually garroted instead of whatever symbolic things that should be done
Feel like you just could have written a book review of Bloom’s “Anxiety of Influence,” which every English major used to have to read from like, 1975-1985. Now every English major doesn’t have to read, at all.
What English majors?
(In case it’s not clear this is a reference to no one majoring in English anymore)
Can confirm, changed my major from English to web/graphic design halfway through. Negative regrets.
I wish we could apply this to armchair Internet philosophers. "Describe one unique feature of your thought." "How do your views differ from a generic example of your school?" "Name one thing you believe that a typical person in your time and place would not choose to believe solely in order to maintain their circle of friendships?"
> Name one thing you believe that a typical person in your time and place would not choose to believe solely in order to maintain their circle of friendships?"
Do you mean by this to intentionally behave in untruthful ways?
(“Untruthful” does a lot of work here I know.)
I cannot imagine pretending to like a certain kind of music just so I can hang out with a few fellows who
like that kind of music, for instance.
Of course, if I lived in a world where my friends could turn me into the Gestapo, that might change my thinking. I guess the moral of that is to really know who your friends are.
No! I mean that people need to be individuals. ("Freedom is the only way!") Or, well, they don't *need* to be individuals, but if they want to be artistically or philosophically interesting, they do. Or, well, they can still be interesting without being individual, but they certainly have to have the insight necessary to look around them and see beneath the surface of what's going on. And if that doesn't reveal something about themselves to their inner eyes, then I suppose that can be interesting in itself.
I don't think it's "pretending", really, just ... often the reason why people like things, is because other people around them like the same things, and there's a contagious enthusiasm and a sense of camaraderie. But if you separate the people, and let them all have a similar experience individually, and then have them state a reaction, you can sow the seeds of discord. Suddenly they'll have stated an opinion that wasn't vetted by the group. Suddenly they become aware of the pressure, and face the choice of whether to hide or go boldy forth, and if the latter, whether to back down from a challenge or whether to continue onwards. (Sometimes I'm practicing that latter thing on ACX, picking a position and making a case for it, regardless of my own opinion. Not here, though.)
> if I lived in a world where my friends could turn me into the Gestapo
According to Hannah Arendt, this worked both ways. Normal Germans who didn't make waves and went along with the current opinions of polite society, rapidly succumbed to Nazism. But even Gestapo, when posted to countries (like Denmark) where there was principled resistance, became unreliable because they went native. The theory is that they weren't used to disagreement, to having to justify themselves, and to arguing with peers that they respected, and so when faced with steadfast resistance, they crumpled and gave in and started subverting the Holocaust.
>don't *need* to be individuals, but if they want to be artistically or philosophically interesting, they do. Or, well, they can still be interesting without being individual, but they certainly have to have the insight necessary to look around them and see beneath the surface of what's going on
True enuff. Let who you are be the person you want to be.
I also thought of Anxiety of Influence, reading this.
Interesting. What year do you think the cutoff for the various humanities is? i.e., if I am interested in learning about literature, after what year can I ignore literary criticism?
Even by the time that Bloom writes “Anxiety” (1973), his kind of literary criticism is seen as pretty old-fashioned. So somewhere in the late 60’s, maybe early 70’s. I like Barthes and Sontag, but as the 70’s go on most literary theory becomes bad political theory.
It seems that being mentally healthy requires some tension between respect for the value of what came before while being open to the possibilities of what could come. I think this is part of the left/right distinction. Finding any kind of value in the past is a reminder of things like, constraints and the propensity of man to foolishness: inherently consvervative ways or thinking. Left wing movements have generally focused more on how we ought to, and must move forward. Right wing movements have generally been more focused on preserving good things from the past, sometimes at the cost of preventing good changes.
Actually maybe this could be simplified as, “respect for the past makes much more sense if you think value is real, rather than purely socially constructed.” If value is purely socially constructed than anything can be beautiful if enough intellectuals deem it so. Honoring the past implicitly challenges the power of intellectuals to define the “true” values now.
Economists will tell you that value is a social construct. If someone else has something you value, and you have something they value more than the thing they have, trade is possible and beneficial. That's how free markets create wealth from whole cloth.
This doesn’t make it a “social construct”so much as “has a socially transmitted component”. If it were a pure social construct, people could just agree they were all wealthy and then they would be.
What's wrong with believing that you are wealthy? The value of something you possess is entirely of your own decision. If, in your own mind, you have everything you want, who is to gainsay you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value might be interesting.
The problem is when you starve to death. Which is the point: there is actually objective practical value to things (like food and clothing and shelter), even if how much we subjectively value them is societal.
How much value? Value is subjective.
My kid saying he’s hungry and my inability to feed him would gainsay me. My brother asking for help and my inability to help him would gainsay me.
Yes, I am indeed aware that “subjective theory of value” is indeed a thing. But there is nothing subjective about, ie, the need to keep my body temperature regulated. Nor is there anything subjective about the need for controlling flows of energy if i am going to do this reliably.
Denying that our computation of value comes from psychological judgements is of course an error. So is denying that if a group values something, soon others will as well. But I think it’s also mistake to imagine that value is merely some purely mental phonemena. Economists tend to agree that revealed preference is a thing. I would say that the ability to exert force along a distance - ie work - is the only thing that reveals and thus communicates true value. The vector along which true value is transmitted is the exertion of force.
Values communicated in other forms are, I think, just symbols pointing to the intentional expenditure of energy.
Subjective but not arbitrary. Crucially, if you value something, anyone who cares about you will value that thing. Including negative cases where they wish to gain power over you by controlling that thing.
Not everything one values is tradable.
That sounds like the opposite of a social construct, as the whole basis for trade is that value is individually subjective as opposed to socially agreed.
Your value for something is subjective, but if you wish to trade it with someone else, then you need them to agree that it's more valuable to them than something else they already have. Hence the "social construct" requirement for trade.
nah, I think you're confusing subjective value with price. value is socially constructed insofar as it gets aggregated into a single price across a market. But for an individual, their subjective valuation doesn't necessarily depend on what anyone else thinks, and therefore is not socially constructed. The difference between the subjective value and the market price is what generates economic surplus, which is what makes the trade positive sum and thus motivates the trade.
Value is neither something that exists independently of a mind's motivation nor something determined by social consensus. It's just how desirable something is to a particular terminal goal- which means that relative to that one terminal goal, value is objective, but relative to different terminal goals, the value will be different.
Individual people have various terminal goals, as do animals, arguably some collectives, and eventually AGI. As a society, we have various social technologies like laws, deontological moral commitments and social rituals which mitigate the problems caused by all of those terminal goals competing with eachother- ideally turning zero-sum competitions into positive-sum cooperation. Deontological morality, for instance, prevents collective action problems by getting people to precommit to ignoring their individual incentives in certain situations- in the long term, allowing those people to get a lot more of what they value from comparative advantage.
None of that is something that's subject to the whims of the elite- you value what you value objectively, and different social technologies will objectively give you more or less of it. At the same time, however, those social technologies can be improved. There's still an enormous amount of what you and I value that's lost to pointless red queen races- zero-sum games that could be positive sum.
If we want to make and preserve that progress, we're going need to see things clearly- to understand our values as something particular to us; one side of a negotiation, not the imperative center of the universe.
Do you think there can be an agent which has no need for energy?
If not, wouldn’t that that that make energy a fundamental value shared by all agents?
That might be a universally convergent instrumental goal, along with things like a need for time or a need for existence, but instrumental goals and terminal goals are still two very different things. Most agents want energy in order to promote some specific thing, not for its own sake.
Do you think it matters how much of human activity is about terminal goals vs convergent instrumental subgoals?
Like, suppose the economy consists mostly of “getting primary energy, turning that into compute and transport”, with some small fraction going to meeting human biological needs, like food etc.
If that were true, wouldn’t it make more sense to view the pursuit of mechanisms for advancing instrumental goals (free energy and the ability to deploy it either to run code or move stuff around) as being independent and in a real sense “objectively good for all rational agents” rather than “mere artifacts of human desires?”
I'd say it matters enormously.
Most of the activity in the economy isn't going into maximizing energy use- if that was the only thing we cared about, we'd all be living in maximally spartan barracks inside of vast power plants, devoting all of our attention to increasing the power output, and then expending that power in some maximally efficient way, like releasing it as heat. Instead, we're very willing to create and use less energy if it means that the energy goes into things we actually value for their own sake- like having pleasant lives, doing signaling competitions, and so on.
At the limit, if any agent were given a choice between having infinite energy that could only be used to harm the things they value and having no energy, they'd choose the latter. In the real world, lesser versions of that tradeoff are ubiquitous. Watching a movie leaves you with less control of energy than saving the money; buying a large, comfortable car leaves you with less control of energy than buying a very small but equally reliable car; letting your daughter play and enjoy childhood leaves you with less control of energy than making her work in a sweatshop. In all of those cases, you're consuming energy to get something- not as a means to have more energy later, but because you value that thing for its own sake.
More control of energy is valuable, but depending on an agent's terminal goals, other things can be more valuable. If you want to figure out what best promotes what everyone in a society values, therefore, "more energy" is very insufficient.
Of course: someone who doesn't want to live.
Well, they'd still need to use some energy to cause their death. But maybe an agent with the terminal goal of not using any energy would count- they would need to use a bit of energy to decide to stop thinking, but that wouldn't really be a intentional decision, so calling it a convergent goal might be a stretch.
If u thought value is "real" instead of subjective I wouldn't be more prone to searching for it in Ancient Rome. I think naval engineering is "real", but that doesn't inspire modern engineers to recreate the Roman Trireme. Instead they resort to the scientific method. As you would when you're analysing a "real" phenomenon.
Fun Fact: This is literally the origin of the terms left and right wing - In the early part of the French Revolution the national assembly ended up naturally sorting itself in physical space according to how much each figure wanted to preserve old institutions or enact radical change, with the former ending up by chance on the right and the latter on the left respectively.
I take from this that you should read more modern poetry.
Any recommendations? I think modern American poetry is atrocious, would love to see counterexamples.
Richard Hugo.
"Approaching the Castle" is good, but it's from 1973. He died in 1982. I think our host's point stands. :)
Paul Edwin Zimmer, if you can find any of his works.
His works *do* tend to mirror the themes of epic poetry. I particularly like "The Flute of Aki Moro"...but good luck finding it.
Not all American, but: Donald Hall, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Marie Howe, Jane Kenyon, Wendell Berry…..just to start.
Billy Collins, Mary Szybist, Kathleen Raine, Grace Paley….
….you know where a good place to start might be is the popular “Good Poems” anthology curated by Garrison Keillor. It’s a mix of older and newer poems but plenty of excellent ones from the past 50 years for sure.
I saw “the lushness of it” by Mary Szybist the other day, and liked it. Though if someone doesn’t like modern poetry, I wouldn’t expect them to like it!
Here’s the poem: https://x.com/marianneLchan/status/1545961318812975105
Nope, don't like it, sorry :-(
The idea, the image, is good, but the flow is so awkward.
Well, it managed to convince me there's some value in the non-rhyming format; ending lines in an expression of half a thought does have an evocative effect that basic prose wouldn't.
On the other hand, "Keep on floating there, cradled, unable to burn." Fruit never expires, indeed.
I’ve only read one Billy Collins’ poem - “The Lanyard” - but I liked it. I think that disqualifies it though. It’s too “Life in These United States”. I have no opinion on whether he’s a hack, but I’m aware of the charge.
He could be much less of a hack and he’d never escape the label.
I also like the Vaudeville aspect of M*A*S*H and if we ever go back to having broadcast TV, and I have a working TV which I don’t currently - I could see watching it with my supper. TV trad style. Or after the ten o’clock news.
Thank you, and everyone, for the many suggestions, will explore.
The funny thing is, it was Garrison Keillor's NRP poetry feature that did the most work turning me against modern poetry. There was this "poem for the day" thing he did, and I often caught it during commute. And - every time it left me with this sense, like, I was listening to crappy pompous prose read out loud. There was neither rhyme nor rhythm to any of these, and it felt like a bunch of words strung together to create some pretense of deep meaning, but there was really none. I was, like, I want Dr. Seuss back! Green Eggs and Ham to spare the misery.
The term "modern poetry" usually refers to poetry from the early 20th century, represented by poets such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, etc.
I can only read her in translation but I really like Wislawa Szymborska. I mentioned Philip Larkin elsewhere.
A. E. Stallings.
Charles Simic?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39907
Elizabeth Bishop?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52192/at-the-fishhouses
C.D. Wright?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47847/everything-good-between-men-and-women
Here's one by Andrea Cohen that I liked, from this May's edition of Poetry magazine:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/162449/fable-660f96a232f44
Sorry, none of these. For example, Ms. Bishop writes:
"Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.[...]"
And this is what I want to do with it:
"Although it is a cold evening,
down by a fishhouse
an old man sits, a-netting,
his net, a dark purple-brown.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and eyes water.[...]".
And Andrea Cohen's piece is a wonderful short story, excellent prose, really:
"I’m tired of meaning, says the tortoise to the hare, who agrees. The lions and crows don’t disagree, and the snake chimes in: It would be better if we didn’t have to moonlight as morality lessons.
Exactly, says the chicken. I’d like to let loose once in a while, I’d like to stretch my wings, she says.
Yes, says the fox. You should get out of your pen more, says the fox. You should let me help, says the fox, opening the latch to the evening.
It was a fine evening and a fine conclusion they were coming to, thought the fox, helping the chicken out of her feathers."
Fantastic! But why it's called a "poem" eludes yours truly.
Who cares what it's called? I'm happy for you to call it "fantastic", that's a big improvement over "atrocious".
Yes, you have a point there. :)
But - good prose doesn’t good poetry make. These two things are supposed to be different. Maybe i have an old-fashioned view of poetry, I expect at least one of the two: rhyme or rhythm.
I have to say, looking at how you have it written out without the line breaks, it doesn't really look like good prose. Good prose style doesn't put, "says the fox" three times in a row like that. Any prose editor would change that. I think something about the line breaks turns that un-stylish, bad prose repetition of "says the fox, says the fox, says the fox" into something very different. Rhythm is more than just repetition, and it can happen along axes other than syllable count or syllable emphasis position.
Ted Kooser and Richard Wilbur.
Hah! This conversation was just happening a couple days ago, and today a sorta ACX-adjacent art/aesthetics nerd published this post on "Poetry's return to form": https://www.ruins.blog/p/poetrys-return-to-form
I'm not putting this forward as an example of "Here is some poetry I say are good and you should like it," but "Hey, this guy says these have been constructed with more 'old-school' goals--including meter and rhyme--and can be usefully analyzed with more of the standard old-school tools than ...what is usually the case for most current poetry!"
This post is awesome, it's like the guy looked into my head and expressed my thoughts about poetry 100X better than I possibly could. And then this:
"The celebrated poetry of our day is stupid, asinine, humiliating, sterile, laborious, ugly, treacherous, posturing, insulting, worthless, destructive, licentious, false and an all around affront to decency and greatness. And when it is not busy being a grotesque monstrosity, it addresses us as naked propaganda, not even having the courtesy of making itself comely."
"it’s by a Victorian Brit" - a strange way to describe Lord Macaulay. The term 'Brit' is borderline offensive, and should be laid to rest. Macaulay should be described as British or Scottish.
I hadn't heard that the term "Brit" is offensive. It is a shortened version of a word, which is common with disrespectful terms https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/is-libby-a-slurhtml but that's also a general feature of language over time.
>that's also a general feature of language over time.
True! And also in some other spheres ... https://tinyurl.com/app
Some people use it as a slur but for a word used as a slur to actually be offensive the people it is aimed at have to actually be in a position where they will see it as offensive. I don't know many fellow brits who would take it as a slur and instead I often hear it used to self-describe! The only place I've heard it effectively used as a slur is in Ireland where when used as a slur it would be aimed at an Irish person to imply that they are too pro-Britain or anglicised.
Can confirm, am a Brit, would use the term in jovial contexts, don't find it offensive. "West Brit" might be offensive to some Irish people in some contexts, but it's a different term.
I would like to see ____ used in a sentence that's offensive:
That ____ is a charming chap
I know a ____ would think that potato dish is tasty
anyway:
Doesn't Ireland get a pass to call the British anything they want to, forever? kinda like the Blacks in the US? Personally, they get a pass from me.
And would be preceded by “fekkin’”
I am old enough to have lived through the whole of the Troubles. It is engraved on my mind as an insulting term.
It's OK for Americans, we were colonized by the Brits. ;-P
The colonies were mostly in place before 1704 (Act of Union creating the United Kingdom) so you were actually colonised by the English. Canada is the British colonies...
And Georgia
I wonder if we could convince people to start calling Americans "Amys"?
What, is "Yanks" too old-fashioned?
I completely forgot that was a term.
So yes.
While my late wife and I moved to South Carolina in late 2020, I still have no idea how typical people here regard the term "Yanks" as a term for all USAians, by people outside the USA...
Is there any analogous term in European nomenclature for the winners of some 19th century war in Europe that is similarly extended to include the losers of said war?
"Yankee" is a flexible term that basically means "someone culturally closer to rural New England than me and/or you", for all possible speakers. For non-Americans, yeah, it means all Americans. And most Americans understand this and are OK with it.
I also would be interested to hear of analogous terms for other groups.
Many Thanks!
>"Yankee" is a flexible term that basically means "someone culturally closer to rural New England than me and/or you", for all possible speakers.
Yup, in order of increasing specificity, I've heard it described as:
USAians
USAians-from-states-on-the-Union-side-of-the-Civil-War
New-Englanders
rural New-Englanders (culinarily, I've heard: Has cheddar cheese with their apple pie for breakfast https://www.saltwaternewengland.com/2017/09/apple-pie-for-breakfast.html)
USAliens.
Mon ami?
It’s nowhere near 70% on the hyperstitious slur cascade.
Why is it that shortened descriptors of ethnic/national origin are inevitably thought of as slurs? Such as Jap/Japanese, Jew/Jewish, Black/African American. They are perfectly serviceable as shorthand and mean the exact same things. Is there a slur effect that increases the less syllables a descriptor has?
Subjectively, I think there is. Monosyllabic words do feel more aggressive, and longer words do feel softer and more euphemistic.
>Black/African American
I'm confused. As of the last time I heard, Black was the current _polite_ term.
I believe "Black" is yesterday's polite term, still somewhat acceptable, and "African-American" is the currently approved descriptor.
Many Thanks! I guess I missed the memo... :-) The Woke Inner Party needs to improve their communications skills... :-)
I think it's a lot better than "Britisher" which seems to have been a term used in late 19th century American prose (and some British, oddly enough).
> This is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me
I really would love to hear specific examples of arguments for being "trad" that you had in your mind when writing this. Most arguments for being "trad" that I hear are from people who want to argue to roll back recent progressive changes in society. In this context I think it is fair to point out that the past they want to go back to wasn't as great as they imagine.
The example I gave was people supporting 1950s nuclear families. If you don't like nuclear families and you think that 1950s families were actually bad for the people in them, that's a fine argument. But instead I hear people say:
- "Not all people in the 1950s had nuclear families"
- "Nuclear families were only characteristic of a brief period in the 19th and 20th centuries and aren't the most traditional possible family structure"
- "The 1950s also had other bad things, like racism, so liking their family structure is racist"
The people I hear supporting 1950s nuclear families are people who are opposing all other sorts of families, describing them as inferior to 1950s nuclear families and often proposing legal discrimination against people not in 1950s nuclear families.
The first two are perfectly reasonable arguments for saying "you can't get back 1950s society by forcing everyone into 1950s nuclear families because that's not how the 1950s worked" and the last is an argument for "and you maybe don't want to get back 1950s society anyway".
If "supporting 1950s nuclear families" means doing so as an aesthetic choice that people can make, then that's very different from supporting them by taxing everyone else to bribe people into living in them.
'The first two are perfectly reasonable arguments for saying "you can't get back 1950s society by forcing everyone into 1950s nuclear families because that's not how the 1950s worked" '
Only the first argument is about that. And "not all"-arguments are typically missing the point.
In such cases it is important to be open, clear and specific about your critique. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but since you would like a 1950s family, I'm going to assume that you'd also like to force the rest of society to return to the 1950s with respect to gay rights, (...whichever other things you intend to critique...). But actually at that time, (...your critique...)." By being explicit about the assumption, you'd make it easier for people to deny the assumption is correct, and therefore avoid derailing the conversation.
Thank you. Discussions would be so much nicer if people laid out their assumptions like this.
If only.
> "Wherefore men argue not as they argued
> In the brave days of old."
doesn't seem to hold, thus I am a progressive in this area, or even dare I say a radical: to the guillotine with all who do not uphold honest standards of argumentation! (Knowing that my turn would inevitably come, as I am weak and at times succumb.)
It's not all that relevant whether the traditionalists in question are arguing for pressuring/coercing people into nuclear families, or merely advocating for them as a voluntary choice. Either way, if they make the argument that they worked well in the 50s, then it's a relevant counterargument if the 50s didn't actually work like that, otherwise it isn't. If they are arguing for pressure/coercion, that just makes the stakes of the debate higher.
I don't want a 1950s family in particular, I'd take a 1940s, 1970s or other period family of the majority at the time which was: two parents, married to each other, generally had the children within marriage, both parents are the parents of those children (save in the case of adoption or stepchildren).
Not everybody wants that, not everybody likes that, not everybody would thrive in that. But we shoved that notion of the family out in the name of progressive change, and surprise surprise, it didn't work out to be all gumdrops and lollipops. The people most in need of the support both to be in that institution and support for that institution had the foundations knocked away from underneath it; meanwhile, the liberals pushing for Fwee Wuv ended up going the traditional route of "get married before having kids, don't have kids by multiple partners, don't get divorced".
We've talked on here about consistency in views with regards to other posts, so I'm going to go right ahead and be that monster: yeah, some family structures *are* inferior. Johnnie and Susie live with Mommy and Daddy who are not married, and they get on just fine? I'm glad, but I do think it would be much better if Mommy and Daddy were married.
Gay marriage? Eh, as civil marriage, sure, right now it's no worse than straight marriage. That's down to the mess we've made of straight marriage by chipping away at it, and yes I think it would be good to roll back some of those changes.
So to sum up: do I want to go back to a time when all gay people were in the closet for fear of being Mathew Shepharded? No. But I maybe wouldn't mind some rollback on Pride all over the place for June, and certainly the Drag Trans Queens For Toddlers stuff can go away without me weeping salt tears over it.
Expanding on the above: Pride parades where everyone marches and is plastered with rainbows? Sure, why not, every special interest group gets their parade time. Seventy different flags* for the ever-increasing sub-sections of 'queerness', plus puppy play and kink on display for kids? You can stuff that right back in the closet.
If you can tell me, with evidence of any sort, that this photo is a fake I would genuinely be very grateful and glad to hear that:
https://x.com/lorgair/status/1647456869638868992
Yes, I'm a bigot, and I'm just fine with that, thanks for asking.
*And I say this as someone who gets one, maybe two, of those new flags to represent my identity 🙄
> meanwhile, the liberals pushing for Fwee Wuv ended up going the traditional route of "get married before having kids, don't have kids by multiple partners, don't get divorced"
I don't think this is true. Yes, the people who are most elite went that route, but elite!=progressive.
I'm not talking about current day progressives, I do mean liberals. Like the woman I love to hate, Ivana Bacik. (Well, I don't hate her, I just got tired of seeing her mug on the news all the time back in the 80s).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivana_Bacik
"Bacik's policies have been described as liberal and social democratic; In 2004 she was described as "Labour's queen of political correctness" in an Irish Independent opinion piece."
Made her name, back when she and I were of an age (or at least around five years of it) as a student radical out of - of course - Trinity College. From a background that I think the current acronym to describe is PMC (Professional-Managerial Class); became the president of the students' union at Trinners, was on the tea time news often agitating in favour of abortion.
Got her law degree, went on to have a career that has culminated in her being the current leader of the Irish Labour Party (a lot of student union officers do seem to take that as the first step on the cursus honorum to political life) and is married, to a man, and they have two kids in perfect cis heteronormative patriarchal traditional style.
I think life would at least be more affordable if we went back to 1950s sized houses and (lack of) amenities.
Most of those amenities are cheap enough now that they're over the hump of economies-of-scale. What we need is an LVT, to pop the bubble of real-estate speculation. Not many people can afford houses at all when modest-sized vacant lots cost more than a decade's pay.
At least in the most expensive areas, the price of housing is primarily a function of the NIMBYist cartel, not the actual cost of construction or materials. (And you can't roll back wages, anyway, so only the "materials" part is particularly relevant).
The best argument I've heard for older social organizations is David Brooks' "The Nuclear Family was a Mistake," which basically argues for extended families living together, or very close to each other. It doesn't argue that everyone was happier, exactly, but that we've traded up for more privacy an autonomy at the expense of built-in fallback systems that come with, say, having lots of cousins around to baby sit.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/
That seems to make sense, but the brute fact is that collectively speaking, we *have* made the trade. Society gave lots of people the choice, and the ability to afford each option, and people largely opted to stop living together as large extended families. As long as we keep the choice open, I don't care either way - if a number of people start deciding to live together as extended families again, more power to them! But pointing out that something is somehow "better" is pretty toothless when people are clearly and freely making the opposite choice.
Eh, put a free unlimited cocaine dispenser in front of people and you'd find that a few months down the line a large portion of them are addicted to it. They all made the free choice (at least initially) to take the cocaine but that doesn't tell you anything about the relative merits of being a cocaine junkie vs not being one.
Yeah that's what we seem to be doing to ourselves with social media for example.
I don't think it works for major life decisions like nuclear vs extended vs alone vs poly or whatever though, because you do that for decades on end and you're not particularly hijacking your dopamine system in the process, so any random time you should be able to take some alone time and evaluate your life choices. People seem to do it!
Sure, the proliferation of free cocaine dispensaries (also known as superstimuli) is a decent metaphor for the modern world, but nobody has a good idea yet of how to deal with it. People haven't really moved past the "just ban it" universal remedy idea, which doesn't work that well in practice, for both real and metaphorical cocaine.
Okay but it totally does? Way less people do cocaine than would if cocaine was sold at gas stations. Weed legalization has definitely made people smoke way more weed.
The good argument against prohibition is that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, not that there's no juice.
The happy medium is that you live in a nuclear family but within a short drive to your parents and siblings. Then you marry someone from the same general area so you can also live near their parents and siblings. You don't all need to live together in the same house
I would love to have my parents nearby, but I don't really want to live with them. And when my kids are grown up I would love to have them close by, but wouldn't want to live with them either.
Yeah that sounds like a cozy and reasonably practical arrangement for all concerned. But, just to continue the argument, how far would you go to ensure that? If you happen to really like someone whose family is 1500 miles away, do you go "sorry dear, it's not going to work"?
Or, assume you do just as you say... and then your kids grow up and one of them makes her life in Singapore. It happens!
My point is, we're not going to roll back the practical consequences of having a modern standard of living, and ease of travel is just one of them. (Unless we have a truly huge economic crash that does it for us, of course...)
The problem is that that ties you down to a specific area and its job market, which means making a lot less money than you could be, or in particularly bad cases, having no decent jobs available at all. People don't just move around for shits and giggles.
Seriously are people so far removed from not having the choice that they've forgotten that living with extended family is a f*cking nightmare?? Just trying inviting yout parents to stay with you and your spouse for two weeks...you'll be climbing the walls by day 6 and remember. This is funny to me that people have such a romanticized to view of the past (though really they just wish they had more free babysitters). I know many people who had an active criteria in choosing a spouse that they didn't want to marry someone whose parents lived in the same state...too many arguments about what the families are doing for holidays, too many hurt feelings to negotiate, too many opinions.
Good point! I always wonder when people idolize the past whether they'd last even a week in it.
The average US household size in the 1790 census was 5.7, down to 2.6 today. But if we eliminate single-person "households", it goes from 5.9 in 1790 to 3.2 today.
Which is significant, but I'm pretty sure most of the variance is in the number of children. In a world where the average women has 7 children, 3.8 of them surviving to adulthood, a 5-6 person family is not one in which the grandparents have moved in (or never left). Multigenerational families under one roof were always in the minority.
>As long as we keep the choice open, I don't care either way - if a number of people start deciding to live together as extended families again, more power to them!
I think there is a collective action problem here. If there are a bunch of advantages of parents and both of their kids live within a short drive of each other, but if the advantages degrade a lot as soon as any of them moves away, this only works if _all_ of them agree to it. And a lot of people in careers with opportunities that aren't uniformly spread across the country have very strong incentives to move where the jobs are.
It could be that living close together with one's clan has good and bad sides and the bad sides are slightly stronger. E.g. women living with their in-laws having more heart-attacks [needs a reference].
I guess it's that there's lots of unsubtle disadvantages (personal conflicts, lack of freedom) and subtle advantages (stability, more hands to help) that calculating the trade off becomes difficult.
The main societal benefits to smaller family units aren't privacy and autonomy but a more dynamic economy a la the themes in _The Weirdest People in the World_. If cousins don't leave home, they can't move to the place where their skills will be most valued.
That may be a benefit of not having very strong norms *against* leaving your extended family, but what fraction of families have even one member with a specialized enough profession that they can't all find a decent job in the same city?
The norm these days is adult children moving away (at the latest when they marry/cohabit with a romantic partner) even if they stay in the same town. There are plenty of large extended families all living in the same city, but apart.
It's not at all about finding a *decent* job. The difference between finding a decent job as a software engineer in Indianapolis and a great job as a software engineer in the Bay Area could be literally an order of magnitude of productivity.
Perhaps, but my point stands that the number of people who move for such reasons is (I think) much smaller than the number of people who just move out to a separate home in the same (or a nearby) town because that's the norm/to get privacy and autonomy.
Tightly woven social structures are a response to a precarious existence where you need friends to avoid dying after every poor harvest. There's a reason they tend to go away when societies get richer.
That's the thing, right? The thoughtless "I can show you what an idiot you are for thinking that" statement.
"On Blueberry Hill was the number one song - for two years! in the '50s" was always my thoughtless bleat. I have long ago let that one go - because the '50s don't get much idolization anymore and because it is incorrect, I think.
The one I still hold on to is against the fascination with the 1964 New York World's Fair.
You feel bad you missed standing in line on a blacktop in August for three hours just to see a dishwasher?
They left me home for some reason (Mom and Dad and brother Felix).
I was six and it was AWESOME. Huge Pascal triangle demo with balls dropping to form a bell curve!
Nowadays people just stand in line for three hours to get brunch, which doesn't feel like an improvement.
I don't want to go to the 1964 World's Fair, I just want to live in a society with the kind of optimism that makes a 1964 World's Fair possible.
no one wants the reality of Queens in August
or being left home with Mrs. Pitts.
>I just want to live in a society with the kind of optimism that makes a 1964 World's Fair possible.
Seconded!
There's much less of an incentive to hold world's fairs in a world where you can just go on Youtube and see as much as you want about life in other countries at any time from the comfort of your own house.
If Emmanuel Todd is to be believed, the nuclear family was *the* family structure throughout our hunter-gatherer past. Yes, it was "undifferentiated", meaning that sometimes there were multiple generations of adults, sometimes there was polygyny, and sometimes there was matrilocality (the new family living with/near the "wife's" family), and usually there were kin nearby, but it was dominant, he says.
It's also the defining feature of northwest European family systems, that he claims gave rise to the renaissance, the enlightenment, and the industrial revolution.
The "I Love Lucy"/"Jetsons" nuclear family is the Hollywood form, of course, and is as much like actual families as Hollywood criminal forensics is like real criminal forensics.
The baby boom did indeed happen. In our lower-working-class, first-ring suburb of an industrial urban center, most kids had both parents - I can't recall any who didn't. Most children also had siblings; I can't think of a single only child. In the US, more children were born in 1957 than in any other year (apparently), so you had an entire generation having kids at the same time, most of them (statistically) with dads around. That is the nuclear family; I don't understand the confusion or the debate.
"Nuclear" is the label for a family structure in which a household consists of an adult couple and their children only. Other family structures, the great majority until quite recently, are some form of patriarchal (couples live with the husband's father (and probably mother)) and/or polygamous; and these days, single-parent. (Matriarchal exists but is rare.)
The debate is members of the woke elite saying "the nuclear family is not necessary for the well-being of the children", and experts saying, "yes it is", and the woke saying "people who had nuclear families were racist/sexist/X-phobic so that proves nuclear families are bad". The Flynn effect has reversed very fast and very far.
These "other family structures" have never been the majority in US history, unless you count singles and DINKs as "families" in which case they are probably more common *now* but not historically. I've posted the statistics elswhere in this thread.
I keep forgetting about the parochialism here. That's not very interesting, though. The interesting questions are, why did other family structures become dominant in the Old World; are there other as-yet-untried family structures that result in psychologically well-adjusted, healthy children (to a greater degree than those in use); do we want those novel structures; and how do we create and maintain and reinforce them?
"Nuclear" seems like it got distorted somewhere in this thread (and elsewhere?) to mean isolated from other family and neighbors - I'm not sure that was ever the case (concerning the historical definition).
That would be the neolocal nuclear family, in which upon marriage, the new couple forms a household in a new location.
Neolocality arose in parts of northwestern Europe (maybe other places, but there): England, the Paris basin, most of the Low Countries. Its creation was made easier in those places by the custom of sending teenagers to work as waged servants in other (normally wealthier) households. The teenagers saved their wages and married when they had enough to form their own nuclear household. At that decision point, they could move away from their families if they heard wages and conditions were better elsewhere. (They'd already been away from their families for some years by that point, too; so it was easier to leave them again.)
This is considered to be a friction-reducing mechanism for the industrial revolution, helping to explain why it happened where it did. (It also acted as a control for fertility: when wages were low, it took longer to save up enough to form your own household, and less time when wages were high. Women's age at marriage varied from 22 to 28 under this system, much older than in typical Asian family structures in which women were married as teens irrespective of economic conditions.)
Re neighbors, neolocality as a custom both depends on and reinforces high degrees of trust among unrelated people, those very same neighbours. So that was another way in which that family structure helped along the complexification of societies and the industrial revolution.
It all depends on the context of the argument. Often it goes like this:
Simplicio: it would be better for poor black people / the lumpen proletariat / incels to live in 1950s style nuclear families.
Sagredo: Not all people in the 1950s had nuclear families. Specifically, poor black people / the lumpen proletariat / incels didn't generally live in those types of families in the 1950s, either. There are forces preventing them from forming such families.
Simplicio: Marriage should be between one man and one woman because that is the natural family unit. As it says in the bible...
Sagredo: Nuclear families ... aren't the most traditional possible family structure. Most people would have lived with a large extended family that helped with raising children and so on. Many people did not have their own biological children. And of course outside of Europe there were many other family structures.
The third one is a bit difficult to demonstrate in a short dialogue, but if the thing they're complaining about isn't literally racism but rather oppression of women, homophobia, discrimination against nonmarital children and so on, I think it's pretty clear how that connects to idealising the nuclear family.
<i>Sagredo: Not all people in the 1950s had nuclear families. Specifically, poor black people / the lumpen proletariat / incels didn't generally live in those types of families in the 1950s, either. There are forces preventing them from forming such families.</i>
Don't marriage and legitimacy statistics indicate that the vast majority of both poor black people and the lumpen proletariat did actually live in nuclear families during the 1950s? Obviously incels by definition weren't living in nuclear families, but there seem to have been far fewer incels back then as well.
<i>Sagredo: Nuclear families ... aren't the most traditional possible family structure. Most people would have lived with a large extended family that helped with raising children and so on.</i>
Nuclear families were the norm in England since at least the 1200s. Maybe they're not as "most traditional possible" as, say, a hunter-gatherer band, but 800 years is plenty traditional by any reasonable metric.
The large majority of "old traditions" in the West were invented in the 19th century for nationalistic reasons.
Liking them anyway is fine. Using them as an argument for the ancient qualities of your nation and culture seems dubious.
Since traditions dating before the 19th century would have almost all been local, it's not surprising that the version we see is from the 19th.
For example, yes there were Christmas celebrations before then. But they differed by region, and "region" is pretty small because almost nobody could visit any place more than a couple hours walk away. The exceptions (the rich and the nobility) wouldn't change things much as they had their own celebrations (while they might participate in whatever local ones they happened to be in).
In the 19th though, you did start to see lots of people moving from place to place. The traditions would have rubbed up against each other and sort of melded.
Some of these would have been artificially boosted, but much less than many think. The Santa Claus we know yes was made up by a company. But it became popular because people liked it better than whatever local one they had. You only have to look at the way people reject other attempts at changing tradition, i.e. ones they don't like better, to see this.
As for nationalism (or rather nation-building), the older tradition was to look to the local authorities. If you remove those, they must be replaced with something. If you don't come up with something national (that people will accept), other local authorities will rise. And you might not like them.
> made up by a company
Are you referring to Coca Cola? https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
An even more fun example of a Christmas tradition made up by a company is that in Japan, it is traditional to eat KFC on Christmas (dating to the 1970s).
I'd be curious to hear how they did that.
Perhaps some actual Finns can correct me if I've got this wrong, but I understand that Santa Claus in Finland is now visually indistinguishable from the American red-suited Santa that we all recognise, but he still goes by his old name of Joulupukki - Yule Goat - harking back to when he was a more wild, horned and hoofed entity.
That's correct.
Similarly, S:t Lucy celebrations - do you have that in Finland as well? - are kinda weakly theoretically connected to the saint cult and to old traditions, but in every way that matters, it's a 19th century construction to invent a tradition.
Yes, St. Lucia celebrations are done in Finland, but they're sometimes considered particularly a Finnish-Swedish tradition. Like it happened in my completely Finnish-speaking school in Eastern Finland but was pretty subdued.
It's not be necessarily that they liked the global Santa better than their local Santa traditions, it's just that the global Santa is louder. And if you tell your kids that Saint Nicholas wears a bishop's hat in green and your kids tell you that they saw on TV that Santa wears a red and white outfit then this is something that you have to resolve.
In Germany these days, they have a confusing fusion of the local and global traditions where St Nikolaus comes on the 6th of December and Santa Claus comes on the 24th.
Why is it "louder"? There are a number of things that are pushed extremely hard, but still don't make it out of their local market.
E.g. NFL, and football in general. There's a *lot* of money there, but they've struggled to get any traction at all outside of the US and Canada. Canada has the rival CFL, but there's not nearly as much money there. I suppose the money in Europe is in soccer.
The global Santa appears to be genuinely popular, as in it shows up in places where it's not pushed. Admittedly, a fellow who's perpetually jolly and gives you "free" stuff is often popular for obvious reasons.
Some of the stuff around Santa though may not make it to some places. When I was young there was the "photos of the children with Santa" thing, which was a lot of effort.
I don't know if that ever made an impression in Europe. It's still here, but I think photos in general aren't as much of an ooh-aah thing as they used to be.
Or for that matter, the whole "bad kids get bad presents", e.g. lumps of coal seems to have gone out of style. People take what they like and leave the rest.
I think what's very important here is to understand that different cultures have radically different relationships to their own pasts. It's only at the end of the 18th C. that many European cultures start to think about themselves in a truly historical sense. Things like the figuration of time in progressive models, or the thinking of articulated historical periods as important to our own understanding of ourselves are radically new.
The very architectonic terms of this debate are ones of an historical culture which is stumbling towards trying to have a rational relationship towards its own past. In the scheme of things, understanding ourselves in an historical frame (instead of eschatalogical, cyclical, transcendental, mythical) is a NEW idea. We're just figuring it out. But we stand in a different relationship to the problem than the Victorians did, if subtly.
Claims about tradition are ALWAYS somewhat constitutive--they to some degree invent the past they want to inherit. But they are also bound to a past, like it or not--culture isn't really something you get absolute free choice in--except perhaps (one must nod towards TS Eliot) "with great labour." I am causally and historically bound to a certain broadly-European tradition that limits the way that I can reflect upon it--the tools I'm given to "invent" tradition are ones given to me by a tradition. It might even be most precise to say that traditions determine the means of their own misapprehension.
Koselleck's "Futures Past" and Löwith's "Meaning in History" are good books on this topic (and I suppose so is Hegel in his own obscure way).
I appreciated this.
“the thinking of articulated historical periods as important to our own understanding of ourselves are radically new“. I dunno. Marcus Aurelius specifically refers to The Age of Trajan and the Age of Augustus as now belonging to a legendary past. He was placing his own time in historical context, and using it to highlight the transitoriness of existence.
The basic sense that stuff happened in the past--or that it was different than our present--does not constitute a historical sense. When we talk about modernity having a historical consciousness, we are looking at a consciousness that understands what happens in our age as a product of previous ones in ways that don't fit into mythic narratives.
Ovid or the book of Daniel have eschatalogical topoi of a decline from the Golden age--all the pastoral genre plays with this. Plato's Timaeus situates ancient Egypt as an intermediary between the present and myth. Aboriginals in australia understand the present in relation to the "dream time." The medieval period generally saw historical events as essentially a period of cyclic, often meaningless events in a fallen age that were comprehensible only in light of eternity.
The point is that these narrative structures are mythic--they do not pertain to actual historical relations--and basically any events can be narrated within them (take a look at how someone like Glenn Beck understands history--his narrative structure is mythic). Historical consciousness is one which tries to develop narratives structures that emerge FROM events they describe and are not externally imposed. If you look at early 19th C. literature's discussion of history, you see a radical confusion with how to conceive of the historical moment it inhabits. The French revolution has disturbed the old meaning-making frames of history--and trying to fit it into paradigms of eschatology or apocalypse don't actually work to describe what happens. In the wake of the revolution, European consciousness has to look at a couple really interesting problems:
1.) It is obvious that something pretty radical happened in France with the fall of the ancienne regime. People, citizens in a new sense, have a control over history that no-one assumed before. It's not a stretch to say that a new KIND of political consciousness is produced.
2.) Trying to figure out how the French revolution happened is a PROBLEM for history. It turns out that our old narrative structures are wrong, that we don't live in an eschatological frame, and that humans have control over their destiny. We seem both to be a product of our history, and our history seems to have control over us. Our old categories for thinking about history (cycles, ages, eschatology, the book of the world, anagogical, spiritual, mythic), which seemed to be transcendent, didn't actually account for the actual historical happenings, which means those frameworks aren't timeless and eternal, which means they come from somewhere. Our very frameworks for understanding history themselves are historical.
Every civilization has had an understanding that the past is different. Every culture understands the present in light of the past. Not every culture has a responsible way of understanding how present perspectives EMERGE from the past, how our frameworks of interpretation are not transcendent to history, or how consciousness (i.e. a particular way of understanding things) is historical (that is, doesn't stand over-and-above, detached, from the present age). These are uniquely modern problems.
> When we talk about modernity having a historical consciousness, we are looking at a consciousness that understands what happens in our age as a product of previous ones in ways that don't fit into mythic narratives
Well Hegel seems to believe in a supernatural force of progress. Despite you saying it twice I’m not sure how modern historians are so radically different from, say late Roman historians on early Rome.
The book of Daniel seems more like a parody or subversion of the Golden Age trope. The descent from Gold, to Silver, to Bronze, to Iron (in chapter 2) occurs among the pagan kingdoms who have conquered the Jews, not the Jewish people. And the "Golden" empire (Babylon), far from being a source of nostaliga, is the empire that sacked the Temple and deported the elite Jews. From the Jewish perspective of Daniel, these same pagan kingdoms are all depicted as freakish monsters (chapter 7) while the human(e) figure of the Son of Man represents a future Messianic era, not a past "Golden Age" in the standard sense.
Chinese civilization has historically been very into its own history. Maoism changed things, with movements to destroy tradition, but more recently they've promoted Confucianism.
It's picture's like these that always hammer this home for me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attila#/media/File:Képes_krónika_-_10.oldal_-_Attila_király_a_trónuson.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Catalaunian_Plains#/media/File:Battle_of_the_Catalaunian_plains.jpg
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.284.html (more than just the soldiers, our whole standard picture of the crucifixion is basically medieval)
https://picryl.com/media/life-of-julius-caesar-from-bl-royal-16-g-vii-f-219-6b021a
https://pixels.com/featured/king-david-from-the-bible-historiale-french-school.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hengist_and_Horsa#/media/File:Hengist_King_of_Kent.jpg
People into the beginnings of the early modern period didn't have a great sense that the past was different to the present beyond a seemingly quite vague sense that at very early dates there were fewer people and that the Romans had something loosely reminiscent of democracy at some point.
I agree that cultures place different values on history. What I disagree with is that European cultures are new to this phenomenon. If you (as you do in another comment) exclude mythic or cyclical history or chronicles (which do not explain events) then Europe has the oldest. Thucydides is about 300 years older than Sima Qian. If you don't then the oldest is the Middle East but Europeans had access to this tradition and used it for over two thousand years.
I'm aware of this revisionist idea. But it relies on dubiously treating the 18th/19th century romantic revisions to history (which were real revisions) as the invention of history itself rather than another revision in an ongoing process that dates continuously back to at least Greek times and arguably back to Egypt and the Middle East. For example, in order to sustain this argument you have to explain that the debate between the Ancients and Moderns (a 17th century phenomenon) did not involve "real" history. Of course, they believed many silly things. But so did people in the 19th century and today. The load bearing distinction between "real" historical relations is arbitrary in a way that's obvious if you poke at it even a little. And there's often a lot of special pleading.
Sure we can define "history" however is conceptually useful. The general argument is that it's conceptually useful to define a "historical consciousness" and associated modern concepts of history with the abandonment of transcendental categories for understanding the past (every preceding historical debate was a debate about the proper transcendental category) in favor of understanding our very categories as historical. If you read through the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, the most conceptually advanced development is the recognition that different ages prefer different things from their literature: it's on the cusp of the recognition that our very conceptual categories are historical, but it has no way to understand that. It's actually a remarkable gap in the thought. It's almost there, but not quite.
From the perspective of philosophy of history, critical historiography, and intellectual history, what happens is monumental enough that it represents a fundamental break (though one that takes hold only slowly) with the past modes of historiography.
As an analogy, is Aristotle's work on biology "science"? If you're trying to look at it from a perspective of "how do frogs work," you can argue that it's as much science as Darwin. But if you're interested in basic conceptual assumptions, the assumptions--practical and methodological--that Darwin is making are so different, that there's not much philosophical value in talking about a pre-Galilean science.
If you want to define history as "literature that attempts to talk about the past," you'll get a lot of continuity in the same way as "biology is trying to figure out how frogs work"--but that definition is useful in some contexts (the long history of trying to figure out how frogs work is amazing!) and less useful in others (galileo's intervention in methodology and philosophy of science was world-changing). In this context, where we're talking about historically varying concepts (tradition, representativeness, etc.) in an irresponsibly transhistorical way, I'll push for the value of understanding "history" as something that emerges with a conceptual revolution in the late 18th C.
German differentiates between "Historie" and "Geschichte," which would probably be a terminologically useful intervention in English.
I don't deny the basic trends you mention, but in terms of specifics, let's take the Herodotus-Thucydides-Xenophon tradition. It seems obvious to me that the "historicity" shows up with Herodotus, who is mostly trying to describe rather than explain. Thucydides is almost perfectly modern in his understanding, IMO. And then with Xenophon we can see the transition into a tradition which seeks to use history to convey other lessons. Some of the classical successors, especially in Rome, are closer to Thucydides, but more and more are dominated by the desire to impact moral guidance, or elucidate grand theories of the world, etc.
The debate between the Ancient and Moderns was not primarily about literature. It was about the nature of history and, in order to support their version, each side constructed competing narratives, sought to establish new facts, and argued who was correct. In the end, the moderns won which laid the groundwork for the Whiggish traditions that would follow. (You even have some basic class analysis with some of the Moderns claiming the Ancients were serving the interests of landlords.)
I suspect you are using a non-standard definition of historical and you're locating it in the 19th century to associate it with a specific ideology. And certainly if you define historical consciousness in the Marxist sense then, while there are some precedents, it doesn't show up until Marxism as a concept develops. I'm aware that such historians tend to define what they do as history and everything else as not history. But I think this is like the idea that they are non-ideological scientists who have discovered some objective advance in the field: something of a pose rather than anything supportable by objective evaluation.
History is not, and cannot be, an empirical field. History is inherently unobservable. So reasoning by analogy probably fails in this case. There is no historical equivalent of the frog we can reference.
More to the point: I have yet to meet someone who argues as you do with a valid definition of history that starts when they want it to. Most often the definition is circular. So what do you mean by history?
>But actually, the Hastings festival dates from 1983. If you really stretch things, it’s loosely based on similar rituals from the 1790s. There’s no connection to anything older than that.
I was skeptical of this, because 1790 doesnt sound like a time the english would invent quasi-pagan rituals. I looked at the original article and Im not convinced. Big human-like figures made from plant material are quite old and found in many spring celebrations across europe. When dickens describes it as new, it is likely just *new to London*, brought by some of the many people moving in from the countryside during that time, rather than newly invented by londoners. He then writes:
>Everyone else might enjoy the summer, but for sweeps it’s the lean season, since no one is really using their fireplace any more.
which seems strange to me as well. People used fire to cook, and they wouldnt have done all of that outside in the summer, especially in a big dense city. Be more willing to disagree with Kriss about ancient history!
They didn’t cook in the fireplace in that era. Or fireplaces. Big houses had fires in multiple rooms and stoves in the kitchen.
I guess if you dont call stoves a type of fireplace.
Generally I wouldn’t. There’s a fire within of course but that’s true of a lot of things, like a kiln. Anyway even if the stove were connected to a chimney, rather than a flue that exits the wall or has done other form of egress, the chimney sweep is still out of work for the rest of the chimneys.
I'm sorry, but this kind of lazy, uninformed, presentist skepticism annoys me. It's easy enough to find out the facts before you put fingers to keyboard.
What’s uninformed about my answer? Why do you think that chimney sweeps wouldn’t be out of work in summer in the era in London?
For that matter what’s “presentist” about dickens saying that chimney sweeps were out of work in summer?
I’m a man from England who has lived in London and knows the history pretty well.
You may be right and chimney sweeps were as busy as ever in summer because of …. Whatever unarticulated reason you didn’t articulate, but I doubt it. Please reply with your beliefs, because as the moment all we have there is an attack on the argument but none of your own.
I agree that they would have less work in summer (if nothing else, because the fire wouldnt burn all day). I was just surprised by the interpreted claim that they would rarely have a fire inside.
There were far more chimneys in houses than most people would now realise, as once central heating came in, many were removed as unsightly. Here’s an example where the chimneys are intact.
https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/13k0fi8/why_that_many_chimneys/
This isn’t flats or apartments (in the modern sense), it’s one house - but all the bedrooms were connected to chimneys so as to heat them.
This is where London’s famous smog and soot covered buildings comes from, not industrial chimneys - they did exist in 19C London but the industrial chimneys were high and the smoke dissipated or was blown away.
In this photo of London’s skyline you can see, in the bottom right there are buildings with 8 chimneys in a row encased in a brick block, each one is presumably connected to different fireplaces at different levels. It looks like 32 chimneys for 4 houses.
https://20bedfordway.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/st-pauls-1800s.jpg
At most one of these would be for cooking, and possibly none of them because stoves could often have a different flue system, exiting out the wall and up through the eaves.
This still seems like a rich phenomenon, even having multiple rooms was not standard. And did these stove flues not need sweeping? That said, the idea of chimneys as primarily for heating other rooms was new to me. Thanks.
If you think about it, summer is the best time for sweeping chimneys - no or few fires burning so the flues are clear to be cleaned out.
https://fullservicechimney.com/best-time-of-year-for-chimney-cleaning/
1790 is exactly when you'd expect to see the English inventing quasi Pagan rituals? It's the very beginning of English Romanticism, which would really take off a couple decades later. For example, The Ancient Druid Order was started in 1781, and they're just one of the larger and longer survived examples of a pagan revivalist group that got started during this period.. This is the period where modern Neo-paganism starts to develop, for a whole bunch of reasons.
The Order of Druids has little connection to them outside the name, and said Romanticism was a niche literary movement. The green man ritual is a public procession, which there where neither the numbers nor the religious tolerance for.
Be more willing to disagree with Kriss about objective reality in general. He's a hugely entertaining writer and very funny, but he can be extravagantly full of shit sometimes.
"Morrocco" and "Morroccan" refer to the modern-day country, so it feels strange to me to use the terms in relation to (Neo)- Moorish architecture, especially since this style is associated with Al-Andalus, (Moorish or Muslim Spain in the Middlle Ages).
Still, I like the piece.
Would you say the same thing about Rome?
Rome was always called Rome though. It’s not ambiguous. He’s wrong about this architecture being solely Spanish though.
No.
BTW reading back the piece I think my comment is a bit dumb, because I realize people using the "wrong"(according to me) name is an illustration of the fact that most traditions are made-up phenomena, so the exact geographical location of the architecture one tries to imitate is not that important.
> I’m not recommending that people lie and invent fake genealogies for what they were going to do anyway.
I am. I like the *aesthetic* of the appeal to ancient mores more than the other standard approach of manufacturing some novel moral principle out of whole cloth.
I'm currently visiting Japan and enjoy visiting Shinto shrines. Many (most?) seem to trace their roots back a thousand years or so and many (most?) seem to have special traditions specific to that particular shrine.
It seems that often the shrine completely burned down at some specific point in history (like 800 years ago or something) so they lost a lot of information about things but they have kept up with the traditions without knowing why exactly they are doing it. (The famous anime Your Name revolves around this plot, and I have seen many shrines tell nearly the exact same story)
A Japanese friend tells me that Shinto is actually based on Jewish traditions from the lost tribe and there is a whole cottage industry speculating about that, which is a whole other rabbit hole.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CulturalLayer/comments/nfkhmv/parallels_between_shinto_and_judaism/
As part of the negotiation of local identity that produces local traditions, local historians in England used to build up the importance of their locality by assuming a monastery from the English church's Golden Age (pre-Vikings; also a myth) stood there until it was destroyed by Vikings, who conveniently also destroyed all the records. Current historians can't identify any monastery that definitely stopped functioning as a result of a Viking attack (although don't rule out the idea), but the invented traditions of a destroyed church and martyred monks and nuns gave antiquity and history to a place that was otherwise unremarkable. I think the same process seems to be in play in the Japanese temples: the creation of an older history through the creation of a tale of a break in historical continuity. The antiquity of the shrine may itself be an invented tradition, tied in with others.
I thought Lindisfarne was pretty definitely sacked and destroyed by Vikings?
No. The bishop and relics of St Cuthbert didn't leave after the 793 sack, and only left about 860-870, and the sculptural evidence shows a clerical community likely remained there throughout the tenth century. The 'destruction' of Lindisfarne was probably very disruptive but not long lasting. Further north Porthmahomack in northern Scotland was burnt during this period (I said England above advisedly) but there's no evidence that it was Vikings rather than a local dispute or someone dropping a candle, and that's the closest I know to definite evidence.
There's a theory that Vikings wouldn't destroy monasteries because that would mean they couldn't come back and get more from them which is unprovable but should be remembered.
" parody a style... and ending up doing it better than any of the real practitioners" reminds me of the way Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie.
I've seen neither, but more recently I recall people saying that The Orville was the best current Star Trek show (there have been more Trek shows since I heard that though).
The Orville isn't really a parody of Star Trek like Galaxy Quest is. Its comedic but its more "Star Trek with Seth McFarlane contractually obligated to inject humour" than Galaxy Quests loving parody of Star Trek and Trekkies.
"Hot fuzz is the best buddy cop movie", is a statement I wish I could make, but I haven't seen many buddy cop movies, so cannot honestly do so.
But yes, hot fuzz is very good.
If you read history you will soon notice that people frequently started new things by making preposterous claims to be returning to even older traditions. You find this in Greek discussions of lawgivers, in the Tao, in every generation of politicians etc. etc.
But "people have always invented pseudohistory to justify what the wanted to do anyway" doesn't make it the right thing to do, either pragmatically or morally. It doesn't hurt if we're talking about art styles or fertility festivals, but when it comes to making big decisions about society or lifestyle there are other ways, more honest, and less likely to lead us into making mistakes by haphazardly combining our desires, little snippets of decontextualised history, and various myths that have grown up around history into a romantic utopia built on the specious lie that it could work because it worked before (1. it hasn't really worked before and 2. Even if it had, the circumstances don't exist now).
Yeah, if people are going to do a Chesterton’s fence, it better be a real fence.
What are you talking about, there was always a fence *right here* until some fools burned it down just before your historical memory starts! ;-P
But making up shit about history is humanity's oldest Chesterton's fence!
I recently ran into the "all primitive societies were socialist utopias until infected with capitalism" story. :-(
Bravo.
The Green Man is harmless so that fact that it's a pseudotradition is harmless.
Moorish revival architecture is harmless (if an aesthetic crime - I hate it) so the fact that its practitioners completely misunderstand the principles of Andalusian Islamic architecture and design is harmless.
But people fight and die over rituals and symbols in some contexts (religious, nationalistic/patriotic) or make public policy based on an idea of 'tradition.' So it behooves us to be interested in the provenance of our symbols and 'traditions,' whether they actually represent real historical experience or real accrued wisdom of the ages or whether they were encouraged or created wholecloth to further someone's agenda.
Without intending to be glib or nitpicky about it, how is "the ancients didn't faff about with appeals to myth and tradition, they just did stuff" as posed by Sam Kriss not just a different flavor of appealing to a mythologized tradition?
Perhaps, but that isn't necessarily a problem. One way to defeat a certain ideology us to show that it is self-contradictory. For example woke people say you should (preferentiall) listen to minorities. If is an objection to wokism then to point out most black people don't hold very woke views on a variety of issues. Likewise; if it's true that the ancients dispiced looking to the past for answers, a modern looking for the past for ideological guidance would be self-defeating
Unfortunately, that only works on an ideology that values consistency. Wokeism follows in the steps of its intellectual forebears from a century prior — Marxist Russian revolutionaries — in being almost gleefully contradictory, because nothing matters more than The Revolution. Witness just how how familiar and modern this description of Russian _intelligents_ (pro-revolutionary intellectuals) sounds:
> What is more, the very tactics the revolutionaries condemned became acceptable when the revolutionaries themselves used them. The argument that comes naturally to liberal-minded people—what if the shoe were on the other foot?—was rejected in principle. For an _intelligent,_ there is no other foot.
>
> In Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, when young Veronika criticizes revolutionaries for doing just what they condemn, her intelligentsia aunts are shocked. Why,
>
> > the unfeeling girl was equating the oppressors of the people with its liberators, speaking as though they had the same moral rights! . . . Let him [the _intelligent_] kill. . . . The Party takes all the blame upon itself, so that terror is no longer murder, expropriation is no longer robbery.
— https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals
For one! I think most adherents of even woke ideology want to think to of themselves as consistent (call me naive)
For two; even if the woke don't accept our demands for consistency, we outsiders can still judge them based on it.
For three; I was only bringing up wokism for the purposes of illustrating the principle. As long as at least the traditionalists care for consistency, Kriss's argument is still valid (though maybe not sound).
To be fair, the notion of an ineffable Mystery at the heart of a totalizing evangelical ideology is *totally* a product of the last 2000 years of European tradition.
Sure. See my quote elsewhere in this comments page, where Chesterton points out that when you break a religious system's hold on society, it's not just the vices that get turned loose and cause damage, but in fact the virtues get taken out of context and cause even more damage than the vices.
Which, of course, is the same point Jesus made in his condemnation of contemporary Jewish religious leaders in Matthew chapter 23. In verses 23-24, he condemns them for their exacting care towards payment of tithes in even the smallest matters, which, he says, while a good thing that should not be "left undone," was still wrong because they were neglecting "the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith."
Same energy as the classic "You know who else used ad hominem arguments? Hitler!"
My favorite version is "you know who else used false accusations and guilt by association?"
Yes, that's better. Not quite as punchy, but a lot more precise.
Mostly I just go with the "guilt by association" bit, but I suppose I was in a pedantic mood when I posted. :-/
No because it's a factual claim.
One of my favorite examples of a parody becoming iconic is The Eiger Sanction, the first novel by Trevanian. He was a film critic and professor who wrote a parody of a thriller movie.
I think another aspect of this psychology is that if you've got an idealized prototype in mind, it is easier to achieve than if you just want to be generically good. In computer science terms it's the difference between convex optimization (which is easy) and non-convex optimization (which is hard). Basically with a prototype, you have a clear distinction between what is an error vs intended/unimportant, so you can just go fix each error with priorities based on cost/benefit instead of having to deal with uncertain hypothetical value.
But also, the prototype has to be realistic. I guess that's part of why people argue about historical cultures so much, as any actually existing culture must be realistic. This probably puts a challenge to your just-a-pointer view, but maybe not a huge challenge since e.g. with food safety we have more wealth and technology so it's obviously realistic to have idealized Indian food.
(You wrote convex optimisation for both, just fyi)
Convex and non-convex. "Convex" roughly speaking means that you have a single hill you want to get to the top of (or valley you want to get to the bottom of). It's the convexity that makes optimization easy, so the hard type is just called non-convex.
Part 1: The past gets compressed by survivorship bias. We remember all the good songs/movies/architecture, forget the crap, and compare yesterday's best to today's average. This leads to,
Part 2: "we need to get back to a time when we did things right!"
Also, I'm pretty sure the Roman republicans looked back to ancient Greece as their guide.
See https://worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the-prettiest/ , I think this ably argues against that thesis at least for architecture. But also, where is the modern poem as good as the Iliad?
I don't think the early Roman Republic was really aware of the existence of Greece - when Republican Rome was founded in 510 BC, most of what we think of as "classical Greece" hadn't happened yet!
Most people are usually referring to the late Republic.
Have you heard of the Tartarian hypothesis? EDIT: Disregard.
You must read his post "Whither Tartaria"! Unless that was tongue-in-cheek
Oh, shit, that's where I first heard of it! :D
You really like the Iliad that much, as poetry? I find it historically interesting and it’s a fun expression of a pretty alien mindset, but it’s very repetitive and all over the place as a poem, at least to me (though I am no sprig of Ares).
Never read it in the original Greek, but I hear it has moments that are quite clever. For example, Achilles shoots his bow and the sound is similar to a bowstring twang or something. Anyone here read it in the original who can confirm/correct this?
Interesting article, but it's not arguing what you cited it for. It's arguing that modern architecture is uniquely (almost intentionally?) ugly, and that this is not a characteristic of older periods. It would be odd to see someone, for example, arguing that most buildings were as impressive as the Pantheon. The article isn't arguing that. It's arguing that modern architecture is going through an ugly phase, and that hypothesis cannot be refuted by appealing to survivorship bias.
It isn't arguing that survivorship bias doesn't exist, or that it has no impact on what architecture survives. That would be obviously false. Same with movies, TV, pop music, etc. There's a lot of bad techno, power ballads, disco, etc. Nobody listens to it, even if it used to be played on the radio. There's good stuff that got forgotten, to be sure, but any look backward compresses decades of effort into a single memory.
I'm not sure how you're saying this doesn't argue what I'm citing it for. It's arguing against the claim that modern architecture is only worse because only the prettiest buildings of the past survived, showing that even where we have representative samples unaffected by survival bias, the same pattern is present.
His argument: Modern architecture is uniquely ugly.
[Counterargument: no it's not, that's just survivorship bias at play. There were plenty of ugly buildings in the past, you just don't remember them.]
His response: look at these old photos and find me anything half as ugly as modern architecture. Some of the buildings were plain or simple, but they weren't intentionally ugly.
You cited this in reply to an appeal that survivorship bias exists, and it colors how we favorably view the past as enriched for producing really GOOD stuff. He's not arguing that survivorship bias doesn't exist, nor is he arguing that it doesn't influence whether we think of past periods as 'better' because we compress decades of effort into one side of the ledger and compare it to a single year of effort on the other side.
Are you arguing that survivorship bias doesn't exist? Are you arguing that there's no selection at play in what gets preserved in art, music, literature, philosophy, and yes architecture? I'm highly skeptical of this claim.
It seems to me that the position in your original post was the “survivorship bias proves that the past was not as good as we think it is.” I believe Scott’s replies were basically “actually, even though survivorship bias exists, it is still entirely possible that elements of the past were, on average, better than elements of the present. For example, *most* buildings from the past are better than *most* buildings from the present, when we take a representative sample from each.” Survivorship bias existing and the past being better than the present are not mutually exclusive.
> But also, where is the modern poem as good as the Iliad?
On one hand, yes. On the other hand, I suspect this is largely simply because we don't write our sagas as poems anymore. Where is the ancient poem as good as The Stormlight Archive?
I'm not really sure architectural aesthetics is the same as social traditions.
(Also, that article appears to be pretty sure of itself as to what is beautiful and what isn't. I'd bet they'd list a few "beautiful" things I'd think are not, and list a few "ugly" things that I'd think are not. Much like your two examples of synagogues: I like the modern one better. The moorish style is too ornate and symmetrical for my tastes; the modern has cleaner lines and a well-balanced asymmetry, at least from the angle in the photo.)
Yeah, it's funny how often when someone posts photos of "look how ugly these new buildings are compared to old ones", I find myself thinking "the new one actually looks nicer".
As someone who loves old movies and watches a lot of Turner Classic Movies, I can testify from personal experience how wrong anyone is who thinks the 1930s and 1940s were nothing but "The Maltese Falcon," "The Wizard of Oz," "His Girl Friday," and "Stagecoach." This is so even without getting into the A-picture/B-picture divide. I love me old screwball comedies, but I can attest that for every "Bringing Up Baby" or "The Palm Beach Story" there are many tiresome efforts like "Theodora Goes Wild." Even a film like "The Wizard of Oz" looks a lot less special when you discover that the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion are just mugging their way through the same hoary old vaudeville riffs that litter so many other films of the period. (Imagine an "Oz" made in the 90s that starred Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, and Adam Sandler. Audiences in 1939 were watching the equivalent when they went to see their "Oz".)
Realizing that the past was a lot less special than you thought, because you've looked upon the works that didn't survive, doesn't make the good stuff any less good. If anything, I appreciate better how rare and wonderful a film like "Casablanca" is -- that's a movie that is somehow both infinitely better than other 1940s melodramas while also only being about a 10% improvement on them. (It's that 10% that somehow makes the infinite difference.) It confronts you with the fact that the qualities you thought made those great old movies great (rare personalities; clever writing; the "cool" that culturally distant places often possess) is usually irrelevant. Their greatness lies elsewhere.
This is a fascinating comment, thank you!
This is a slight sidestep; it's not poetry per se. But when you think about the cultural role that the Iliad had in the time of Homer, it's a decent fit-
I think Lord of the Rings is, in fact, probably as good as the Iliad.
Oh, good one! I would typically go for Don Quixote, but that analogy doesn't translate nearly as well as a truly modern work.
"where is the modern poem as good as the Iliad?" I think this, and comparable style of questions ("who is the modern writer who is as good as Shakespeare?""), are misleading. When we hear the word "Illiad", we don't think only of the particular poem, we also hear, overlapping, the meaning "one of the greatest poems of all time". Which is to say, that "Iliad" as two concurrent meanings, as does "Shakespeare" So saying that *any* contemporary work is the equal of the Iliad ends up sounding like a contradiction in terms. If you compare someone modern to Dickens or Austen, you're comparing to "one of the greatest novelists ever". People dismiss you out of hand even if (maybe especially if!) they haven't read the older works.
The Romans fancied themselves descendents of Troyans (yes those Troyans). I think that shows they had an affinity for the Greek tradition very early on.
Depending on what source you're thinking of, I would caution against taking early Imperial commentary about either Rome's history *or* Rome's past view of its own history at face value. I love the Aeneid as much as anybody, but it's pretty clearly another example of rewriting the past for "modern" purposes!
> Where is the modern poem as good as the Iliad?
As a parent who enjoys story time for its own sake, and knowing you're also a recent parent, allow me to recommend the instant classic "Bea Wolf" - a modern-day retelling of Beowulf that's a vast improvement on the original (with pictures!). Two of my favorite passages:
"Heidi got forth Eamglay, blade of legend, born before safety standards, blast-forged of asbestos and broken glass. She lashed the lock, loosing a storm of pups." Meaning puppies, lol.
Speaking of adults: "The shushers, scolders, scrapers of screentime, the grade-givers, unglad but grinning: red in pen and eye. The fiends who fib with food! Feasting on celery fouled with cottage cheese! "Cheese boats" they style these arks of sorrow! What snakes!"
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60316971-bea-wolf
I love that book.
I think "poem" is a wierd category for art that introduces more confusing than clarity to one's thinking.
The right reference class for the Illiad is not poems but long-form narrative fiction. The Illiad is 200k words long and only adopts poetuc forms as a mnemetic aid (it was originally transmitted orally). So for example, I think that the manga "Berserk" is really deep and good. (Particularly the "golden age" arcI havven't read the Illiad but got really bored by the Oddesy so I am not hopeful.
Shakespeare's sonnets on the other hand are lyrical poetry, it uses peotic form for deliberate aesthetic effects. A sonnet typically contains a mere 100-120 words because they are designed to maximize _density_ of effect. Lyrical art today is dominated by musical lyrics. I myself am not a great music listener, but from what I gather, actual music fans fund a lot to love in music lyrics today.
To the extend "poetry" has died, I suspect it is because would be poets found it easier to employ their talents in other, newer mediums. Comic weren't invented yet in Greece and most people couldn't even read. Music obviously existed in Shakespeare's time, but the lack of recording technology made the relation we have to music today impossible.
What is left of poetry is wierd people doing experiments with it that can't be done in music. It has almost nothing to do with the poetry of old.
I am a music lover, and mourn the loss of good lyrics in modern music all the time.
Out of curiosity, try listening to the older stuff from this group? (I only just now found out about the new stuff, so I can't vouch for it.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Project
I know this isn't causally related, but it feels like 'shrinkflation' hit lyrics as well. Sure, good lyrics are harder to create than a jumble of cliches, but that's a timeless issue with songwriting. Meanwhile, is it just me or are there fewer verses (and shorter verses) in the average pop song than in the past? Feels like they just repeat some catchy beat in the chorus - and not even the whole chorus, but just one or two phrases - instead of getting some real substance to the song.
I remember in the 90's friends would have to work to memorize the fast-paced lyrics of songs from Savage Garden or Barenaked Ladies or whatever. Has that all gone away, or did it migrate over to something like country rap?
In the 90s, you had Tubthumping, which consists of approximately one line, endlessly repeated.
I have a similar objection to complaints about the falling quality of "paintings". There is still plenty of good illustrated art out there, including photo-realistic stuff. It is just not made with literal paint on a canvas, because that is not the state of the art technology for illustrations anymore.
They aren't "high culture" though, which is what plenty of people really care about. Intentional ugliness being celebrated as pinnacle of taste.
Although I agree with Scott that modern architecture sucks, I can't help but draw the analogy that contemporary complaints were made of nearly every recent revolution in art. Whether it was the absurdists, impressionists, or cubists, they were all told by contemporary audiences their new stuff was ugly or unimpressive, only to be later celebrated.
I'm not saying every movement is later appreciated, but maybe it's difficult for contemporaries to admire an artistic movement? Perhaps this also contributes to the perception that "the past was better", because we're too busy complaining about what future generations will view as revolutionary.
Maybe today there's broad agreement that the Cybertruck is uniquely ugly, but future generations will see us as having lived during the time when bold, creative advances in automobile design like this were created.
As opposed to the decades-long trend of every car looking exactly the same with minor differences. And indeed, once a major trend is set and accepted, everyone else follows suit in the new 'safe' design aesthetic, leading to a new period of 'boring' also-ran designs that copy what was done before, thereby ushering in a sense that "in the past they did new and innovative things, but today everyone copies and regurgitates past genius".
Yes!
Despite all the complaints about the Star Wars prequels, I will say this: George Lucas was trying something new. We can see what happens when people stop trying new things, by looking at the Star Wars sequels.
> a lot to love in music lyrics today
They gave Bob Dylan a Nobel prize. I prefer Robert Hunter myself, there's also Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. How about Tom Lehrer...
<i>I don't think the early Roman Republic was really aware of the existence of Greece - when Republican Rome was founded in 510 BC, most of what we think of as "classical Greece" hadn't happened yet!</i>
Even before the Classical period (which is usually held to have begun around 480, so just a few decades after the foundation of the Republic) Greece had an advanced and influential civilisation, including in Rome itself, where, e.g., the late regal/early republican temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was built in the Greek style. Granted they weren't really "looking back", because this was all contemporary, but the early Roman Republic was very much aware of and influenced by Greece.
> But also, where is the modern poem as good as the Iliad?
I'll take a break from defending Shakespeare against Hananianism, and quibble with this. Widespread literacy fundamentally altered the role of poetry in society. As well to ask who the greatest swordfighter in the world is. (Would they put it on a business card?) There will never be an Illiad again, not as long as our civilization endures. As with Shakespeare, Homer had an early mover advantage, and the world has changed and grown in ways that baked their superiority in. Was Abraham truly the objectively best patriarch?
The best patriarch was clearly Joseph
Anyone have a perspective on the question of how widespread illiteracy was, and when?
I recently read that phonetic spelling was common on signs and in other limited areas. People learned the alphabet and could work things out just fine. Most who had learned their letters could spell their name. If you were really smart, you could spell it more than one way.
Then the intelligentsia started enforcing standardized, non-phonetic spellings that made it impossible to read without formal education. Suddenly it wasn't enough to just know your letters, you had to be able to 'read' to understand what was written.
At least, that's one story, and I'm not sure how far it goes, or to which period(s) it applies. Anyone have more insight on this question?
I think the problem with standardized spellings was that they were for one particular dialect, and became frozen in time, and then traditional. (And then started warping the language toward the spellings.) Plus, England went through the Great Vowel Shift shortly afterwards (we'd be a lot better off if spelling hadn't been standardized until afterwards). Like, the "e"s weren't silent, once upon a time, but we've been stuck with those spellings for the last several hundred years.
I think Arabic is like this today: almost no one except TV announcers and clerics can actually generate speech in "standard Arabic", but most can understand it when spoken, and read it, and maybe even write it. Although the writing is somewhat hampered by not connecting directly to their local vernacular. I think it'd be like if we had to do our writing like this:
http://maloryproject.com/winchester_viewer.php?folio=Folio%2071r&pos=1§ion_id=8
Regarding dialects, before us peasants got rich enough to travel, and before mass media, people's dialects differed wildly, even over small geographical distances. One of my favorite movie scenes ever:
https://youtu.be/G42YHaGPou0
The modern poem as good as the Iliad is a novel, or a movie, or a TV series.
Art forms go out of fashion and then they die completely. You can't write a good epic poem these days, there's no living epic poetry tradition to fit it into. You can't write a great symphony either, not build a great Moorish revival building. If you try any of these you'll just create a self conscious aping of the past
The only way to write a good epic poem nowadays would be to create a whole new tradition of epic poetry. This would initially be terrible aping of the past but eventually would become its own tradition in which good work is possible. I don't know how to persuade thousands of people to write bad epic poetry for fifty years though.
This is a very good comment and also puts one in mind of the great dig someone made about Southey's epics: "They will be remembered when Homer and Virgil are forgotten—but not until then."
"But also, where is the modern poem as good as the Iliad?"
Depending on your meaning of modern, I suggest Paradise Lost. Of course, that's an example of looking back to the Iliad for inspiration.
Even Alexander looked back to Achilles.
There's an image on the internet I can't find anymore where Hitler thinks to himself that he'll never be as great as Napoleon, Napoleon thinks he'll never be as great as Caesar, Caesar thinks he'll never be as great as Alexander, and finally a very satisfied Alexander just thinks about how awesome his horse is.
Nice.
"If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed."
~Bertrand Russell
Alexander probably envied Sesostris.
See the "Will I ever be as good as the old masters?" meme template for more great examples.
Re parodies that became more famous than the things they parodied, *Princess Bride* is a good example.
Or Airplane! parodying Zero Hour!
Would Don Quixote be the trope namer?
Traditionalists often don't just refer to some (real or fake) past as a pointer to describe what they want, but they also use it as an authority: "If it worked well for so long, if it's what most societies converged on doing, it must be the right thing to do".
That argument doesn't hold water anyway IMO: conditions have changed, there is no reason the same customs should be optimal today as were decades, centuries or millennia ago. But it's another counterargument if the past wasn't even actually like they describe. (Or even if it was like that in some times and places, but not in many other times and places.)
Depends on the conditions. No matter how much the world around us has changed, human nature hasn't, and people ignoring this and hubristically claiming that "things are different now" have caused quite a bit of harm in modern times.
The degree to which human nature can be molded by circumstances is one of the underdiscussed fault lines between conservatives and progressives.
I'd like to say that examining past societies, good and bad, can provide evidence for the natural law. But natural law thinking doesn't seem to be something that twenty-first-century people can be argued into or out of, unlike the ancients. Score one for the pro-circumstance folks, I guess.
>No matter how much the world around us has changed, human nature hasn't
Partially agreed, but partially disagreed. Average serum levels of fluoxetine are not what they were before 1970, nor of sildenafil what they were before 1998. It has been claimed that the internet and cell phones have reduced our average attention span. (Writing from the USA), our average weight is heavier than it was a century ago. Our very bodies have noticeably, albeit neither catastrophically nor paradisically, changed.
Incentives are still incentives. Short term and long term memory are still memories.
Generally agreed.
There are some exceptions for the very recent and well documented past. I grit my teeth that it takes us longer to build a nuclear power station than the whole Manhattan Project took.
Well as written, in the general case I would agree with Scott. In the specific case of made up British Druidism - with its hostility to actual history and its incoherent disavowal of Christianity - I’m tending to side with Sam.
In the case of architecture specifically, it made me wonder: when you read 19th c. architectural magazines, you see that: 1. A *lot* of the standard architect training was just "here’s that cool Roman monument, please make a drawing of it. Then make another, until you know that building very well." (to the deep annoyance of some, then more, architects who were starting to notice that comfort, and making buildings fit for their purpose, or even paying attention to construction methods, were all way more important than just learning good models by rote and always wanting to make everything symmetrical). A surprisingly large number of books that purported to help you or your architect design your house started with fifty pages on the evolution of the typical house from the Neolithic to the present day. ; 2. You also see that, at least in some cases, what they knew of the styles they were imitating was more or less "here’s an illustration taken from the Tales of a Thousand Nights", "Here’s a cool building I saw when I was vacationing in Rome", etc. So, imho, there was much more of a *story*, with the accompanying visual imagery, associated with architectural features than if they’d said "Oooh, I really like that shape" or "this house is sturdy and cheap to build". So, the prompt the architect used imho *wasn’t* "How did the Moroccans do it?", it was more "the people the Torah talks about lived in the Middle East, I want to feel like I’m among them"
I don’t know how relevant this is to the post’s main point. Probably not very much.
I want to go back to the early 1980s when the purple haired women on the moon weren't fat angry lesbians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2PoXfZdYVU
"It is traditional, Archchancellor" said Ponder reproachfully. "Although I might go so far as to say that not observing it has now, alas, become traditional"
"Well that's fine, isn't it?" said Ridcully, "if we can make a traditional of not observing another tradition, then that's doubly traditional, eh?"
I read in "The Battle for Christmas" how the Victorians basically invented or borrowed all the "traditional" Christmas celebrations because their own tradition (of going house to house singing and demanding liquour) was considered too boorish.
Going house to house when it's -40 degrees is definitely boorish!
This. A lot of Americans don't realize just how cold it gets in England. London is at approximately the same latitude as Calgary.
Though not -40, surely, due to the Gulf Stream? A quick Google suggests that all-time record lows around London are in the positive single digits F (negative teens C). More typical winter temperatures are in the 30s F (close to zero C).
Scotland is colder, but still much warmer in the winter than most of Canada.
Right. There's a reason that Canada was once described as "the Irishman's Prize" back in Britain.
A long trend of 0°C would also be unlikely, unless in the coldest of winters.
For me, it was the opposite - I was surprised at how mild the weather in England is. London (and Birmingham, Manchester, etc.) has milder winters than NYC (and Chicago, Boston, etc.): https://weatherspark.com/compare/s/3/45062~23912/Comparison-of-the-Average-Winter-Weather-in-London-and-New-York-City
But much warmer than Calgary. The US has many places much colder than England.
They still do it in Alaskan villages, but it's "Slavicing" two weeks later for Russian Christmas. Fitting all the coats is indeed a challenge.
Going house to house singing - carol singing -hasn’t disappeared at all. Not outside cities anyway. And carol singers often do end up getting a few drinks at the end. Often at the rectory. Victorian Britain did bring in the Christmas tree though. A decent addition.
If I recall my schoolin' correctly, the Iliad and the Odyssey were essentially fictional stories of Mycenaean Greece meant to inspire people during the Greek Dark Ages that followed the late Bronze Age Collapse and remind them of a more glorious past; a Golden Age, if you will. These stories continued to inspire people even after the Dark Ages ended and Athens and Sparta began their rise to prominence, and they continued to think of Mycenaean Greece as the golden age of Greek civilization. Seems like another important data point for the "idealizing the past can be helpful/useful."
I guess the logical question, then, is when does idealizing the past become pathological or something to be resisted? Because I must say I don't care for narratives, for example, like the one where Lenin was a swell guy and the Soviet Union would have been some kind of wonderful if only he'd lived longer and found somebody not named Stalin to succeed him. You could think of plenty of other such historical revisionist claims: Germany's stab in the back in the 1920's, the Lost Cause mythologizing of the American Civil War, the myth that the Wehrmacht's hands were clean and it was all those nasty SS guys doing the killing on the Eastern Front. Or consider the 1619 Project, which seems to be aimed at reframing the American Revolution as an attempt to establish some sort of breakaway white supremacist slave empire because Britain was turning too cosmopolitan. I think the motives of the people pushing these narratives are fairly obvious, and I consider each of them to be rather malign, and I can't help but think that there is also a danger in letting people with decent, pro-social motives mess with the historical record, too.
Not quite to your point, but India's middle class is larger than the entire population of the US.
"Of course past heroes looked back at an idealized even-further-past when doing their heroic deeds!"
And there you have Chesterton's Fence: stop doing traditional things at your own risk.
The problem is when people arguing Chesterton's Fence have an incorrect picture of what the past was actually like. That's the real problem with "fake traditions" that Scott ignores.
"It's still better than any poem of the last fifty years, fight me."
Okay! "Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg" is a poem by Richard Hugo that was published in 1980, so it makes the cut. I think it is better than the poem you excerpted here.
Philip Larkin wrote tons of better poems in the last 50 years. “Aubade” is from 1977. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48422/aubade-56d229a6e2f07
I'm not Scott, but I'd take the Lays of Ancient Rome any day. Their power is pure, and they're easy to memorize, so at any moment you can throw some ringing syllables out to entertain yourself and any other listeners. Aubade is just depressing.
Well, there's no accounting for taste, but I can at least account for mine! When you say that the strengths of the Macaulay are easy memorization, ringing syllables, and entertainment, I think I agree, but that's just another way of saying it's a narrative poem with a simple rhyme scheme. I think there are way better examples of the form: "Kubla Khan," "The Cremation of Sam McGee," almost anything by Tennyson or Browning or Kipling. The meter of the Macaulay is ragged at times—"And a long shout of triumph", "And the broad flood behind", "Nought spake he to Lars Porsena"—and there are a number of half-rhymes ("given/heaven"), all of which would be less of a problem if the poem had other merits.
But my main reason to prefer Larkin to Macaulay—and this may be the most relevant to today's post—is the Macaulay doesn't strike me as *true.* Especially the part Scott quoted: it just seems like empty sentiment to me. I can believe that a Roman would think that in the old days all the Romans got along and there was no class conflict. And I can believe that Macaulay could relate to that rose-tinted view, just as everyone above a certain age can. But what is missing is any kind of critical view of the topic. By critical I don't mean that one has to dismiss it or attack it, but more in the sense of critical faculties: that there should be some examination of the feeling, some consideration of what it is and why one feels it. Sticking with Larkin, he has quite a few poems with a nostalgic tint: "Going, Going" (https://www.thepoetryhour.com/poems/going-going), "Annus Mirabilis," (https://allpoetry.com/Annus-Mirabilis), "MCMXIV" (https://allpoetry.com/Mcmxiv). None of them are ironic or anti-nostalgia—"Annus Mirabilis" is a bit funny but the other two are totally sincere—but they all capture something *about* that feeling. They're curious about it; they aren't just unthinkingly voicing it as Macaulay is. (Larkin also looks at the feeling that things will keep getting *better*, in "High Windows" (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48417/high-windows) and "Next, Please" (http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/philip_larkin/poems/14537), with a similar level of curiosity.)
If Macaulay's story or descriptions were more unique that could be a kind of truth ("what the eye seizes as beauty must be truth" as Keats said), but to me they're pretty average.
I'm sorry you find "Aubade" depressing (though I take issue with "JUST depressing"). Can I recommend "Church-Going" (https://www.thepoetryhour.com/poems/church-going) or "The Whitsun Weddings" (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48411/the-whitsun-weddings) or "The Trees" (https://poetryarchive.org/poem/trees/)?
And I can account for mine! "Aubade" is full of big words that spoil the rhythm of the art, and long, dull, dry sentences to evoke a long, dull, dry mood -
> Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
> Making all thought impossible but how
> And where and when I shall myself die.
> Arid interrogation: yet the dread
> Of dying, and being dead,
> Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
"Arid interrogation" is exactly right - it's dry, it's dusty, it's dull. And it's academic. (Obscure adjective and a five-syllable word.) Macaulay does everything with plain, simple English - there's exceptions, like "trysting", that are deliberately archaic, but :
> East and west and south and north
> The messengers ride fast,
> And tower and town and cottage
> Have heard the trumpet's blast.
> Shame on the false Etruscan
> Who lingers in his home,
> When Porsena of Clusium
> Is on the march for Rome.
That's proper nouns, single-syllable words, and a small number of exceptions ("messengers", "cottage," "trumpet", "lingers,") all of which fit the mood of the story. "The messengers ride fast -" people are doing things. The poem is perpetually specific, in a way that Larkin's work isn't; Macaulay is describing things happening, in a specific place, with specific people. His story is fundamentally about people, who exist within the world of the story, doing things, in a way in which Aubade is about the author being in despair.
> But what is missing is any kind of critical view of the topic.
Yes, and that's one of the many reasons why I like it better - what I meant by "pure." It shows instead of telling. The man who saw the first sunset saw a greater beauty than anyone who's read a dissertation of the beauty of the sunset; a pure tone is more beautiful than two tones set to form a discord. A critical view of a topic separates the reader from events; it's the difference between watching a movie and hearing someone describing the plot of a movie, the difference between reading a thrilling adventure and reading the TVTropes page summarizing a thrilling adventure. Or, to quote Scott's review of Jordan Peterson, and Scott quoting David Foster Wallace:
> This is the General Prophetic Method. It’s easy, it’s old as dirt, and it works.
>
> So how come not everyone can be a prophet? The Bible tells us why people who wouldn’t listen to the Pharisees listened to Jesus: “He spoke as one who had confidence”. You become a prophet by saying things that you would have to either be a prophet or the most pompous windbag in the Universe to say, then looking a little too wild-eyed for anyone to be comfortable calling you the most pompous windbag in the universe. You say the old cliches with such power and gravity that it wouldn’t even make sense for someone who wasn’t a prophet to say them that way.
> The next literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.
The Lays of Ancient Rome are good because they aren't ironic. Like the Lord of the Rings, which I am a fan of (and Scott is a fan of). There are two characters in the L-R who exhibit ironic detachment, and they're old men (or, an old man and an old angel) driven to madness and despair by their belief in their own superiority over the rest of the world and in their looking on evil two long. This is not a coincidence. I don't think ironic detachment is good for art, and I really don't think it's good for me.
Edit - And I'll add one final point: I don't think poetry is for reading to yourself. The two purposes I've found for poetry - where it is actually better than just reading a book - are to memorize it so you can recite it at any circumstance where it is socially appropriate (such as silently, to yourself, in the dentist's chair) and so sweep up others and yourself in the flood of prose - or to listen to it recited by someone with the right knack for it.
This is, perhaps, why when a friend got together a poetry night with a 500-word cap, I had trouble finding anything that fit. She was looking for a different definition of poetry than I was - she wanted something clever. I want to be swept away by the flood. I suspect you may also be looking more for cleverness than for power?
We clearly have different visions for poetry, and that's okay—wonderful, even!—but I do want to quibble with a couple things. I'm going to echo you in quoting the full first stanza of Macaulay:
East and west and south and north
The messengers ride fast,
And tower and town and cottage
Have heard the trumpet's blast.
Shame on the false Etruscan
Who lingers in his home,
When Porsena of Clusium
Is on the march for Rome.
I find the first half of this to be doggerel, frankly. (The second half is fine.) The meter is shot to hell—the first line is four beats and ends on a stress, while the third, which it's matched with, is three beats and ends unstressed. More importantly, what you find specific I find comically unevocative ("fast," "have heard"—I picture nothing here). Compare all that with this stanza from Browning's "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," which uses specifics and (partly thanks to the use of a steady meter) actually sounds like riders in a hurry:
At Aerschot, up leaped of a sudden the sun,
And against him the cattle stood black every one,
To stare through the mist at us galloping past,
And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last,
With resolute shoulders, each butting away
The haze, as some bluff river headland its spray.
In general I'm surprised to hear you defend the Macaulay on the grounds of "show, don't tell", not just because the action is often told rather than shown, but especially because the emotional beat we're arguing about (the Rome of old) is told and not shown: it's just a guy saying how Rome used to be. To me what Larkin does is much more "showing" an emotion than what Macaulay does: Aubade is *about* the feeling of restless fear of death, and it shows us that feeling (indeed, I feel it too). "Going, Going" is *about* the unease of the death of pastoral England and it shows us that feeling. Watching Macaulay watch someone be crankily nostalgic does nothing to show me what that feeling is like; I have to take his word for it, basically.
This is also why I'm surprised to hear you talk about "ironic detachment" in Larkin. I mean I already said that I don't think any of the poems I mentioned are ironic, "Aubade" least of all. Irony would mean, isn't it funny or silly on some level that I feel this way; irony would be a comfort, but he doesn't avail himself of it. I think what you're referring to as ironic detachment is what one could call self-consciousness or self-awareness, but there's nothing inherently ironic about regarding oneself, if it's done earnestly.
On Larkin's word choices, you're right that "Arid interrogation" is trying to evoke the feeling you say, and I can't blame anyone for not wanting to meet him there, but in the bit you quoted, "the dread/Of dying, and being dead/Flashes afresh to hold and horrify" is quite straightforward, with simple Anglo-Saxon words, fresh verbs, and even some alliteration. "The anesthetic from which none come round" chills me every time and can certainly not be called technical (yes "anesthetic" is many syllables but it's a familiar modern concept); same with "Postmen like doctors go from house to house." Anyway, if you want simple and evocative language, you truly can't do better than "This Be the Verse." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse :-)
"I suspect you may also be looking more for cleverness than for power?"
This I have to object to strongly. I find all the poems I've cited to you highly powerful; I am moved by them. I think by "power" I mean something like "emotional and intellectual impact," and you mean something like "sound." In which case I'm chasing my form of power and you're chasing yours.
I quite like "The Cremation of Sam McGee," and I'll agree with you that Kipling's best work is better than the Lays of Ancient Rome (though I'm less impressed by Tennyson and Browning than you are - they're good, but either people have been recommending me the wrong ones or I think they're overrated) - but Kipling died almost eighty years ago, and I haven't found any new Kipling.
That's quite good, thanks!
> I don’t think it would be any more meaningful if someone had dug up some thousand-year-old seagull fetishes from a nearby field. It’s powerful simply because of what it is. Invention, just doing stuff, is the nebula that nurses newborn gods.
This is wrong. Dead wrong. Human beings are notoriously resistant to new ideas, particularly when they do not have immediate, beneficial practical applications. One of the key strategies of rhetoric to persuade people to act is to phrase your cause as something that binds everyone together, and nothing is more useful in this sense than shared history and tradition. The reason that everyone cites ancient tradition even if something is in fact new is precisely because it's effective to do so.
If you want a striking example of this you might look at the Pentateuch. That is the rock around which the Jewish faith and identity are formed, and it is in essence (to the lay atheist) a book that tells a story that is at least partially apocryphal about the origin, struggles and shared destiny of a group of people. And one of the purposes of the book is absolutely political: to create the legitimacy of the claim of King Josiah of Judah to the greater territory of Israel, by establishing that the two peoples were one in the past, and were always meant to be one whole. It is a justification of political authority that goes back all the way to the creation of the universe.
> The reason that everyone cites ancient tradition even if something is in fact new is precisely because it's effective to do so.
And that's exactly why it's worth pointing out when it's actually false!
Whether it is false is not especially important. False things bring people together as well as true ones, and at a certain point it ceases to matter. If you brought up archaeological evidence today that the exile of the Jewish people in the desert is almost certainly not factual, do you think you would destroy the Jewish faith and identity? Would you wish to?
You cite the past in order to get people in the present to act in order to attain a future you envision.
Fair enough, but I don't think the two sides are as much in contradiction as you say. People bond over shared narratives, we've always done it, I also do it and it's fine, it's part of basic human nature and how culture is threaded together.
We also have a kind of collective endeavor of evidence-seeking, and sometimes evidence appears that happens to clash with some cherished narratives. It has happened many times, look at all the philosophical and religious opposition that arose to the discovery of Darwinian evolution, but also look at Einstein's qualms over quantum mechanics for a subtler example.
I don't think the two approaches particularly owe anything to each other. If someone were to dig up evidence that some particular bunch of people did not get lost in the desert some 3500 years ago, it would be cool information to know, and it would be a good sign of a lively culture with a curiosity for things if their finding became at least a popular book and a TV series or two. And it would be a bad sign if people refrained from publishing it for fear of damaging Jewish culture, or conversely, if people used it to throw shade on it. But of course the mere information itself wouldn't destroy the Jewish faith and identity; they have many centuries of shared history besides that to bond over, including plenty of recent struggles. Why is that even a question? Nobody is asking to destroy anyone's identity around here as far as I can tell.
For that matter, you can bond over a shared narrative without literally taking it to be true. I think cultures are slowly coming to understand that its safer to do it this way, because in today's multicultural and connected world, you can't reasonably expect everyone else to handle your cherished myths with gloves anymore.
Festivals, religions, rituals etc are sometimes based on ancient tradition but all cuisine is fake, no national dish would be recognisable to people 150 years ago and that is fine.
Salmon Sushi clearly represents something about the essence of Japan and it's culture despite being invented by Norwegians during the Clinton administration, that is part of the absurd magic of the world and human culture.
P.S. All Thai food is invented by politicians as part of a high modernist national branding effort.
>P.S. All Thai food is invented by politicians as part of a high modernist national branding effort.
Yes, I find that one of the strangest tales of the early 21st century
https://www.foodandwine.com/why-are-there-so-many-thai-restaurants-7104115
>Gastrodiplomacy, also known as culinary diplomacy, involves a country using food as a means of globalizing and gaining international influence. This was something Thailand was particularly skilled at. In 2002, the Thai government launched the Global Thai Program, a diplomatic initiative with the aim of increasing the number of Thai restaurants worldwide. The state provided training programs, grants, and information to Thai investors who wanted to open restaurants abroad. As part of this campaign, Pad Thai — a dish with virtually no cultural history — was positioned as Thailand's national dish and pioneered a culinary campaign funded by the Thai government with 500 million baht ($15 million USD). The government believed that the project would contribute to agricultural and food exports, while also producing foreign income from overseas transactions of goods and services. It worked. Thailand's cuisine has become a global phenomenon as a result of the project.
Our preference in the synagogue example, and other examples in architecture and related fields, may have more to do with our taste for symmetry, ornamentation and detail, and use of natural materials than a vague sense of attachment to the past. Setting aside the "why" for such tastes, and other recursive "whys". At some point architecture moved to minimalism and asymmetry.
In areas that actually "matter" -- life and death, important aspects of day to day living, rather than aesthetics, there is much less general nostalgia. Almost no one is nostalgic for the age of surgeries without anesthesia, or mathematics without algebra, or transportation with horse and buggy.
I think most also have a preference for textures - smooth is boring, in buildings, clothing or things. Even beautiful minimalistic furniture must have wood grains or other features to add details at some scale.
I think this fails to recognize that past times have probably been much more static than later times. Accordingly a higher percentage of what they did would have been 'default' and taken for granted, rather than being either a conscious act of imitation or deliberate innovation. This suggests that to an extent, the model of people in traditional societies living in the moment, as it were, is more correct than Scott indicates. The existence of myths or legends in those societies that vaguely connected the present to the past doesn't really change that.
I'm glad you brought up the Roman example, because pre-modern societies were -always- doing the whole "pretend our reform or change is rediscovered Ancient Wisdom because these are mostly conservative, agrarian societies and the idea of progress or change for its own sake would be seen negatively" schtick (see also Plato's "Ancient Athens").
Correction: Perhaps I'm mistaken, but isn't the synagogue on the right in St Louis, not NY?
https://stlgs.org/research-2/congregations/jewish/jewish-synagogues-and-temples/congregation-bnai-amoona
> And it’s still better than any poem of the last fifty years, fight me.
I can think of lyrics to several Pink Floyd songs more recent than June 1974 that are way better poems than that, sorry.
> The right is a different New York synagogue, by an architect who was “just doing stuff”.
Not all architecture “just doing stuff” is that bad, though. Gaudí was very much *not* explicitly working off any picture of anything earlier! People even call his style "modernism"!
> Some popular art was written by people trying to parody a style they didn’t like, and ending up doing it better than any of the real practitioners
(I assumed one of the examples would be "Song 2" by Blur, which was intended as a parody of pop punk but ended up more successful than anything they did in earnest.)
(and there are weird cases such as the Illuminatus! trilogy or "Prisencolinensinainciusol", which are not only way better but also *earlier* than what an uninformed reader/listener would guess they're parodies of)
> Prisencolinensinainciusol
All right!
> I can think of lyrics to several Pink Floyd songs more recent than June 1974 that are way better poems than that, sorry.
"An acre is the area of a rectangle whose length is one furlong and whose width is one chain."
Prisencolinensinainciusol is not really a parody. It’s attempting to sound like English sounds like to non English speakers. Also it’s of its day, sonically.
An artist who is part of a tradition or inspired by one is working within something much bigger than themselves. The one who is "just doing stuff" is just doing it for himself and his ego. Hence the traditionalist will end up with something more inspired and creative.
Even an artist who is not trying to do so will be inheriting plenty of tradition, unless they're into some kind of absolute primitivism, which probably also became a tradition by the time the second person borrowed the idea from the first.
The question as I see it is, how honest is the artist in their acknowledgement of what is and what isn't traditional within their art?
It may not be the intention, but Scott's piece comes close defending intellectual dishonesty because "it works".
Is Scott moving away from tech-worshipping rationalism? Or is this attitude somehow consistent with it?
It's worth noting that an obsession with innovation and invention and progress and change is one of the defining features of the West. An interesting thing about, say, Indian philosophy is that there were all these commentaries on the Sutras and the Vedas that were doing *new philosophical work*...but presented their original ideas as actually not original but derived from the original ancient texts. That gave them legitimacy; originality would not have.
We're unusual in embracing the opposite. In everyone *wanting* to be seen as original and new. In conceiving of every decade and every generation as being "the best time in history"- or the worst time in history, but never merely continuous with the past.
I think this unusual hatred of the past is baked into our culture and has been for a long time (which is precisely why things like revivals are actually interesting and noteworthy and even revolutionary) and explains so much about the quirks of our society.
It's been said that "there are two great fools, the one who says 'this is old, therefore it is good,' and the one who says 'this is new, therefore it is better.'" I think in our day we're beginning to realize why the second fool is so foolish.
>"there are two great fools, the one who says 'this is old, therefore it is good,' and the one who says 'this is new, therefore it is better.'"
There are _certain_ areas where the second fool is actually making a pretty good guess. Specifically, in areas where our technology, particularly our instruments, have been consistently improved over time, the accuracy of a recent measurement is very likely to be better than the accuracy of an older one.
Rømer and Huygens's measurement of the speed of light in 1675, matching the currently used value to within 30%, was a triumph for their day. We _have_ gotten systematically better at measuring it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light#History
It is rare to _lose_ the ability to measure something to a given degree of accuracy, so our ability to measure typically improves with time, though, of course, any given attempt at a measurement might contain a blunder.
> An interesting thing about, say, Indian philosophy is that there were all these commentaries on the Sutras and the Vedas that were doing *new philosophical work*...but presented their original ideas as actually not original but derived from the original ancient texts.
Yes, they did plenty of that, I've read my fair share of it, and it can be quite funny. The Tibetans have a form of commentary called "chen drel" or annotationsl commentary, where the new text includes the full text it's commenting on, syllable by sillable, and inserts its explanations in between. It's pretty crazy to read and keep track of what both texts are saying at once.
I can't vouch for the overall effects of this kind of culture though. After centuries upon centuries of putting words and ideas into the mouth of past figures who never said them, the sad result is a tradition that enshrines plenty of delusional ideas about its past, and has no way to honesty look at the mess they've made, let alone attempt to untangle it.
I remember one pretty egregious case of chen-drel where the commentator brazenly added a "not" before the original verb, literally suggesting that the original author meant the opposite of what he said.
EDIT for context: I really appreciate the Indian intellectual tradition and its surrounding offshoots; it's specifically because they have plenty of good philosophizing and lots of really interesting things to say, that we modern-minded people find it rather irritating when their historical self-view is full of inaccuracies!
> I remember one pretty egregious case of chen-drel where the commentator brazenly added a "not" before the original verb, literally suggesting that the original author meant the opposite of what he said.
That's a lovely side-effect of enlightenment. :-)
Maybe both the author and the commentator were enlightened, and the assertion was neither true nor false, not both nor neither ;`)
rationalists often discuss chesterton's fence.
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
That's true regarding social institutions (to a limited extent: try fitting polyamory and group house orgies into that framework). But I meant the aesthetic side. Appreciating and valuing the beauty of old things is almost the polar opposite of "make new artificial things as fast as possible" that the tech community runs on.
>I think this unusual hatred of the past is baked into our culture and has been for a long time (which is precisely why things like revivals are actually interesting and noteworthy and even revolutionary) and explains so much about the quirks of our society.
Any estimate of when this happened?
I have a completely speculative wild guess:
Gutenberg's press made making copies (comparatively) cheap. Perhaps novelty increased in value _in comparison_???
The increased rate of technological change and information exchange made it more clear that progress was actually possible.
Historically, even when major innovations occurred (e.g. the spinning wheel), they took long enough to diffuse that it wasn't obvious to any one person that revolutionary change was occurring.
Many Thanks! Could be... So do you expect that the value put on novelty increased more-or-less smoothly as the industrial revolution took hold? Or as average transportation speed increased?
I think the belief in progress predates the industrial revolution.
Many Thanks! You may be right. (Some people - how large a fraction?) believing that progress (can? often does?) occurs is not quite the same thing as valuing novelty in general, which was the point in ascend's comment that I was speculating about.
I meant to reply to this and didn't get around to it (and had to think about it). I think the standard answer would be the 18th century Enlightenment, from which the idea of "social progress" comes I believe. Of course that whole process of rejecting tradition was built on several previous such processes, mainly the Reformation and the Renaissance. The latter (and yes involving the printing press) is probably the ultimately correct answer: it was itself contingent on a lot of particular events (the Mongol conquests opening up the East-West trade routes for a while, the Black Death overturning the social order and having weird complex economic effects that helped stimulate artistic/intellectual patronage, and the Ottoman invasions driving classically educated Byzantine refugees into western Europe) but once it happened, it arguably set off a volatile but inevitable chain of events leading to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. I'm sure all this can be heavily disputed though.
On the other hand, I'm somewhat inclined to think it's a natural result of the individualusm that the West is particularly defined by (going right back to ancient Greece in some ways, and being a much more central part of Christianity than of other more collectivist religions). A society of individualism is just going to lead to individuals doing their own thing, inventing things and making their mark, and is much harder to structure around solemn tradition than a more collectivist one. So, it at least some sense, anti-traditionalism is baked into the DNA of the West, but required prosperity and global dominance to really manifest.
Many Thanks! Yeah, it is complex. I wish I had a nice graph for how likely punishment for saying "What the King said is wrong." was as a function of time. I have no such graph. And, of course, I'd like to have similar information about various contributing factors, which I also don't have. ( And this isn't _quite_ the same thing as valuing novelty, but more a matter of how much individualism was accepted as a function of time. I _do_ agree that accepting individualism is a necessary precondition for accepting novelty. If every potential innovator gets hammered down, there can't be much novelty. )
Traditions can persist for millenia. For example the european Venus statues of the Paleolithic were made and used by the Cro-Magnon peoples for at least 24 000 years.
From wiki:
"the Venus of Hohle Fels dates back at least 35,000 years to the Aurignacian era, and the Venus of Monruz dates back about 11,000 years to the Magdalenian."
I like to know how fake things are. I grew up doing English and Anglo-American folk dancing and music, revering things that were collected in the 1920s as "authentic" and "traditional." Some of this is about who can do the thing - as a teenager I felt pretty strongly that only men should do the Abbots Bromley horn dance. It's genuinely ancient; one of the antlers used in England has been carbon-dated to the eleventh century. But knowing more about how flexible traditions have been over time made me more relaxed. (In this case Americans have standardized a dramatic theatrical version, while by the 20th century the residents of Abbots Bromley UK were doing it to tunes like "Yankee Doodle" and "Pop Goes the Weasel".) Once I realized stuff like that, I felt ok with innovations like . . . . women doing the dance too. I assume that my kid yelling "That's my mommy!" when she recognized me under the antlers is more or less similar to what's been shouted by children in the original English village for centuries.
One song about woo origin stories about Morris dancing, which I can't find the full words to:
"Dance, dance, but don't go telling me
It's some kind of old pagan revelry
You can feed that line to reporters on TV
But it's only the joy of the dance to me."
To the tune of "Lord of the Dance," I assume?
Yes (which is originally the tune of "Simple Gifts", a 19th century Shaker song).
Morris dancing is so typical English... but apparently the original name is "moorish", as in imported from the Moors!
And one of the most traditional dances of Spain is the "chotis", whose name is apparently a corruption of "Scottish".
One of the things I enjoy about the American "Christmas Revels" is how they feel free to muck around with the bits of stuff they have, and try to create new traditions as they go along. It seems, I dunno, traditional. :-)
Yes, I like the vibe of "tradition is ours to play around with."
I mentioned reading about Calusari and Kukeri in another comment here, they are both "Mummer" traditions in Romania and Bulgaria respectively. The scholars say Calusari is a direct descendant of the cult of Diana from Roman times (Romania is named after Rome and their language is Romance not Slavic), and the Kukeri are a direct descendant of the cult of Thracian Dionysus. So - living traditions that are actually ancient. The similarities between these and Morris dancing are numerous and striking - solo dancing rather than circles or lines, bells on the costumes, associated characters like the hobby horse, death and resurrection skits, fertility rituals, etc. So I was quite surprised to find out that Morris dancing is not similarly ancient, but in fact dates to the (yes here it is again) 19th century.
Morris dancing dates to the 15th century, although we don't know a lot about how it changed over time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_dance
Thanks for this. Seems like newer knowledge than when I researched it decades ago. Wiki says "Boxing Day 1899 is widely regarded as the starting point for the Morris revival." - that's likely what I was seeing back then.
I can’t believe I’ve read through all the comments and no one has yet mentioned the Confederacy or the fondness for the antebellum South.
Did you miss this? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/fake-tradition-is-traditional/comment/59563553
(writing from the USA) Re Lost Cause and 1619 Project, my _least_ favorite use of history, accurate or inaccurate, is exhuming old grievances. While there are _many_ aspects of law that I dislike, I solidly endorse statutes of limitations.
Oh, drat, you said "fondness", that spoils the game, and tells me which set of myths you were talking about.
So glad to see Horatius recognized as the eon-defining masterpiece that it is. That poem makes me cry every time.
"Sometimes I have attempted a rather bold metaphor, but have seen that no one would accept it if it came from me (I am a mere contemporary), and so I have attributed it to some out-of-the-way Persian or Norseman. Then my friends have said that it was quite fine; and of course I have never told them that I invented it, because I was fond of the metaphor. After all, the Persians or Norsemen may have invented that metaphor, or far better ones." - J.L. Borges, This Craft of Verse, p. 73.
Also, Scott is being entirely naive about the heritage of architecture like the modernist synagogue. Architects working in that style are looking at Bauhaus traditions, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Adolf Loos, etc. It is a novel tradition, but still a referential practice, iterating on previous innovations while retaining certain core features viewed as essential to a shared tradition. And finally, this demonstrates something of the shallowness of the tradition-fetishist, if only because Alexander places this beautiful synagogue (the B'Nai Among synagogue) in NY rather than its rightful place in St. Louis, MO.
To be fair, I don't think Sam Kriss's "people doing stuff" excludes building on the past, recent or not. The distinction he's trying to make is this kind of normal "people doing stuff", versus exaggerating the past into some kind of unchanging ideal.
I loved the Sam Kriss piece, and this rejoinder is quite nice, too. I'm delighted to see this back-and-forth between two authors I admire very much, in very different genres. Thanks, Sam, and you, and Substack!
Ooh, I heard someone calling! Good poems from the last 50 years?
I like Hollie McNish, who has a great rhyming, scanning rant here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJX5XHnONTI
And this one caught my attention when I read it: Mirror Orchid, by Pascale Petit
A megasaurian massif reared above our vineyard,
its reptile-scale thistles slowly opening and closing during siestas as if they wanted to speak.
It's up online here: https://www.tumblr.com/kiekua-blog
As for the "just doing stuff" vs. "looking back at an idealized even-further-past" - it's always going to be a complex mix, though, innit. In the midst of trying to idealise, there are some bits that we just do, and they become a new and strange whole. I think the point Kriss was making was that you can't ever assume that just because a thing has the tag "traditional" attached to it that it harks back further than about 1 generation. We may well be trying to copy someone who was trying to copy someone who was trying to copy someone who was... but along the way, every copy was imperfect, and so every element of any copy may only be one turn of the screw old.
Thanks for recommending Hollie McNish, I was unfamiliar and that's really good.
I also really like Shane Koyczan's "This is my Voice". https://youtu.be/FHczVzGfyqQ
But I don't think the topic was good poems of the last fifty years, I think it was the very best poems of the last fifty years. And since Ginsberg's "Howl" is older than that, what the very best are isn't obvious to me. Is it to you?
Wow, that one really builds!
No, I have no idea what is 'the best.' I'm only a casual reader of literature, without the breadth or the expertise to make judgments. My working assumption is that I'm missing out on the best because I'm not into hip hop at all. That genre represents such a massive outpouring of rhythmic words, including entirely new technical-artistic concepts like flow, that expect much of the best in the last few decades has come from there. Whether the best is really the names we know like Kendrick Lamarr or Childish Gambino, or some other more obscure artists, I have no way of knowing.
Slam poetry, too, includes real gems. I don't really have a feel for how to judge them or which will last, but I can see pieces like that Koyczan and Talyor Mali's one about teachers sitting in anthologies 20 years from now.
Past that, I am at the mercy of those who read more than me, and write googlable anthology lists.
I strongly agree with you about Hip Hop. I suspect the best poets leave poetry for songwriting because it is more competitive. And "Hamilton" is just utterly amazing.
Also I love your Tang poetry translations! I can't read the originals so I'm missing out on most of the complexity of the work, but what little of it I get is lovely. Subscribed. 😀
I hope you like the Seven Secular Sermons too. 😉
I don't quite understand one thing: why is the past special in this regard? The urge to paint with bold colours and ignore aspects of reality for aesthetic or inspirational reasons applies laterally and contemporarily, too, with stereotypes and idealisations of every kind: local and religious identities, gender, even things like corporate cultures, sometimes for good but mostly for ill.
If the point (as suggested by the bit about laundering present-day ideas as returning to past) is to smuggle some reactionary takes around without rising too far above the parapet, then a) it's inherently a bit shabby and dishonest; and b) does the past even retain the kind of authority anymore that would make this an effective tactic?
My super uninformed take is that the reason the "older" synagogue is more appealing is that its materials look more like that natural environment we evolved in.
Also uninformed, I like that it emphasizes the height more. There are quite a few modernish skyscrapers I also like, for proportion and height reasons.
I think some of the reaction against deconstructing fake tradition comes from the threat that like, allegedly "real" traditionalism poses to some people.
I'm not one to go after like, dishes and architecture (and I love a good Tikka Masala", but I will get up in arms when people wistfully say things adjacent to like "I just want traditional families to come back, and for things to be like the wonder years" or similar. That past is made up. It's like wishing for the time of king Arthur. It's fine as long as you realize its a wish.
Who is threatened by "traditional families"? Unless you mean gays, in which case I would say traditional family can mean a lot of things beyond that...
Also, an aversion to traditional family can seriously threaten a lot of people.
I could maybe say "perceived threat" to be a bit more fair.
There is a lot of effort expended trying to "resurrect" or "restore" traditional structures that didn't exist in the first place, and the fact that they didn't suggests it might not be as good of an idea as people think.
Imagine you meet someone wistfully longing for a quasi-arthurian era when monarchs had absolute power and everyone respected them and thought they were divinely ordained and there were never any civil wars or anything. There are lots of objections you can lodge against such a system but the primary one is "that era never existed and may be unachievable."
There's an easy enough answer to that one: "...and how did King Arthur's story end?" The tragic end of Arthur's saga is almost as famous as its beginning.
Really? I'd never heard of it before. I know from pop culture that Merlin got trapped in a tree by Morgana or something, but nothing about Arthur.
Well, here's the short version: Arthur's great successes as a king and a warlord ended up not amounting to all that much when his shortcomings as a husband led to a love affair between his queen and Sir Lancelot, the greatest among his knights, because once Arthur found out what was going on, he is honor-bound to see them both executed for their treachery. Guinevere is arrested, Lancelot escapes and runs off, raises an army, and comes back for her, and the ensuing civil war weakens Arthur enough that a third party is able to assassinate him and usurp the throne.
Funny thing,Theodidactus, we did have real times that existed where people had two-parent families where the parents were married.
They didn't always work. But a lot of those marriages and families did work.
The new way doesn't always work either. There are a lot of unhappy people after divorces, or never married and their long term relationship broke up, or they can't get a long term relationship, or they can't get a date, or why don't guys want to date single mothers?
There's no one perfect system, but some things work better than others. Yeah, it's easy to look back wistfully at the past and idealise a time you never lived in, but it's also easy to look forward wistfully to the future and idealise a time you may never see, where the tyranny of "gotta get married to have sex, if have sex gotta have kids, if married can't get unmarried" is all done away with. New ways, new problems.
The trick is, and it's a very difficult trick, keeping the good parts that did work and carrying them forward, and integrating them with the good parts that do work of the new systems.
I think people interpreted this comment as me saying "traditional families are bad" and that is really telling to me.
Well you said that you get in arms when people say they want them to come back.
Traditional families aren't a forgotten ideal like traditional architecture though. They're still the default in well behaved middle class circles. When I say I want traditional families to make a comeback I'm not reaching after some mythical past, I'm just saying that I want other kids to enjoy the same kind of stability that my kids do.
> when people wistfully say things adjacent to like "I just want traditional families to come back, and for things to be like the wonder years" or similar
In my experience, that's mostly a polite way to say "please stop hurting me".
In fact I don't think it hurts you at all for someone *else* to get gay-married.
By itself, no. But it's never by itself, no one exists in isolation. It's the result and cause and mediating step for a vast sweeping social change that denigrates a large group of people and everything they value. One person burning a tiny bit of coal isn't a problem, but once everyone does it we get global warming.
Scott's two arguments -- that "Tradition" is not some blanket endorsement of everything about the past, and that pretense has always been part of tradition -- can be combined, and moreover combined with a third argument, to wit that, Um Actually, there have been (and are) traditions that really do maintain real continuity over long stretches of time by being very intentional about it (as well as being influenced by some measure of pretense). The little genealogy in the middle of this post -- the bit of "current traditionalists look to the Victorians, the Victorians looked to the renaissance & the middle ages, the renaissance looked back to Rome & Greece, Rome & Greece imagined a golden age in the distant past...," is exactly right. But I would add that it is not just fake tradition that is traditional. *Critiques of tradition* are also traditional. In those traditions which I have attended to the most (which, caveat lector, is not saying very much) -- that is, traditions regarding spiritual discipline and prayer -- there is inevitably, alongside many stern warnings to not just go mixing it up on your own whim, and to guard against "novelty," and so on, a little counter-theme that says: "do not rely solely on tradition!" This is found in Buddhist sutras that insist the claims are verifiable and *must be verified* by the individual; in Christian monastic writings (and indeed the New Testament), warning that you can do all the prostrations or repetitions of prayer you like exactly as they have been handed down, and fail to "get it;" and so on. On the other hand: these traditions are also characterized by being intentional and unbroken -- until they aren't, of course. They are very focused on master-to-disciple transmission. Chains of Hadith need to be rigorous and reliable at every step; the Talmud records rabbis teaching the teaching they received from their teacher, etc etc. Once this central cord is broken (and all it takes is a generation), that is gone. If other things have been preserved -- cultural forms, architecture, texts -- then those who were sufficiently sensitized to the tradition to eventually feel its loss, will attempt, and perhaps be able with some success, to "reconstruct," and if they find some remnants of actual transmission, a few masters & disciples who survived the deluge, the phoenix may arise again. To some extent this is "just doing stuff," but in a way that attends to or is oriented by the strong ("subconscious"?) force of vision that Scott and Sam K are both referring to here, and it probably turns out that when you are thus guided, you do well to attend also to how others have done it.
Love it. I think we are entering an era when people have internalized the shared wisdom inherent in numerous faith traditions and are seeing that they are actually rigorous epistemic guides.
“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
— G. K. Chesterton
I've not heard that quote before, but it's a good one. Thanks.
A while ago I wrote a similar argument about retrofuturism. I think there's a failure mode, when making predictions for the future (e.g. in science fiction), to try to make it sound more futuristic by removing references to the past. But in fact the future is always some combination of new innovations and various older influences, and since those older influences can be very aesthetic or otherwise attractive, it's a mistake to try to avoid them. It makes our predictions less inspiring.
https://etiennefd.substack.com/p/retrofuturism-is-futurism-done-well
I don’t get it. “The people of the past weren’t trying to return to some idealized history” doesn’t make any sense as an argument against traditionalism even if it was true.
Of course people in the 1950s weren’t looking back to an idealized past, because *their* past wasn’t ideal! Their present was!
Well, your premise (that at a certain period things were ideal) opens up the "do you think people in India all get enough to eat" critique. If the idea is that the 50s really were preferable, then arguments against that premise are fair game.
I’m not claiming that the 1950s are ideal myself, just that that’s presumably what traditionalists believe.
IOW, “people in the past didn’t want to return to an ideal past” only makes sense as an argument against traditionalism if you define traditionalism as “the belief that, regardless of what time you are living in, things were better in the past” rather than the more plausible “the belief that, at the present moment in history, things were better in the past”.
And I’m not claiming they’re not! Just saying that becomes a different kettle of fish when that claim is made.
Other than the Amish and similar folk, I don't think many people actually want to go back 100% to something in the past, and certainly there are no big political movements that want that. Instead, lots of people want *some specific things* to go back to the way they were in the past, while others stay as they are now or improve further. Someone who thinks US sex roles were better in the 50s than now isn't in general proposing to do away with computers or MRIs, they're proposing some changes to specific stuff they think got worse. (Though it may be that technological change they like makes this impossible--at a guess, sex roles were guaranteed to change once the pill became widely available, for example.)
This is not always the case, but a lot of times there's more "just doing stuff" to traditions than we know. As Donald Kingsbury famously put it, "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was."
This is a good, non-analogical statement of Chesterton's fence.
Agreed. There is also a third possibility: That the problem that the solution was for was a problem for _some_ people, say lords who wanted to keep the serfs _firmly_ under their thumbs, and wished to suppress a peasant revolt, and the peasants who wished to revolt had a rather different set of preferences about the matter. It is still illuminating to find out what _was_ the problem that a tradition was a solution for...
edit: One other thing... Even when the _stated_ problem justifying a tradition _is_ preserved and known, it may not be the actual reason that a tradition carries an advantage. If there is some ritual with three parts, each with esoteric, mystical justifications, but it just happens that the second part of the process happens to minimize the odds of getting cholera, then the traditional _justifications_ may be pure noise, but one part of the ritual might actually be valuable.
> In the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It’s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that.
I don't think this is true. People often use the age of a practice to argue for its goodness, either through a "Secret to Our Success" style cultural evolution argument or the Lindy effect. If the nuclear family was a very temporary phenomenon, or was dependent on some class of people not having nuclear families, then these facts undermine the argument. In fact, it's unclear why someone would even bother referencing the past in defense of nuclear families unless they thought there was some rhetorical benefit in doing so.
The second half of the post is good though!
The Indian food example doesn't sit well with me. The stakes of someone liking Indian food are so low and personal that a respondent who launches into a debate about the true nature of Indian food is obviously being an ass -- just let them enjoy the food!
My impression of arguments about tradition is that, while they are sometimes about such matters of personal preference, they are more often about how we should collectively structure our society, a topic with much larger stakes for more people. In such cases, traditionalists are often not just using the past as a source of inspiration, but also as a claimed authority. And it is quite reasonable to respond to a claim that "if only we did X, life would be better, like it was in the past" with a response that, actually, X didn't yield such great results in the past.
I think the myth of the American cowboy may be one of the most dramatic contrasts with reality.
Although I've never specifically researched it, it's pretty obvious the adventures of movie and TV cowboys tell us more about popular culture in the 1930s or 1950s, the Great Depression and the Cold War, than the American West of the late 19th century -- as boys' adventure novels of the 1860s or the original 'Westerns', dime novels of the 1880s, romanticized an earlier time.
For example, Deputy Sheriff William M. Breakenridge's 1928 book 'Helldorado' (Houghton Mifflin / Riverside Press) tells quite a different story about Tombstone than novelists, film and TV directors; and Robert F. Dykstra's 'The Cattle Towns' (Alfred A. Knopf, 1971) tells us more about cowboys than Larry McMurtry and Randolph Scott.
Did you ever see "Unforgiven"?
Sure. Eastwood updated his cowboy for postmodernism. But nearly all his other cowboys are of the mythical genre. The squint alone is gold. Doctorow's western, 'Welcome to Hard Times' breaks the stereotype as well, and then there's the Cohen brothers' Buster Scruggs. But these are all quite different from the films made from about the 1920s to the 1970s.
Unforgiven is a bleaker take on the same myth.
If you want to make a movie which really captures what cowboy life was like, it's going to have a lot less gunfighting and a lot more cows.
And, apparently, gold miners in boom towns drinking champagne because whiskey and spirits could be watered down, but if you open a bottle of champagne, that's it, you can't water it down and reseal it and recreate the "pop!" (allegedly):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeWT1EDwmv0
I mean, you do mention it, but the mfk Renaissance was an attempt to revive civilization by larping a few ancient greek and latin texts after some Byzantine scholars started teaching greek and latin well agian, and it turned out pretty ok.
When I was at university, I enjoyed participating in the "Time Ceremony", held each year when the clocks went back.
It was only in my final year that I discovered that the ceremony, rather than being a tradition from time immemorial, had in fact been invented as a joke by some students in the 70s.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-29551988
https://www.thatoxfordgirl.com/post/merton-s-annual-time-ceremony-a-very-oxford-tradition
https://www.cherwell.org/2014/11/02/merton-celebrate-historic-time-ceremony/
🤔
But the clock going back, in fact clocks themselves, are a modern invention.
whether we have some grand conscious reason or otherwise, all “doing” is interpolated through a “fake”construction of the past
> “Here is my, Scott’s, utopian vision of the good” is a hard sell. “Why don’t we go back to how the Romans did this?” is a little easier. Even if it was only three Romans, one time, and what they did was only vaguely reminiscent.
> I’m not recommending that people lie and invent fake genealogies for what they were going to do anyway.
These are in contradiction. You're acknowledging the usefulness of lying (or being incorrect) and then saying it's a useful tool that makes it easier to convince people but then saying that people shouldn't do it after an essay singing its praises. You even end on a note of how that's the standard method of getting things done.
This reads a lot like an endorsement of lying. And lying in a way that can have catastrophic consequences. What is the principle here? Because it seems like the end state is that you and your opponents both invent fake histories and then battle over who gets to tell the "real" one. This is a common thing, remarked upon by men from Napoleon to the first Emperor of China. But I'd hope there's something here beyond "this works to cynically maximize power so let's use it."
Isn't Scott pointing to the middle ground of extracting the good from the past and bringing it forward, while also adding new good to it?
I agree with your message but note the line about "even if it was only three Romans one time and what they did was only vaguely reminiscent" as a way to get around a hard sell. The reason I ask what's the principle would be is because "good" is somewhat a matter of opinion. And without limiting opinion history becomes something to manipulate for subjective ends. Which it might already be but that's often with a heavy dose of lying.
I'll take a stab at this. I think things that are clearly over the line are lying, making up new lies, and inventing history. But on the acceptable side is taking inspiration from the fragments of truth and lies that we have, and distilling that into an ideal that we can use to move forward.
In general, I think this is how our bio-neural-net brains work. When presented with incomplete information, they fill in the gaps with what are now called "hallucinations". When presented with a lot of random data, they call forth a pattern that could hold it all. When presented with a bunch of examples, they extract an inner pattern from those examples.
If what someone had was a few poems and some pictures, maybe their brain came up with an ideal of what Roman Courage was like. The ideal probably has as much to do with what their idea of modern courage is (or isn't) as it has to do with the sources. It would be incorrect to say that that's how *historical Romans* viewed courage, although lots of people, being imperfect, make that mistake all the time about all sorts of things. But "Roman-inspired" is a perfectly fine description. A lot of "X-inspired" stuff is crap, but a lot of everything is crap. It's probably no worse than some of the weird neo-Celtic feminism Goddess-worship stuff that was going around in the 1980s thanks to Marion Zimmer Bradley.
So my issue with this is that things can be more or less correct. For example, I was talking with someone about Cicero and they insisted that Romans were stoics who avoided pleasure and sought pain to make themselves stronger. This is wrong. I was able to point out that in his "On the Purpose of Good and Evil" Cicero's argument is actually that you need the wisdom to understand which painful things make you stronger and which pleasurable things make you weaker. And that if you avoid all pleasure or all pain you will not achieve eudaimonia. He does argue against avoiding all pain but he also argues against avoiding all pleasure.
So in some sense it's correct that Cicero argued against being overindulgent and advised people to seek out pain to improve yourself. But only in a wider argument that includes the importance of proper (but not improper) pleasure. One of these interpretations is more correct.
Now, the other person might say (and say truthfully) there is some instrumental use to them in the less correct argument. They can say their ideas are "Cicero inspired." And they can argue it's better for the modern world. But that argument is begging the question that it's better. If history's primarily value is in instrumentally being useful, largely apart from the truth of its claims, then it becomes nothing more than a battleground. Which is what it is. But I don't like that and I don't want to like that.
I agree with what you say. But ... I feel like there's something I can't quite articulate, here, and maybe that's because it's just an illusion in my head.
Maybe it's that part of being in a living tradition is being able to point to a set of things and say "we do these things in part because these are the things we do", and an intelligent person will acknowledge that the traditions do in fact change over time, continually adding and discarding things. And there can be a distinction between the formal outlines of the practice that we attempt to preserve exactly, and the parts that are emphasized and used today, and part of the value of the distinction is that it allows us to go back to the historical record and bring forward ideas that have fallen out of practice. Kinda like a seed bank.
And inevitably, not everyone will have that perspective, or have the knowledge that makes the perspective work, because most people just want to get on with whatever in their life they think is important. And that's where people like you come in, perhaps?
I feel like there are a lot of people these days who are searching for something to ground their life in, and one of the things they turn to is imaginary simplified history, which give them the feeling of being part of a whole that they don't get elsewhere in their lives.
This returns to my initial point though. It is a defense of lying. It's the noble lie of Plato but that's still a lie. I don't deny lies might be useful. And maybe you or Scott want to argue for this particular use. But you should grapple with the problems of that position.
My criticism of the original argument (Sam Kriss's) is that there's a smuggled assumption. Traditions is invented (true) therefore it's fake (false). Or perhaps they argue it's infinitely changeable or arbitrary or unimportant. That is a non-sequitur. In what other context do we accept that something being invented means that it's arbitrary or artificial? Your computer is invented. Is it arbitrary? Is it fake? No, it's a real computer. It does something. And if you start changing things about it it might stop doing those things. Tradition does not need to be a lie to give people a sense of purpose.
Is it cool now to support the dynast politics of the Congress party and it's (33 ?) partners who cobbled together to oppose Modi? I'm also fascinated that it is now cool to oppose this man who has revolutionized welfare in India.
Money actually reaches the poor. All of it. Or do you oppose Modi because he wants to do away with caste and is low caste himself (teli, or oil pressing caste)? This is why many Hindu elites oppose him.
Sure he plays identity politics (but he has some prominent Muslim supporters too) but who doesn't play identity politics nowadays? His opponents do so in ugly ways. Modi's welfare schemes benefit religious minorities too, by the way.
I'm tired of Westerners superficially calling him fascist. He forced every Indian to create a bank account so money meant to help them actually reaches them. He's also great at making sure the poor spend it on intended schemes (build a home or get a gas cylinder instead of wood burning stoves, build a toilet, etc). Shouldn't ppl who think about Effective Altruism be his super fans?! Crazy crazy world.
I didn't read the bit about Modi being fascist as Scott's actual belief, but rather as the sort of line that the sort of critics he's talking about frequently pulls out, which Scott seems to find obnoxious.
I did think that too. That maybe he was mocking what you're expected to say about Modi. But it's the only politically correct opinion for sure - the opinion permitted by the NYT, WaPo end of things as well as maybe MAGA (who hate him because he's made mass conversions to Christianity harder in India - a lot of it happens under the cover of fake NGOs).
Scott's never cared particularly much for political correctness. It's kind of refreshing.
It's refreshing that he doesn't care for political correctness or that he cares for it in this context?!!
But I think he shares a certain anti-Modi bias with the NYT. Maybe because he's a rationalist and Modi is religious. Hinduism is a very liberal religion though - it doesn't believe it has a monopoly on the truth.
Submitted without comment: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-modi-a-political-biography
I loved that review
Scott's positions can sometimes be politically correct, even though that might not be his goal. In other words, I think his positions on Modi are rather boring.
An effective altruist should take a serious look at how Modi has succeeded so hugely in making welfare for the poor work so well in a massive, diverse and complex country. Just throwing around words like fascist, is silly.
{Citation needed}
Of course, both the people celebrating fake ancient traditions, and the people (like Sam Kriss) pointing out that those traditions are fake and complaining about lionizing of the past, are both following the well worn paths of tradition. This debate has always been present, and is itself an ancient tradition.
so i don't think i'd want to argue for the idea that no one should ever take any influence from the past, and that until the late nineteenth century no one ever did. (not least because the last piece i published on here involves borrowing forms from fourteenth-century vision books and sixteenth-century pamphlets. lying and inventing fake genealogies is basically my entire practice as a writer! ) tbh, i don't think that's what i was really getting at in the essay. as i wrote, just before the bit you quote:
"Tradition says that all images are immutable and the meanings of all symbols are naturally determined. A leaf must signify the exact same thing, whether it’s in Hastings or Hyderabad, now or three thousand years ago. Tradition pretends to be a respect for the past, but it refuses to let the past inhabit its own particular time..."
i'm definitely not saying that painters, poets, and architects were always 'just doing stuff' and have never referred to their predecessors. when i argue against 'tradition,' this is what i'm arguing against: the notion that symbols are fixed and eternal rather than contingent and conventional, and therefore the way people did things in the past was natural, while any deviations from that are artificial and should probably be discarded. it's possible that no one holds this position as strongly as i'm arguing against it, but i do think some implicit version of this underlies a lot of what you could call folk folklore studies. it's not just the green man; a lot of people are absolutely certain that (for instance) easter is a pre-christian germanic fertility festival, which it absolutely isn't, because the image of an egg is somehow inherently pagan. more pressingly, it also seems to animate a lot of the trad right, who often identify eternal cultural forms with whatever people were doing immediately before the jews invented modernity some time around 1965. for someone like jordan peterson, a disney film from 1960 is part of the same deep cultural current as a book of hours from 1060, but a disney film from 2020 is not. obviously whenever societies have come up with basically arbitrary conventions, they've preferred to think of them as eternal absolutes; i guess for the purposes of that piece though i was more interested in the truth.
I followed the link and read the whole "green and growing" piece. I loved it as much as I love Scott's writing--which is saying a lot. But I wonder about the "just doing stuff" idealization of the past. This itself seems to follow the Rousseauian tradition of longing for some lost, innocent state that allowed humans to enjoy life before writing, property, language, agriculture, the state, thought, or whatever else it was that a person wants to say ruined us. The same attitude of course inspired the nineteenth-century inventors of "pagan" traditions (and Frazer, in his way: I don't think contempt could explain that prolix, lifelong obsession, and it does seem that he dropped that scheme at least somewhat in the third edition--see the discussion in Josephson-Storm's brilliant _The Myth of Disenchantment_). It seems to me simply part of the post-infant human condition that spontaneity and "just doing stuff," like inspiration, are hard to come by. Habit is sometimes a good substitute (and can make a place for more inspiration). But I suspect the person who made the lovely gull-idol had *something* in mind when they were doing it, even if it was just wonder at gulls.
Since you don't allow comments on your substack, I'll say it here: I massively enjoyed your last piece. It had me laughing the whole time, while at the same time bringing up uncomfortable questions about how we interpret the things that happen to us as if we were the main character of the story.
And btw, as someone who spent years learning Tibetan culture, congrats on your characterization of Tibetan stuff, the guy who pronounced his consonants like a rube from the borderlands was hilariously on-spot.
Plus 1 for this. I emailed that piece on to a friend with the title ‘Borges lives’.
This comment did indeed clarify it for me, so thanks!
Best part about this post was finding out about your substack! Really great!
"A leaf must signify the exact same thing, whether it’s in Hastings or Hyderabad, now or three thousand years ago."
Sometimes a leaf is just a leaf, but sometimes if I see carvings of leaves in Hyderabad from three thousand years ago, I can understand why the person did that and have some idea of what was meant by it.
The cool green shade of foliage dappled by sunlight is a common trope be it in rainy Ireland or sun-blasted Hyderabad (if Hyderabad is sun-blasted, I don't know).
Sometimes a leaf just being a leaf *is* an immutable image for our ancestors and for us.
There's a post on Tumblr I just read today where someone is talking about holding a 500,000 year old hand axe and connecting with it and the person who used it because they know today how to use such a thing.
If something works, it lasts. Be it tradition or fake tradition, there's a reason the people around you were chanting for the sacrifice of the green man. Some things resonate with us and in us, like a plucked string. Green leaves are just leaves, but they're not *just* leaves.
https://www.tumblr.com/gallusrostromegalus/740167194569310208?source=share
"I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.
It's right-handed
I am right-handed
There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly
I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.
There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.
I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.
A homo erectus made it
Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.
Who were you
A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?
Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?
Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?
Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?
Who were you?
What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?
What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.
Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?
Or has it always been divine?
Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?
Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.
The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.
Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?
I'm not religious.
But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine
I don't know what is."
I'm not sure what an egg could be a symbol of if not fertility but in any case the smug Easter-revealers* - admittedly tedious at this point - are perhaps pleasing themselves by saying merely that Easter was so placed in the spring so as to slot into or compete with a pagan fertility festival.
*And the fourth of July was the fifth. Or the fifth was the fourth? And Columbus was stupid, etc. And Jesus' birthday may be some other time of the year lol. In fact we "know" it's not the 25th of December, Anno Domini. The latter's my favorite because it comports well with my chief alienation from humanity, the attachment people have to "birthday".
"a lot of people are absolutely certain that (for instance) easter is a pre-christian germanic fertility festival, which it absolutely isn't, because the image of an egg is somehow inherently pagan"
God be good to St Bede, if he could have seen what the folklorists, 19th century weavers of new "traditional ancient national culture", anthropologists, New Agey types and Wiccans and neo-pagans and what you will did with his mention of Eostre, I think he'd have decided "Screw it, nobody cares about this particular small Saxon tribe anyhoo" and left it out of "The Reckoning of Time".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%92ostre#
The Easter Bunny is traceable to March hares, and eggs I suppose because of customs around decorating eggs when the Lenten fast was over and flesh meat could be consumed once more.
The Roman Empire!
that checks the box for this week
Making stuff up out of whole cloth, with zero constraints, rarely leads anywhere interesting. Music, literature, visual art, architecture, games. Creativity really only arises when you’re working within constraints, testing the boundaries, can I change this element while keeping this other element fixed. Even improvisational forms like jazz generally stick to a scale or a key or theme. The past is a source of templates to be improved on. Similarities to evolution by natural selection are intentional.
"Your work is both good and original, but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good."
— attributed (probably apocryphally) to Mark Twain
I've heard that said about work in the sciences too. I'd guess that a mathematician say instead: "Your work is both good and original, but these parts are disjoint."
Perhaps the reason that music has stagnated since the 1990s is that we've run out of long-standing folk traditions to plunder/build on.
However, problems happen when the fake tradition is an implicit attack on someone else, or otherwise is used to make fake claims about something that's still around. This is the biggest reason to complain about fake traditions that isn't just "I hate everything my outgroup does" and Scott is severely understating it here.
I think this misses the reason that these arguments are being made? When trads argue for a return to tradition, they often say things like "this was selected for by hundreds of years of cultural evolution, therefore it's good for civilization, be mindful of Chesterton's fence", etc. In that context, it make sense to reply "actually many of your traditions were invented whole-cloth in the 1950s."
If you're arguing that traditions are good and worth respecting because they've withstood the test of time, then it matters whether they're actually old or not.
I dunno it really seems like a lot of self-identified trad people are making a much stronger-than-aesthetic argument, something like "the past was good and we should do this so we are happy like the people in the past were" such that it's a correct response to go "actually the past sucked".
Moorish revival style may be pretty and pleasing and you don't have to accept any of the moral judgements of either the moors or the people who came up with moorish revival style to appreciate.
Traditional marriage structures on the other hand encode actual moral and practical considerations of the past, which result in actual concrete outcomes in daily life and should in fact be analyzed a bit more deeply!
>Moorish revival style may be pretty and pleasing and you don't have to accept any of the moral judgements of either the moors or the people who came up with moorish revival style to appreciate.
Generally agreed, though it might be disquieting if e.g. one of the architectural features was originally designed to expedite carrying out a stoning...
I think there's an important distinction to draw between idealizing an aesthetic tradition and idealizing a social tradition. Someone who says "I like Indian food" is unlikely to advocate for adopting Indian laws or economics to encourage Indian food. Someone who builds a synagogue in an idealized Moorish architecture is unlikely to advocate for adopting the social structures of al-Andalus. But someone who says "I like 1950s family structures" is likely arguing that we should change our laws and social structures to encourage those.
A fake Jack-in-the-Green parade doesn't meaningfully harm anyone else. But changing laws to discourage women from working outside the home does.
+1000 yes! I knew something was bothering me about this piece, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
But now we've swung round to "Everything in the 1950s was awful all the time, all the families were miserable, nothing worked and everything sucked" and that's just as false and idealised a view as "The 50s were perfect".
"But changing laws to discourage women from working outside the home does."
What counts as discouraging? Giving homeschool parents the same amount of tax money per child that a public school gets, is that discouraging women to work outside the home?
I'm not going to get into an argument about specific policy proposals. My point is just that idealized aesthetic traditions are mostly harmless, but idealized social traditions are not.
Demonized social traditions may be a bigger problem seeing as how the government will fund whatever but not stay-at-home moms.
I think you have to actually engage with the person and his beliefs to determine that, or it's super easy to just attribute everything bad to your outgroup.
"I like Indian food" doesn't mean "I want to live in an Indian cultural immersion program," it means "I like the food available to me that comes with the label 'Indian food' on it." Anyone who pretends not to know this is just being a troll.
The difficulty is not with the use of pointers, the difficulty is that these claims are often (in fact) literal - not just "I want life to be like the fictionalized, idealized version of the 1950s as seen on Leave It To Beaver and similar", but "The 1950s was actually like that for most people and things have gone horribly wrong." Such claims (were they true) would have strong implications regarding policy, and are often used to support bad policy that would supposedly restore the previous golden age. Nothing wrong with being inspired by stories of the past, or using them as indicators for values, but this is a small minority of RETVRN-style claims, and the standard form of them are much less wholesome.
I do have some "How did we lose the knowledge or ability to do this?" concerns, mostly on variants of cost disease and related problems. E.g. Why does it now take us longer to build one power reactor than the whole Manhattan Project took?
> Why does it now take us longer to build one power reactor than the whole Manhattan Project took?
Well for one thing, the Manhattan Project didn't build any power reactors. You'd be better off using reactor construction in the 70s as your point of comparison.
Many Thanks! True, the Manhattan Project used reactors for plutonium production, with the power from the fission process discarded.
> A reactor built by Argonne National Laboratory produced the world’s first usable amount of electricity from nuclear energy on Dec. 20, 1951, lighting a string of four light bulbs.
( from https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/first-nuclear-reactor-explained )
The Shippingport atomic power station, which delivered power to the electrical grid, started construction on September 6, 1954 and
> The first electrical power was produced on December 18, 1957 as engineers synchronized the plant with the distribution grid of Duquesne Light Company.
( from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Atomic_Power_Station )
In contrast, the most recent nuclear power plant in the USA
>Vogtle Unit 4 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia that began commercial operation on April 29, 2024.
( from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=228&t=21 )
>Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and in 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. Georgia Power now estimates the total cost of the project to be more than $30 billion
( from https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61963 )
So, in summary, we went from taking 3 years to build a nuclear power plant in 1954-1957 to taking 15 years to build a nuclear power plant in 2009-2024. Not good!
I think that using the past as an enabling fiction both to inspire new ideas and to legitimate them, is fine, but I think this piece is too dismissive of the second argument it raises. Sure, people in the past looked farther back, but they also did many things just to do them, and many of the things that we look back on with nostalgia were done originally for different reasons.
I think it matters if people built a fence to keep in a bull, and now we want to keep the fence around after dairy farming has been outlawed. Maybe the fence will be a spur to new invention: we will come up with new uses for it. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it's original purpose was different: that should inform how we think about its uses now.
"I like [political policy]."
"Ah, you must be a [central member of worst group ever to ensure that policy]."
Perhaps it's like those"primitive" societies that tell outsiders that everyone is equal and there's no property, but it turns out that in practice there's a rigid hierarchy and strict rules about who is allowed to use - or even touch - objects and land.
Or perhaps people who claim to support ideals like "rationality" or "faith, hope, and charity", but who in practice only live up to those ideals a relatively tiny bit more than everyone around them.
Yes, yes, only physical reality matters, blah blah blah. But the ideals we subscribe to, and the stories that we tell ourselves about why we do what we do, are also important. Especially if we want to understand our fellow humans and influence them. And maybe envisioning a better world is the first step toward bringing one about, rather than just "randomly doing stuff" like a blind idiot (god).
I find myself confused.
What work is the "looking at the past" doing, if you can get it so wrong and come up with something so good? It seems like either there is something accurate about these perceptions, or people are just doing something good and associating it with an old thing that's actually unrelated.
Also, if everyone is looking back at a previous era, but that era is also looking back at an even more distant past... it's hard to put into words, but it feels to me like this also doesn't make sense. If this "modern traditionalist" went to an actual Victorian and started gushing over how great their time was, would their response be "of course we're great, why wouldn't you copy us"? Or would they be more like "What? No, we're just a pale imitation of the Renaissance and ancient Greece." ?
If the latter, why look at Victorians at all? Why not just look directly at ancient Greece? And if the former, why can't we improve on them the way they improved on what came before?
I guess this is a perfect example of how the supposedly "rationalist" community has stopped caring one bit about whether something is true or a fabrication, let alone what it means for something to be true. Truth gets boring after a while, fake stuff is fine and no-one should call it out as fake, as long as it helps get things done or creative juices running, and we can move on to endless discussions of ethics and "shoulds"!
Sorry but I'm not on board. I enjoy fiction and the powers of fantasy as much as anyone, but when I'm thinking about some real-world claim, my first and main question is how literally real it is. The Scottish festival is *cool* and I'd be happy to attend if I lived anywhere near, but I much prefer to read Sam about how its origins are fake, than some fluff piece about its imaginary ancient pagan roots.
The worst is, I don't think there's even a real contradiction here! Novelists and all kinds of professional fiction wranglers have been able to extract inspiration from more or less idealized past epochs, exotic foreign lands, and prior fictions and myths. They know how suspension of disbelief works, and we can all do it if we've ever been able to enjoy a work of not-strictly-realistic fiction. We can get inspiration from stereotypes and idealizations without mindlessly buying them as true!
I don't exactly get angry either at people "looking backwards fondly at some idealized past as a guide to future whatevers". Fair enough, find your inspiration where you can. But I get *even less angry*, and indeed nod quite approvingly in the general direction of someone who just shines a torch and explains the actual history of things, and how it differs form the popular narrative.
The prototypical argument here was one person saying they like "Indian food" and another going on a rant that ended by calling a politician fascist.
Isn't there a place for saying "yes, I like this, this seems fun and good, I want my kids to be able to try this", without on the one hand being forced to sit through a rant about how everything you like is bad and problematic, or on the other hand coming up with some bullshit about how ancient Indians 20,000 years ago were cooking identical aloo tikka masala and it's been the beating heart and generative core of the subcontinental civilization throughout the subsequent millennia?
Well yes of course there's plenty of space between! I'd say it's basic manners, you don't want to be a literalist bore when someone is talking poetically, metaphorically or just vaguely. If you like tikka masala, you just like a dish, it's quite irrelevant whether it's a recent invention or comes straight from the Atharva Veda!
EDIT: I also don't see either Scott or Sam arguing for more impromptu "rants that stuff is bad and problematic", in fact I'd guess that both of them dislike such rants.
Hey, speaking of tradition, remember Bladder Ball? Did they still have it when you were there?
I think it had died out by my time. :-/
Looked it up in Wiki. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bladderball
Really gave me a strange and pleasant tingle to hear so many familiar place names and street names. Elm St., Hillhouse Ave., Beinecke Plaza and of course A. Bartlett Giamatti. My years there were mostly good. Do you remember yours fondly?
I do. :-)
I never even attended. But it was a day of drunks and craziness. An inflated bladder ball was somehow handed over to the undergrads —
I think it was quite large, like maybe 5 feet in diameter — and then the colleges competed all day for the thing. This involved a lot of plotting and planning and diplomacy and lies, mostly that rather than running around in a mob on a field grabbing at the thing. One of the years I was there JE deliberately de-inflated
the bladderball — sort of a
3-D version of cutting thru the Gordon knot — and won. But the other colleges didn’t take that well, and all year you heard chants of “JE sucks” and came across JE Sux graffiti. Then JE took recenge on one college — what for? I dunno —
It it had something to do with the college’s response to the deflation of the bladderball. So people from JE set up a device that poured over people exiting the dining hall after breakfast a mixture of 2 chemicals, one of which smelled like shit and one like vomit. Device was in the rafters and the foul smelling acids damaged toe finish on the rafters and they had to be replaced.
Back when life was simple and fun, & all you had to figure out was how to deliver the butyric acid
In Edinburgh they symbolicly kill the Green Man every year: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0kl7wjn2jlo
The Ken Burns documentary about Country Music makes a similar point about that genre. No matter how far back you go into the history of Country Music or its roots, the music was always about idealizing a simpler past time; "Traditional Country Music" was never the genuine article in a purist sense, rather *pretending to make traditional American hillbilly music* is all Country Music ever was from the beginning. It's role-playing all the way down.
I suppose the question is "how fake is role-playing?" I say it's a spectrum. The image of the old south presented in minstrelsy, for example, is deliberately deceptive. On the other hand imitation is a really important way of learning, so if "imitation is fake" we're stuck.
In the finest tradition of this then-as-yet-unwritten post, a couple months back on the subreddit we spotted in the wild a made-up SMAC quote falsely attributed to Chairman Yang: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/19dgg5l/should_the_future_be_human/kjbflla/?context=3
That's hilariously awesome!
I don't think a building designed by the standards of an architectural movement in favor of ugliness is a good example of "just doing stuff". They weren't trying. If you tried, you might still draw on elements of a few traditions for inspiration, combine them with your own ideas, and get something that looks good, without conforming to any tradition in particular.
Good art has never been tried.
Since it's come up a lot in the comments, I'll point out that the nuclear family has been the norm in England since at least the 13th century, if not before. (Hence, probably, why our words "mother", "father", "brother", "sister", "son" and "daughter" all derive from Old English, but our words for "aunt", "uncle", and "cousin" all had to be borrowed.) It might not be the traditional arrangement for every society, but nor is it some unstable modern construct that only existed for a few decades in the early 1900s like a lot of people seem to imagine.
This matches my map of the world very well. I tend to associate this with stories of fake inventions that made someone else surge to beat them by the knowledge that it is possible (where StarCraft came from) or how the overwhelming belief by the English in the Ancient Rights And Liberties Of Englishmen Dating Back To Anglo-Saxon Times (probably false) provided one of the two cornerstones of modern democracy, along with idealistic liberals looking back on their vague concept of the Roman Republic and saying "it worked once, let's do it again."
There's also "The Philosopher's Alice" (https://archive.org/details/philosophersalic0000unse).
Surprised not to see mention here of "Ossian", the made-up ancient Celtic bard whose purported poems, actually composed by an otherwise undistinguished 18th C Scotsman, were hailed as the equal of Homer's and played a huge role in 19th C European Romanticism and nationalism. The most traditional of fake traditional sources, perhaps?
As an example of fake tradition inspiring great art: I learned about Ossian because Brahms wrote several achingly beautiful choral settings of Ossianic poetry, e.g. "Darthulas Grabesgesang" and the "Gesang aus Fingal".
Or the Welsh Eisteddfod, which in its current form owes way more to Iolo Morganwg than any actual surviving native traditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iolo_Morganwg
I think taking it as "yes we know it's all made up but let's have fun with it" is the best way to go there, and I think the Welsh might be on that track now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUoQmk3kWnM
We dodged a bullet on this kind of thing in Ireland, in the early Celtic Revival and independent statehood days, there were a lot of efforts to establish 'genuine Gaelic culture' but most people were either authentically poor and starving on the land and couldn't be bothered, or were living in towns and didn't want to go around in saffron kilts.
It was beautifully satirised by Flann O'Brien/Myles na gCopaleen in "An Béal Bocht/The Poor Mouth" published in 1941.
‘There was a man in this townland at one time and he was named Sitric O’Sanassa. He had the best hunting, a generous heart and every other good quality which earn praise and respect at all tirnes, But alas! there was another report abroad concerning him which was neither good nor fortunate. He possessed the very best poverty, hunger and distress also. He was generous and open-handed and he never possessed the smallest object which he did not share with the neighbours; nevertheless, I can never remember him during my time possessing the least thing, even the quantity of little potatoes needful to keep body and soul joined together. In Corkadoragha, where every human being was sunk in poverty, we always regarded him as a recipient of alms and compassion. The gentlemen from Dublin who came in motors to inspect the paupers praised him for his Gaelic poverty and stated that they never saw anyone who appeared so truly Gaelic. One of the gentlemen broke a little bottle of water which Sitric had, because, said he, it spoiled the effect. There was no one in Ireland comparable to O’Sanassa in the excellence of his poverty; the amount of famine which was delineated in his person. He had neither pig nor cup nor any household goods. In the depths of winter I often saw him on the hillside fighting and competing with a stray dog, both contending for a narrow hard bone and the same snorting and angry barking issuing from them both. He had no cabin either, nor any acquaintance with shelter or kitchen heat. He had excavated a hole with his two hands in the middle of the countryside and over its mouth he had placed old sacks and branches of trees as well as any useful object that might provide shelter against the water which came down on the countryside every night. Strangers passing by thought that he was a badger in the earth when they perceived the heavy breathing which came from the recesses of the hole as well as the wild appearance of the habitation in general.’
The hypothetical guy who likes Indian food isn't making any particular claims about long standing tradition (he probably knows Chicken Tikka Masala is a British/Pakistani innovation).
On the other hand, "paganism" often claims historical roots which, as this article points out, often turn out to be not nearly as old as claimed.
I think many of the pretension accusations are proxies for other, truer objections, since attacking someone's hypocrisy or lack of authenticity is much more socially effective than attacking their values directly. "You're evil" is kinda lame; "you're a poser" actually stings.
It doesn't help that fans of artificial tradition rarely acknowledge it as just a pointer, for the same reason.
"Your imaginary version of Morocco"
Al Andalus wasn't Morocco, it was Muslim Spain.
Speaking of Muslim Spain, it's about time current Spain reclaimed its cultural heritage... Ibn Arabi was at least as important a thinker as e.g Ramon Llull, but hardly anyone in Spain has heard of him.
This just seems like literally the same argument you had against dogwhistles, where you were somehow shocked that somebody who likes a very unpopular position might try to hide that from the masses while still communicating it to their side.
If somebody is arguing for "1950's family structure", what they are actually doing, 99% of the time at a minimum, is arguing against civil rights, and we really don't have to pretend otherwise.
Well damn it, I was going to keep out of this, but sorry Mark, you drew me in.
"When someone is arguing for traditional family structure, what they really mean is I'M A FASCIST YES I LOVE HITLER".
I think I have been on here a time or two arguing about I really would like if we could go back to the idea that a family is two parents, married, who have kids and they didn't necessarily have the kids old enough to be ringbearers when Mom and Dad decided to get hitched. Bonus super plus they are the mutual parents of the kids, not "mom's kids by her three previous boyfriends and dad's kids by his two babymommas".
If that makes me a raving Hitler lover - well, no, I don't love Hitler. What I hate is seeing kids getting destroyed by fuckwad 'parents' who prioritise their own wants, needs and desires over being adults and buckling down to raising their children with attention to the wants, needs and desires of the kids. No, Dad has to dump his family because he is called to be a musician. Mom fools the social worker that her current partner is a domestic abuser because she's angling to get a better house and she needs the bleeding-heart to back her up on "but she's only a poor single mother". [And before anybody thinks I'm making that up, those are only two of the real-life examples from my time back in social housing, so go suck a lemon].
But yeah, that means I'm arguing against civil rights. You got me. I want all the black people back in the cotton fields.
Tell me, what is it like to be 100% right 100% of the time about every single social issue? It must be lovely never to have one shred of doubt that you are on the right side of history and the values you happen to have rattling around in your skull this minute are the only possible correct take on anything.
In case anyone hadn't noticed, yes I'm pissed off about this. Maybe there are dickhead Americans who do want to turn back the clock, but not everybody who thinks 'we threw the baby out with the bathwater' is secretly sizing up Hugo Boss uniforms and polishing the ole jackboots.
Listen, if you heard "arguing against civil rights" and immediately assumed that meant "overthrowing democracy", that's on you. There's plenty of room for someone to be wrong, and then even more room for someone to be an awful person, without being literally fascist.
"If somebody is arguing for "1950's family structure", what they are actually doing, 99% of the time at a minimum, is arguing against civil rights, and we really don't have to pretend otherwise."
Since I am an idiot simpleton who is too stupid to understand that In Fact The Past Always Sucked In Every Way, please clarify for me what you mean by "civil rights" and how that is tied up with traditional family structure.
See, I'm not seeing how you get from A to B there. Civil rights = democracy, okay. Would like fewer broken families = against civil rights, not getting that.
99% at a minimum says would like fewer broken families = 99% at a minimum against civil rights = against democracy = really are fascist. How you get 99% as your estimation, please show the working.
In exactly the same way I don't have to pretend that people talking "1950's family structure" aren't actually talking about something else, I don't have to pretend like you have no idea what I mean by civil rights. Please be a troll somewhere else.
Deiseach is rightly ticked off but not at all a troll.
Unlike her, I am American. I initially took your comment about civil rights to refer to racial equality, and in that context your original post looks pretty incoherent. Unfortunately, there really are a lot of people who argue that way: "If you oppose me on this issue, that can only be because you are broadly against truth and goodness."
On further reflection, I take your use of the term civil rights to refer to acceptance of homosexuality, gender transition, and the like. Opposing those things is indeed normal among supporters of the nuclear family, but that's not the primary motive you seem to believe. Social conservatives do in fact care about the health and flourishing of families in their own right and not as some sort of pretext.
Yeah, it took me a moment to figure out too, since in isolation, "Civil Rights" is strongly associated with the, well, Civil Rights Movement.
But I don't have any idea what you mean.
You dropped a smirking little remark about dogwhistles and 99% of people really being some sort of anti-civil rights.
What do you mean by civil rights?
Jim Crow laws?
Sodomy laws?
Anti-drug laws?
The marriage ban?
You could, for all I know from your bon-mot there, be referring to "It is my human right to get blasted off my face as and when I like and no state or power has the right to forbid me or make that illegal".
I realise that there are some people in American, and sadly now over here in Europe as well, politics and social movements who are what is called the far-right and white supremacists. Let's throw in Christo-fascist while we're at it, that seems like a term you might like, given your certainty about the sort of people who are socially conservative.
What I'm saying is that this is like Scott's example about Indian food.
"I wish society would encourage traditional marriage more"
"Oh, so you're saying you want to go back to the days of lynching black men and persecuting gays and marital rape is legal, do you?"
"I just like stable families!"
Because I've seen, and continue to see, a shit-ton of broken families in the jobs I've had, and we are not living in the new paradise of "once free from the constraints of the Bad Old Days when the Church ruled with a heavy hand, all will be happy happy joy joy".
I'm willing to accept gay marriage is legal. I just want more relationships involving people having kids to *be* marriages, not "we shacked up, we had a kid, we broke up, we moved on to new partners, rinse and repeat".
Yeah, I know that won't prevent relationships breaking down. But we've thrown away the anchor and now the ship is drifting loose. Maybe anchors are, in fact, a good idea?
"If somebody is arguing for "1950's family structure", what they are actually doing, 99% of the time at a minimum, is arguing against civil rights, and we really don't have to pretend otherwise."
Oh, and I wasn't around for the 50s, I was born in the 60s. I'd be quite happy with 70s marriage structure, it's the *structure* I want, not any particular era. But that's okay Mark, you know that I *really* mean "women, gays and minorities are sub-humans with no rights" at least 99% of the time I say that, yeah?
I'll just chime in to tell you that you are the archetype of toxic and hateful discourse, and that you are the *exact* reason for all of the distrust, polarisation, and general bad will in our society.
I can't even compehend the nerve of making a ridiculously broad accusation, giving no reasons for it or even explanation of what you meant, and then when specifically asked for an explanation not only *still* refusing to give one but telling the other person it's their fault for not knowing what you meant!
Tell me: do you feel good about yourself? Do you like it when people make baseless accusations against *you* and don't even explain them when asked? Do you appreciate being told that when you say you're concerned about civil rights, that that's really just a way of saying you're a satanic pedophile who supports terrorism and loves to kill babies? Do you enjoy that? Do you think that kind of discourse is healthy and kind and conducive to social harmony?
If not...maybe consider treating other people with the same fucking respect you'd want for yourself.
Admittedly this is an American based infrastructure with an American author but even there it’s possible to imagine that there might be other people posting from other countries from time to time. It’s possible that deiseach - who is Irish I believe - is pro the 1950s nuclear family and uninterested in returning to the status quo of America in the 1950s in other respects. In fact Americans can make that distinction as well.
In any case your response is to be very specific (and parochial) about a general issue.
"99% of the time at a minimum, is arguing against civil rights, and we really don't have to pretend otherwise."
What specific civil rights are you referring to?
How do you decide what is a dog whistle and what isn't?
Like, for what values of P can you safely ignore people who say "I like P" because they actually mean "I like Q"?
Having recently read the ACOUP series on Sparta, I feel like Brett would have a field day with this post.
There were several Greek authors who wrote about how great Sparta was, and their fine military tradition. These Greeks were writing centuries after the supposed golden age of Sparta, as in their time Sparta was either an irrelevant regional power or essentially a theme park for Roman tourists. So they were idealizing the past. And this continues to the present day. The US military uses the Spartan lambda logo in places, and the Halo video game series called their super soldiers that fought aliens Spartans.
Except Spartan society was pretty awful, and they were marginally competent at military affairs. Their battle record was close to 50/50 and they had serious logistical issues operating out of their own territory. Philip II of Macedon would wipe the floor with Sparta. Supposedly the Spartan society was structured to raise fierce warriors, although in reality it seemed to mainly function as a way to oppress slaves. Which made up a whopping ~85% of Spartan society, far more than other Greek states or the Romans. For comparison, the Antebellum South had a slave population that was roughly 1/3rd.
So why did the later Greeks think Sparta was so great? The authors whose work survives were mostly elitists using the Spartans as a mirror to write about perceived flaws with their contemporary society. Herodotus, for instance, was from a rich and connected family and he was a powerful general, so probably he was the 1% of ancient Greece. And he would write about how the Spartans were so much better, because they *really* kept the women and slaves in their place, unlike the wimpy Greeks of the Athens Herodotus lived in. Or maybe because Sparta was ruled by two kings of the just Spartan class of citizens, unlike Athens where the filthy plebs could influence the government through democracy.
The Romans had a similar cultural trope where they would write about how the barbarians were more virtuous and pure, insulated from the effeminizing influence of decadent civilization. To be clear, when Greeks or Romans talk about virtue and manliness, they primarily mean fighting prowess as a warrior. Caesar would write in his commentaries on the Gallic Wars how the tribes furthest away from Rome were the hardest to fight and the most fierce. Yet Vercingetorix would prove to be his biggest challenge, and the Arverni were one of the closest tribes to Rome that had borrowed a lot of Roman tactics and institutions! Tacitus would write about the fierce German barbarians, despite never having met one or traveled to Germania. Yet Arminius, the mastermind behind the ambush of Varus' legions in Teutoberg Forest, was taken at a young age and raised in Rome!
We can also see in hindsight that all of these Roman authors writing about the sad decadence of society and lamenting about superior barbarian manliness were completely wrong. Their writings predate the best centuries of military power by the Roman state, and the biggest threats to Roman rule were the barbarians that were most like the Romans. So I think it is completely valid to point out that people idealizing the past are often imagining a fantasy that never existed, and believing in baseless lies. In the example of Sparta, trying to emulate their romanticized society would in fact make things objectively worse for everyone who had to live through it.
Standing ovation! Fantastic comment, and I second the ACOUP recommendation.
The ACOUP series on Sparta is strongly coloured by the author's dislike of the Spartans. In particular, his sections on "Spartan Battle" and "Spartan Ends" are extremely misleading, and his treatment of Herodotus, both here and in the "Fremen Mirage" series, is absolute garbage.
It's pretty clear that Devereaux is biased against the Spartans, but saying his analysis is garbage without offering anything else is lazy and not persuasive.
Unfortunately I don't have the time now, but I'll get something up tomorrow or Saturday showing why it's bad.
Right, let’s drill down into what Devereaux says. (For anyone else reading this, I’ll mostly be referring to his statements here https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vi-spartan-battle/ and here https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/ )
From the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC, the Athenians adopted a strategy of avoiding pitched battle with the Spartans, instead withdrawing into Athens itself whilst the Spartans ravaged the Attic countryside. This indicates that the Spartans already had a formidable military reputation – so much so that the Athenians didn’t even think it worth trying to fight their army – so if we want to find out how the Spartans got this reputation, we need to look at the period before 431.
Fortunately, Devereaux has a big list of battles involving Sparta; the battles taking place before 431 are as follows:
<i>494 – Battle of Sepeia – Victory over the Argives
480 – Battle of Thermopylae – Defeat against the Persians (Coalition)
480 – Battle of Artemesium – Draw/Defeat against the Persians (Coalition), Naval Battle
480 – Battle of Salamis – Victory over the Persians (Coalition; Minimal Spartan involvement), Naval Battle
479 – Battle of Plataea – Victory over the Persians (Coalition)
479 – Battle of Mycale – Victory of the Persians (Coalition)
4?? (early) – Battle of Tegea – Victory over Tegea (Hdt. 9.35.2)
4?? (early) – Battle of Dipaea – Victory over Tegea and Arcadia (Hdt. 9.35.2)
457 – Battle of Tanagra – Victory/Draw over Athens and Argos (note: effects undone within the year due to heavy Spartan losses which result in Spartan withdrawal. With the sack of Gythion, Thuc. 1.108.3-4, war ends in a draw)</i>
So, that’s a total of seven victories, one draw, and one defeat. If we exclude the naval battles, both of which had minimal Spartan involvement (although this is only pointed out regarding the victorious battle – I wonder why that might be), we’re left with six victories and one defeat, a win rate of 86% -- very high, and easily enough to explain how the Spartans got their reputation, particularly because the sole defeat was a glorious last stand against overwhelming odds.
So, how does Devereaux claim that the Spartans only had a win rate of around 50%? Quite simply, because the Spartans suffered a precipitous decline after the Peloponnesian War and started losing most of their wars. But this isn’t exactly a novel observation – indeed, it’s exactly what the primary sources say happened! Devereaux’s battle list doesn’t prove that ancient authors were wrong about Spartan military prowess, it proves that they were right.
Now, before we get onto the whole “Herodotus memed everyone into thinking the Spartans were great when they actually sucked” argument, I’d like to consider Devereaux’s statements about Spartan logistics, Spartan strategy, and Spartan diplomacy. Regarding logistics, Devereaux sneers at “their almost comical inability to sustain operations in Attica during the Peloponnesian War”, adding that “They are two days – on foot! – from a major friendly trade port (Corinth), and they run out of supplies.” Except we know that Sparta could maintain armies abroad, because they did – in Asia Minor, Attica, northern Greece – before, during, and after the Peloponnesian War. Unless we suppose that the Spartans somehow forgot about logistics for these particular invasions of Attica, but remembered them at other times, we can say that supply difficulties weren’t dictating how long the Spartans spent ravaging the Athenians’ fields. Devereaux says that “Thucydides is in several cases (e.g. Thuc. 3.1.3) explicit that what causes these armies to fail and disperse back home is that they run out of supplies.” However, the referenced chapter of Thucydides doesn’t actually say this. What Thucydides actually says is that “After staying the time for which they had taken provisions, the invaders retired and dispersed to their several cities.” Contra Devereaux, there’s no indication that the invaders wanted to stay longer but were prevented by supply problems; it’s more plausible, given Sparta’s elsewhere-documented ability to send armies further afield and for longer periods of time, that they first decided how long they wanted to spend in Attica, and then took as much food as would be necessary.
As for Spartan strategy, again Devereaux sneers at them for their Persian War plan of “find a choke-point, fortify it and hold it indefinately [sic] with a hoplite army”. It’s difficult to see what other strategy they could have employed on land, however. The Greeks were superior in heavy infantry to the Persians, but greatly inferior in cavalry, so fighting in open terrain would just have resulted in them getting outflanked, surrounded, and destroyed. The only hope the Greeks had of beating the Persian army in battle was to find a place where their flanks would be secure and try and bait the Persians into attacking head-on. Did such a strategy severely limit the Greeks’ options and make it difficult for them to win unless the Persians obediently went along? Yes. But the problem wasn’t that the Spartans were too stupid to realise this, it was that Greece lacked the pasture to raise enough horses to match the enemy cavalry, placing them at a military disadvantage against the more balanced Persian army.
(Incidentally, Devereaux misrepresents Herodotus when he says that “the Battle of Thermopylae is often represented in popular culture as an intentional delaying action, but it was nothing of the sort – Herodotus is clear that this was supposed to be the decisive land engagement (Hdt. 7.175”. Herodotus says that Thermopylae was supposed to be the *site* of the decisive land battle, but he also says that the force with Leonidas was just an advanced guard, with the main army to follow along soon, and that the battle occurred sooner than the Greeks were expecting, Hdt. 7.206. Devereaux misrepresenting Herodotus will be something of a theme.)
Finally, we have Spartan diplomacy. Devereaux says that Spartan diplomacy was bad, as evidenced by the fact that their allies kept turning against them. But the same could be said of basically any Greek state. Athens ended up alienating its own allies and the rest of Greece with its empire-building, resulting in its defeat in the Peloponnesian War. (It then established a second empire, and managed to alienate its allies *again*. Learning from past mistakes was not a virtue of Greek statecraft.) Thebes, which finally broke Spartan power at Leuctra, ended up losing its hegemony soon afterwards. Macedon, being stronger than any city-state, was able to exert more control, but even it faced constant rebellions in Greece. It wasn’t until the overwhelming might of Rome came along that the region was finally pacified. Greek city-states of this period were strongly competitive, hard short memories, and tended to intensely resent anything that suggested inferiority or subordination to another city-state. This all made achieving hegemony a very tall order. Sparta wasn’t successful at this, but neither was anyone else, so we don’t need to appeal to any special defect with the Spartans in particular to explain their failure here.
Anyway, I’ve got to get ready for work now, so I’ll wrap it up here. If anyone’s interested in reading more of my ramblings, I’ll try and get up a comment later on about Herodotus and his portrayal of Sparta, the Greeks in general, and the barbarians.
Good commentary, thanks.
You're welcome.
Would be interested in reading more.
Pt 2/2
So, we’ve seen that, during the period in which they actually acquired their reputation for military excellence, the Spartans are recorded as winning far more battles than they lost. We don’t really need to look any further to explain how they got their reputation – they were good, and people noticed they were good. But because Devereaux has smushed together the Spartan record from all different periods to make the Spartans look bad, he’s left with the problem of how these allegedly incompetent people came to be so hyped. His answer is that ancient Greek authors with an ideological axe to grind, starting with Herodotus, made up the Spartan reputation for fighting, and everyone since has just uncritically followed their lead.
Now, there are several problems with this theory, aside from the fact that it’s an attempt to answer an entirely self-created problem. The first is that it overstates Herodotus’ influence. Yes, he was widely-read and influential, but he was never the final arbiter of Greek historiography – Thucydides, for example, quite plainly criticises him on the very first page of his History of the Peloponnesian War. (Incidentally, Thucydides had fought the Spartans during this same war, so he’d be in a position to know if Herodotus was full of BS about their fighting skill.) Even if Herodotus had had some narrative or ideological reason for portraying the Spartans as a bunch of super-soldiers, then, there’d be no reason for everyone else to go along with him.
Secondly, the chronology doesn’t really line up. As mentioned earlier, the Spartan reputation for military prowess evidently pre-dates the start of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. But Herodotus was writing after the outbreak of this war, which he mentions (Hdt. 7.137, 9.73). Even if we suppose that parts of the Histories were released earlier, before the war began, we’re still left with an implausibly short amount of time for a part-finished work of history to convince the Athenians that the Spartans – whom they have fought, and fought alongside, multiple times in living memory – were super-tough soldiers when in fact they were nothing of the sort.
Thirdly, it misrepresents the contents of Herodotus’ work. Devereaux, following Hartog, says that Herodotus is really writing about Greece all the time, and that his portrayals of barbarians are just intended to provide a foil to the Greeks, a literary “other” to help produce a sense of shared Greek identity and culture. Contrary to what Devereaux strongly implies, this is not actually an uncontroversial position among scholars (indeed, when I studied the topic a few years ago, I had the distinct impression that most historians would reject it), and with good reason, because Herodotus is quite happy to highlight points of similarity between Greeks and barbarians. He’s quite happy to say, for example, that the Lydians’ customs are almost identical to the Greeks’ (1.94), that some Greek customs have found favour amongst the Persians (1.135), and even that the Greeks copied most of their religion off the Egyptians (2.49, 50, 52). Nor, contra Devereaux, is there a dichotomy between brave Greeks and decadent, unwarlike barbarians. There are plenty of Greeks on the Persian side (9.31 etc.), the rebellion of Greek Ionians against the Persians is a complete failure due to the Greeks’ laziness and indiscipline (6.12), the Greek army sent to sack Sardis runs away as soon as the Persians fight back and subsequently ends up being defeated (5.101 f.) and the Greek navy almost flees in panic before the battle at Artemisium (7.183, 8. 4, 9). Meanwhile the Persians at Plataea show themselves no less valiant than the Spartans, though they are worse-equipped and less well-disciplined (9.62). As for Sparta specifically, Herodotus explicitly highlights their similarities in custom to the Egyptians (6.60) and even the Spartans (6.58-9). So much for Sparta being the ideal embodiment of Greekness, in contrast to the alien Persians!
So, that’s why I say that Devereaux’s treatment of Herodotus is garbage: it’s an implausible solution, to a non-existent problem, which is inconsistent with the actual text of Herodotus.
And finally, I’ll just respond to a couple of points which I don’t think are in the “Spartan Mirage” series, but which probably owe their origin to Devereaux’s blog:
<i>Herodotus, for instance, was from a rich and connected family and he was a powerful general, so probably he was the 1% of ancient Greece.</i>
Herodotus was no doubt from a rich and connected family (he’d have to be, to do all that travelling), but I’m not aware of any evidence that he was ever a general, or even that he had military experience. The usual belief, as far as I’m aware, is that he was a merchant, as evidenced both by his wide-ranging travels and his interest in the goods produced by each country. The Spartans, of course, were famously down on trade and money-making, so it’s unlikely that Herodotus’ background would make him over-prejudiced in Sparta’s favour.
<i>And he would write about how the Spartans were so much better, because they *really* kept the women and slaves in their place, unlike the wimpy Greeks of the Athens Herodotus lived in.</i>
Spartan women were notoriously liberated and even (gasp!) influential in political life, so if Herodotus believed that women should be chained to the kitchen stove he picked the wrong city-state to idolise. And I’m not actually aware of any ancient author, even among the pro-Spartan ones, who praises their treatment of the Helots. Mostly they either gloss over it in embarrassed silence, or else try to explain it away, like when Plutarch argues that the krypteia must be a later corruption of the original Spartan constitution, because surely Lycurgus was far too humane and benevolent to countenance such brutality.
<i>Or maybe because Sparta was ruled by two kings of the just Spartan class of citizens, unlike Athens where the filthy plebs could influence the government through democracy.</i>
Herodotus does quip that an Ionian ambassador found it easier to hoodwink 30,000 Athenian citizens than a single Spartan king (Hdt. 5.97), but he also says that, after establishing democracy, “The Athenians accordingly increased in power; and it is evident, not by one instance only but in every way, that Equality is an excellent thing, since the Athenians while they were ruled by despots were not better in war that any of those who dwelt about them, whereas after they had got rid of despots they became far the first. This proves that when they were kept down they were wilfully slack, because they were working for a master, whereas when they had been set free each one was eager to achieve something for himself” (Hdt. 5.78). In other words, he’s really not some kind of democracy-hater who thinks the great unwashed should be kept far away from politics.
Interesting. And kudos for following up with some solid information. My response to you was a bit short, and I see that you were simply under time constraints rather than doing an unsupported drive by.
Devereaux's conclusion was two fold; the Spartan society was actually brutal and awful, and this didn't even have the consolation of creating great warriors. Evidently the Spartans were quite militarily capable until after the Peloponnesian War, although that still leaves a long time period where they were not competent. His first point was largely correct, no? Especially regarding the hereditary plots of land given to the ruling Spartitiate class, and how this was consolidated into fewer and fewer families until the system basically collapsed. Life as anyone other than a Spartitiate - so 95% of people in Sparta - sounded notably horrible, even relative to other states in Greece at the time.
Oh yeah, Spartan society was pretty brutal, and under a Rawlsian veil-of-ignorance type scenario I'd probably choose literally any other ancient Greek city-state instead. Though despite the constant threat of Helot uprisings, Sparta did manage to stave off revolution and civil strife much more successfully than most other Greek city-states, which were usually riven with internal conflict. Maybe the reason was simply that the Helot threat forced the Spartiates to stick together for self-preservation, IDK, but I think it's understandable that, to an observer from another city-state, Sparta would seem (even if misleadingly) like some kind of beacon of order and stability.
Right. And for context, the "Fremen Mirage" that Devereaux is arguing against, is the theory that brutal societies (whether internally or externally imposed) produce badass warriors what can whip any pansy "civilized" army in any fair fight. Which, OK, needs some serious pushback. And since many proponents of this theory use "Look! At! Spartaaaa!" as their primary argument, Devereaux pushes back aginst that hard.
But Sparta really was a brutal society that really did produce badass soldiers who could whip just about any other army of the day in any vaguely fair fight that didn't involve e.g. being flanked by cavalry on open ground. And then they got tripped up by demographic collapse due to their brutal notions of racial purity. But until then, they really were a data point in favor of the theory Devereaux wants to tear down.
He'd have been better off pointing out that one data point is not enough, and that correlation is not causation, the early Spartans may have been badasses for reasons other than their brutality.
Pretty much this, yeah. Re: Sparta, I think a better argument against them would be that, whilst Spartan society produced some very tough soldiers, it was also very brittle. States like Athens, Thebes, and Macedon were able to recover from some pretty severe beatings (extending, in Thebes' case, to being completely destroyed by Alexander and then being reconstituted several decades later), because a large portion of their inhabitants were invested (emotionally, economically, politically) in the continued survival of the state. With Sparta, on the other hand, the vast majority of the inhabitants were Helots who only participated in the Spartan system out of fear, so once the Spartiates became too few to keep them in line the system fell apart irrevocably.
Re: the "Fremen Mirage", I feel like the term conflates two different positions. One is that people from primitive societies are all a bunch of Conan the Barbarian types who can fight off ten pencil-armed "civilised" weaklings at once. The other is that hardship is character-building, and that people whose lives are too easy and comfortable will lack the strength of character necessary to maintain an advanced society. Certainly there are similarities between the two positions, but there are also important differences, and I get the impression that Devereaux's Fremen Mirage series spends most of its time arguing against the first view while the people he's trying to refute generally believe something closer to the second.
I think you are mischaracterizing the objection people have to the RTVRN crowd.
It's not that they want to RTVRN; the objection is "You have political prescriptions or moral values I disagree with, and you are laundering them as wanting to return to tradition rather than what you REALLY want, which is (BAD THING of choice)"
In that context, it really does matter what really happened when and why.
When I hear trad in the american context, I don't think tradition. I mean, I'm Traditional as fuck! I RTVRN at least three times a day!
To give my full creds:
I shave with a straight razor, I do woodworking with hand tools only, I grow as much of my own food as is practical 100% from local inputs with no mechanical aid, I have a stone and mud oven made 100% from stuff I dug up in my own acreage, I make my own soap from lye and fat, I heat my home with a wood fire and cool it with hopes and dreams, I just bought a scythe blade from the 1800's which I am going to restore and then fit to a snath I made myself to mow my lawn, I get my water from a 1900's cast iron and stone well that I dropped a sub pump down, but I have a hand pump on there also just for kicks, and 1000 other things.
None of those are Trad.
Hema isn't trad, Pankration isn't trad, SCA isn't trad, a dude who wears period appropriate clothing and uses period appropriate gear and goes into the mountains like Lewis and Clark is not Trad.
When people dog someone for being trad, it's because they suspect the the 1940's aesthetic is a motte for women not being allowed to open bank accounts without their husbands permission; which is why the attack is "You don't know shit about this thing you profess to love, because you don't actually love it."
Hey, congrats on your chosen lifestyle, it sounds really interesting that you'd chose to do those things, why don't you blog about it.
And a small request: we're not all plugged into trendy Twitter / X / TikTok / whatever, it would be helpful to give some explanation of the movements your reference. The googles tells me that Hema and SCA are related to swordfighting, but the only "RTVRN" I can find seems to be some GPS-adjacent network, which is probably not the one you're talking about.
Thanks for the bucket of references. Is "hopes and dreams" original, or did I just fail to find the reference? (I'm so going to steal it, regardless.)
On (1), this misses the whole point. The problem is not that someone wants a 1950s-style nuclear family for themselves; the problem is that the people in question want to enforce it for the whole of society. In that light the problems of the 1950s are quite significant: trying to fit everyone into the same box means chopping off appendages, and stuff like suburban sprawl was never actually sustainable. Similarly, it's one thing to like Indian cuisine, another thing to restructure our agricultural industry around copying India; trying to go back to the agricultural practices of an idealized past is literally what Pol Pot did, to genocidal effect. Moorish revival works because it's an aesthetic only; if you try to engineer a building using the materials that 11th century Morocco had, then at best you'll have an 11th century Morocco quality of house; if you aren't an expert on historical Moroccan construction, you'll end up with a pile of rubble.
On (2) - yes, human nature means that it's often convenient to believe innovations are a return to the traditional past. But there's a whole principle of truth-seeking that says to avoid this type of convenient lie, and at the absolute least to avoid lying to yourself. And in general, I'd argue that modern culture is far too hesitant towards social innovation of any kind, and this has left us stuck with a wildly dysfunctional society - the whole anti-progress stack. There's value in celebrating innovation for its own sake.
I want to return to the lifestyle lived by my ancestors in the moments after the Big Bang
I mean, of course it's an idealization. Why would we steal the past's bad ideas, or it's no-longer-needed compromises?
I guess it needs to be said... Props to Scott for pointing out Jethro Tull's album Thick as a Brick, it's old stuff by now and the style is long out of fashion but its still seriously good stuff, and quite a fun one to listen to.
I bring up that “Indian food is Indian aristocrat food” only in reply to “Indian food is so much better than English food” and talking about peasant English food.
Three of my favorite quotes are apocryphal:
* may you live in interesting times
* too soon to tell
* Earnests shacklefords help wanted ad
I was especially gutted by "too soon to tell"
Dundee Man Lost At Sea
Quotes concerning rumours of my death have been greatly embellished.
I couldn't find a good version of Lovecraft's 'Nathicana' online (one of the examples of parodies being better than the original), so I've typed it up from a scanned copy: https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/L/Lovecraft%20-%20Selected%20Poetry%202.pdf.
It was in the pale gardens of Zais;
The mist-shrouded gardens of Zais,
Where blossoms the white nephalot,
The redolent herald of midnight.
There slumber the still lakes of crystal,
And streamlets that flow without murm'ring;
Smooth streamlets from caverns of Kathos
Where brood the calm spirits of twilight.
And over the lakes and the streamlets
Are bridges of pure alabaster,
White bridges all cunningly carven
With figures of fairies and daemons.
Here glimmer strange suns and strange planets,
And strange is the crescent Banapis
That sets 'yond the ivy-grown ramparts
Where thickens the dust of the evening.
Here fall the white vapours of Yabon;
The thought-blotting vapours of Yabon;
And here in the swirl of the vapours
I saw the divine Nathicana;
The garlanded, white Nathicana;
The slender, black-hair'd Nathicana;
The sloe-eyed, red-lipped Nathicana;
The pale-rob'd, belov'd Nathicana.
And ever she was my belov'd,
From ages when time was unfashioned;
From days when the stars were not fashioned
Nor anything fashion'd but Yabon.
And here dwelt we ever and ever,
The innocent children of Zais,
At peace in the paths and the arbours,
White-crowned with the blest nephalote.
How oft would we float in the twilight
O'er flow'r-cover'd pastures and hillsides
All white with the lowly astalthon;
The lowly yet lovely astalthon,
And dream in a world made of dreaming
The dreams that are fairer than aidenn;
Bright dreams that are truer than reason!
So dreamed and so lov'd we thro ages,
Till came the cursed season of Dzannin;
The daemon-damn'd season of Dzannin;
Where red shone the suns and the planets,
And red gleam'd the crescent Banapis,
And red fell the vapours of Yabon.
There redden'd the blossoms and streamlets,
And lakes that lay under the bridges,
And even the calm alabaster
Glowed pink with uncanny reflections
Till all the carv'd fairies and demons
Leer'd redly from backgrounds of shadow.
Now redden'd my vision, and madly
I strove to peer thro' the dense curtain
And glimpsed the divine Nathicana;
The pure, ever-pale Nathicana;
The lov'd, the unchang'd Nathicana.
But vorted on vortex of madness
Beclouded my labouring vision;
My damnable, reddening vision
That built a new world for my seeing;
A new world of redness and darkness,
A horrible coma called living.
So now in this coma call'd living
I view the bright phantoms of beauty;
The false, hollow phantoms of beauty
That cloak all the evils of Dzannin.
I view them with infinite longing,
So like do they seem to my lov'd one:
Yet foul from thier eyes shines thier evil; [sic]
Their cruel and pitiless evil,
More evil than Thaphron or Latgoz,
Twice ill for its gorbeous concealment. [sic]
And only in slumbers of midnight
Appears the lost maid Nathicana,
The pallid, the pure Nathicana
Who fades at the glance of the dreamer.
Again and again do I seek her;
I woo with deep draughts of Plathotis,
Deep draughts brew'd in wane of Astarte
And strenghten'd with tears of lost weeping.
I yearn for the gardens of Zais;
The lovely, lost gardens of Zais
Where blossoms the white nephalot,
The redolent herald of midnight.
The last potent draught am I brewing;
A draught that the daemons delight in;
A draught that will banish the redness;
The horrible coma call'd living.
Soon, soon if I fail not in brewing,
The redness and madness will vanish,
And deep in the worm-people darkness
Will rot the base chains that have bound me.
Once more shall the gardens of Zais
Dawn white on my long-tortur'd vision,
And there midst the vapours of Yabon
Will stand the divine Nathicana;
The deathless, restor'd Nathicana
Whose like is not met with in living.
I think it's an excellent parody of a kind of poem I dislike, but although it has some great moments (from ages when time was unfashioned // from days when the stars were not fashioned), I'm not sure it's actually better than the style it's parodying. I'd say e.g. that Poe's 'The City in the Sea' is similar in style and theme but better in execution: https://poets.org/poem/city-sea
It is very like Poe. What would be interesting is if anyone has a parody of Swinburne, who sometimes could parody himself, having such a facility for verse that once he got going, he could churn it out by the yard without stopping.
This reminds me of Chesterton's parody of poets on the theme of "Old King Cole":
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Variations_on_an_Air
"After Robert Browning
Who smoke-snorts toasts o' My Lady Nicotine,
Kicks stuffing out of Pussyfoot, bids his trio
Stick up their Stradivarii (that's the plural
Or near enough, my fatheads; nimium
Vicina Cremonce; that's a bit too near.)
Is there some stockfish fails to understand?
Catch hold o' the notion, bellow and blurt back "Cole"?
Must I bawl lessons from a horn-book, howl,
Cat-call the cat-gut "fiddles"? Fiddlesticks!"
The problem with this is that it is only marginally more overwrought than the rest of Lovecraft, so the effect is much less if one is applying that context. Someone who hasn't plodded through the collected voluminous prose of HPL is likely to experience it differently.
Re: if you're interested in the history of British traditions, the great scholar is Ronald Hutton, and his great book is Stations of the Sun. He's weird! I think he's a practicing Druid. But also very fair about both the novelty of most of the things we find "traditional" and the okayness of that.
One example he finds is that something--I think the practice of drinking from the Wassail bowl--was described as new sometime in the 1500s, and then "ancient and traditional" or whatever 80 years later. <--all factual claims in this paragraph are placeholders. I don't have the actual book in front of me to check.
Hutton also wrote The Triumph of the Moon about the early history of Wicca, another "invented tradition" dating back to 1950s.
One reason to like actual traditions is that they can embed some kind of accumulated wisdom. Like, if Catholics have been praying the Rosary in front of a statue of Mary for like 1500+ years, there is probably something that works well for a lot of people in that practice. If gangs and tribes and armies have always done some kind of hazing/initiation rite to their new members, again, maybe there's something load-bearing in that practice that has some benefits we don't necessarily understand.
The difficulty is that some part of those traditions may just be noise--it's done this way because this is the way it's done. Some may be adaptive for some past environment but useless or harmful now--norms about women being excluded from combat make a lot more sense when the combat is with swords than when the combat is via drone-fired missile, for example. Because we're trying to benefit from accumulated experience and wisdom that's not spelled out in words, it's often hard to be sure which parts of the tradition are load-bearing vs useless vs outdated and harmful.
To the extent I want to benefit from accumulated experience and wisdom in tradition, though, I definitely want something that's actually come from many generations of people doing it, rather than something that was invented as a marketing gimmick in the 80s and stuck around.
SMAC MENTIONED LET'S GOOOOOO
ahem
I'm really sorry, it's just THAT good of a game.
And indeed many of the quotes live rent-free in my head https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKdkafwii_w
> Kriss: Tradition is fake, and invention is real.
Objecting to things as "fake" is bullshit. Human social and cultural behavior is often referential, and the referent is often something abstract or affective. This is perfectly fine!
Such behavior can be good or bad, depending on its effects, including how it relates socially and culturally to other things. But that must be evaluated on its own merits, not simply by labeling it "fake."
>> Kriss: Tradition is fake, and invention is real.
Inventions are fake. The act of inventing is real.. ??
You’re right it’s bullshit.
As we say in the science biz, it's important to stand on the shoulders of giants!
There are cathedrals everywhere with those with the eye to see
There's no way the average Indian eats "a few bites of flavorless rice daily", is there?
I'm not objecting to the "rice" part. Certainly the diet is mostly grains (rice or wheat depending on area). The rural poor's calorie intake is 70% grains, and 8% processed foods many of which are grain-based. [1]
I'm somewhat objecting to the "a few bites" part. The poorest Indians eat only 1640ish calories/day, an amount that'd make me scream from hunger pangs. About 1100 of those calories come from grains [1], which works out to over 800g of cooked white rice[2] daily: hardly just "a few bites".
I'm strenuously objecting to the "flavourless" part. 1–2% of the calorie intake of all groups (rich and poor, rural and urban) is spices. Look at the everyday food of any Indian family [3]: there's one plate of plain rice in there, all others have spices or sauce or a side. Even the very poorest family have some jars of powdered spices [4] or some chillies [5].
Your example dialogue would still stand if it had a perfectly accurate description of the average food in India: most people (including yrstruly) who like Indian-restaurant-in-the-First-World food much prefer its very rich, complex, copious, only moderately spicy, and overall Westernised cuisine to the typical everyday food of an Indian family. So I'm not sure why the "um, actually, 'Indian food' should mean food typically eaten in India" character needs to be wrong about this part.
[1] Sharma, A comparison of the Indian diet with the EAT-Lancet reference diet (2020): https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-08951-8
[2] Calories in white rice: https://www.fatsecret.com.au/calories-nutrition/generic/white-rice-(medium-grain-cooked)
[3] Dollar Street: Plates of food in India by income per month: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street?countries=in&media=all&topic=plates-of-food
[4] Dollar Street: Family 166: Spices: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/families/family-166?countries=in&active=5d4beaa4cf0b3a0f3f34ad02
[5] Dollar Street: Family 165: Spices: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/families/family-165?countries=in&topic=tables-with-food&media=all&active=5d4bea88cf0b3a0f3f34a9a0
Well done.
Can vouch that a cheap place for a quick meal in South India, in a random village far away from tourist-land, will typically serve you a huge pile of rice, plus a good serving of really spicy pulses and vegetables to go with it. Not "a few bites", and certainly not flavorless.
To steelman the opposition, how about this:
The human tendency to invent fake history is a problem, because the fake history is generally simpler and more straightforward than the present crisis, and therefore it inculcates an attitude that the present is uniquely bad. Whereas there've always been problems, people have always been infighting and backstabbing, and yet we've somehow made it this far. Which implies that learning actual lessons from actual history could be useful in helping us navigate the present in the same manner as in the past. But this is actively hindered when people come up with stories about how everything was great and we live in a fallen age in the latter days of the law.
Which all seems fairly accurate, except that history is not a curve going ever upward. Sometimes bad things do happen, and metrics fall back, and we need to stop that from happening. Civil wars do break out. Democracies do fail. Rivers run red with blood. What do things look like shortly before those disasters happen? (Aside from people being convinced that the past was better than the present, of course.)
>What do things look like shortly before those disasters happen?
My opinion: Exactly as they look now. Uncertain.
Fake history? It’s the same thing that happens to yesterday’s football game.
I always feel compelled to chime in that SMAC is pretty much an unofficial adaptation of Frank Herbert's "The Jesus Incident." From the manual section on inspirational fiction: "A speculative and philosophical tour de force by my favorite science fiction author. You'll probably have to search the used bookstores for this one, but it's well worth it. My favorite science fiction novel ever. A clear inspiration for the story of Planet." The chapter intro quotes for "The Jesus Incident" are very reminiscent of the scientific discovery quotes from Alpha Centauri. Seeing the Bible attributed as the "Christian Book of the Dead" blew my mind in sixth grade...
Now this is good rationalisme
>Some popular art was written by people trying to parody a style they didn’t like, and ending up doing it better than any of the real practitioners
There's a long list of "iconic" songs that were actually written as Weird Al-esque style parodies.
Blur's "Song 2" is taking the piss out of grunge/alternative, The Beatles' "Back in the USSR" was written to satirize the Beach Boys, etc. They ended up capturing the era better than most of the serious stuff.
OK, Scott, I'm gonna fight you about the poem. The Victorian Brit poem is pretty good. The rhyme and meter are perfect, the train of thought is very clear, and there are some very nicely turned phrasings, my favorite of which is And the Tribunes beard the high/And the Fathers grind the low. And by expressing his take as a poem instead of a paragraph, the poet accesses that magical thing that happens when we hear something in rhyme and meter or set to music: Something about the shapeliness of the thing makes its content seem truer and more important than a prose summary. Sort of like it's a golden tablet.
I don't think it's meaningful to compare this poem to one without rhyme and meter, & of course not many good poets have been using conventional rhyme and meter schemes in the last 50 years. But a few have, and below of one of my favorites. I think it's better than the Victorian Brit's because it delivers more, on more channels. It too is a commentary on what people are like. But it packs much more emotional punch, including a fery substantial dose of shiver, and there is lots more to enjoy about the language -- many ways of putting thing that are novel but apt: "they prized themselves emparadised," "the moon's bony light" and of course "his hugely grinning head."
I must confess, though, that this poem was published in 1962, so is from a bit more than 50 years in the past. But have a heart. I could have used some other Nemerov that's later, but this is my favorite.
On the long shore, lit by the moon
To show them properly alone,
Two lovers suddenly embraced
So that their shadows were as one.
The ordinary night was graced
For them by the swift tide of blood
That silently they took at flood,
And for a little time they prized
Themselves emparadised.
Then, as if shaken by stage-fright
Beneath the hard moon’s bony light,
They stood together on the sand
Embarrassed in each other’s sight
But still conspiring hand in hand,
Until they saw, there underfoot,
As though the world had found them out,
The goose fish turning up, though dead,
His hugely grinning head.
There in the china light he lay,
Most ancient and corrupt and grey.
They hesitated at his smile,
Wondering what it seemed to say
To lovers who a little while
Before had thought to understand,
By violence upon the sand,
The only way that could be known
To make a world their own.
It was a wide and moony grin
Together peaceful and obscene;
They knew not what he would express,
So finished a comedian
He might mean failure or success,
But took it for an emblem of
Their sudden, new and guilty love
To be observed by, when they kissed,
That rigid optimist.
So he became their patriarch,
Dreadfully mild in the half-dark.
His throat that the sand seemed to choke,
His picket teeth, these left their mark
But never did explain the joke
That so amused him, lying there
While the moon went down to disappear
Along the still and tilted track
That bears the zodiac.
I think it's misleading to say that societies have always glorified their past. It's true, but a lot of the things we admire about past societies were not produced by their average members, but by their innovators (and even when these innovators drew inspiration from the past, they still moved things forward in some way).
So it's fair to say, if you admire the Victorians, stop being glued to the past; go explore, like their leaders did.
In the 1830s and 1840s in England especially, people looked at the then present condition of the poor and the average and thought that this was worse than it hd been in the past. (They had no question that the wealthiest quintile were better off than anyone ever had been.) If the better parts of the Middle Ages weren't ideal, and thus not to be idealised, the Victorians had a sense that they were in some respect better than the early Victorian period.
I am assuming that the Victorians we are admiring are the likes of Dickens, lord Shaftesbury and Ruskin. I think it was at least partly because of them, and even more a widespread admiration of them that the late Victorian era was much better. By the end of the Victorian era, the do gooders were talking about the "submerged tenth" who had not yet received real benefit from modernity - a great improvement over more than half.
ARRRRGH. Okay, here we go. Scott's inherent niceness prevents him from seeing something really dark.
"Trad" doesn't mean what you think it means. It is an abbreviation of "Traditionalist", which is a specific school of thought started by Rene Guneon but mainly developed and spread by Julius Evola, the famous black magician and Fascist. Not fascist as in, "Dude, the Dems/Reps are, like, totally fascist!", but as in Kicked-Out-Of-Mussolini's-Party-For-Being-Too-Extreme, Criticised-The-Nazis-From-The-Right Fascist. As in, the most invoked guru of modern fascist movements and chaps that have way too many norse runes in their twitter profile.
So, yeah. Fascist.
In the idea of "Traditionalism", there is a kind of holy revelation to different peoples way, way back in time, and the Tradition is handed down as an initiatory revelation. Yes, this is perfectly analogous to Plato's magical World of Forms. This is why there's a lot of argument in neo-fascist circles about whether or not Christianity is the "Vessel of the European Tradition" etc.
The practical upshot of all this is that it doesn't matter if a tradition is invented or inauthentic, since to Traditionalism, the tradition as actually practiced by people living long ago is inauthentic - or, rather, "decadent". The Traditionalist aspires to embody the true tradition of primal revelation, and since this does not in fact exist, this means in practice making stuff up.
This is a useful illustration of the power of ideas. The ideas of an obscure italian whackjob are now dominating discussion on substack and X. C'est la vie...
I think I have vaguely heard of Evola but I've never read anything by him and from your description, don't care to.
I'm more familiar with Traditionalist in the context of "SSPX schism", or "canonically irregular" as Wikipedia delicately puts it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Saint_Pius_X
I can sympathise with people who want the Mass in Latin, but the old days weren't that glorious because of lack of lay understanding. I don't sympathise with the people who are "everything since Vatican II, and maybe a chunk before that, is heretical and false and you are all, from the pope on down, going to Hell unless you convert to my particular understanding of faith and practice".
I mean, there *has* been a ton of watering down both lay piety and liturgical practice, and it wouldn't be any great harm if we revived some of the high view of the sacraments and liturgy. Benedict was my pope on this, but he was indeed trying to row against the current. I'm happy that the liturgy is in the vernacular and the priest faces the people to celebrate the Mass, I also want people to genuflect before the tabernacle and treat the Eucharist with a heck of a lot more respect and belief.
Most of the time I've seen the word in use, "traditionalist" just means "someone who wants to preserve/revive traditional ways of doing things", much as "rationalist" just means "someone who wants to be more rational" rather than "someone who subscribes to the school of philosophy originating with Descartes which holds that we know about things through innate ideas".
Sure. But that's the point. Many people who have never heard of Kant - and many more who have never read him - say stuff like "It may be true for you, but it is not true for me".
It's the power of ideas in action.
There are many documented cases of people wanting to preserve/revive traditional ways of doing things from literal millennia before Julius Evola's birth, so I'm not clear what point you're trying to make.
That's an interesting side of the debate! I'm not quite sure that every reference to "tradition" in modern internet discourse necessarily refers to the so-called Traditionalist movement of Guenon and Evola in the early 20th century, but I guess some influence is probably there.
So yeah, about these people. To make some sense of the Traditionalists, first we need to talk about their predecessors, the Perennialists, so fasten your seatbelts. For context, by the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, Western culture had had a really good look at the Eastern cultures and religions, and a number of people had come away suitably impressed. Put this together with some older purely Western trends like Deism, Universalism and Transcendentalism, old philosophical ideas like Neoplatonism, a bit of mystical Christianity and random bits of Occultism, and you get all sorts of syncretic developments, the most famous of which was probably Theosophy. And once the high walls of traditional monotheistic exclusivism had been breached, some more philosophically minded people looked at all this, and proposed the relatively simple theory that there was a common, transcendent, intuitive and experiential reality at the core of all the world's major religions and spiritual systems. This idea was called the Perennial philosophy, and FWIW, in its most minimal incarnation, I think it's basically true. The famous book that presented it to the world was a 400-page tome by none other than Aldous Huxley. In Huxley's own words: "The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds."
Perennialism had a pretty good reception initially, it clearly strikes a chord, but it quickly started receiving piles of criticism from all directions. Scientifically-minded thinkers called it recycled woo; it was quickly pointed out that it was a poor match for most Indigenous religions, and the representatives of the major religions didn't appreciate the implicit dismissal of their specific belief systems and cherished narratives. Rather than finding some common minimal ground, it was widely interpreted as imposing uniformity from the top; you can find modern well-grounded criticisms of that aspect in the works of Jorge N. Ferrer.
Alas, powerful but simple ideas tend to not stay simple for long, becoming instead convenient props for people's agendas. And the Spirit seems to attract gatekeepers faster than cow shit attracts flies. Soon enough you had Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and probably a few others arguing that their respective religions were the best place where the perennial Real could be accessed. And so, step by step, the discussions around Perennialism were less and less about the common minimal core, which was clear enough to everyone involved, and more about the conditions for accessing it, and how hard and rare they actually were. Here's where things go off the rails, and you start hearing of rare initiation lineages, the scarcity of true transmission, etc. After a while, a bunch of honest-to-God self-avowed fascists had hijacked the entire conversation, and turned what was originally an egalitarian idea of simplicity and individual seeking in a spirit of intuitive abundance, into its exact opposite: a sinister, collectivist, authoritarian project of civilization-level spiritual gatekeeping. The only good thing I can say about them is that they were honest enough to give their project a new name, "Traditionalism".
>tradition (n.)
late 14c., tradicioun, "statement, belief, or practice handed down from generation to generation," especially, in theology, "belief or practice based on Mosaic law," later also of Christian practice, from Old French tradicion "transmission, presentation, handing over" (late 13c.) and directly from Latin traditionem (nominative traditio) "a delivering up, surrender, a handing down, a giving up" (also "a teaching, instruction," and "a saying handed down from former times").<
Are we talking about the same thing here? I feel like I am watching a snake eating its own tail.
Perhaps the phrase “a relic of the past” is closer to the truth
Relic n.
(Snip) The general sense of "remains, remnants, that which is left after the loss or ruin of the rest" is attested from early 14c. The meaning "something kept as a souvenir, a memento" is from c. 1600. By 1590s the word had developed its weakened sense of "anything made interesting by its association with the distant past." By 1580s as "surviving trace of some practice, idea, etc.;" hence relic of barbarism (by 1809) "survival of a (bad) old custom or condition."
also from c. 1200
Also makes me wonder; if it’s such a modern imposition why is the word for it so old?
Paul Simon's "That was your mother" is better than any Zydeco track by actual professional Zydeco musicians I've ever heard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im9KnAg0r-w
I heard Clifton Chenier on the Cerys Matthews blues show recently - a nice musical connection. TWYM is a beautiful little song about parenting and I sing it to myself regularly.
There's a hint of unreliable nostalgia in that song too - life as a travelling salesman, moving from state to state sounds awful! But the not the way he sings about it.
Careful: Kriss is looking for someone to beef with at the moment, and seems to have given up on Curtis Yarvin.
Also, I think he’s wrong to oppose tradition to invention, and you’re wrong to defend it primarily as a device for laundering invention. Isn’t the true counterpoint that neither, actually, could exist without the other?
T S Eliot, writing about “free verse” (a category he didn’t think really existed): ‘But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.’
Eliot is brilliant. Two things: he totally immersed himself in the classics, to an extent I don't think anyone else has had the patience for before or since. Also, his poetry is much less accessible for the average person, and that is relevant. High modernism in all the arts has put a lot of people off the arts full stop.
True; but I think the point about fixity and flux is widely applicable, including to much more accessible genres/forms/media than high modernist poetry…
It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern,
and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind,
a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner,
but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
Great post. This came up on an open thread recently. I suggested that c. 1850-1950, there really was a genuine effort to redistribute access to the arts to the masses, which was a Good Thing and is now at risk. But if you try and defend it, you run up against a general sense that past lives were "nasty, brutish and short".
Suppose each culture has a particular type of mistake that they are prone to making.
A modern person trying to "just do stuff" is likely to make modern mistakes.
A modern person trying to imitate ancient Rome is less likely to make modern mistakes, because the Romans they are imitating didn't make those mistakes.
And they aren't at risk of making Roman mistakes, those mistakes would be obviously stupid to anyone in modern culture.
In the case of those buildings, I think the modern mistake is not having decorative ornamentation details. And a 1100s al-Andalus mistake would be having the whole thing collapse because they didn't know the maths and engineering well enough.
> I just get angry when people make blanket objections to looking backwards fondly at some idealized past as a guide to future institutions.
But the problem is that when you use an imaginary version of the past to guide future institutions, you are pretending to have true information you're using, when actually you don't. If I use an idealized version of the 1950s household to model how a household should be, and attempt to create an institution to model it, then I might as well just be making it up - except the "1950s household" lets me pretend it's tried and true. Traditionalists constantly appeal to the fact that traditions are old, and therefore durable and presumably have a reason to exist, and can be expected to continue to exist - but if they're actually just forty years old and pretending, then it's obviously very new and prone to disruption, unexpected issues, and problems in execution.
No-one has a time machine, but there's a spectrum, no? I have a copy of Dear Newlyweds by Pius XII - a collection of talks he really did give to married people. That strikes me as a fairly accurate picture of what Catholics were at least aspiring to in the 40s/50s.
>But the problem is that when you use an imaginary version of the past to guide future institutions, you are pretending to have true information you're using, when actually you don't.
Agreed. It is "evidence from fiction.".
So are you saying that the 1950s were not different, and the era is not represented fairly?
Ok, unrelated to main theme, but Scott, I've found you to be best rationalist among blogs/people I follow. I will recommend you get news about Narendra Modi/India from people who are in India and from diverse sources. Washington Post, NY Times, BBC, Aljajeera, Economists, and others have always presented biased view of India. This is not opinion Indians hold of him as reflected in the popularity surveys, nor he commands those scores because of dictatorial tendencies as reflected in sub-40% vote share recent election unlike Putin or King John Un.
Coming down from the trees was a mistake.
Even leaving the oceans was a dangerous novelty that we should strongly deplore.
We were happier as single-called organisms, happier still as proto-cells bathed in the warm sea of a young world.
Not so. Civilization is better, but it does need to be cared for, like a garden.
It post-dates coming down from the trees and is accordingly beyond the pale.
The only true and valid way of life is to convert available chemical energy provided by geothermal processes into simple biomolecules. And none of this photosynthesis stuff - it's crass and produces decadent, ruinous free oxygen.
You seem to be making a reductio based on the past being better. What is better is not the past, but movement towards or maintaining civilization.
Finally, somebody who gets it!
We all need to RETVRN to anaerobic metabolisation, we've lost our way, and everybody is just too woke or brainwashed by the pro-oxygen memeplex to even talk about it.
Agreed.
Life was better before organs, before organelles, before predation, before oxygen. When competition was the simple tug of ions across lipid membranes. And when cooperation was the exchange of free-floating RNA.
The good old days.
Traditions change continually, interweaving this thread and that. It may be technically true that Jack-in-the-Green developed in the late 1700's, but it is clear that May Day processions and celebrations contained lots of themes of greenery and foliage, relating to rebirth and fertility. As a child in rural Wiltshire I was accustomed to maypoles, morris dancers, mummers, the Green Man, and corn dollies (some of which were allowed in the church, whilst others were regarded as evil and could not be used as decoration—perhaps like their big brother, the wicker man.) Like Glastonbury, we also had our holy thorn, supposedly sprouted from the staff of Joseph of Aramathea. Relatively modern times, but the realities of the yearly cycle and the crops we depended upon were not far beneath the surface! Sixty years ago one could still climb the earthworks of a bronze age hill fort at night and hope to see the herlaþing...
Sounds like a genuinely rich experience. I hear this phrase a lot "traditions change all the time" and taken literally it seems like a contradiction in terms. If something isn't being kept substantially the same as its being passed on, how is it a tradition? Obviously various accidents can change. I hear there's a thriving Morris dancing scene where people bring it up to date but surely there is a core platonic form of Morris dancing.
Fake traditionalism is great as an aesthetic thing, but if someone talks about traditional *policy* then I think it's really important to take a hard-nosed look at what the past was actually like.
Like, if someone enjoys the 1950s white picket fence aesthetic then that's fine, but if someone says "...and that's why we should get rid of no-fault divorce, because it will let us have happy 1950s families like this," then "um actually, a lot of 1950s families weren't that happy, and divorce was a good thing for everyone in them" is in fact the correct response.
(Of course, the internet being what it is, the argument is rarely laid out in such a neatly refutable way - a more likely scenario is some guy on Twitter with a roman statue avatar posts an aesthetic picture and vaguely gestures in the direction of their preferred policy, and other people - correctly understanding the direction of the gesture - post historical takedowns of that era to gesture in the opposite direction.)
There are people though - e.g David French, roughly - who think traditional marriage is better but the state shouldn't enforce it.
I like Sam Kriss, but in many ways he is a traditional scold.
Is there a poll that could resolve this? E.g what is your favourite decade in the last 70 years? Or, in what decade was your favourite book published/film released? I believe the 2020s and 2010s would be outliers.
I looked into some Sight & Sound polls. They happen every ten years and ask critics for their favourite movies of all time. There are some changes but there is a core of movies that don't chane. But if tradition is bad maybe we should stop watching Vertigo, Citizen Kane, 2001? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Whatever your actual politics, you're one of the best conservative writers out there.
Modern poetry mostly sucks, because the niche that poetry used to take is much more occupied by music nowadays. There's so much more opportunity and access to adding music to your rhymed words - why wouldn't you do that?
>I don’t have a great explanation for why I like the one on the left so much better.
I am going to guess at about 80% confidence that, adjusting for whatever needs to be adjusted between the two time periods, the one on the left cost at least 10x as much to build.
(or, at least the visible parts did, maybe the right spent a lot on solid foundations and electricity and plumbing and etc. that the left just doesn't have)
If I'm right, that may be a big part of it. It's not mysterious why a $50 kitchen knife is nicer to use and looks better than a $5 kitchen knife.
Every tradition has to start somewhere sometime when a group of like-minded people decide to celebrate, commemorate, worship, party, or mourn some event, revelation, or story. All traditions are as real as celebrants make them.
You could even argue that coming up with something whole cloth would inadvertently have elements of the past. That less interesting Moorish design still used principles of architecture developed in the past. Anyway, here's a better poem: https://poets.org/poem/self-portrait-28
"When doing something incremental, pitch it as revolutionary" (to gain attention)
"When doing something revolutionary, pitch it as incremental" (to avoid thread-rigidity)
I remember the proposed EU constitution being described as "a tidying up exercise".
Hear me out: SCOTUS just ruled that the 2nd amendment allows the confiscation of firearms from those subject to a restraining order. I'm not defending originalism, but it it strikes me as a useful analogy for this discussion. The ruling goes way beyond the founding era and references gun controls in England from the 14th century and the 17th century. Now, suppose the oral arguments went like this:
"There were gun controls in the 14th century"
"LOL people burned witches then"
"There were gun controls in the 17th century"
"LOL people used leaches for medicine then"
That would seem to miss the point. The point is (1) Targeted gun control seems like a good thing (2) there really is a long precedent for it. And that's it. There's no obligation to start using leaches again. Similarly, almost all calls for tradition in the arts or politics or whatever are targeted defences of things (1) the speaker thinks is good in themselves and (2) with some real support in the historic record. Genuinely fake traditions are possible but fraud is not an argument against faithfulness.
Tradition Very Rarely Lies
I, admittedly, haven't read the SCOTUS opinion(s) on this case.
It would be interesting to know if the motivation for the 14th century gun controls were or were not directly opposed to the motivations for the 2nd amendment. I would expect that an originalist supreme court justice would take any older legislation which was directly opposed by the USA Constitution as being overridden by the Constitution - but I don't know if this is or is not such a case.
Not my area, but it makes sense that discontinuities would be resolved in favour of the revolution, otherwise ze whole point of having a revolution is lost. The opinion also lists some targeted gun controls from around the time of the revolution, so in this case there's continuity. My point is a targeted historical inquiry is not a "gotcha" one way or another (1) Is this thing good in itself? (2) Is it supported in some way by History or tradition? There is room for debate in specific cases about either 1 or 2 or both but some comments seem to suggest that ANY appeal to tradition is the thin end of the wedge and we'll all be burning witches by the end of the week. But it turns out you CAN have your cake and eat it and we often do.
Many Thanks!
>Not my area, but it makes sense that discontinuities would be resolved in favour of the revolution, otherwise ze whole point of having a revolution is lost.
Exactly agreed!
>My point is a targeted historical inquiry is not a "gotcha" one way or another (1) Is this thing good in itself? (2) Is it supported in some way by History or tradition? There is room for debate in specific cases about either 1 or 2 or both but some comments seem to suggest that ANY appeal to tradition is the thin end of the wedge and we'll all be burning witches by the end of the week. But it turns out you CAN have your cake and eat it and we often do.
Agreed. I commented ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55322541 ) in a discussion prompted by a quote from C.S.Lewis ( quoted in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55298272 ) about "doing an about-turn", that societies are not one-dimensional. As I put it (also in the same discussion, in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke/comment/55324116 )
>It is typically the case that at any given time some trends are favorable and other are unfavorable and it is sensible to want to continue the former and reverse the latter.
Thank you. Personally I like that Lewis quote, it is simplistic but he is responding to a simplistic analogy i.e you can't turn back the clock. But real examples are better because otherwise people fill in the blanks and mix up the past with their preconscious terrors
Many Thanks!
My understanding of the argument is not gun control from the 14th century, but the idea of a surety or bond . Troublesome people were required to post a bond that would pay for any damages they caused if they misbehaved. The majority found a parallel in that and the idea of disarming someone who had created reason to believe that they were “problematic”
Clarence Thomas would have none of it
Many Thanks! Hmm... Personally, I would be very leary of any "troublesome people" line of argument. Why stop at disarming them? How about any number of other disempowering measures? If "troublesome" trumps 2nd amendment rights, does it also trump 1st amendment rights?
From an admittedly cursory look at https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/law/academics/experiential_learning/clinics/domestic_violence/_resources/ro_plaintiff.php , it seems like the standard of proof for a restraining order is well below e.g. the standard for conviction of a felony. Personally, I'm uncomfortable with depriving someone of a constitutional right with such a low bar. And, again, what _other_ constitutional rights might they be deprived of, with such a low bar?
Well, there is always a slippery slope to be found isn’t there? but I think it would be hard to extend the idea of depriving someone of a means of deadly force based on a reasonable showing of the risk involved to silencing them.
This point was discussed extensively in the oral argument at the SC, which I listened to. It was a pretty good one.
I mean, they can always go around calling their ex a bitch, they just can’t shoot her.
Anyway, I was just trying to clarify the points in old common law that they relied upon in their opinion. It was an unfortunate test case in someways because the man involved really was a jackass. It was pretty hard to argue for the idea of him owning a gun .
Many Thanks! Personally, I _do_ think that "a means of deadly force" is indeed special. I'd be happier if there were a clearer retaining wall around the possible slippery slope...
>I mean, they can always go around calling their ex a bitch
Actually one of the pieces of evidence that can be used in requesting a restraining order, as per https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/law/academics/experiential_learning/clinics/domestic_violence/_resources/ro_plaintiff.php , is
>or social media posts from the Defendant
and it is unclear whether calling their ex a bitch to all listeners on social media might qualify, so it may be that we are already past that level of slide down the slope. And the general criteria include
>Harassment, Second Degree means that someone has made you _feel mental or emotional distress_ by doing things such as contacting you repeatedly through verbal, written or electronic means.
[emphasis added] which is _vastly_ different from a credible threat of deadly force.
Like I said, it’s a slippery slope. If there were not slippery slopes, the Supreme Court would have nothing to do would it? Every layer along the way is kind of a tell. A man sits around with his friends at a bar and describes what a Cunt his ex was. Then a man goes home, gets on Facebook, finds a group that he knows she’s a member of and starts to post the same kind of thing. That’s a line crossed.
Then he starts saying things like you better watch your back. Or there’s no way I’m going to let my children live with you. I want my children.
He leaves her 85 phone messages a day, pleading, threatening, crying, screaming demanding…( that’s what “ harassment “ looks like)
pretend you’re the law , where would you draw the line?
It helps, at least a little, that in this case "troublesome people" is defined as a group of people who have already and through (abbreviated) due process of law had some of their other civil liberties restricted.
I think our society and our courts are a bit too cavalier about restraining orders, treating them as a one-size-fits-all default solution to "these two people keep complaining about one another". But if there's room for any sort of restraining order in our system, then there's room for at least a subset that include "hand over your guns until this gets resolved".
Many Thanks! Basically agreed. I'm a bit queasy about the, as you said, abbreviated part, but I agree that at least, as you said, a "due process of law" has been followed. And I _do_ think of access to deadly force as a special case. I mostly want to _keep_ it a special case, with no further enlargement of the set of civil liberties restricted or (in my view, worse) enlargement of the set of "troublesome people".
CTRL+F: 'casey'
No hits. No hits? No hits!
(Barbarians!)
The problem with looking to an idealized past that never was is when people assume that if it happened in the past, it can happen in the future. Or when people long for some aspect of the past without recognizing the costs involved.
For example, a "marriage for life" culture implies a lot of people stuck in abusive relationships forever. You can't have the former without the latter, and that's a price most people aren't willing to pay any more.
But in the real world what are the chances of getting back to that culture? I get that there are post-liberals and so on but they are a fringe group - most people just want the freedom to express an opinion on traditional marriage without e.g being thrown out of the Lib Dems
I think population mobility makes it a lot harder, especially for the college educated. Me and most of my friends all live >200 miles from where we grew up, so no grandparents and aunts and uncles around to help out.
I agree. No simple answers. RETVRN ain't happening. I'm all for people being alert for 'red flags' in choosing friends or partners. But people are looking for red flags everywhere. Scott's article was partly about architecture. Are we honestly saying that building a pretty library is a segue to RETVRN?
<i>For example, a "marriage for life" culture implies a lot of people stuck in abusive relationships forever.</i>
Do you have any statistics to show that "a lot" of people were stuck in abusive relationships before the 1960s?
<i>Do you have any statistics to show that "a lot" of people were stuck in abusive relationships before the 1960s?</i>
I should also add -- any statistics that show domestic violence is lower now than it was in the '50s?
I think part of it is that if any status is left lying around, people will try to steal it.
I've heard that "traditional" all male morris dancing was invented in the 1930s and mixed sex morris dancing is actually older.
Wicca as a "traditional" religion was invented in the 1950s. Some of its practices carried into Neo-Paganism, which is more honest. "We use the same sources as our ancestors-- our imaginations".
I was surprised to find that the cross-quarters, eight equally spaced holidays on the solstices and equinoxes and the times between them, wasn't traditional. Ancient peoples would celebrate some but not all of them.
It's interesting that older can translate to better-- it's not just time-tested, it's as though people started out with a more direct relationship with reality.
"I was surprised to find that the cross-quarters, eight equally spaced holidays on the solstices and equinoxes and the times between them, wasn't traditional. Ancient peoples would celebrate some but not all of them."
Oh, that one is a favourite complaint of mine! The majority of it is lifted from Irish sources, some are Scottish, a couple are Welsh, then they had to throw in Norse "Yule" to round it out because the native traditions in the British Isles didn't have a surviving name for the winter solstice festival, if any, due to Samhain being the bigger seasonal change. But if you're doing a consciously "opposite of the current, that is Christian, calendar" then you need a big feast to correspond to "We're celebrating Christmas only it's not Christmas".
I don't know why Litha, another Anglo-Saxon term, for Midsummer but I suppose you can fudge it all in by saying "it's all the traditions of the British Isles, not just the Celtic", but then you do run up against problems such as some of these festivals are very plainly from the Christian tradition, e.g. Lady Day
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_the_Year
The least blood-pressure elevating explanation is that this was more or less invented by the modern (as in 1950s/60s) witchcraft tradition, working off older anthropological and folklorist studies. The "wheel" as presented is a fake tradition, as this post says.
Nobody seems to celebrate perihelion and aphelion. Would adding festivals for them be considered ... eccentric? :-)
Oh, you!
Just add in the epicycles to correct it all 😁
Though I imagine the solstices are the nearest we get to celebrating perihelion and aphelion:
https://www.almanac.com/content/what-aphelion-and-perihelion
"Aphelion is the point of the Earth’s orbit that is farthest away from the Sun. It always happens in early July, about two weeks after the June solstice,
Perihelion is the point of the Earth’s orbit that is nearest to the Sun. This always happens in early January, about two weeks after the December Solstice."
So the Southern Hemisphere is probably more 'correct' in having their summer/our winter be around the time Earth approaches nearest the sun, and same for their winter/our summer.
Many Thanks! Agreed that the Southern Hemisphere gets the effects of our orbits' eccentricity adding to the seasonal effects, while, for us, it subtracts. Perihelion and aphelion actually do move (very slowly) relative to the solstices.
https://www.space.com/what-is-perihelion#section-perihelion-precession
>On Earth, perihelion and aphelion at one point coincided with the winter and summer solstice. But that was back in 1246, according to Time and Date. Due to something that is called orbital precession, there is a gradually opening gap between the solstices and the peri and aphelions. By the year 6430, perihelion will fall on the March equinox (March 20), according to Time and Date.
Both the spin axis and the peri and ap helions move, the former circling every 23,000 years, the latter more slowly, every 112,000 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsidal_precession
>Earth's apsidal precession slowly increases its argument of periapsis; it takes about 112,000 years for the ellipse to revolve once relative to the fixed stars.[19] Earth's polar axis, and hence the solstices and equinoxes, precess with a period of about 26,000 years in relation to the fixed stars. These two forms of 'precession' combine so that it takes between 20,800 and 29,000 years (and on average 23,000 years) for the ellipse to revolve once relative to the vernal equinox, that is, for the perihelion to return to the same date (given a calendar that tracks the seasons perfectly).
A fascinating musicology book: The Modern Invention of Medieval Music by Leech-Wilkinson. When the Notre Dame school started being rediscovered in the early 20th century, there were some surprising performances involving saxophones - sadly no recordings exist. If anyone has heard any Leonin/Perotin here it will probably be a cappella because that came to be seen as more authentic than saxophones, but only because the scores are quite simple and no specific instruments are listed.
Opera got invented in an effort to replicate the ancient greek drama, where the chorus was singing. I have heard a reconstruction of that ancient singing. Opera as we know it is much more exciting.
The Wikipedia link to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri should have gone to https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/ instead (or in addition).
"In the same way, when people say they like Moorish Revival architecture or the 1950s family structure or whatever, I think of these as pointers. It’s fine if the Moors also had some bad buildings, or not all 1950s families were really like that. Everyone knows what they mean!"
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/ :p
Poetry of the last 50 years: I'll bet that Seamus Heaney wrote better stuff than the cited example between 1974 and his death. Plus: a lot of Rock lyrics, like Grant Hart's stuff (A letter from Anne Marie, The Main, So far from Heaven, 2541, The girl who lives on Heaven Hill), in german language "Materialien zu einer Kritik der bekanntesten Gedichtform italienischen Ursprungs" by Robert Gernhardt and probably lots of stuff I never encountered.
I am going to have to stop you when you describe Thick as a Brick as Jethro Tull imitating a style they didn't like, as they absolutely *were* a progressive rock band and their parody was as affectionate as it was cutting. In fact they did their own version of an overwrought prog rock concept played straight with their very next album, A Passion Play.
It's a very interesting argument or a counterintuitive position, but it's convincing and establishes something important.
I would zoom in a little bit and assert that philo-medievalism, in particular, is an indispensable cultural currency which modern society should use more extensively, intentionally and seriously. It's a paradoxical suggestion, perhaps, since modern times are richer, more populous, more knowledgeable, etc. And yet there's a precedent, for Western Europe indulged in a kind of obsessive philhellenism for centuries, from Petrarch through the Victorians and beyond, and profited by it immensely. To constantly juxtapose two ages in one's imagination just seems to be very mentally invigorating. If you work at it, you can combine the best of the past and the present.
In a sense, we're already two centuries or so into a civilization-wide philo-medieval obsession. Walter Scott and Alfred Tennyson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had it, as obviously did CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, down to the Dungeons and Dragons games that teenage boys play for hours. But we're still not very serious about it. It's still a kind of game.
What I'd like to see a resolute attempts to revive feudalism, chivalry, kingship in the medieval manner, very expansive rights of the Church, and so forth.
I tried to spearhead it here: https://lancelotfinn.substack.com/p/the-age-of-chivalry
"This is how most arguments about being “trad” sound to me. Someone points out that they like some feature of the past. Then other people object that this feature is idealized, the past wasn’t universally like that, and the past had many other bad things."
This is how most arguments about wokeness sound to me.
There's no value in tradition for its own sake. The value comes from the value of what is handed down.
As in the case of a literal patrimony: If your father hands you down some gold… the value of the gold does not derive from that your father handed it down to you, but from the value of the gold itself.
Things are not good because they are handed down. At best, they are handed down because they are good.
Practically speaking, there is the related aspect of humility (with regard to the reception of tradition)—it's not wise to pretend to know something you don't or to discard the wisdom of your elders (when it is a question of their wisdom versus one's own ignorance)—but this virtue itself (humility) derives its value from the "gold" of truth.
Socrates' wisdom was not a pose or a profession of ignorance for its own sake. It was a reflection of the relative extent and stability of his knowledge.
In the same way, we should accept traditions and perpetuate them when they correlate with something in our experience—even if that experience is the value of authority and the trustworthiness of others.