Speaking of Gene Wolfe and ancient history and feuding commentariat over deliberately enigmatic brief chronicles, Wolfe fans might be interested in this: 14 years after starting, and 43 years after publication, I've solved "Suzanne Delage". It turns out to be basically "Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ if Dracula had gone to New England instead of England": https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage
I don't think there's much more to the Proust allusion than there are to the other equally overt allusions like Hamlet or Chesterton. If anyone could have constructed much more of an interpretation off the Proust, they would've by now. It's the covert allusions to _Dracula_, which carefully avoid a give-away quotation or name (eg. the careful hiding of the reference to Gypsies/Jews), which power the story, as opposed to individual throwaways.
I just read the story. There is an inversion of the situation in Proust: the narrator's new girlfriend mistakenly believes that his mother and Suzanne's mother are friends; in Wolfe the narrator's mother and Suzanne's mother are friends.
Rereading that short section in Proust makes me think that Wolfe got the idea for the story while reading those lines. There's this character, Suzanne Delage, whose existence the narrator has been aware of since he was young but has never met. Sounds like the inspiration for an eerie story like the one he wrote.
BTW: Very interesting post. I've never read Wolfe before and don't know what to think of the story other than it was very interesting after reading your theory -- and the history of various interpretations of the story.
No, I don't think she does. Le Guin was a careful, precise writer, and the normal way to group them would be to write 'Wolfe, Pei, and Emshwiller' (with or without the Oxford comma); but she uses a redundant-seeming way to indicate that she doesn't mean the normal thing. (Only a lunatic writes 'X, and Y, and Z', if all they meant was 'X, Y, and Z'.) You can argue that she might mean splitting the three the other way but not that they are identically in one group.
There is no semantic difference between "X, Y, and Z" and "X, and Y, and Z". I don't think Miranda July is a lunatic for titling her debut film "Me and You and Everyone We Know", nor Jesse Andrews for the title "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl". And they ARE in one group which "tell of lives lived on the edge of hope, or a little over the edge". Le Guin being a careful writer to me means she liked how her phrasing read. It does not, to me, mean a clue that Wolfe's story is an inverted Dracula (is Wolfe supposed to have told her that was the case but cautioned her about what kinds of clues would be too obvious?).
There's no semantic difference between "X, Y, and Z " and "X, and Y, and Z", but I think there's a connotative difference. The second one gives more weight to each item. It's saying "This isn't just some list or some group, pay attention to each of the three."
That's an option. More commonly, pronouncing a list like that might have the effect of emphasizing how numerous examples are of whatever phenomenon you're listing.
Yes, there is. An explicit use of polysyndeton is telling the reader that it is not the usual list. If I say "I ran and hopped and jumped and swam", that conveys something entirely different to the reader than "I ran, hopped, jumped, and swam." (For example, the first version strongly implies a strict causal ordering, while the second one is vaguer in simply including a set of activities. If you don't believe me, consider this variant: "We ate ice cream, and chips, and chuck roast." vs "We ate ice cream, chips, and chuck roast." The second is an ordinary dinner, while the first leaves you wondering if this was a slumber party or the children were left in charge of the meal planning.) The meaning of the two are not the same even if they may superficially seem the same if you reduce them from natural language to an impoverished logic.
> I don't think Miranda July is a lunatic for titling her debut film "Me and You and Everyone We Know", nor Jesse Andrews for the title "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl".
I'm unfamiliar with those works so I couldn't say.
> is Wolfe supposed to have told her that was the case but cautioned her about what kinds of clues would be too obvious?
Or told by Kidd, who I suspect did most of the work (with Le Guin as the celebrity headliner), but no, he wouldn't've have needed to tell her something so obvious. Le Guin is not an idiot and hardly needs to be coached by a fellow writer, whose works she read and admired ("our Melville", not to mention all the other blurbs she contributed), a friend, and a writer contributing a piece to the anthology she is editing, into not blabbing. She understood perfectly well that the story is a puzzle and should not be spoiled right in the introduction.
I agree with your first example consisting of four entries, which one can naturally divide into two groups of two, and will be more likely to do so if one comes across a phrase written as "ran and hopped". But that relies on the reader already knowing that once running one can translate forward momentum into hopping, and that one swims after jumping into water.
In your quote of Le Guin begins with this other example of a group of authors:
> Some—Engh, Mitchison, Sanders, Dorman—write of existences at the limits of civilization
This also does not follow the convention of just commas for the initial entries but an "and" for the last one. It is only commas. Then in the next example (which we've been discussing) she uses only a commas followed by an "and" for each entry. Why does she write the two lists out differently? I think a list of four would contain too many "ands" if she'd included one for each pair, whereas with only three it's only one more "and" than usual. In both cases, as Nancy Lebowitz points out, each entry is treated equal to every other entry in the list. At the same time, she's able to vary the style as suited for the different lengths.
Whether a story should be spoiled in the introduction is a separate question from whether the introduction should contain clues at all that one can decode by connecting it to blurbs. If one were going to use blurbs at all (and that's far from obvious to me, since Wolfe isn't writing them to provide intended clues, rather they are supposed to serve the anthology as a whole), one could go by process of elimination. But your analysis indicates that both "VISIONS" are represented by Pei & Emshwiller together, so there isn't a remaining blurb unaccounted for. You don't think there are other examples of blurbs which apply to multiple stories (you are arguing against the "lover never known" applying to Wolfe), but you do have a story you think isn't connected to any blurb. But, however idiosyncratic the Urrea story, if one why not two? If the story is a puzzle, why not just have all the clues reside in the story itself?
I haven't even read _The Land Across_! I doubt I can crack that one if Marc hasn't yet.
I just got lucky with "Suzanne Delage" in that I was a bit more stubborn (and contemptuous of copyright law) than anyone else who was looking at it, and noticed the clue in the covers of the original printing (omitted from all subsequent versions), and finally was the very first person to ever ask "if it really does involve memory-loss and a young lover torn away from him, and vampires are the best theory to date, then... could... this have something to do with _Dracula_?" (As far as I can tell from my past research and subsequent searches, _Dracula_, specifically, has *never* been mentioned in connexion with SD.) After that, it's all rather trivial. Any of the other Wolfe fans like Marc could've done as good or better a job of interpreting it.
That's a story I didn't know about until now, thank you! It's a very Wolfe story, it builds up until you expect some climactic revelation, gives you what should be start of one - and then ends. He was a great writer 😀
The story may very well be exactly what it presents itself to be: the story of a man to whom nothing very remarkable has happened, and the only thing out of his ordinary life he can think of as anything like "we forget extraordinary events" is that there was one particular girl whom he *should* have known, by all the usual chances of life - their mothers were friends, they went to the same high school - but didn't. That's it, that's the biggest thing that ever happened to him.
It would be completely in line with Wolfe to have this be "that's it, it's just a slice of life story". That we, the readers, expect some big revelation and spend time trying to work out what is really going on, what is the hidden story (vampires, clones, what?) is the trick - real life is not a story. Real life doesn't lead up to revelations of supernatural horror like a Lovecraft tale - and the setting is deliberately intended to evoke Lovecraft, I think, with the New England setting and the expeditions to hunt down Revolutionary-era relics preserved and carried on "in the unschooled, traditional ways of the old farm families" which usually ends in some kind of disaster for the narrator or his family member/friend who hunted out such items, the references to churches and ethnic minorities, the idea of Suzanne's photos going missing because of something revelatory like 'the Marsh look' coming out in them as time goes on, the very name itself evoking the old families like the Marshes etc. in Lovecraft's stories - it just ends abruptly or messily or with no clear resolution.
The narrator never met Suzanne herself. He had two failed marriages, no children, seemingly no siblings (unless they died in the mysterious epidemic) and his parents are dead and have left him the family home. Suzanne married and has a daughter - or maybe she didn't marry, the scandal of having an illegitimate child would be enough for her to drop out of all polite society discourse as nobody would talk about this openly. Narrator was too involved with his own routine life to hear about this and his mother certainly wouldn't have brought it up.
*That* might be the 'big secret' at the end, why the female friend can't remember what the name of Suzanne's daughter is, and why she refers to Suzanne by her maiden name. She never got married, the friend can't remember or never knew who the putative father of her child was and so doesn't know how to refer to the girl. That's the 'mystery' around Suzanne Delage and our ordinary guy narrator who is too self-centred in his casual, routine way and his own little life never heard any of this gossip. In fact, he had so little interest in Suzanne that it was only after trying to remember if anything 'extraordinary' had ever happened to him, that he came up with "the girl I never met". That's what life is like for most of us, it's not a neatly-plotted story. The End.
And I'm doing the very same thing here that Wolfe is jogging our elbows about - coming up with an explanation for "what about Suzanne Delage was so odd?" Maybe there was nothing. They grew up, got married, had lives. Narrator has two failed marriages and no kids, Suzanne got married and had one kid, a daughter who looks just like her at that age. The End.
I think given the narrator's reaction to the daughter, and her resemblance to Suzanne, that it's clear that he either never met Suzanne or he met her but somehow forgot her. Given the end of the second paragraph, I think "forgot" is what we're meant to assume. Which is even stranger, because given his reaction to the daughter, what could possibly make him forget the mother?
That's about as far as I got with the story on my own. Although I hadn't seen "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" yet. That probably would have put me onto the track of "he was made to forget", which certainly seems more plausible than somehow doing it himself. The last line does have an allusion to the friend expecting him to know that the daughter is Suzanne's, but I can't tell if that's highlighting the improbability of the narrator not having met Suzanne, or if it's a subtle hint that town gossip assumes that he knows Suzanne.
An alternative interpretation might be "Fight Club" or "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", where the narrator definitely knows Suzanne, but in another identity. Which is why this version of him is so boring and placid: all the exciting parts of his life are crammed into the other personality. Thus also explaining the "forgetting" theme. ("Why is the kitchen full of buckets of nitroglycerin littered with yearbook cutouts?")
Nice! That interpretation makes a lot of sense. Especially how it explains the lengthy (for a story this size) digression into his mother's expeditions with Suzanne's mother, which always puzzled me. But if they're repeatedly getting drained by a vampire, and then escorting a coffin into town, that would explain it. And also the peculiar absence of fathers in the story ("grandfather" is mentioned once), and no hint of what happened to his mother, who used to live in the house he now occupies.
My only quibble would be in the footnote regarding the church - I think it's going a bit too far to say "the only church the town apparently has", because I'd expect any town with 50k-100k population to have at least a dozen churches. But I think this could instead be interpreted to mean that this church is the only one that has any faith, and all the rest have decayed into glorified social clubs. Which supports your thesis just as well.
I was trying to be a bit sardonic there about the narrator's cryptic reference to a 'fundamentalist church' but no other churches.
Clearly in that time & place, there would be easily dozens of churches and everyone would go to church, so the narrator never mentioning his own church (where was he married repeatedly?) or any other church leaves a naive reader wondering if he's trying to imply that there's only one church. Of course there was not, so there may be some significance to such an utterly out-of-place and extraneous and highly-selective detail. (And with the _Dracula_ interpretation in mind, given how heavily it involved churches and consecrated hosts etc, it defies belief that the only church or religious reference might mean nothing at all.)
My guess is that the implication is that there are many churches in town but they are all Protestant, probably Methodist or Anglican, superannuated and stultified by convention and liberality and ecumenicism and a genteel creeping agnosticism - indeed, all positively *Unitarian* (imagine this pronounced with the whiskered mustache quivering indignantly) - and the fundamentalist church is the only church which actually *believes* in such things as the Ruinous Powers or servants of the Adversary operating in the current day and so the only church the narrator could resort to. (Like the Catholic Church, of course, which to this day continues doing exorcisms, obsessively tracking miracles, and so on.)
> I have heard that ‘when a domain is about to fall, its regulations are sure to proliferate.'
Wow. This is so ridiculously easy to apply to today's EU and USA.
What I don't understand though is, how could the Zheng bureaucracy function so long *without* written regulations? Or is it just that the regulations existed but were purely internal and opaque to outsiders?
I'm guessing it was a matter of social norms rather than written regulations - and that advisors considered social norms to be more effective than clearly defined punishments. There are certainly scenarios where this is true - I remember reading about how a school tried to discourage parents from taking a while to pick up their kids after school by levying a fee, only for the amount of late pickups to increase (presumably because they no longer felt guilty as long as they paid the fee).
When I see that they 'lost' the list of participants and the followups mysteriously never get published, that's typically the point at which I add the authors to my warning list and begin looking for a meta-analysis which includes bias tests...
I don't, no. I try to update my website's excerpts/annotations when I come across them but in this case, I haven't cited/linked 'A Fine is a Price' ever. (I too have always had some qualms about it being just a bit too pat and entertaining and Replication-Crisis-bait.) Just have to remember these things, I guess, or hope that your note-taking system lets you refind them.
Thanks for this! I have made references to A Fine Is a Price ( Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, The Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (January 2000), pp. 1-17), many times to students over the years, but have always felt a bit queazy that there is only one RCT on the effect of fining late-arrivals in kindergartens. Take-home pont is that I should be even more cautious referring to the study in the future, despite - or because - students love the tale.
The misgivings you refer about the Gneezy/Rustichini experiment brought back memories from reading Feynman's essay Cargo Cult Science back in the days, an essay worth sharing with new readers:
"When I was at Cornell. I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this—I don’t remember it in detail, but it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do, A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person—to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A—and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1935 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens.
....
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and, still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A‑Number‑l experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat‑running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using—not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat‑running.
I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The subsequent experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of Cargo Cult Science."
Actually, we very recently succeeded in tracking that one down! See: https://gwern.net/maze (It is pretty interesting, and turns out that it both does and doesn't support Feynman's use.)
It's also said, colloquially, that what matters is the certainty of the punishment rather than its severity, but clearly one of these bits of conventional wisdom has to be wrong here.
I think these are talking about different things. Putting a number on something that is almost never done codifies it, and makes it plausible that you should do it when the benefit is greater than that cost. It’s no longer a sacred value.
But for something like speeding, which is frequently done but almost never punished, just doubling or tripling the fine doesn’t particularly increase the deterrent effect, but making people actually likely to get caught does.
"But for something like speeding, which is frequently done but almost never punished, just doubling or tripling the fine doesn’t particularly increase the deterrent effect, but making people actually likely to get caught does."
Speeding is kind of a strange case. In the states where I've lived and driven (New York, California, and South Carolina), the impression I've always gotten is that the police enforce something like a official_limit_plus_5_or_10 actual speed limit. My impression is that there isn't some small-but-not-insignificant probability of being ticketed starting at official_speed_limit_plus_1 and going up from there, but rather that there is a vanishingly small probability of being ticketed at official_speed_limit_plus_1.
If the police announced tomorrow that they were going switch policies to strictly enforcing the official speed limit, I'd switch from going official_speed_limit_plus_5 to going official_speed_limit (and hope that the cars behind me, who today would be 3 inches off my rear bumper if I did that, would also switch to the lower speed).
Ted Gioia contents that the earliest laws were sung. Certainly there are examples of foundational myths in the form of poems, "The Mountain Wreath" in the case of Serbia for instance.
Written codes can be amended or lawyered to make them say something other than their plain meaning. But no Act of Congress can change the lyrics of a popular song, even if a bipartisan congressional delegation and Don McLean himself were to decree that "American Pie" shall henceforth reference "good old girls" as well as good old boys, that wouldn't make karaoke amateurs and drunks sing it any differently.
"The Mountain Wreath" (Gorski Vijenac) is Montenegrian not Serbian founding (modern) myth, and besides it's been written down from beginning and it's an epic poem not a code of laws.
Serbia had its medieval codex of Car Dušan, which was written and very much not a poem.
I didn't say that the Mountain Wreath was a code of laws.moreover, Serbs also claim it as their own,(IIRC it explicitly references Serbia) and as I understand, the printed version was simply an oral tradition written down.
Nope, it was all authored and written down by Njegoš in 1846. It certainly owes its rhythm and style to the older rich oral tradition of epic poems, shared across Serbia, Montenegro, Herzegovina, Krajina, and perhaps wider. The story is original.
An act of Congress can't change the lyrics of a song, but the people that sing it can. Weird Al made a career out of it, to be specific, and the general case speaks for itself in the Liberty Valence Effect. Or, how would you spell the surname of those bears from the children's books? That might take your final sentence to its conclusion.
> no Act of Congress can change the lyrics of a popular song
True, but the lyrics of popular songs constantly mutate over time anyway, sometimes into statements that (1) would have meant nothing to the composer, and (2) also mean nothing to the people singing them. Compare how the attested lyrics to "The Raggle-Taggle Gypsy":
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘢𝘳𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘊𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘦'𝘴 𝘭𝘢𝘥𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯,
𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨-𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘳;
𝘈𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘴𝘢𝘸,
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳.
are routinely assumed to be corrupted from earlier lyrics stating "they cast their glamour over her". Why? Well, because gypsy grandmothers have no particular folkloric significance and there is no reason for one to be mentioned here, whereas gypsy 𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘤 has a very prominent place in folklore and would make a compelling explanation for why the lady of a castle would abandon her exalted position to run away with gypsies and sleep in the fields. And the two lines, attested and hypothetical, both fit the meter of the song correctly and are phonetically very similar.
Seems uncontroversial. Cultures used oral transmission before they had writing.
You can't change the lyrics of a popular song by act of congress, but you can beat up all the people who sing it the wrong way or convince people it's wrong, and then there's no record. That's why they're always destroying books in 1984 and Farenheit 451. A law on a bronze tablet, you actually have to destroy the tablet. Which the new government can certainly do, and was done, but is a little harder. And there's always the risk someone hid a copy somewhere. They suppressed the Gnostic gospels, but someone found a bunch of them in a garbage dump in Egypt two millennia later.
> You can't change the lyrics of a popular song by act of congress, but you can beat up all the people who sing it the wrong way
You can also do this with things that are written down somewhere. I have read that during the lockdown period, the Chinese government found itself forced to suppress an outbreak of patriotism among Chinese who kept quoting the Chinese national anthem. (Since the lyrics were written as a protest against the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, they begin "Rise up, all who refuse to be slaves!")
Oddly reminiscent of when the municipal government of Washington D.C. refused to print the slogan "No taxation without representation" on local license plates.
A magistrate can judge the situation as it is and weigh principles against each other; a written regulation is blind to that context. A magistrate can understand someone's actions as being adversarial by judging many different factors; a written regulation cannot (or, if it says "the magistrate decides", why bother writing it?).
So a place which switches from individual regulations to judgments allows its internal adversaries to optimize against it more easily.
---
But there's also just a 'selection effect' view of this. Having lots of social problems points to both possibly imminent downfall and proliferation of regulations intended to counteract those social problems.
It's like a startup getting to scale. Early on you can rely on the virtuous culture of your founding lieutenants to maintain order and get things done,l. Unspoken norms and performance reviews factoring in cultural fits and so on may not reference specific items but those in charge know what it's about. As the org scales, the rewards to defecting from those norms becomes bigger in terms of both rewards and penalties - the size of the org provides access to more, and also makes it easier to obscure what you're doing. Management becomes new enough that it doesn't have the same grip on the culture and virtues that drove performance, and hires are able to divide and conquer to get whatever answer suits them best. To address these growing areas of malfeasance and shirking, management must declare a set of rules which enable impartial punishment of those 'defecting' from the org in classic agent principal problems. This gives a clear guide for managers to punish, but also marks an end to a certain kind of dynamism.
It's reminiscent of a quote by Cicero "The more profuse the laws the more corrupt the state".
I guess Bronze age rulers, not only in China, were worried about committing laws to writing because (beside the reason mentioned in the review) they realised that not everything could be codified, and anything not included would implicitly become legal, or arguably so, instead of being subject to the ruler's judgement based on customs.
These patterns of growth and decay are constants throughout history, especially the imperial histories.
The tendency for implosion due to internal power struggles is one of the most obvious warning signs that is brown stuff approaching the rotating object any time now.
The exact timeframe is hard to work out though as these are slow moving relationships.
Oral traditions passed from generation to generation are very sticky so the need to write them down wasn't too urgent. Plus, look what happens when you do, everyone argues about what was really meant for centuries after...😉
"Lord Shang, the Legalist reformer, might’ve been the first to go deeper, theorizing that the pressures of growing population create new problems and require the development of new forms of governance."
This reminded me a lot of the struggles in Mesopotamia, where ritualistic village chieftans somewhat abruptly become regional kings, and controlled a vast territory that demanded an entirely different tech tree to keep it.
There is one set of skills required to rally a bunch of hungry men to go rob neighboring people. There is another set of skills required to ensure a proper tax base and allocate effective portions to pay security and military forces while maintaining living standards to prevent rebellions of desperation.
It's like you have some guns butter curve, with "pillage" on one end and "complex accounting" on the other, and you have to ride that perfect angle between those to achieve liftoff into empire.
This is a very interesting review, and I found it highly entertaining. Unfortunately, I know so little of Chinese history that I don't know what to make of it beyond that. For example - who is this king? Does that mean the emperor of China?
I feel like I've just watched a Tudor drama, while never having heard of the Reformation, Parliament, primogeniture, or the Dissolution - but I have heard of Wolsey! And while I'm frantically trying to look these things up on Wikipedia, the offhand references to the Medici and the French Wars of Religion are too much.
What is a good starting point on Chinese history for someone completely unfamiliar?
All of this is before the "First Emperor". The Warring States Period ended when one of the states won the wars, and that state's king gave himself a new title that we translate as Emperor.
This is my favorite kind of review: a review which introduces me to a whole set of ideas I would never have encountered without reading this blog. Excellent work, anonymous contributor!
"When the people know that there is a code, they will not be in awe of their superiors. Together they bicker, appeal to the code, and seek to achieve their goals by trying their luck. They cannot be governed."
This gets to what I feel is the most important divide between Western thought and Eastern thought (roughly, between Western Enlightenment and Chinese). This quote aspires to the rule by law. The west aspires to rule of law.
I'm glad to now have some basis for what the Warring States Period was preceded by. You're right, it is definitely more pedestrian. Enough that I skipped much of the block quotes after a while. I'm not at a point in my life where I have a taste for quotidian accountings of the hours. I'll have to keep this in mind for when I am old and ragged, and not now when I am ragged and young.
> This gets to what I feel is the most important divide between Western thought and Eastern thought (roughly, between Western Enlightenment and Chinese). This quote aspires to the rule by law. The west aspires to rule of law.
The quote is from the philosophy that lost. The other guy, casting that legal code in bronze, was following a core tenet of Legalism. (The tenet for which Legalism is named.) And it was the Legalist state of Qin that won the wars of the Warring States Period and began the Imperial era. After the Qin dynasty, Legalism got a negative reputation, but it was too useful to *actually* throw away; they kept the basics of Legalism and dressed them up in Confucian ideals.
And the European version is older than the Enlightenment too. Every written legal code in modern Europe is a descendent of the Roman written legal code. And the Romans didn't make up the idea; the Greeks had written legal codes, and so did Near Eastern civilizations before them.
What (my understanding of) The Enlightenment does differently with legalism is to bend it toward liberal will. Liberalism brought the power of rule of law to the masses, which is the context that I work in but that's probably not universal. Liberalism is a young person on the world stage compared to ages-old things like legalism, especially our modern form of it, but that's recency bias for you -- I didn't state effectively that I was pointing toward liberalism with legalism under its umbrella and not legalism per se.
That's the clear juxtaposition to me. Rule of law is, now, a tenet of liberalism and representative government. Rule by law is within the heart of authoritarianism, with other tools sitting beside it in the toolbox.
I don't know that I would cast the whole of the Spring and Autumn Period in an authoritarian light, I simply don't know enough, but that quote exemplifies authoritarian thought in communal spaces and at the government level.
That is what rings most loudly for me after reading the review. Which, seeing it written out like this, feels pretty tangential to the review. I guess that's two Apologies I owe. Sorry.
I'm afraid I don't quite see the distinction you're getting at. Aside from anything else, modern liberal states probably exercise at least as much control over their citizens as ancient legalist ones.
"[...] the king publicly boiled one of his lords alive to send a message."
I have to disagree with your first statement. I can't not see the distinction. I'm reasonably sure that Gavin Newsom, Doug Burgum, etc. can't make mince out of someone and wouldn't try to fricassee somebody under cover of night, so to speak. The people that they would be cooking have rights that extend from humanitarian principles. People in power are in their positions, de jure, to serve, and they'll just have to stew over any naysayers and prying reporters.
To be honest, I could have stopped this after the first few lines, and I'm stopping now so as to not scramble things. I saw a delicious opportunity for some puns, so I seasoned my response with a few.
It's true that ancient Chinese punishments were often very brutal by today's standards, but I don't see what that has to do with the question of whether the laws should be written down. A written law code can impose some highly draconian punishments (our term "draconian" comes from the Athenian statesman Draco, whose code famously prescribed the death penalty for virtually everything), whereas a society without a written law code can impose penalties which we'd view as remarkably lenient, if that's the cultural norm (such as medieval Iceland, where the standard punishment for murdering someone was to pay a fine to his family).
"After the Qin dynasty, Legalism got a negative reputation, but it was too useful to *actually* throw away"
My understanding is that the philosophy called Legalism which got a bad reputation at this time was not so much the earlier "we think there should be legible and enforced laws", which as you say had been thoroughly assimilated by that time, but the probably quite different (although obviously lineally descendant) school of thought which, among other things, infamously advocated the death penalty for pretty much all transgressions.
The practice of using a clear law made available to the ruled so they knew what the ruler expects of them so they can better conform to the ruler’s will to avoid punishment is actually at the heart of the rule by law approach, and was advocated by people like Hobbes, an example par excellence of a rule by law advocate. The frays is rule by law after all, not rule by whim, and letting the people know what the ruler expects of them is obviously a win-win for both the ruler and ruler. Indeed, if people don’t know the laws, they have no possible way to obey them. Rule by law is a step between decentralized norms and arbitrary exercise of power by officials (who are not being directly supervised by a central authority and thus will often handle similar cases very differently because of things like corruption and different officials having different ideas of what should be prohibited) and rule of law. so it’s actually a sign of china moving closer towards the rule of law that they began to have rule by law instead of ad hock punishment by officials who might not have the best interests of the government in mind.
I’ll also note that some philosopher’s like Joseph Raz have argued that the virtue of the rule of law is like the virtue of a sharp knife, i.e it makes the law more effective, but not more just or moral. I myself wouldn’t go that far, but part of the confusion is that we don’t have a universally agreed definition of the rule of law, so I don’t exactly know what you mean by the frays. I myself associate it with legal limits on the ruler’s power, not just transparency about the content of the laws.
*Btw, in some ways if not others, Hobbes thinks a lot like the legalists, though there are obviously some differences.
It reminds me of how many internet forums/chatrooms/etc have a rule stating that the admins can ban anyone at their whim. More to the point, some even have no codified rules at all (that I could see), including https://www.datasecretslox.com/ and https://www.lesswrong.com/.
Lovely to see Chinese history getting the kind of serious attention that it deserves.
And if the reviewer's reading is right, it's still much more relevant today than it might seem. Remember, one of the leading contenders for being the cause of the Great Divergence (Western Europe + USA gets rich, rest of the world doesn't) is the resources shock of colonialism (this is contested, but I cautiously endorse this theory). Like the Zhou, taking control of a large empire offers such bounty that they can create a golden age. In Zhou, that meant a populace at peace (internally); in the modern west it meant the rise of science & new tech.
When the resources shock wore off, the golden age came to an end and the grind of competition reduced the space for big new innovations again.
I dunno how that will play out in the modern world. Despite the gloomy progress studies commentary in the last couple of decades, I never really bought the idea that progress has slowed. Certainly it feels like we're on the verge of some pretty big changes now. Though I have to say, the friction and alleged decoupling between China and America seems to support the idea of decline. The USA plus China would be an unstoppable partnership of brains and industrial might; divided, they might well achieve much less. That looks a bit like the mechanism of decline that the Zuozhuan/our reviewer are mapping out.
"The USA plus China would be an unstoppable partnership of brains and industrial might"
I think that this was always long-term impossible. In order to be a useful partner to the USA, China must remain poor (otherwise, manufacturing is better done at home), but the Chinese quite naturally resent this state of affairs. What they get out of the partnership is realistically ony the opportunity to lift themselves up, which if withheld by political will or (as I think) nature will lead them to seek other paths to that goal. As indeed we find them doing, now that the association no longer produces as strong a living-standards pump as it had hitherto done.
"In order to be a useful partner to the USA, China must remain poor..."
I don't think this is right at all - it's the big fallacy of international trade. The USA's biggest trade partners are the EU and Canada: rich countries, not poor ones.
There certainly was a trade pattern that existed for a while where China provided low-wage manufacturing labour, and the USA created high-value services and designs. But that's not the only kind of trade partnership that there can be. There are two ways it would evolve in an ideal world: (1) manufacturing stays in China and is gradually pushed inland to poorer areas where the wage gap can be maintained; (2) China gets richer and starts being more like a larger extension of the USA, with both countries providing a consumer market and creating high-value products and services; meanwhile low-wage manufacturing moves to new territories like Vietnam.
Politically, these wouldn't be easy, of course; but neither was the initial trade partnership that emerged in the 1990s (both sides resorted to shenanigans to get China membership of the WTO). Economically, so far as I can see, there are plenty of paths to continued, deeper partnership.
I’m interested in why people post that list so often. I found it useful once, but when I’ve seen it later, it seems much less helpful. He doesn’t say anything about what sorts of contexts are ones in which some of these assumptions are violated, and gives a list of assumptions that he tells you not to make that includes the assumption that “people have names”. Since anyone working with names is going to violate at least that assumption, it would be much more helpful to have some set of guidelines that one can work with, rather than a set of rules that will break.
Yes, the negation of many of the assumptions is not exactly actionable.
> People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
So you use variable length strings.
Your first customer has as their name the text of "war and peace" (to the dismay of your database admin), the next a base64 encoding of a movie (incuring the wrath of the MPAA) and the parents of the third decided that their name should end with a list of all prime integers in decimal (could be worse, at least that is still computable).
> People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
Okay, so you give up the evil tool of cultural imperialism that is unicode and allow people to use postscript in their name. People insist that their name is color-sensitive, so you buy a color printer (they go on to label you a CMYK-supremacist). Someone insists that their name can not be accurately captured on flat surfaces, so you contemplate buying a 3d printer for them. Before you can decide, some troll uses the Turing-completeness of postscript to make it calculate and print the last ten digits of the value of the Ackermann function for some insanely large value. When you refuse to buy the resources to calculate that in a speedy manner, people call you bad things on twitter.
> People have names.
You give up. From now on, every customer gets a customer number, and you address them by "Customer #245471" or whatever. (Later, the universe decides to punish you by sending you alien customers which can split into multiple parts, with the legal requirements being that all parts are equal to the original entity but not each other. Shame on you not to think of that possibility before introducing integer-based customer ids!)
Meanwhile, your competitor kept their old EBCDIC-based system which allows only /[A-Z. ]{5-25}/. This is annoying to use for customers not of European descent, but even many of these prefer that to memorizing their customer number, which always exists as a backup when name-based lookup fails.
The real lesson is that "name" is poorly defined. "Thing you use to uniquely identify a user", "thing you use when addressing messages to a user," and "thing that the government combines with various official records to uniquely identify a citizen" are all separate pieces of information and if you ask for a user's "name" you may not get the thing you're actually asking for. You can violate some of these assumptions in some contexts, so long as you're aware of what you're asking for.
For instance, you might use a separate "username" and "display name," where one is alphanumeric, short, and unique to make it easy to find users, while the other is Unicode and long and full of bells and whistles so that the guy whose name is written in an obscure variant of Sanskrit with color-sensitive ink can still receive marketing emails that address him nicely by name.
By the way, for "people have names," there is actually a somewhat common real-world scenario where this assumption gets violated - newborn babies. If you're a hospital and you need to record vitals for a newborn baby, you need to have some sort of way to identify their medical records, and asking mommy to give you a name 30 seconds after a baby pops out of her is probably not going to improve patient satisfaction.
Epic's solution is to automatically name a newborn baby "BabyMomsfirstname Momslastname," which seems inelegant, but it makes it very easy for a doctor or nurse to look up the baby's chart by name.
On population, ten million would be the right scale. Spring and Autumn China covered an area roughly 20% of the current PRC, so population density would have been comparable to, say, the post-Civil War era US.
For Western comparators, the Zuozhuan is in some respects a bit like a hybrid of Herodotus and Thucydides, and very little like the historical books of the Old Testament.
> the new translation standardizes names used wherever possible, so Fan Hui is always called Fan Hui, with a superscript index so you can look up what name was used in the original text in the back.
I have the Moss Roberts translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and I was immensely disappointed to see the introduction brag about doing the same thing. Well, almost the same thing; there is not even a reference left in the back of the book to the original name used. (Not that it would help much; for some ungodly reason the notes to both volumes are printed together at the back of volume 2.)
I can't understand why someone would want this. Let the translation reflect what the text said. Put footnotes explaining which person the name refers to; don't pretend each person has just the one name and make people interrupt their reading -- 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘢 𝘯𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘥 -- to hunt down the name that was actually used in a hidden reference somewhere else.
I want to know what people were called! Why not go through the Spider-Man archives and replace every instance of "Spider-Man", "Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man", "the Web-slinger", and "the Wall-crawler" with "Peter Parker"?
I am more sympathetic to your position than my previous snark would suggest. If the different names that are getting collapsed are epithets of some kind, yes, I agree there's some value in retaining them: I'm particularly fond of Homer's "rosy-fingered Dawn." But you also don't want to keep saying things like "He-Who-Fights-from-Afar," so there's some skill required in translating names in a way that retains the spirit of the original.
Using Zichan as an example, if he was referred to as "the chief minister of Zheng," sure, retain that. (If he was ever actually referred to as "the ignorer of dragons," DEFINITELY retain that.) But if he was called Gongsun Qiao in some places, you either need to make a big deal of the style name, or just shunt it to a footnote or the back of the book. As an analogy, if I'm reading about Caligula, "Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus" doesn't add anything worthwhile, but I'd appreciate Scipio being called "Cornelius" until the battle of Zama, and "Africanus" after.
I think Fan Hui being referred to Shi Hui, Shi Ji, Sui Wuzi, Sui Ji, Wu Ji, Wuzi, Jishi, Sui Hui, and Fan Wuzi is one of those cases where nothing of value is lost by dropping all but one name.
But if you're reading a philippic made against Caligula, and it mocks the achievements based on which he received the name Germanicus, and as part of that message it refers to him as Germanicus, there's a different message than if the same speech refers to him as Caesar. (And if it refers to him as Caligula... there's a very different message again!)
I think that the main goal of any text I would consider reading should be to transport the content across clearly, which puts limitations on alternate phrasings dependent on the gap between the reader and the author.
If one texts ones significant other, one can easily use lot of alternate names for them for poetic effect and will probably be understood.
If I read a detective novel, I probably have the context to know that "Mr. Hound", "John", "the detective", "the policeman" all refer to the same person.
For a modern reader of Schiller's Maria Stuart, referring to Wilhelm Cecil, Baron of Burleigh sometimes as Burleigh is already confusing.
If the gap between writer and the non-expert reader is a few millennia, the main challenge will be to get the gist of the plot across.
Besides, translation already mangles names into mostly connotation-less identifiers, so as my co-commentator says, if you want meaningful names you want to stick to the original version. (Also, you may want to avoid spoilers by secondary texts which point out which names actually refer to the same thing, so you can puzzle it out yourself as intended by the authors.)
I'm generally in favor of multiple different translations for multiple types of reader. For something like this, based on my low knowledge of Chinese, I'd personally prefer the single-name version, with footnotes or endnotes explaining what titles and names people used, and what the differences are. It's historical not narrative, and I'm unfamiliar with the cultural context.
There's other works in other cultures where I'm right with you, though. There's some shadings of meaning that I don't want to lose.
> It's historical not narrative, and I'm unfamiliar with the cultural context.
What bothers me is that the way you become familiar with the cultural context is by reading contemporary documents that embody that context. And that specific thing is what's being prevented by this translational choice. When there are several different ways to refer to someone, there are often very good reasons why one of them was or wasn't chosen in a particular case.
(And let's also note that between the historical work and the fictional one, it's the historical work that decided the names were important enough that there should at least be a way to know what they were.)
I agree, but there's only so much I'm going to accomplish from a single reading. If I were going to be reading more works of Chinese history, or studying Chinese history and culture in depth, I'd want the more nuanced translation. But I find it highly unlikely that I will, and so my personal preference would be for a streamlined version.
A while back I started watching Chinese dramas with my parents and learned that they might get completely lost when characters were referred to in multiple ways. All of these are plausible forms of reference:
1. Full name. ("Song Yunhui")
2. Just the personal name. (Lei Dongbao is addressed as "Dongbao")
3. Diminutive form of personal name. (Song Yunhui is called "Xiao Hui")
4. (Different) diminutive form of personal name. (His sister, Song Yunping, is called "Ping Ping")
5. (Yet another) diminutive form of personal name. (Fu Rong is called "Rong'er")
6. Nickname. (Wei Yingluo addresses Fuca Fuheng as "shaoye")
7. Formal title. (Zhu Di is addressed as "Huangshang")
8. Familial relationship. (This is, obviously, determined by the relationship between the speaker and the person they are referring to.)
9. Fictive familial relationship. (This one is mostly determined by the speaker's personality.)
(This can be confusing to me too, but doing the work to figure out what's going on serves my personal goals, so I don't consider it a waste. Many of these will just be obvious to me.)
But the context there is that you're watching a TV show in real time and if you don't understand the dialogue, you don't know what's happening.
I don't see that footnoting a canonical name at the bottom of the page poses the same kind of barrier to someone reading a book.
Not my cup of tea. Though interesting. (Are those quotes the best bits one could find?! - I am still underwhelmed). I actually had trouble to make out what the 'book' or the review was about. See, I do have a minor in history and another in theology - and the concept of 'understanding history' (esp. pre-Greek) by reading ol' texts ... is not a straightforward thing at all. There was no actual kingdom of David or Solomon - you can research early (but post-gospel) Christian history without knowing the gospels - reading Gilgamesh will not tell you much about how power worked in Uruk, mostly it will mislead laypeople. - When one knows some of the period, that knowledge shall illuminate those texts, to some extent (one recognizes the misconceptions, then). Not the other way round (reading Tertullian about angels teaches zero about angels - knowing the church hierarchy of his time makes you see where his drivel comes from). Drawing parallels (which?) from a mythic concept of 'China' to present USofA - lost me.
I think it would be misleading to see the portrait of Spring & Autumn China in the Zuozhuan as "mythic," Mark. The annals section is largely a single archived, thoroughly bureaucratic and surpassingly dull court record (despite the tale that Confucius made sagely alterations), each entry dated to the day, and the commentary, while including tale-like narratives, traces an historical outline confirmed by independent sources, such as contemporaneous bronze inscriptions. The history sections of the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, and Mesopotamian epics are not appropriate comparators. Thucidydes or Ibn Khaldun would be much closer. All historical narratives are necessarily gross simplifications and written from particular points of view, but in the world of ancient and medieval accounts the Zuo stands out as an unusually valuable historical source.
As an afterthought: Your feeling that the cited passages are underwhelming may reflect the degree to which the commentary is constrained by the multiple contemporary chronicles on which it is based.
Knowing far too little about Chinese history, I take your word for it, Robert. - The "pure" annals seem possibly accurate enough, with that one example of uncommented data-points. The Zuozhuan commentary as quoted in the review(!): less so (murder of regent for a turtle soup, sure) - where it turns 'Confucian': well, I think of Hesiod's 'Works and Days' (the 'Golden age'). The reviewer itself says: a) "There’s a few too many mythological creatures ... for the Zuozhuan to be taken entirely at face value, (but ....). While the overall level of historical rigor versus 4th century BC authorial invention remains under heated debate, ...". Well, I would have appreciated some example of that heated debate. b) "And importantly, it’s enjoyable." Taste clearly differs. If those quotes are of the most enjoyable 5% (as they should be!): not for me.
Much of that debate about historical rigor concerns differing approaches between Western and Chinese scholars, Mark, and we can't expect the reviewer to read Chinese. Moreover, the debate is not usually focused on theories of the text per se; it concerns disagreements about specific narratives, one by one and in detail. I would wager that if the reviewer had gone through a few of these he would have lost many of his readers, likely including you.
Most of the mythology in the text is presented as political actors recounting myths as historical fact, and that is likely historical (although, as with Thucydides, the specific speeches are presumably inventions). Even the annals section includes occasional notices of miraculous happenings, but these are notices of items reported at court in an age of belief, and thus as historical accounts (there are certainly a few intrusions of later editorial hands in the annals as well, such as notice of Confucius's birth, but recorded instances of solar eclipses, etc., demonstrate the authenticity of the base text--authors could not at that time calculate accurate eclipse dates centuries removed from their present).
Obviously, the text was not written for the entertainment of readers unimaginably removed in time and space. For modern readers who do find enjoyment in access across such gaps, the fact that the characters in the text are often complex and clearly delineated, reappearing in detailed vignettes over periods of decades, and that the political and ethical dilemmas they face are of generalizable relevance makes the text engaging. However, I'll confess I didn't take much note of which narrative sections the reviewer selected--perhaps the selection could have been more appealing to casual readers: the Zuo text is about 800-1000 pages in English (the quotes are closer to <0.05%, not 5%), and it's hard to choose just the right passages to illustrate its literary attraction when the point of the review concerned variety of narrative motives rather than the power of its more sustained sections.
But looking at the final choice--the critique of Zichan's laws--I think the literary impact should be clear. You do have to recognize that both Zichan and his correspondent are major characters that you would know well and be invested in if you were reading the whole text consecutively (imagine, say, if Henry Clay had been alive to write to Lincoln about his abrogation of habeas corpus). Look at what the Zuo author achieves. The correspondent mobilizes a host of rhetorical strategies to shame his friend Zichan for what he's done. He recounts a common idealized version of the distant past eras, and cites specific canonical texts about their downfalls; he quotes the poetic canon understood as the distilled wisdom of the past; he details the specific dire consequences he sees arising from Zichan's actions. To all of which Zichan responds with pointed brevity, blaming himself for the failures of his age and then in one sentence uttering the key to subsequent judgments of his historical role: alternatively: "I did it to save the world." (And, just to point out why the Chinese text is so celebrated, the entire speech Zichan makes here, which involves 40 syllables in English, is accomplished in 18 in ancient Chinese.) Millennia of people in traditional China, for whom the Zuo was a canonical text to be studied lifelong, would have read this brief reply and sighed at how it crystallized the tension between political aspirations and ideals and the crushing disappointment of political reality. The translation the reviewer read by Durrant, Li, and Schaberg tries wherever possible to equip the reader with enough background and context to grasp the impact, so the entertainment you might find by actually committing to the text would likely be far greater than a short review can demonstrate, which is why the reviewer had to add in so many words that you'd find it.
Amusingly, Wikipedia has this to say (in the page linked earlier):
> In response Zichan claims he's "untalented" thus unable to properly manage the laws with a view toward the future generations. To benefit people alive today was his aim.
It's a fair paraphrase, Moon Moth, though I think "laws" is an error: "manage the state" would be fine. Ancient Chinese is highly compressed and there are often multiple ways to render it. "I am untalented and can't reach [=anticipate/plan for] sons and grandsons [=the future]. I took [as my goal] rescuing the [present] era." Different translators will work with those units and come up with somewhat different readings.
Just a quick note to say that this seems a very responsible review. The sources cited towards the close--the translation by Durrant et al. and the secondary works by Li Feng, Loewe & Shaughnessy, and Pines--are all very solid scholarship, and the Watson selection is indeed readable and generally reliable. (It's worth adding that the now dated Legge version is probably the most impressive, as it was completed 150 years ago with no prior work to rely on.) I think the reviewer has done a very good job of introducing this rich and enormous historical source.
The writer of this review takes for granted that there is a special amount of upheaval in the current world order. What hard evidence of this is there? My prior is to distrust any regard of the modern day as especially bad, both because people are inclined to find their personal circumstances as special and because this attitude sometimes arises from the presence of 24 hour news in our national and international narratives.
I think this depends on how widely you define "today". I'm pretty sure that the '90s were even stabler and more peaceful than the '10s, but these decades could certainly be reckoned in with one another as part of "the modern age" or "these days".
In either case, it seems obvious that comparison only to the all-time global minimum is itself highly misleading and insufficient to call a period particularly brutal or unstable, so I agree with the fundamental point you're both making.
The last century was the most violent of all time (or maybe only one of the most violent, if you go by percentages), so there's blatant cherry picking of dates with statements like that ("since the last major war ended, we've had no major wars!") Why are we so determined to feel our lives are special that we keep insisting the present is either the most peaceful time in history or the most dangerous time in history, but never just "fairly similar, all things considered, to many other times in history"?
1. I assume that it depends on how many centuries are included in the comparison. Within the last ten, presumably only the 13th would compare? In the ancient world it might be different but I have no hard data. If you do know of hard data on this I'd be very interested in which centures' death tolls equal or exceed the 20th.
2. I also have no idea whether it makes more sense to use percentages or raw numbers. Judging similar-scale wars as getting more destructive simply because the fighting population is increasing seems misleading. But judging modern wars as less destructive simply because the losses are replenished much quicker also seem misleading.
The 17th century was extremely violent in many parts of the world. Especially Central Europe had the 30 Years War that I am quite familiar with, but eg China also had its fair share of trouble.
Right, I thought of the Thirty Years War in Europe and the Taiping War in China for the 17th and 19th centuries respectively but thought they were only in one part of the world. I also asked ChatGPT and got a completely useless answer (like I do almost every time I ask it anything, I can't understand the AI hype):
"Certainly, here are very rough and unreliable estimates for the percentage of the world population that may have died in wars during each of the last ten centuries:
10th century: Less than 1%
11th century: Less than 1%
12th century: Less than 1%
13th century: Less than 1%
14th century: Due to the Black Death, around 5-10%
15th century: Less than 1%
16th century: Less than 1%
17th century: Less than 1%
18th century: Less than 1%
19th century: Less than 1%
Please note that these are highly speculative estimates, and the actual figures could vary widely. War casualties were often localized, and historical records are not comprehensive for earlier centuries. The 14th century stands out due to the significant impact of the Black Death on global population figures."
And the Black Death isn't relevant because I specifically asked about wars!
Strongly agree. And I'd similarly distrust claims that the modern day is especially good (as in "the best time in history", not merely "part of a clearly dominant and prosperous few centures for our civilisation") as a function both of the same desire to think your circumstances are special and of propaganda from government and other institutions determined to potray the current ruling ideology as the best of all possible ideologies.
And honestly, just once, I'd like to see a rationalist make the prediction about the near future that is most rational (in terms of how often it's been the correct one at almost all other times): that it will be interesting, but overall not fundamentally different from what came before. Instead of that the world is about to end, that the world is about to become a utopia, or (the most common one around here) that the world is about to either end or become a utopia, but nothing else.
It's not unreasonable to expect that all of the technology developed over the past few centuries would have significant effects on society. It doesn't require the current politics to be uniquely good, there's already a separate reason for the modern day to be unique. I think what has been happening is already fundamentally different from what came before, and it is not necessarily rational to ignore that and assume that what's happening now is just like the high points in previous civilisations. Most of the extreme predictions for the near-ish future relate to AI, but nukes for example are already a proven technology with the potential to destroy far more of the world than would ever have been possible before.
> The existing foundations of our world are damaged but not broken. For all the upheavals in recent years, I struggle to believe that the pace of change will slow, or that the ideas to truly make sense of these changes already exist. This is only the beginning, and the Zuozhuan gives a visceral sense of what that really means. Our culture wars will seem like people getting mad over ancestral tablet placements.
I mostly do not share this perspective. Tales of decline and decay have been in fashion for times immemorable. Sometimes they are obviously point on (e.g. Hari Seldon's predictions, or the fall of Rome) but ever so often they are not, IIRC the Romans have bemoaned the moral decay of their contemporaries since the early republic. By many metrics, we are doing pretty okay. Yes, there are new challenges, the gap between capital and wages widens, global warming, housing prices, population dynamics, increase in migration, you name it. But the past seven decades were also globally more peaceful than anything which happened before, and people are generally getting wealthier in some ways (if not others). US politics may be more partisan than they were 20 years ago, and the culture war may intensify, but US politics are still rather tame compared to Weimar politics and I will take the culture war over the shooting wars which littered the past any day of the week.
So personally, I don't feel very fin du siècle. Perhaps we create ASI in the next decade and it either kills us or leads us into a singularity, but that is far from certain. I don't think it is preposterous to assume that in 2100 CE, we will still have market based economies, Coca Cola, the internet, and cars, or that the US will still be a big player internationally.
O tempora, o mores! Little men at the far end of history, hiding their banality by inflating their petty squabbles to compete with the grand tragedy of ages past.
... Is certainly something I've felt at times. But at the same time, dude, I can eat fruit year round!
I think the most important takeaway here, perfectly explicit in the text, should be that the end of an era is not the end of the world. After the upheaval, most of us will continue "doing pretty okay", maybe less okay than before, maybe more, but statistically, the humanity at large will keep advancing as it always did.
This does not negate the validity of the confusion, and genuine perception of decay, of people who rely on or benefit from the current arrangement. (This is, in a way, most of us as far as stability is concerned. But most prominently, it's elite people high up in the hierarchy, precisely the kind of people who leave written artifacts behind for future generations.) They're entirely correct to be horrified of turbulence and change, and I wish them well, even as I don't exactly wish them the stability of their posts and the entire hierarchy they occupy, and have no emotional attachment to the norms they rely on.
To put this another way, of course the US will remain a big player internationally for the foreseeable future, just like the UK, France, Russia remain big players to this day. And yet, did things not completely change since their heydays?
What do you mean by the gap between capital and wages widening?
That proportion of GDP that goes to capital has been broadly stable (in eg the US) over time. The amount going to land owners has increased somewhat at the expense of labour. But still, the labour share of GDP has been fairly stable, too.
Strong contender for the most illuminating book review this year. I actually felt I understood the world (very) slightly better after reading it than before. Definitely worth the 20 or so minutes.
>I actually felt I understood the world (very) slightly better after reading it
Very much this. I had zero understanding of ancient China before, and now I feel like I have a reasonably complete, if simplistic, perfectly useful mental model of it.
Which, impressive, considering that I'm pretty sure all the info about China was just a buildup to deliver the punchline:
>Our culture wars will seem like people getting mad over ancestral tablet placements.
And, fair, it's a great one. Genuinely puts things in perspective, I'm stealing that analogy for future use.
I'm struck by how big a deal proper respect via allotment of food was ... short someone on some meal they thought they were due, and it's time for assassination, betrayal and blood feud...
This comes up in ancient Irish sagas, too; the Champion's or Hero's Portion. People would contend over this. I think it happens in Viking sagas as well. Like the Iliad, this is a pre-Christian (or in the case of China, non-Christian) honour-bound society where being a warrior is an elite social role and your status heavily depends on being recognised and awarded your due.
"The Curadmír, modern Curadhmhír (Champion's Portion) was an ancient custom referred to in early Irish literature, whereby the warrior acknowledged as the bravest present at a feast was given precedence and awarded the choicest cut of meat. This was often disputed violently. The custom appears most often in the legends of the Ulster Cycle. It is parallelled by historical customs of the ancient Celts of continental Europe, as recorded by classical writers.
The Story of Mac Dá Tho's Pig
The Ulster Cycle saga Scéla Mucce Meic Dá Thó ("The Story of Mac Dá Tho's Pig") features a dispute over the Champion's Portion between warriors of Ulster and Connacht who are guests at a feast in Leinster. They dispute it by boasting of their previous heroic deeds, and eventually the Connacht hero Cet mac Mágach is acknowledged as the bravest man present. Just as he is about to carve the pig, the Ulster hero Conall Cernach arrives, and his boasts force Cet to give way to him. But he claims that Conall would have had to give way to his brother Anlúan had he been there. Conall responds by tossing Cet Anlúan's freshly severed head. Conall carves the pig, but gives the Connachtmen such a small portion that battle breaks out between them."
Achilles sulks in his tent, the general dips into the cauldron of turtle soup, because a public insult has been laid upon them demoting them to a lesser role. If they don't react and just take it, then they've proven that they're weaklings who deserve to be downgraded. And if they're downgraded, they lose a lot both in reputation and clout. Now those formerly their inferiors will be emboldened to take liberties and try to rise into that vacant spot.
There's a very funny story called Bricriu's Feast in the Irish sagas, where Bricriu is a known troublemaker who does things for the lulz. He throws a big party and invites all the important and famous people. Nobody wants to go, because they realise he's only going to set people up, but he threatens that if nobody turns up, he will cause even more and worse trouble than if they do.
It's interesting not only for the glimpses into a warrior society that it gives, but also as a source for the later Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Gawaine and Cú Chulainn, the respective heroes of the tales, are both the nephew of the King in the main story, they face beheading by a giant, etc.)
Why I say it's funny is because Bricriu starts trouble first amongst the warriors, then when that is sorted out he starts it amongst their wives and then moves on to their charioteers/servants. Each time it's patched up, but the bad feeling engendered means that in order to settle who really *is* the greatest hero of Ulster, the three contenders visit different kings to get an answer. The last one, king of Munster, realises that whoever he picks, the losers are going to take it out on him, so he sets up or sends them off for the beheading contest. It's entertaining to read, and you can see why the story survived in some form over the centuries. It's not as Great Literature as the Iliad, but the stakes are not as high; if Achilles sulks in his tent, the Greek army is slaughtered by the Trojans, but if the three Ulster heroes are running around getting decisions on who's the greatest, at least nobody is killed.
"Fled Bricrenn (Old Irish "Bricriu's Feast") is a story from the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. Bricriu, an inveterate troublemaker, invites the nobles of the Ulaid to a feast at his new bruiden (hostel, banquet hall) at Dún Rudraige (Dundrum, County Down), where he incites three heroes, Cúchulainn, Conall Cernach, and Lóegaire Búadach, to compete for the "champion's portion" of the feast. The three heroes perform several feats, and travel to Connacht to be judged by Ailill and Medb, and to Munster to be judged by Cú Roí, and on each occasion Cúchulainn is proclaimed champion, but the other two refuse to accept it. Eventually, back at Emain Macha, the three heroes are each challenged by a giant churl to cut off his head, on the condition that they allow him to cut off their heads in return. First Lóegaire, then Conall, takes up the challenge and cuts off the churl's head, only for him to pick it up and leave, but when the churl returns the following night they are nowhere to be seen. Only Cúchulainn lives up to his side of the bargain. The churl spares his life, reveals himself to be Cú Roí in disguise, and announces that Cúchulainn's bravery and honour make him undisputed champion.
The story dates from the 8th century and is found in several manuscripts, including the Lebor na hUidre (c. 1106). The motif of warriors competing for the champion's portion is found in another Ulster Cycle tale, Scéla Mucce Maic Dathó ("The Tale of Mac Dathó's Pig"), and is reminiscent of descriptions of customs of the Celts of continental Europe as recorded by classical authors. The beheading challenge also has classical parallels, and also appears in later medieval literary works like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."
From the Chinese annals, we see that it is a stratified society bound by ritual and precedent, and violations of such cause trouble. Deliberately breaking the balance throws all into disarray. The general trespasses by seeming to impinge upon the rights of his host and superior (i.e. he *had* to serve him a portion of the turtle because of the omen), the king trespassed by laying a public insult upon a high official (calling him forward then deliberately not giving him a portion). End result was This Insult Can Only Be Wiped Out By Blood and the ruler gets assassinated. It wasn't about "he didn't get a portion of the feast", it was about "his status was insulted and denigrated before his peers by the ruler who acted improperly".
"It fell upon a day there was in Emain a gathering of the Ulster men. He was anon made welcome, and was seated by the shoulder of Conchobar. Bricriu addressed himself to him as well as to the body of the Ulster men. "Come with me," quoth Bricriu, "to partake of a banquet with me." "Gladly," rejoined Conchobar, " if that please the men of Ulster." Fergus mac Roig and the nobles of Ulster also made answer : " No ; for if we go our dead will outnumber our living, when Bricriu has incensed us against each other."
" If ye come not, worse shall ye fare," quoth Bricriu. "What then," asked Conchobar, "if the Ulster men go not with thee ? " "I will stir up strife," quoth Bricriu, " between the kings, the leaders, the heroes of valour, and the yeomen, till they slay one another, man for man, if they do not come with me to share my feast." " That we shall not do to please thee," quoth Conchobar. " I will stir up enmity between father and son so that it will come to mutual slaughter. If I do not succeed in doing so, I will make a quarrel between mother and daughter. If that does not succeed, I will set each of the Ulster women at variance, so that they come to deadly blows till their breasts become loathsome and putrid." " Sure 'tis better to come," quoth Fergus. " Do ye straightway take counsel with the chief Ultonians," said Sencha, son of Ailill. " Unless we take counsel against this Bricriu, mischief will be the consequence," quoth Conchobar.
Thereupon all the Ulster nobles assembled in council. In discussing the matter Sencha counselled them thus : " Take hostages from Bricriu, since ye have to go with him, and set eight swordsmen about him so as to compel him to retire from the house as soon as he has laid out the feast." Furbaide Ferbenn, son of Conchobar, brought Bricriu reply, and showed him the whole matter. " It is happily arranged," quoth Bricriu. The men of Ulster straightway set out from Emain, host, battalion and company, under king, chieftain and leader. Excellent and admirable the march of the brave and valiant heroes to the palace."
These conditions don't worry Bricriu, because he knows a trick worth two of that. He goes privately to each of the three heroes, flatters them, and tells them to request the championship and the hero's portion. At the feast, they each do so at the same time, fighting breaks out, and it is barely ended when Bricriu - who is absent all this time - starts the next phase of his plan. He meets the wives of the three heroes singly, flatters them outrageously, and sits back to enjoy the fun:
"The three companies thereupon went out till they met at one spot, to wit, three ridges from the hall. None of them wot that Bricriu had incited them one against another. To the hall they straightway return. Even and graceful and easy their carriage on the first ridge ; scarcely did one of them raise a foot before the other. But on the ridge following, their steps were shorter and quicker. Moreover, on the ridge next the house it was with difficulty each kept up with the other ; so they raised their robes to the rounds of their limbs to compete in the attempt to go first into the hall. For what Bricriu said to each of them regarding the other was, that whosoever should first enter should be queen of the whole province. The amount of confusion then occasioned by the competition to enter the hall first was as it were the noise of fifty chariots approaching. The whole palace shook and the warriors sprang to their arms and made essay to kill one another within."
So what starts out as a decorous procession of the noblewomen with their attendants ends in a mad scramble of a race where they hike up their skirts and pelt along to see who can enter the feast hall first. More trouble ensues:
""Stay," quoth Sencha, "they are not enemies who have come ; it is Bricriu who has set a-quarrelling the women who have gone out. By the god of my tribe, unless the hall be closed against them our dead will outnumber our living." Thereupon the doorkeepers close the doors. Emer, daughter of Forgall the Wily, wife of Cuchulainn, by reason of her speed, outran the others and put her back against the door, and straightway called upon the doorkeepers ere the other ladies [came], so that the men within got up, each of them to open for his own wife that she might be the first to come within. " Bad [look-out] to-night," quoth Conchobar. He struck the silver sceptre that was in his hand against the bronze pillar of the couch and the folks gat seated. " Stay," quoth Sencha, "'tis not a warfare of arms that shall be held here ; it will be a warfare of words." Each woman went out under the protection of her spouse, and then followed the Ulster women's war-of-words."
The women insult each other and their rivals' husbands, so the men break open part of the wall to let their wives in. Cú Chulainn, because he is the Best and Greatest of course, lifts up the wall to let his wife in:
"Thus did the men in the hall behave on having heard the laudatory addresses of the women — to wit, Loigaire and Conall ; each sprang into his hero's light, and broke a stave of the palace at a like level with themselves, so that in this way their wives came in. Moreover, Cuchulainn upheaved the palace just over against his bed, till the stars of heaven were to be seen from underneath the wattle. By that opening came his own wife with half a hundred women attendants in her train, as also half a hundred in waiting upon the other twain. Other ladies could not be compared with Emer, while no one at all was to be likened unto her spouse. Thereupon Cuchulainn let the palace down till seven feet of the wattle entered the ground ; the whole dún shook, and Bricriu's balcony was laid flat to the earth, in such wise that Bricriu and his queen toppled down till they fell into the fosse in the middle of the courtyard among the dogs. " Woe is me," cried Bricriu, as he hastily got up, " enemies have come into the palace." He took a turn round and perceived how it was lop-sided and inclined entirely to one side. He wrung his hands, then betook himself within, so bespattered that none of the Ulster folk could recognise him. From his manner of speech only did they do so."
He blames them for wrecking his beautiful new feast hall, they sort it out, the feast proceeds, the women start quarrelling again, the heroes try to provoke a duel, but it is prevented and there are three days of feasting. But after that, the problem flares up again, and Conchobar the king decides to send the three pains in his neck off to some other king to be his problem, so he sends them to Curoi for judgement as he is known to be a fair and impartial judge. Curoi sets up a test on the way for them, Cú Chulainn wins this, but the other two are not satisfied as they claim he got his fairy friends and relations to set up this trick. Conchubar sends them off to Ailill and Maebh of Connaught then for a decision, and I'll leave you to read the rest online for the poetic tropes of describing the chariot, horses, armour and appearance of the heroes to be identified:
"Thereupon Findabair, daughter of Ailill and of Méve, went to the soller over the high porch of the hold.
" Mother dear," she said, " I see a chariot coming along the plain."
" Describe it," quoth Méve, "its form, appearance and style ; the colour of the horses; how the hero looks and how the chariot courses."
…In the chariot a fair man with long curling hair ; his tresses tri-coloured : brown at the skin, blood-red at the middle, as a diadem of yellow gold the hair at the tips. Three halos encircle his upturned head, each merging into the other. About him a soft crimson tunic, having five stripes of glittering gold. A shield spotted and indented, with a bright edge of bronze. A barbed five-pronged javelin flames at his wrist. An awning of the rare plumage of birds over his chariot's frame."
"We recognise that man," quoth Méve, ' from his description."
" Compeer of kings, an old disposer of conquest,
A fury of war, a fire of judgment,
A flame of vengeance ; in mien a hero,
In face a champion, in heart a dragon ;
The long knife of proud victories which will hew us to pieces ; The all-noble, red-handed Loigaire ; His the vigour that cuts the leek with the sword-edge — The back-stroke of the wave to the land.”
… In the chariot a fair man with wavy hanging hair. His countenance white and red, his jerkin clean and white, his mantle of blue and crimson red. His shield brown with yellow bosses, its edge veined with bronze. In his hand flames a fiery, furious spear. And an awning of the rare plumage of birds over the wicker frame of his chariot."
" We recognise the man from his description," quoth Méve.
" A lion that groaneth, a flame of Lug, that diamonds can pierce ; A wolf among cattle ; battle on battle, Exploit on exploit, head upon head he heaps ; As a trout on red sandstone is cut Would the son of Findchoimi cut us ; should he rage against us, no peace !
… In the chariot a dark, melancholy man, comeliest of the men of Erin. Around him a soft crimson pleasing- tunic , fastened across the breast, where it stands open, with a salmon-brooch of inlaid gold, against which his bosom heaves, beating in full strokes. A long-sleeved linen kirtle with a white hood, embroidered red with flaming gold. Set in each of his eyes eight red dragon gemstones. His two cheeks blue-white and blood-red. He emits sparks of fire and burning breath, with a ray of love in his look. A shower of pearls, me thinketh, has fallen into his mouth. Each of his two eyebrows as black as the side of a black spit. On his two thighs rests a golden-hilted sword, and fastened to the copper frame of the chariot is a blood-red spear with a sharp mettlesome blade on a shaft of wood well fitted to his hand. Over both his shoulders a crimson shield with a rim of silver, chased with figures of animals in gold. He leaps the hero's salmon-leap into the air and does many like swift feats besides. Such is the chief of a chariot-royal.
"Truly, it is a drop before a shower ; we recognise the man from his description," quoth Méve.
"An ocean fury, a whale that rageth, a fragment of flame and fire ; A bear majestic, a grandly moving billow, A beast in maddening ire : In the crash of glorious battle Through the hostile foe he leaps, His shout the fury of doom ; A terrible bear, he is death to the herd-of-cattle, Feat- upon feat, head upon head he heaps : Laud ye the hearty one, he who is victor fully. As fresh malt is ground in the mill shall we be ground by Cuchulainn.”
>In 536 BC, toward the end of the Spring and Autumn period, the state of Zheng cast a penal code in bronze. By the standards of the time, this was absolutely shocking, an upending of the existing order
>...
Gosh, that must be awful. Imagine ruling over a people who know what the law is and are able to avoid being punished unjustly. Imagine being able to be held to your own standards instead of having yourself *be* the standard so you can do no wrong. Can't imagine what it must be like. Such chaos and anarchy.
> And none of the thinking beings in the Zuozhuan, for all their debates and worrying about the world, could’ve understood the additional forces of change beginning to awaken in their own era. This period is also the beginning of China’s Iron Age, a prerequisite for the tools for increased agricultural production and the weapons for mass infantry that would enable the dynamics of the Warring States.
> I’ve seen one reader exclaim that the people of the Spring and Autumn era read like demonic spirits. Figures from even a century or two later argue from nice rational self-interest in ways that are comprehensible to us today, but for the people in the Zuozhuan, especially the early figures, the world spun on different axes. That’s not to say they didn’t understand self-interest, or that their high-flown speeches couldn’t disguise ruthless calculation, but they interfaced with the world through concepts like Heaven’s Mandate and ritual propriety, truly believed in them the way medieval Europe believed in Hell and heresy. Only, while medieval thinkers at least had ideas from the Classical world to draw on, the thinkers of the Spring and Autumn had no predecessors from more advanced societies than theirs.
These 2 sections remind me of the Bronze Age Collapse, around 1200 BC, and of Scott's review https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ about the alleged development of consciousness around the same time. One of the proposed causes for the Mediterannean Bronze Age collapse was the development of iron, which, as was presumably also the case in China, was much more accessible to small, isolated states than bronze was (bronze is an alloy of multiple metals from different places, and thus access to it requires a substantial trading network).
Heaven's mandate and rituals seem to map roughly onto Greek gods or personal spirits (summoned by rituals). Maybe the same thing happened in this period in China as happened in the Mediterranean world a few centuries prior?
> And importantly, it’s enjoyable. You can think of the Zuozhuan as the Gene Wolfe of ancient historical works.
You sold me.
Speaking of Gene Wolfe and ancient history and feuding commentariat over deliberately enigmatic brief chronicles, Wolfe fans might be interested in this: 14 years after starting, and 43 years after publication, I've solved "Suzanne Delage". It turns out to be basically "Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ if Dracula had gone to New England instead of England": https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage
That's very interesting! Could you say a bit more about how this interpretation relates to the Proust reference from "The Guermantes Way?"
I don't think there's much more to the Proust allusion than there are to the other equally overt allusions like Hamlet or Chesterton. If anyone could have constructed much more of an interpretation off the Proust, they would've by now. It's the covert allusions to _Dracula_, which carefully avoid a give-away quotation or name (eg. the careful hiding of the reference to Gypsies/Jews), which power the story, as opposed to individual throwaways.
Very cool. Thank you!
I just read the story. There is an inversion of the situation in Proust: the narrator's new girlfriend mistakenly believes that his mother and Suzanne's mother are friends; in Wolfe the narrator's mother and Suzanne's mother are friends.
Rereading that short section in Proust makes me think that Wolfe got the idea for the story while reading those lines. There's this character, Suzanne Delage, whose existence the narrator has been aware of since he was young but has never met. Sounds like the inspiration for an eerie story like the one he wrote.
BTW: Very interesting post. I've never read Wolfe before and don't know what to think of the story other than it was very interesting after reading your theory -- and the history of various interpretations of the story.
I found this bit odd:
> SD would appear to be like Emshwiller in telling about how the narrator never encounter Suzanne Delage, yet Le Guin groups SD with Pei
But this is what you quote Le Guin writing in her introduction:
> Wolfe, and Pei, and Emshwiller tell of lives lived on the edge of hope, or a little over the edge
She groups all three of them together, not Wolfe with Pei instead of Ernshwiller.
No, I don't think she does. Le Guin was a careful, precise writer, and the normal way to group them would be to write 'Wolfe, Pei, and Emshwiller' (with or without the Oxford comma); but she uses a redundant-seeming way to indicate that she doesn't mean the normal thing. (Only a lunatic writes 'X, and Y, and Z', if all they meant was 'X, Y, and Z'.) You can argue that she might mean splitting the three the other way but not that they are identically in one group.
There is no semantic difference between "X, Y, and Z" and "X, and Y, and Z". I don't think Miranda July is a lunatic for titling her debut film "Me and You and Everyone We Know", nor Jesse Andrews for the title "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl". And they ARE in one group which "tell of lives lived on the edge of hope, or a little over the edge". Le Guin being a careful writer to me means she liked how her phrasing read. It does not, to me, mean a clue that Wolfe's story is an inverted Dracula (is Wolfe supposed to have told her that was the case but cautioned her about what kinds of clues would be too obvious?).
There's no semantic difference between "X, Y, and Z " and "X, and Y, and Z", but I think there's a connotative difference. The second one gives more weight to each item. It's saying "This isn't just some list or some group, pay attention to each of the three."
I can buy that.
> The second one gives more weight to each item.
That's an option. More commonly, pronouncing a list like that might have the effect of emphasizing how numerous examples are of whatever phenomenon you're listing.
Yes, there is. An explicit use of polysyndeton is telling the reader that it is not the usual list. If I say "I ran and hopped and jumped and swam", that conveys something entirely different to the reader than "I ran, hopped, jumped, and swam." (For example, the first version strongly implies a strict causal ordering, while the second one is vaguer in simply including a set of activities. If you don't believe me, consider this variant: "We ate ice cream, and chips, and chuck roast." vs "We ate ice cream, chips, and chuck roast." The second is an ordinary dinner, while the first leaves you wondering if this was a slumber party or the children were left in charge of the meal planning.) The meaning of the two are not the same even if they may superficially seem the same if you reduce them from natural language to an impoverished logic.
> I don't think Miranda July is a lunatic for titling her debut film "Me and You and Everyone We Know", nor Jesse Andrews for the title "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl".
I'm unfamiliar with those works so I couldn't say.
> is Wolfe supposed to have told her that was the case but cautioned her about what kinds of clues would be too obvious?
Or told by Kidd, who I suspect did most of the work (with Le Guin as the celebrity headliner), but no, he wouldn't've have needed to tell her something so obvious. Le Guin is not an idiot and hardly needs to be coached by a fellow writer, whose works she read and admired ("our Melville", not to mention all the other blurbs she contributed), a friend, and a writer contributing a piece to the anthology she is editing, into not blabbing. She understood perfectly well that the story is a puzzle and should not be spoiled right in the introduction.
I agree with your first example consisting of four entries, which one can naturally divide into two groups of two, and will be more likely to do so if one comes across a phrase written as "ran and hopped". But that relies on the reader already knowing that once running one can translate forward momentum into hopping, and that one swims after jumping into water.
In your quote of Le Guin begins with this other example of a group of authors:
> Some—Engh, Mitchison, Sanders, Dorman—write of existences at the limits of civilization
This also does not follow the convention of just commas for the initial entries but an "and" for the last one. It is only commas. Then in the next example (which we've been discussing) she uses only a commas followed by an "and" for each entry. Why does she write the two lists out differently? I think a list of four would contain too many "ands" if she'd included one for each pair, whereas with only three it's only one more "and" than usual. In both cases, as Nancy Lebowitz points out, each entry is treated equal to every other entry in the list. At the same time, she's able to vary the style as suited for the different lengths.
Whether a story should be spoiled in the introduction is a separate question from whether the introduction should contain clues at all that one can decode by connecting it to blurbs. If one were going to use blurbs at all (and that's far from obvious to me, since Wolfe isn't writing them to provide intended clues, rather they are supposed to serve the anthology as a whole), one could go by process of elimination. But your analysis indicates that both "VISIONS" are represented by Pei & Emshwiller together, so there isn't a remaining blurb unaccounted for. You don't think there are other examples of blurbs which apply to multiple stories (you are arguing against the "lover never known" applying to Wolfe), but you do have a story you think isn't connected to any blurb. But, however idiosyncratic the Urrea story, if one why not two? If the story is a puzzle, why not just have all the clues reside in the story itself?
> (Only a lunatic writes 'X, and Y, and Z', if all they meant was 'X, Y, and Z'.)
This is obviously untrue. The different phrasings direct focus to different aspects of the meaning, but the meaning doesn't change.
Interesting. For your next act, please solve The Land Across 😁
I haven't even read _The Land Across_! I doubt I can crack that one if Marc hasn't yet.
I just got lucky with "Suzanne Delage" in that I was a bit more stubborn (and contemptuous of copyright law) than anyone else who was looking at it, and noticed the clue in the covers of the original printing (omitted from all subsequent versions), and finally was the very first person to ever ask "if it really does involve memory-loss and a young lover torn away from him, and vampires are the best theory to date, then... could... this have something to do with _Dracula_?" (As far as I can tell from my past research and subsequent searches, _Dracula_, specifically, has *never* been mentioned in connexion with SD.) After that, it's all rather trivial. Any of the other Wolfe fans like Marc could've done as good or better a job of interpreting it.
Fair enough, I enjoyed TLA enough to read it twice but it's definitely "late Wolfe" and not the highest priority. Good work on the Dracula connection.
You know, if it were any other author, I'd say this was a very creative and entertaining but unlikely fan theory.
But Wolfe? Maybe!
That's a story I didn't know about until now, thank you! It's a very Wolfe story, it builds up until you expect some climactic revelation, gives you what should be start of one - and then ends. He was a great writer 😀
The story may very well be exactly what it presents itself to be: the story of a man to whom nothing very remarkable has happened, and the only thing out of his ordinary life he can think of as anything like "we forget extraordinary events" is that there was one particular girl whom he *should* have known, by all the usual chances of life - their mothers were friends, they went to the same high school - but didn't. That's it, that's the biggest thing that ever happened to him.
It would be completely in line with Wolfe to have this be "that's it, it's just a slice of life story". That we, the readers, expect some big revelation and spend time trying to work out what is really going on, what is the hidden story (vampires, clones, what?) is the trick - real life is not a story. Real life doesn't lead up to revelations of supernatural horror like a Lovecraft tale - and the setting is deliberately intended to evoke Lovecraft, I think, with the New England setting and the expeditions to hunt down Revolutionary-era relics preserved and carried on "in the unschooled, traditional ways of the old farm families" which usually ends in some kind of disaster for the narrator or his family member/friend who hunted out such items, the references to churches and ethnic minorities, the idea of Suzanne's photos going missing because of something revelatory like 'the Marsh look' coming out in them as time goes on, the very name itself evoking the old families like the Marshes etc. in Lovecraft's stories - it just ends abruptly or messily or with no clear resolution.
The narrator never met Suzanne herself. He had two failed marriages, no children, seemingly no siblings (unless they died in the mysterious epidemic) and his parents are dead and have left him the family home. Suzanne married and has a daughter - or maybe she didn't marry, the scandal of having an illegitimate child would be enough for her to drop out of all polite society discourse as nobody would talk about this openly. Narrator was too involved with his own routine life to hear about this and his mother certainly wouldn't have brought it up.
*That* might be the 'big secret' at the end, why the female friend can't remember what the name of Suzanne's daughter is, and why she refers to Suzanne by her maiden name. She never got married, the friend can't remember or never knew who the putative father of her child was and so doesn't know how to refer to the girl. That's the 'mystery' around Suzanne Delage and our ordinary guy narrator who is too self-centred in his casual, routine way and his own little life never heard any of this gossip. In fact, he had so little interest in Suzanne that it was only after trying to remember if anything 'extraordinary' had ever happened to him, that he came up with "the girl I never met". That's what life is like for most of us, it's not a neatly-plotted story. The End.
And I'm doing the very same thing here that Wolfe is jogging our elbows about - coming up with an explanation for "what about Suzanne Delage was so odd?" Maybe there was nothing. They grew up, got married, had lives. Narrator has two failed marriages and no kids, Suzanne got married and had one kid, a daughter who looks just like her at that age. The End.
I think given the narrator's reaction to the daughter, and her resemblance to Suzanne, that it's clear that he either never met Suzanne or he met her but somehow forgot her. Given the end of the second paragraph, I think "forgot" is what we're meant to assume. Which is even stranger, because given his reaction to the daughter, what could possibly make him forget the mother?
That's about as far as I got with the story on my own. Although I hadn't seen "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" yet. That probably would have put me onto the track of "he was made to forget", which certainly seems more plausible than somehow doing it himself. The last line does have an allusion to the friend expecting him to know that the daughter is Suzanne's, but I can't tell if that's highlighting the improbability of the narrator not having met Suzanne, or if it's a subtle hint that town gossip assumes that he knows Suzanne.
An alternative interpretation might be "Fight Club" or "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", where the narrator definitely knows Suzanne, but in another identity. Which is why this version of him is so boring and placid: all the exciting parts of his life are crammed into the other personality. Thus also explaining the "forgetting" theme. ("Why is the kitchen full of buckets of nitroglycerin littered with yearbook cutouts?")
Nice! That interpretation makes a lot of sense. Especially how it explains the lengthy (for a story this size) digression into his mother's expeditions with Suzanne's mother, which always puzzled me. But if they're repeatedly getting drained by a vampire, and then escorting a coffin into town, that would explain it. And also the peculiar absence of fathers in the story ("grandfather" is mentioned once), and no hint of what happened to his mother, who used to live in the house he now occupies.
My only quibble would be in the footnote regarding the church - I think it's going a bit too far to say "the only church the town apparently has", because I'd expect any town with 50k-100k population to have at least a dozen churches. But I think this could instead be interpreted to mean that this church is the only one that has any faith, and all the rest have decayed into glorified social clubs. Which supports your thesis just as well.
I was trying to be a bit sardonic there about the narrator's cryptic reference to a 'fundamentalist church' but no other churches.
Clearly in that time & place, there would be easily dozens of churches and everyone would go to church, so the narrator never mentioning his own church (where was he married repeatedly?) or any other church leaves a naive reader wondering if he's trying to imply that there's only one church. Of course there was not, so there may be some significance to such an utterly out-of-place and extraneous and highly-selective detail. (And with the _Dracula_ interpretation in mind, given how heavily it involved churches and consecrated hosts etc, it defies belief that the only church or religious reference might mean nothing at all.)
My guess is that the implication is that there are many churches in town but they are all Protestant, probably Methodist or Anglican, superannuated and stultified by convention and liberality and ecumenicism and a genteel creeping agnosticism - indeed, all positively *Unitarian* (imagine this pronounced with the whiskered mustache quivering indignantly) - and the fundamentalist church is the only church which actually *believes* in such things as the Ruinous Powers or servants of the Adversary operating in the current day and so the only church the narrator could resort to. (Like the Catholic Church, of course, which to this day continues doing exorcisms, obsessively tracking miracles, and so on.)
So I'll edit that.
> I have heard that ‘when a domain is about to fall, its regulations are sure to proliferate.'
Wow. This is so ridiculously easy to apply to today's EU and USA.
What I don't understand though is, how could the Zheng bureaucracy function so long *without* written regulations? Or is it just that the regulations existed but were purely internal and opaque to outsiders?
I'm guessing it was a matter of social norms rather than written regulations - and that advisors considered social norms to be more effective than clearly defined punishments. There are certainly scenarios where this is true - I remember reading about how a school tried to discourage parents from taking a while to pick up their kids after school by levying a fee, only for the amount of late pickups to increase (presumably because they no longer felt guilty as long as they paid the fee).
Seems there's reason to doubt whether the school thing really showed anything (or happened): https://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/papers/behavioral-economics.pdf#page=6 (via https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1693690935123546186 ). They claim to have done a followup study vindicating themselves (brief preview at https://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/papers/WC05/GR1.pdf ) but AFAICT despite an extremely prolific number of subsequent publications (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=Z7LNmGYAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate) their replication was never published.
When I see that they 'lost' the list of participants and the followups mysteriously never get published, that's typically the point at which I add the authors to my warning list and begin looking for a meta-analysis which includes bias tests...
Thanks for keeping track of things like this for the many of us who are just overwhelmed (i.e. lazier).
I've seen several compilations listing failed replications, usually from one subject (e.g. psychology). Do you also keep one?
I don't, no. I try to update my website's excerpts/annotations when I come across them but in this case, I haven't cited/linked 'A Fine is a Price' ever. (I too have always had some qualms about it being just a bit too pat and entertaining and Replication-Crisis-bait.) Just have to remember these things, I guess, or hope that your note-taking system lets you refind them.
Thanks for this! I have made references to A Fine Is a Price ( Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, The Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (January 2000), pp. 1-17), many times to students over the years, but have always felt a bit queazy that there is only one RCT on the effect of fining late-arrivals in kindergartens. Take-home pont is that I should be even more cautious referring to the study in the future, despite - or because - students love the tale.
The misgivings you refer about the Gneezy/Rustichini experiment brought back memories from reading Feynman's essay Cargo Cult Science back in the days, an essay worth sharing with new readers:
"When I was at Cornell. I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this—I don’t remember it in detail, but it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do, A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.
I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person—to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A—and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.
She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1935 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens.
....
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and, still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A‑Number‑l experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat‑running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using—not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat‑running.
I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The subsequent experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of Cargo Cult Science."
Ironically, nobody has been able to confirm that the experiment with putting the maze on sand ever actually happened.
Interesting and ironic indeed. Thanks for the comment.
Actually, we very recently succeeded in tracking that one down! See: https://gwern.net/maze (It is pretty interesting, and turns out that it both does and doesn't support Feynman's use.)
In colloquial terms, the late fee is the cost of the ticket. Putting a number above the undesired behavior codifies it to some extent.
It's also said, colloquially, that what matters is the certainty of the punishment rather than its severity, but clearly one of these bits of conventional wisdom has to be wrong here.
I think these are talking about different things. Putting a number on something that is almost never done codifies it, and makes it plausible that you should do it when the benefit is greater than that cost. It’s no longer a sacred value.
But for something like speeding, which is frequently done but almost never punished, just doubling or tripling the fine doesn’t particularly increase the deterrent effect, but making people actually likely to get caught does.
"But for something like speeding, which is frequently done but almost never punished, just doubling or tripling the fine doesn’t particularly increase the deterrent effect, but making people actually likely to get caught does."
Speeding is kind of a strange case. In the states where I've lived and driven (New York, California, and South Carolina), the impression I've always gotten is that the police enforce something like a official_limit_plus_5_or_10 actual speed limit. My impression is that there isn't some small-but-not-insignificant probability of being ticketed starting at official_speed_limit_plus_1 and going up from there, but rather that there is a vanishingly small probability of being ticketed at official_speed_limit_plus_1.
If the police announced tomorrow that they were going switch policies to strictly enforcing the official speed limit, I'd switch from going official_speed_limit_plus_5 to going official_speed_limit (and hope that the cars behind me, who today would be 3 inches off my rear bumper if I did that, would also switch to the lower speed).
Ha yea, they'd see it as a childcare supplement!
Ted Gioia contents that the earliest laws were sung. Certainly there are examples of foundational myths in the form of poems, "The Mountain Wreath" in the case of Serbia for instance.
Written codes can be amended or lawyered to make them say something other than their plain meaning. But no Act of Congress can change the lyrics of a popular song, even if a bipartisan congressional delegation and Don McLean himself were to decree that "American Pie" shall henceforth reference "good old girls" as well as good old boys, that wouldn't make karaoke amateurs and drunks sing it any differently.
"The Mountain Wreath" (Gorski Vijenac) is Montenegrian not Serbian founding (modern) myth, and besides it's been written down from beginning and it's an epic poem not a code of laws.
Serbia had its medieval codex of Car Dušan, which was written and very much not a poem.
https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Stefan_Du%C5%A1an#Lawmaker
I didn't say that the Mountain Wreath was a code of laws.moreover, Serbs also claim it as their own,(IIRC it explicitly references Serbia) and as I understand, the printed version was simply an oral tradition written down.
Nope, it was all authored and written down by Njegoš in 1846. It certainly owes its rhythm and style to the older rich oral tradition of epic poems, shared across Serbia, Montenegro, Herzegovina, Krajina, and perhaps wider. The story is original.
An act of Congress can't change the lyrics of a song, but the people that sing it can. Weird Al made a career out of it, to be specific, and the general case speaks for itself in the Liberty Valence Effect. Or, how would you spell the surname of those bears from the children's books? That might take your final sentence to its conclusion.
> no Act of Congress can change the lyrics of a popular song
True, but the lyrics of popular songs constantly mutate over time anyway, sometimes into statements that (1) would have meant nothing to the composer, and (2) also mean nothing to the people singing them. Compare how the attested lyrics to "The Raggle-Taggle Gypsy":
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘢𝘳𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘊𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘦'𝘴 𝘭𝘢𝘥𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯,
𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨-𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘳;
𝘈𝘴 𝘴𝘰𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘴𝘢𝘸,
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳.
are routinely assumed to be corrupted from earlier lyrics stating "they cast their glamour over her". Why? Well, because gypsy grandmothers have no particular folkloric significance and there is no reason for one to be mentioned here, whereas gypsy 𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘤 has a very prominent place in folklore and would make a compelling explanation for why the lady of a castle would abandon her exalted position to run away with gypsies and sleep in the fields. And the two lines, attested and hypothetical, both fit the meter of the song correctly and are phonetically very similar.
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
O where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl of Moray
And Lady Mondegreen.
'Tis truly a pity that whatever else had once been known about poor Lady Mondegreen is now lost to the sands of time...
Seems uncontroversial. Cultures used oral transmission before they had writing.
You can't change the lyrics of a popular song by act of congress, but you can beat up all the people who sing it the wrong way or convince people it's wrong, and then there's no record. That's why they're always destroying books in 1984 and Farenheit 451. A law on a bronze tablet, you actually have to destroy the tablet. Which the new government can certainly do, and was done, but is a little harder. And there's always the risk someone hid a copy somewhere. They suppressed the Gnostic gospels, but someone found a bunch of them in a garbage dump in Egypt two millennia later.
> You can't change the lyrics of a popular song by act of congress, but you can beat up all the people who sing it the wrong way
You can also do this with things that are written down somewhere. I have read that during the lockdown period, the Chinese government found itself forced to suppress an outbreak of patriotism among Chinese who kept quoting the Chinese national anthem. (Since the lyrics were written as a protest against the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, they begin "Rise up, all who refuse to be slaves!")
Oddly reminiscent of when the municipal government of Washington D.C. refused to print the slogan "No taxation without representation" on local license plates.
A magistrate can judge the situation as it is and weigh principles against each other; a written regulation is blind to that context. A magistrate can understand someone's actions as being adversarial by judging many different factors; a written regulation cannot (or, if it says "the magistrate decides", why bother writing it?).
So a place which switches from individual regulations to judgments allows its internal adversaries to optimize against it more easily.
---
But there's also just a 'selection effect' view of this. Having lots of social problems points to both possibly imminent downfall and proliferation of regulations intended to counteract those social problems.
It's like a startup getting to scale. Early on you can rely on the virtuous culture of your founding lieutenants to maintain order and get things done,l. Unspoken norms and performance reviews factoring in cultural fits and so on may not reference specific items but those in charge know what it's about. As the org scales, the rewards to defecting from those norms becomes bigger in terms of both rewards and penalties - the size of the org provides access to more, and also makes it easier to obscure what you're doing. Management becomes new enough that it doesn't have the same grip on the culture and virtues that drove performance, and hires are able to divide and conquer to get whatever answer suits them best. To address these growing areas of malfeasance and shirking, management must declare a set of rules which enable impartial punishment of those 'defecting' from the org in classic agent principal problems. This gives a clear guide for managers to punish, but also marks an end to a certain kind of dynamism.
It's reminiscent of a quote by Cicero "The more profuse the laws the more corrupt the state".
I guess Bronze age rulers, not only in China, were worried about committing laws to writing because (beside the reason mentioned in the review) they realised that not everything could be codified, and anything not included would implicitly become legal, or arguably so, instead of being subject to the ruler's judgement based on customs.
These patterns of growth and decay are constants throughout history, especially the imperial histories.
The tendency for implosion due to internal power struggles is one of the most obvious warning signs that is brown stuff approaching the rotating object any time now.
The exact timeframe is hard to work out though as these are slow moving relationships.
Oral traditions passed from generation to generation are very sticky so the need to write them down wasn't too urgent. Plus, look what happens when you do, everyone argues about what was really meant for centuries after...😉
"Lord Shang, the Legalist reformer, might’ve been the first to go deeper, theorizing that the pressures of growing population create new problems and require the development of new forms of governance."
This reminded me a lot of the struggles in Mesopotamia, where ritualistic village chieftans somewhat abruptly become regional kings, and controlled a vast territory that demanded an entirely different tech tree to keep it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA
There is one set of skills required to rally a bunch of hungry men to go rob neighboring people. There is another set of skills required to ensure a proper tax base and allocate effective portions to pay security and military forces while maintaining living standards to prevent rebellions of desperation.
It's like you have some guns butter curve, with "pillage" on one end and "complex accounting" on the other, and you have to ride that perfect angle between those to achieve liftoff into empire.
This is a very interesting review, and I found it highly entertaining. Unfortunately, I know so little of Chinese history that I don't know what to make of it beyond that. For example - who is this king? Does that mean the emperor of China?
I feel like I've just watched a Tudor drama, while never having heard of the Reformation, Parliament, primogeniture, or the Dissolution - but I have heard of Wolsey! And while I'm frantically trying to look these things up on Wikipedia, the offhand references to the Medici and the French Wars of Religion are too much.
What is a good starting point on Chinese history for someone completely unfamiliar?
By far and away https://thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com/ is a joy to listen to.
Seconded. Early episodes are pretty rough but it gets better as it goes.
Thirded, it’s really quite interesting, highly recommend!
All of this is before the "First Emperor". The Warring States Period ended when one of the states won the wars, and that state's king gave himself a new title that we translate as Emperor.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465015808/
The king was the de facto emperor of China, but at that time that particular term had not been invented yet so it is translated as king instead.
This is my favorite kind of review: a review which introduces me to a whole set of ideas I would never have encountered without reading this blog. Excellent work, anonymous contributor!
"When the people know that there is a code, they will not be in awe of their superiors. Together they bicker, appeal to the code, and seek to achieve their goals by trying their luck. They cannot be governed."
This gets to what I feel is the most important divide between Western thought and Eastern thought (roughly, between Western Enlightenment and Chinese). This quote aspires to the rule by law. The west aspires to rule of law.
I'm glad to now have some basis for what the Warring States Period was preceded by. You're right, it is definitely more pedestrian. Enough that I skipped much of the block quotes after a while. I'm not at a point in my life where I have a taste for quotidian accountings of the hours. I'll have to keep this in mind for when I am old and ragged, and not now when I am ragged and young.
> This gets to what I feel is the most important divide between Western thought and Eastern thought (roughly, between Western Enlightenment and Chinese). This quote aspires to the rule by law. The west aspires to rule of law.
The quote is from the philosophy that lost. The other guy, casting that legal code in bronze, was following a core tenet of Legalism. (The tenet for which Legalism is named.) And it was the Legalist state of Qin that won the wars of the Warring States Period and began the Imperial era. After the Qin dynasty, Legalism got a negative reputation, but it was too useful to *actually* throw away; they kept the basics of Legalism and dressed them up in Confucian ideals.
And the European version is older than the Enlightenment too. Every written legal code in modern Europe is a descendent of the Roman written legal code. And the Romans didn't make up the idea; the Greeks had written legal codes, and so did Near Eastern civilizations before them.
What (my understanding of) The Enlightenment does differently with legalism is to bend it toward liberal will. Liberalism brought the power of rule of law to the masses, which is the context that I work in but that's probably not universal. Liberalism is a young person on the world stage compared to ages-old things like legalism, especially our modern form of it, but that's recency bias for you -- I didn't state effectively that I was pointing toward liberalism with legalism under its umbrella and not legalism per se.
That's the clear juxtaposition to me. Rule of law is, now, a tenet of liberalism and representative government. Rule by law is within the heart of authoritarianism, with other tools sitting beside it in the toolbox.
I don't know that I would cast the whole of the Spring and Autumn Period in an authoritarian light, I simply don't know enough, but that quote exemplifies authoritarian thought in communal spaces and at the government level.
That is what rings most loudly for me after reading the review. Which, seeing it written out like this, feels pretty tangential to the review. I guess that's two Apologies I owe. Sorry.
I'm afraid I don't quite see the distinction you're getting at. Aside from anything else, modern liberal states probably exercise at least as much control over their citizens as ancient legalist ones.
"[...] the king publicly boiled one of his lords alive to send a message."
I have to disagree with your first statement. I can't not see the distinction. I'm reasonably sure that Gavin Newsom, Doug Burgum, etc. can't make mince out of someone and wouldn't try to fricassee somebody under cover of night, so to speak. The people that they would be cooking have rights that extend from humanitarian principles. People in power are in their positions, de jure, to serve, and they'll just have to stew over any naysayers and prying reporters.
To be honest, I could have stopped this after the first few lines, and I'm stopping now so as to not scramble things. I saw a delicious opportunity for some puns, so I seasoned my response with a few.
It's true that ancient Chinese punishments were often very brutal by today's standards, but I don't see what that has to do with the question of whether the laws should be written down. A written law code can impose some highly draconian punishments (our term "draconian" comes from the Athenian statesman Draco, whose code famously prescribed the death penalty for virtually everything), whereas a society without a written law code can impose penalties which we'd view as remarkably lenient, if that's the cultural norm (such as medieval Iceland, where the standard punishment for murdering someone was to pay a fine to his family).
"After the Qin dynasty, Legalism got a negative reputation, but it was too useful to *actually* throw away"
My understanding is that the philosophy called Legalism which got a bad reputation at this time was not so much the earlier "we think there should be legible and enforced laws", which as you say had been thoroughly assimilated by that time, but the probably quite different (although obviously lineally descendant) school of thought which, among other things, infamously advocated the death penalty for pretty much all transgressions.
The practice of using a clear law made available to the ruled so they knew what the ruler expects of them so they can better conform to the ruler’s will to avoid punishment is actually at the heart of the rule by law approach, and was advocated by people like Hobbes, an example par excellence of a rule by law advocate. The frays is rule by law after all, not rule by whim, and letting the people know what the ruler expects of them is obviously a win-win for both the ruler and ruler. Indeed, if people don’t know the laws, they have no possible way to obey them. Rule by law is a step between decentralized norms and arbitrary exercise of power by officials (who are not being directly supervised by a central authority and thus will often handle similar cases very differently because of things like corruption and different officials having different ideas of what should be prohibited) and rule of law. so it’s actually a sign of china moving closer towards the rule of law that they began to have rule by law instead of ad hock punishment by officials who might not have the best interests of the government in mind.
I’ll also note that some philosopher’s like Joseph Raz have argued that the virtue of the rule of law is like the virtue of a sharp knife, i.e it makes the law more effective, but not more just or moral. I myself wouldn’t go that far, but part of the confusion is that we don’t have a universally agreed definition of the rule of law, so I don’t exactly know what you mean by the frays. I myself associate it with legal limits on the ruler’s power, not just transparency about the content of the laws.
*Btw, in some ways if not others, Hobbes thinks a lot like the legalists, though there are obviously some differences.
It reminds me of how many internet forums/chatrooms/etc have a rule stating that the admins can ban anyone at their whim. More to the point, some even have no codified rules at all (that I could see), including https://www.datasecretslox.com/ and https://www.lesswrong.com/.
Lovely to see Chinese history getting the kind of serious attention that it deserves.
And if the reviewer's reading is right, it's still much more relevant today than it might seem. Remember, one of the leading contenders for being the cause of the Great Divergence (Western Europe + USA gets rich, rest of the world doesn't) is the resources shock of colonialism (this is contested, but I cautiously endorse this theory). Like the Zhou, taking control of a large empire offers such bounty that they can create a golden age. In Zhou, that meant a populace at peace (internally); in the modern west it meant the rise of science & new tech.
When the resources shock wore off, the golden age came to an end and the grind of competition reduced the space for big new innovations again.
I dunno how that will play out in the modern world. Despite the gloomy progress studies commentary in the last couple of decades, I never really bought the idea that progress has slowed. Certainly it feels like we're on the verge of some pretty big changes now. Though I have to say, the friction and alleged decoupling between China and America seems to support the idea of decline. The USA plus China would be an unstoppable partnership of brains and industrial might; divided, they might well achieve much less. That looks a bit like the mechanism of decline that the Zuozhuan/our reviewer are mapping out.
"The USA plus China would be an unstoppable partnership of brains and industrial might"
I think that this was always long-term impossible. In order to be a useful partner to the USA, China must remain poor (otherwise, manufacturing is better done at home), but the Chinese quite naturally resent this state of affairs. What they get out of the partnership is realistically ony the opportunity to lift themselves up, which if withheld by political will or (as I think) nature will lead them to seek other paths to that goal. As indeed we find them doing, now that the association no longer produces as strong a living-standards pump as it had hitherto done.
"In order to be a useful partner to the USA, China must remain poor..."
I don't think this is right at all - it's the big fallacy of international trade. The USA's biggest trade partners are the EU and Canada: rich countries, not poor ones.
There certainly was a trade pattern that existed for a while where China provided low-wage manufacturing labour, and the USA created high-value services and designs. But that's not the only kind of trade partnership that there can be. There are two ways it would evolve in an ideal world: (1) manufacturing stays in China and is gradually pushed inland to poorer areas where the wage gap can be maintained; (2) China gets richer and starts being more like a larger extension of the USA, with both countries providing a consumer market and creating high-value products and services; meanwhile low-wage manufacturing moves to new territories like Vietnam.
Politically, these wouldn't be easy, of course; but neither was the initial trade partnership that emerged in the 1990s (both sides resorted to shenanigans to get China membership of the WTO). Economically, so far as I can see, there are plenty of paths to continued, deeper partnership.
> Fan Hui is alternately referred to as Shi Hui, Shi Ji, Sui Wuzi, Sui Ji, Wu Ji, Wuzi, Jishi, ...
Reminds me of:
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
I’m interested in why people post that list so often. I found it useful once, but when I’ve seen it later, it seems much less helpful. He doesn’t say anything about what sorts of contexts are ones in which some of these assumptions are violated, and gives a list of assumptions that he tells you not to make that includes the assumption that “people have names”. Since anyone working with names is going to violate at least that assumption, it would be much more helpful to have some set of guidelines that one can work with, rather than a set of rules that will break.
I quite agree. Some examples would have been useful as well, and some conventional personal name rules by country.
Yes, the negation of many of the assumptions is not exactly actionable.
> People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
So you use variable length strings.
Your first customer has as their name the text of "war and peace" (to the dismay of your database admin), the next a base64 encoding of a movie (incuring the wrath of the MPAA) and the parents of the third decided that their name should end with a list of all prime integers in decimal (could be worse, at least that is still computable).
> People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
Okay, so you give up the evil tool of cultural imperialism that is unicode and allow people to use postscript in their name. People insist that their name is color-sensitive, so you buy a color printer (they go on to label you a CMYK-supremacist). Someone insists that their name can not be accurately captured on flat surfaces, so you contemplate buying a 3d printer for them. Before you can decide, some troll uses the Turing-completeness of postscript to make it calculate and print the last ten digits of the value of the Ackermann function for some insanely large value. When you refuse to buy the resources to calculate that in a speedy manner, people call you bad things on twitter.
> People have names.
You give up. From now on, every customer gets a customer number, and you address them by "Customer #245471" or whatever. (Later, the universe decides to punish you by sending you alien customers which can split into multiple parts, with the legal requirements being that all parts are equal to the original entity but not each other. Shame on you not to think of that possibility before introducing integer-based customer ids!)
Meanwhile, your competitor kept their old EBCDIC-based system which allows only /[A-Z. ]{5-25}/. This is annoying to use for customers not of European descent, but even many of these prefer that to memorizing their customer number, which always exists as a backup when name-based lookup fails.
The real lesson is that "name" is poorly defined. "Thing you use to uniquely identify a user", "thing you use when addressing messages to a user," and "thing that the government combines with various official records to uniquely identify a citizen" are all separate pieces of information and if you ask for a user's "name" you may not get the thing you're actually asking for. You can violate some of these assumptions in some contexts, so long as you're aware of what you're asking for.
For instance, you might use a separate "username" and "display name," where one is alphanumeric, short, and unique to make it easy to find users, while the other is Unicode and long and full of bells and whistles so that the guy whose name is written in an obscure variant of Sanskrit with color-sensitive ink can still receive marketing emails that address him nicely by name.
By the way, for "people have names," there is actually a somewhat common real-world scenario where this assumption gets violated - newborn babies. If you're a hospital and you need to record vitals for a newborn baby, you need to have some sort of way to identify their medical records, and asking mommy to give you a name 30 seconds after a baby pops out of her is probably not going to improve patient satisfaction.
Epic's solution is to automatically name a newborn baby "BabyMomsfirstname Momslastname," which seems inelegant, but it makes it very easy for a doctor or nurse to look up the baby's chart by name.
"BabyMomsfirstname Momslastname,"
What do they do about twins?
I usually share this version instead for just that reason: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
Thanks.
A few thoughts on making this more accessible to ignorant Westerners:
A map would be helpful.
Also an estimate of the scale of the population of the empire: are we talking about one million, ten million, or one hundred million people?
I might mention up front that we'll eventually get around to the most famous individual of this era, Confucius.
Maybe a comparison to one or two old Western works of history like a book of the Old Testament or an Anglo-Saxon chronicle.
On population, ten million would be the right scale. Spring and Autumn China covered an area roughly 20% of the current PRC, so population density would have been comparable to, say, the post-Civil War era US.
For Western comparators, the Zuozhuan is in some respects a bit like a hybrid of Herodotus and Thucydides, and very little like the historical books of the Old Testament.
Thanks.
> the new translation standardizes names used wherever possible, so Fan Hui is always called Fan Hui, with a superscript index so you can look up what name was used in the original text in the back.
I have the Moss Roberts translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and I was immensely disappointed to see the introduction brag about doing the same thing. Well, almost the same thing; there is not even a reference left in the back of the book to the original name used. (Not that it would help much; for some ungodly reason the notes to both volumes are printed together at the back of volume 2.)
I can't understand why someone would want this. Let the translation reflect what the text said. Put footnotes explaining which person the name refers to; don't pretend each person has just the one name and make people interrupt their reading -- 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘢 𝘯𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘥 -- to hunt down the name that was actually used in a hidden reference somewhere else.
Do you want to follow the plot, or admire the beauty of the work? If the latter, just do that in the original Chinese.
I want to know what people were called! Why not go through the Spider-Man archives and replace every instance of "Spider-Man", "Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man", "the Web-slinger", and "the Wall-crawler" with "Peter Parker"?
Psst, Peter Parker's secret identity is... Peter Parker.
I am more sympathetic to your position than my previous snark would suggest. If the different names that are getting collapsed are epithets of some kind, yes, I agree there's some value in retaining them: I'm particularly fond of Homer's "rosy-fingered Dawn." But you also don't want to keep saying things like "He-Who-Fights-from-Afar," so there's some skill required in translating names in a way that retains the spirit of the original.
Using Zichan as an example, if he was referred to as "the chief minister of Zheng," sure, retain that. (If he was ever actually referred to as "the ignorer of dragons," DEFINITELY retain that.) But if he was called Gongsun Qiao in some places, you either need to make a big deal of the style name, or just shunt it to a footnote or the back of the book. As an analogy, if I'm reading about Caligula, "Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus" doesn't add anything worthwhile, but I'd appreciate Scipio being called "Cornelius" until the battle of Zama, and "Africanus" after.
I think Fan Hui being referred to Shi Hui, Shi Ji, Sui Wuzi, Sui Ji, Wu Ji, Wuzi, Jishi, Sui Hui, and Fan Wuzi is one of those cases where nothing of value is lost by dropping all but one name.
But if you're reading a philippic made against Caligula, and it mocks the achievements based on which he received the name Germanicus, and as part of that message it refers to him as Germanicus, there's a different message than if the same speech refers to him as Caesar. (And if it refers to him as Caligula... there's a very different message again!)
Well put, and for a modern example the differences between referring to "The Donald", "Trump", "President Trump", "The President" and "45".
Hard disagree.
I think that the main goal of any text I would consider reading should be to transport the content across clearly, which puts limitations on alternate phrasings dependent on the gap between the reader and the author.
If one texts ones significant other, one can easily use lot of alternate names for them for poetic effect and will probably be understood.
If I read a detective novel, I probably have the context to know that "Mr. Hound", "John", "the detective", "the policeman" all refer to the same person.
For a modern reader of Schiller's Maria Stuart, referring to Wilhelm Cecil, Baron of Burleigh sometimes as Burleigh is already confusing.
If the gap between writer and the non-expert reader is a few millennia, the main challenge will be to get the gist of the plot across.
Besides, translation already mangles names into mostly connotation-less identifiers, so as my co-commentator says, if you want meaningful names you want to stick to the original version. (Also, you may want to avoid spoilers by secondary texts which point out which names actually refer to the same thing, so you can puzzle it out yourself as intended by the authors.)
I'm generally in favor of multiple different translations for multiple types of reader. For something like this, based on my low knowledge of Chinese, I'd personally prefer the single-name version, with footnotes or endnotes explaining what titles and names people used, and what the differences are. It's historical not narrative, and I'm unfamiliar with the cultural context.
There's other works in other cultures where I'm right with you, though. There's some shadings of meaning that I don't want to lose.
> It's historical not narrative, and I'm unfamiliar with the cultural context.
What bothers me is that the way you become familiar with the cultural context is by reading contemporary documents that embody that context. And that specific thing is what's being prevented by this translational choice. When there are several different ways to refer to someone, there are often very good reasons why one of them was or wasn't chosen in a particular case.
(And let's also note that between the historical work and the fictional one, it's the historical work that decided the names were important enough that there should at least be a way to know what they were.)
I agree, but there's only so much I'm going to accomplish from a single reading. If I were going to be reading more works of Chinese history, or studying Chinese history and culture in depth, I'd want the more nuanced translation. But I find it highly unlikely that I will, and so my personal preference would be for a streamlined version.
Hmm.
A while back I started watching Chinese dramas with my parents and learned that they might get completely lost when characters were referred to in multiple ways. All of these are plausible forms of reference:
1. Full name. ("Song Yunhui")
2. Just the personal name. (Lei Dongbao is addressed as "Dongbao")
3. Diminutive form of personal name. (Song Yunhui is called "Xiao Hui")
4. (Different) diminutive form of personal name. (His sister, Song Yunping, is called "Ping Ping")
5. (Yet another) diminutive form of personal name. (Fu Rong is called "Rong'er")
6. Nickname. (Wei Yingluo addresses Fuca Fuheng as "shaoye")
7. Formal title. (Zhu Di is addressed as "Huangshang")
8. Familial relationship. (This is, obviously, determined by the relationship between the speaker and the person they are referring to.)
9. Fictive familial relationship. (This one is mostly determined by the speaker's personality.)
(This can be confusing to me too, but doing the work to figure out what's going on serves my personal goals, so I don't consider it a waste. Many of these will just be obvious to me.)
But the context there is that you're watching a TV show in real time and if you don't understand the dialogue, you don't know what's happening.
I don't see that footnoting a canonical name at the bottom of the page poses the same kind of barrier to someone reading a book.
>Legend has it that the king was bewitched by his new consort, a melancholy beauty born from a virgin impregnated by the touch of a black salamander.
Hmm, a Virgin birth huh... how many more of these were there in days of yore?
Not my cup of tea. Though interesting. (Are those quotes the best bits one could find?! - I am still underwhelmed). I actually had trouble to make out what the 'book' or the review was about. See, I do have a minor in history and another in theology - and the concept of 'understanding history' (esp. pre-Greek) by reading ol' texts ... is not a straightforward thing at all. There was no actual kingdom of David or Solomon - you can research early (but post-gospel) Christian history without knowing the gospels - reading Gilgamesh will not tell you much about how power worked in Uruk, mostly it will mislead laypeople. - When one knows some of the period, that knowledge shall illuminate those texts, to some extent (one recognizes the misconceptions, then). Not the other way round (reading Tertullian about angels teaches zero about angels - knowing the church hierarchy of his time makes you see where his drivel comes from). Drawing parallels (which?) from a mythic concept of 'China' to present USofA - lost me.
I think it would be misleading to see the portrait of Spring & Autumn China in the Zuozhuan as "mythic," Mark. The annals section is largely a single archived, thoroughly bureaucratic and surpassingly dull court record (despite the tale that Confucius made sagely alterations), each entry dated to the day, and the commentary, while including tale-like narratives, traces an historical outline confirmed by independent sources, such as contemporaneous bronze inscriptions. The history sections of the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, and Mesopotamian epics are not appropriate comparators. Thucidydes or Ibn Khaldun would be much closer. All historical narratives are necessarily gross simplifications and written from particular points of view, but in the world of ancient and medieval accounts the Zuo stands out as an unusually valuable historical source.
As an afterthought: Your feeling that the cited passages are underwhelming may reflect the degree to which the commentary is constrained by the multiple contemporary chronicles on which it is based.
Knowing far too little about Chinese history, I take your word for it, Robert. - The "pure" annals seem possibly accurate enough, with that one example of uncommented data-points. The Zuozhuan commentary as quoted in the review(!): less so (murder of regent for a turtle soup, sure) - where it turns 'Confucian': well, I think of Hesiod's 'Works and Days' (the 'Golden age'). The reviewer itself says: a) "There’s a few too many mythological creatures ... for the Zuozhuan to be taken entirely at face value, (but ....). While the overall level of historical rigor versus 4th century BC authorial invention remains under heated debate, ...". Well, I would have appreciated some example of that heated debate. b) "And importantly, it’s enjoyable." Taste clearly differs. If those quotes are of the most enjoyable 5% (as they should be!): not for me.
Much of that debate about historical rigor concerns differing approaches between Western and Chinese scholars, Mark, and we can't expect the reviewer to read Chinese. Moreover, the debate is not usually focused on theories of the text per se; it concerns disagreements about specific narratives, one by one and in detail. I would wager that if the reviewer had gone through a few of these he would have lost many of his readers, likely including you.
Most of the mythology in the text is presented as political actors recounting myths as historical fact, and that is likely historical (although, as with Thucydides, the specific speeches are presumably inventions). Even the annals section includes occasional notices of miraculous happenings, but these are notices of items reported at court in an age of belief, and thus as historical accounts (there are certainly a few intrusions of later editorial hands in the annals as well, such as notice of Confucius's birth, but recorded instances of solar eclipses, etc., demonstrate the authenticity of the base text--authors could not at that time calculate accurate eclipse dates centuries removed from their present).
Obviously, the text was not written for the entertainment of readers unimaginably removed in time and space. For modern readers who do find enjoyment in access across such gaps, the fact that the characters in the text are often complex and clearly delineated, reappearing in detailed vignettes over periods of decades, and that the political and ethical dilemmas they face are of generalizable relevance makes the text engaging. However, I'll confess I didn't take much note of which narrative sections the reviewer selected--perhaps the selection could have been more appealing to casual readers: the Zuo text is about 800-1000 pages in English (the quotes are closer to <0.05%, not 5%), and it's hard to choose just the right passages to illustrate its literary attraction when the point of the review concerned variety of narrative motives rather than the power of its more sustained sections.
But looking at the final choice--the critique of Zichan's laws--I think the literary impact should be clear. You do have to recognize that both Zichan and his correspondent are major characters that you would know well and be invested in if you were reading the whole text consecutively (imagine, say, if Henry Clay had been alive to write to Lincoln about his abrogation of habeas corpus). Look at what the Zuo author achieves. The correspondent mobilizes a host of rhetorical strategies to shame his friend Zichan for what he's done. He recounts a common idealized version of the distant past eras, and cites specific canonical texts about their downfalls; he quotes the poetic canon understood as the distilled wisdom of the past; he details the specific dire consequences he sees arising from Zichan's actions. To all of which Zichan responds with pointed brevity, blaming himself for the failures of his age and then in one sentence uttering the key to subsequent judgments of his historical role: alternatively: "I did it to save the world." (And, just to point out why the Chinese text is so celebrated, the entire speech Zichan makes here, which involves 40 syllables in English, is accomplished in 18 in ancient Chinese.) Millennia of people in traditional China, for whom the Zuo was a canonical text to be studied lifelong, would have read this brief reply and sighed at how it crystallized the tension between political aspirations and ideals and the crushing disappointment of political reality. The translation the reviewer read by Durrant, Li, and Schaberg tries wherever possible to equip the reader with enough background and context to grasp the impact, so the entertainment you might find by actually committing to the text would likely be far greater than a short review can demonstrate, which is why the reviewer had to add in so many words that you'd find it.
Zichan rocks. (3 syllables.), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zichan
Confucius's exact words!
Amusingly, Wikipedia has this to say (in the page linked earlier):
> In response Zichan claims he's "untalented" thus unable to properly manage the laws with a view toward the future generations. To benefit people alive today was his aim.
It's a fair paraphrase, Moon Moth, though I think "laws" is an error: "manage the state" would be fine. Ancient Chinese is highly compressed and there are often multiple ways to render it. "I am untalented and can't reach [=anticipate/plan for] sons and grandsons [=the future]. I took [as my goal] rescuing the [present] era." Different translators will work with those units and come up with somewhat different readings.
Just a quick note to say that this seems a very responsible review. The sources cited towards the close--the translation by Durrant et al. and the secondary works by Li Feng, Loewe & Shaughnessy, and Pines--are all very solid scholarship, and the Watson selection is indeed readable and generally reliable. (It's worth adding that the now dated Legge version is probably the most impressive, as it was completed 150 years ago with no prior work to rely on.) I think the reviewer has done a very good job of introducing this rich and enormous historical source.
The writer of this review takes for granted that there is a special amount of upheaval in the current world order. What hard evidence of this is there? My prior is to distrust any regard of the modern day as especially bad, both because people are inclined to find their personal circumstances as special and because this attitude sometimes arises from the presence of 24 hour news in our national and international narratives.
Looking at data, the world has most likely never been as peaceful as today. Even if it doesn’t feel like that.
I think this depends on how widely you define "today". I'm pretty sure that the '90s were even stabler and more peaceful than the '10s, but these decades could certainly be reckoned in with one another as part of "the modern age" or "these days".
In either case, it seems obvious that comparison only to the all-time global minimum is itself highly misleading and insufficient to call a period particularly brutal or unstable, so I agree with the fundamental point you're both making.
The last century was the most violent of all time (or maybe only one of the most violent, if you go by percentages), so there's blatant cherry picking of dates with statements like that ("since the last major war ended, we've had no major wars!") Why are we so determined to feel our lives are special that we keep insisting the present is either the most peaceful time in history or the most dangerous time in history, but never just "fairly similar, all things considered, to many other times in history"?
Going by percentages, I'm pretty sure the 20th century was one of the more peaceful ones.
1. I assume that it depends on how many centuries are included in the comparison. Within the last ten, presumably only the 13th would compare? In the ancient world it might be different but I have no hard data. If you do know of hard data on this I'd be very interested in which centures' death tolls equal or exceed the 20th.
2. I also have no idea whether it makes more sense to use percentages or raw numbers. Judging similar-scale wars as getting more destructive simply because the fighting population is increasing seems misleading. But judging modern wars as less destructive simply because the losses are replenished much quicker also seem misleading.
The 17th century was extremely violent in many parts of the world. Especially Central Europe had the 30 Years War that I am quite familiar with, but eg China also had its fair share of trouble.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Crisis
Right, I thought of the Thirty Years War in Europe and the Taiping War in China for the 17th and 19th centuries respectively but thought they were only in one part of the world. I also asked ChatGPT and got a completely useless answer (like I do almost every time I ask it anything, I can't understand the AI hype):
"Certainly, here are very rough and unreliable estimates for the percentage of the world population that may have died in wars during each of the last ten centuries:
10th century: Less than 1%
11th century: Less than 1%
12th century: Less than 1%
13th century: Less than 1%
14th century: Due to the Black Death, around 5-10%
15th century: Less than 1%
16th century: Less than 1%
17th century: Less than 1%
18th century: Less than 1%
19th century: Less than 1%
Please note that these are highly speculative estimates, and the actual figures could vary widely. War casualties were often localized, and historical records are not comprehensive for earlier centuries. The 14th century stands out due to the significant impact of the Black Death on global population figures."
And the Black Death isn't relevant because I specifically asked about wars!
Strongly agree. And I'd similarly distrust claims that the modern day is especially good (as in "the best time in history", not merely "part of a clearly dominant and prosperous few centures for our civilisation") as a function both of the same desire to think your circumstances are special and of propaganda from government and other institutions determined to potray the current ruling ideology as the best of all possible ideologies.
And honestly, just once, I'd like to see a rationalist make the prediction about the near future that is most rational (in terms of how often it's been the correct one at almost all other times): that it will be interesting, but overall not fundamentally different from what came before. Instead of that the world is about to end, that the world is about to become a utopia, or (the most common one around here) that the world is about to either end or become a utopia, but nothing else.
If you want really rational(ist) predictions, look at the stock market and other financial markets.
It's not unreasonable to expect that all of the technology developed over the past few centuries would have significant effects on society. It doesn't require the current politics to be uniquely good, there's already a separate reason for the modern day to be unique. I think what has been happening is already fundamentally different from what came before, and it is not necessarily rational to ignore that and assume that what's happening now is just like the high points in previous civilisations. Most of the extreme predictions for the near-ish future relate to AI, but nukes for example are already a proven technology with the potential to destroy far more of the world than would ever have been possible before.
> The existing foundations of our world are damaged but not broken. For all the upheavals in recent years, I struggle to believe that the pace of change will slow, or that the ideas to truly make sense of these changes already exist. This is only the beginning, and the Zuozhuan gives a visceral sense of what that really means. Our culture wars will seem like people getting mad over ancestral tablet placements.
I mostly do not share this perspective. Tales of decline and decay have been in fashion for times immemorable. Sometimes they are obviously point on (e.g. Hari Seldon's predictions, or the fall of Rome) but ever so often they are not, IIRC the Romans have bemoaned the moral decay of their contemporaries since the early republic. By many metrics, we are doing pretty okay. Yes, there are new challenges, the gap between capital and wages widens, global warming, housing prices, population dynamics, increase in migration, you name it. But the past seven decades were also globally more peaceful than anything which happened before, and people are generally getting wealthier in some ways (if not others). US politics may be more partisan than they were 20 years ago, and the culture war may intensify, but US politics are still rather tame compared to Weimar politics and I will take the culture war over the shooting wars which littered the past any day of the week.
So personally, I don't feel very fin du siècle. Perhaps we create ASI in the next decade and it either kills us or leads us into a singularity, but that is far from certain. I don't think it is preposterous to assume that in 2100 CE, we will still have market based economies, Coca Cola, the internet, and cars, or that the US will still be a big player internationally.
O tempora, o mores! Little men at the far end of history, hiding their banality by inflating their petty squabbles to compete with the grand tragedy of ages past.
... Is certainly something I've felt at times. But at the same time, dude, I can eat fruit year round!
People have always been able to eat fruit year round. It's all about where you live.
>I can eat fruit year round!
You could in the past as well. It's called jam.
I think the most important takeaway here, perfectly explicit in the text, should be that the end of an era is not the end of the world. After the upheaval, most of us will continue "doing pretty okay", maybe less okay than before, maybe more, but statistically, the humanity at large will keep advancing as it always did.
This does not negate the validity of the confusion, and genuine perception of decay, of people who rely on or benefit from the current arrangement. (This is, in a way, most of us as far as stability is concerned. But most prominently, it's elite people high up in the hierarchy, precisely the kind of people who leave written artifacts behind for future generations.) They're entirely correct to be horrified of turbulence and change, and I wish them well, even as I don't exactly wish them the stability of their posts and the entire hierarchy they occupy, and have no emotional attachment to the norms they rely on.
To put this another way, of course the US will remain a big player internationally for the foreseeable future, just like the UK, France, Russia remain big players to this day. And yet, did things not completely change since their heydays?
What do you mean by the gap between capital and wages widening?
That proportion of GDP that goes to capital has been broadly stable (in eg the US) over time. The amount going to land owners has increased somewhat at the expense of labour. But still, the labour share of GDP has been fairly stable, too.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG has the data for to US labour share of GDP since 1940 or so.
The highest share on record was about 65%, the lowest about 58%, and at the moment the Americans are at about 60%.
Strong contender for the most illuminating book review this year. I actually felt I understood the world (very) slightly better after reading it than before. Definitely worth the 20 or so minutes.
>I actually felt I understood the world (very) slightly better after reading it
Very much this. I had zero understanding of ancient China before, and now I feel like I have a reasonably complete, if simplistic, perfectly useful mental model of it.
Which, impressive, considering that I'm pretty sure all the info about China was just a buildup to deliver the punchline:
>Our culture wars will seem like people getting mad over ancestral tablet placements.
And, fair, it's a great one. Genuinely puts things in perspective, I'm stealing that analogy for future use.
I'm struck by how big a deal proper respect via allotment of food was ... short someone on some meal they thought they were due, and it's time for assassination, betrayal and blood feud...
This comes up in ancient Irish sagas, too; the Champion's or Hero's Portion. People would contend over this. I think it happens in Viking sagas as well. Like the Iliad, this is a pre-Christian (or in the case of China, non-Christian) honour-bound society where being a warrior is an elite social role and your status heavily depends on being recognised and awarded your due.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curadm%C3%ADr
"The Curadmír, modern Curadhmhír (Champion's Portion) was an ancient custom referred to in early Irish literature, whereby the warrior acknowledged as the bravest present at a feast was given precedence and awarded the choicest cut of meat. This was often disputed violently. The custom appears most often in the legends of the Ulster Cycle. It is parallelled by historical customs of the ancient Celts of continental Europe, as recorded by classical writers.
The Story of Mac Dá Tho's Pig
The Ulster Cycle saga Scéla Mucce Meic Dá Thó ("The Story of Mac Dá Tho's Pig") features a dispute over the Champion's Portion between warriors of Ulster and Connacht who are guests at a feast in Leinster. They dispute it by boasting of their previous heroic deeds, and eventually the Connacht hero Cet mac Mágach is acknowledged as the bravest man present. Just as he is about to carve the pig, the Ulster hero Conall Cernach arrives, and his boasts force Cet to give way to him. But he claims that Conall would have had to give way to his brother Anlúan had he been there. Conall responds by tossing Cet Anlúan's freshly severed head. Conall carves the pig, but gives the Connachtmen such a small portion that battle breaks out between them."
Achilles sulks in his tent, the general dips into the cauldron of turtle soup, because a public insult has been laid upon them demoting them to a lesser role. If they don't react and just take it, then they've proven that they're weaklings who deserve to be downgraded. And if they're downgraded, they lose a lot both in reputation and clout. Now those formerly their inferiors will be emboldened to take liberties and try to rise into that vacant spot.
There's a very funny story called Bricriu's Feast in the Irish sagas, where Bricriu is a known troublemaker who does things for the lulz. He throws a big party and invites all the important and famous people. Nobody wants to go, because they realise he's only going to set people up, but he threatens that if nobody turns up, he will cause even more and worse trouble than if they do.
It's interesting not only for the glimpses into a warrior society that it gives, but also as a source for the later Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Gawaine and Cú Chulainn, the respective heroes of the tales, are both the nephew of the King in the main story, they face beheading by a giant, etc.)
Why I say it's funny is because Bricriu starts trouble first amongst the warriors, then when that is sorted out he starts it amongst their wives and then moves on to their charioteers/servants. Each time it's patched up, but the bad feeling engendered means that in order to settle who really *is* the greatest hero of Ulster, the three contenders visit different kings to get an answer. The last one, king of Munster, realises that whoever he picks, the losers are going to take it out on him, so he sets up or sends them off for the beheading contest. It's entertaining to read, and you can see why the story survived in some form over the centuries. It's not as Great Literature as the Iliad, but the stakes are not as high; if Achilles sulks in his tent, the Greek army is slaughtered by the Trojans, but if the three Ulster heroes are running around getting decisions on who's the greatest, at least nobody is killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fled_Bricrenn
"Fled Bricrenn (Old Irish "Bricriu's Feast") is a story from the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. Bricriu, an inveterate troublemaker, invites the nobles of the Ulaid to a feast at his new bruiden (hostel, banquet hall) at Dún Rudraige (Dundrum, County Down), where he incites three heroes, Cúchulainn, Conall Cernach, and Lóegaire Búadach, to compete for the "champion's portion" of the feast. The three heroes perform several feats, and travel to Connacht to be judged by Ailill and Medb, and to Munster to be judged by Cú Roí, and on each occasion Cúchulainn is proclaimed champion, but the other two refuse to accept it. Eventually, back at Emain Macha, the three heroes are each challenged by a giant churl to cut off his head, on the condition that they allow him to cut off their heads in return. First Lóegaire, then Conall, takes up the challenge and cuts off the churl's head, only for him to pick it up and leave, but when the churl returns the following night they are nowhere to be seen. Only Cúchulainn lives up to his side of the bargain. The churl spares his life, reveals himself to be Cú Roí in disguise, and announces that Cúchulainn's bravery and honour make him undisputed champion.
The story dates from the 8th century and is found in several manuscripts, including the Lebor na hUidre (c. 1106). The motif of warriors competing for the champion's portion is found in another Ulster Cycle tale, Scéla Mucce Maic Dathó ("The Tale of Mac Dathó's Pig"), and is reminiscent of descriptions of customs of the Celts of continental Europe as recorded by classical authors. The beheading challenge also has classical parallels, and also appears in later medieval literary works like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."
From the Chinese annals, we see that it is a stratified society bound by ritual and precedent, and violations of such cause trouble. Deliberately breaking the balance throws all into disarray. The general trespasses by seeming to impinge upon the rights of his host and superior (i.e. he *had* to serve him a portion of the turtle because of the omen), the king trespassed by laying a public insult upon a high official (calling him forward then deliberately not giving him a portion). End result was This Insult Can Only Be Wiped Out By Blood and the ruler gets assassinated. It wasn't about "he didn't get a portion of the feast", it was about "his status was insulted and denigrated before his peers by the ruler who acted improperly".
Text and 19th century translation here, you'll have to flip forward to get to the tale itself:
https://archive.org/details/fledbricrendfeas02henduoft/page/4/mode/2up
"It fell upon a day there was in Emain a gathering of the Ulster men. He was anon made welcome, and was seated by the shoulder of Conchobar. Bricriu addressed himself to him as well as to the body of the Ulster men. "Come with me," quoth Bricriu, "to partake of a banquet with me." "Gladly," rejoined Conchobar, " if that please the men of Ulster." Fergus mac Roig and the nobles of Ulster also made answer : " No ; for if we go our dead will outnumber our living, when Bricriu has incensed us against each other."
" If ye come not, worse shall ye fare," quoth Bricriu. "What then," asked Conchobar, "if the Ulster men go not with thee ? " "I will stir up strife," quoth Bricriu, " between the kings, the leaders, the heroes of valour, and the yeomen, till they slay one another, man for man, if they do not come with me to share my feast." " That we shall not do to please thee," quoth Conchobar. " I will stir up enmity between father and son so that it will come to mutual slaughter. If I do not succeed in doing so, I will make a quarrel between mother and daughter. If that does not succeed, I will set each of the Ulster women at variance, so that they come to deadly blows till their breasts become loathsome and putrid." " Sure 'tis better to come," quoth Fergus. " Do ye straightway take counsel with the chief Ultonians," said Sencha, son of Ailill. " Unless we take counsel against this Bricriu, mischief will be the consequence," quoth Conchobar.
Thereupon all the Ulster nobles assembled in council. In discussing the matter Sencha counselled them thus : " Take hostages from Bricriu, since ye have to go with him, and set eight swordsmen about him so as to compel him to retire from the house as soon as he has laid out the feast." Furbaide Ferbenn, son of Conchobar, brought Bricriu reply, and showed him the whole matter. " It is happily arranged," quoth Bricriu. The men of Ulster straightway set out from Emain, host, battalion and company, under king, chieftain and leader. Excellent and admirable the march of the brave and valiant heroes to the palace."
These conditions don't worry Bricriu, because he knows a trick worth two of that. He goes privately to each of the three heroes, flatters them, and tells them to request the championship and the hero's portion. At the feast, they each do so at the same time, fighting breaks out, and it is barely ended when Bricriu - who is absent all this time - starts the next phase of his plan. He meets the wives of the three heroes singly, flatters them outrageously, and sits back to enjoy the fun:
"The three companies thereupon went out till they met at one spot, to wit, three ridges from the hall. None of them wot that Bricriu had incited them one against another. To the hall they straightway return. Even and graceful and easy their carriage on the first ridge ; scarcely did one of them raise a foot before the other. But on the ridge following, their steps were shorter and quicker. Moreover, on the ridge next the house it was with difficulty each kept up with the other ; so they raised their robes to the rounds of their limbs to compete in the attempt to go first into the hall. For what Bricriu said to each of them regarding the other was, that whosoever should first enter should be queen of the whole province. The amount of confusion then occasioned by the competition to enter the hall first was as it were the noise of fifty chariots approaching. The whole palace shook and the warriors sprang to their arms and made essay to kill one another within."
So what starts out as a decorous procession of the noblewomen with their attendants ends in a mad scramble of a race where they hike up their skirts and pelt along to see who can enter the feast hall first. More trouble ensues:
""Stay," quoth Sencha, "they are not enemies who have come ; it is Bricriu who has set a-quarrelling the women who have gone out. By the god of my tribe, unless the hall be closed against them our dead will outnumber our living." Thereupon the doorkeepers close the doors. Emer, daughter of Forgall the Wily, wife of Cuchulainn, by reason of her speed, outran the others and put her back against the door, and straightway called upon the doorkeepers ere the other ladies [came], so that the men within got up, each of them to open for his own wife that she might be the first to come within. " Bad [look-out] to-night," quoth Conchobar. He struck the silver sceptre that was in his hand against the bronze pillar of the couch and the folks gat seated. " Stay," quoth Sencha, "'tis not a warfare of arms that shall be held here ; it will be a warfare of words." Each woman went out under the protection of her spouse, and then followed the Ulster women's war-of-words."
The women insult each other and their rivals' husbands, so the men break open part of the wall to let their wives in. Cú Chulainn, because he is the Best and Greatest of course, lifts up the wall to let his wife in:
"Thus did the men in the hall behave on having heard the laudatory addresses of the women — to wit, Loigaire and Conall ; each sprang into his hero's light, and broke a stave of the palace at a like level with themselves, so that in this way their wives came in. Moreover, Cuchulainn upheaved the palace just over against his bed, till the stars of heaven were to be seen from underneath the wattle. By that opening came his own wife with half a hundred women attendants in her train, as also half a hundred in waiting upon the other twain. Other ladies could not be compared with Emer, while no one at all was to be likened unto her spouse. Thereupon Cuchulainn let the palace down till seven feet of the wattle entered the ground ; the whole dún shook, and Bricriu's balcony was laid flat to the earth, in such wise that Bricriu and his queen toppled down till they fell into the fosse in the middle of the courtyard among the dogs. " Woe is me," cried Bricriu, as he hastily got up, " enemies have come into the palace." He took a turn round and perceived how it was lop-sided and inclined entirely to one side. He wrung his hands, then betook himself within, so bespattered that none of the Ulster folk could recognise him. From his manner of speech only did they do so."
He blames them for wrecking his beautiful new feast hall, they sort it out, the feast proceeds, the women start quarrelling again, the heroes try to provoke a duel, but it is prevented and there are three days of feasting. But after that, the problem flares up again, and Conchobar the king decides to send the three pains in his neck off to some other king to be his problem, so he sends them to Curoi for judgement as he is known to be a fair and impartial judge. Curoi sets up a test on the way for them, Cú Chulainn wins this, but the other two are not satisfied as they claim he got his fairy friends and relations to set up this trick. Conchubar sends them off to Ailill and Maebh of Connaught then for a decision, and I'll leave you to read the rest online for the poetic tropes of describing the chariot, horses, armour and appearance of the heroes to be identified:
"Thereupon Findabair, daughter of Ailill and of Méve, went to the soller over the high porch of the hold.
" Mother dear," she said, " I see a chariot coming along the plain."
" Describe it," quoth Méve, "its form, appearance and style ; the colour of the horses; how the hero looks and how the chariot courses."
…In the chariot a fair man with long curling hair ; his tresses tri-coloured : brown at the skin, blood-red at the middle, as a diadem of yellow gold the hair at the tips. Three halos encircle his upturned head, each merging into the other. About him a soft crimson tunic, having five stripes of glittering gold. A shield spotted and indented, with a bright edge of bronze. A barbed five-pronged javelin flames at his wrist. An awning of the rare plumage of birds over his chariot's frame."
"We recognise that man," quoth Méve, ' from his description."
" Compeer of kings, an old disposer of conquest,
A fury of war, a fire of judgment,
A flame of vengeance ; in mien a hero,
In face a champion, in heart a dragon ;
The long knife of proud victories which will hew us to pieces ; The all-noble, red-handed Loigaire ; His the vigour that cuts the leek with the sword-edge — The back-stroke of the wave to the land.”
… In the chariot a fair man with wavy hanging hair. His countenance white and red, his jerkin clean and white, his mantle of blue and crimson red. His shield brown with yellow bosses, its edge veined with bronze. In his hand flames a fiery, furious spear. And an awning of the rare plumage of birds over the wicker frame of his chariot."
" We recognise the man from his description," quoth Méve.
" A lion that groaneth, a flame of Lug, that diamonds can pierce ; A wolf among cattle ; battle on battle, Exploit on exploit, head upon head he heaps ; As a trout on red sandstone is cut Would the son of Findchoimi cut us ; should he rage against us, no peace !
… In the chariot a dark, melancholy man, comeliest of the men of Erin. Around him a soft crimson pleasing- tunic , fastened across the breast, where it stands open, with a salmon-brooch of inlaid gold, against which his bosom heaves, beating in full strokes. A long-sleeved linen kirtle with a white hood, embroidered red with flaming gold. Set in each of his eyes eight red dragon gemstones. His two cheeks blue-white and blood-red. He emits sparks of fire and burning breath, with a ray of love in his look. A shower of pearls, me thinketh, has fallen into his mouth. Each of his two eyebrows as black as the side of a black spit. On his two thighs rests a golden-hilted sword, and fastened to the copper frame of the chariot is a blood-red spear with a sharp mettlesome blade on a shaft of wood well fitted to his hand. Over both his shoulders a crimson shield with a rim of silver, chased with figures of animals in gold. He leaps the hero's salmon-leap into the air and does many like swift feats besides. Such is the chief of a chariot-royal.
"Truly, it is a drop before a shower ; we recognise the man from his description," quoth Méve.
"An ocean fury, a whale that rageth, a fragment of flame and fire ; A bear majestic, a grandly moving billow, A beast in maddening ire : In the crash of glorious battle Through the hostile foe he leaps, His shout the fury of doom ; A terrible bear, he is death to the herd-of-cattle, Feat- upon feat, head upon head he heaps : Laud ye the hearty one, he who is victor fully. As fresh malt is ground in the mill shall we be ground by Cuchulainn.”
>In 536 BC, toward the end of the Spring and Autumn period, the state of Zheng cast a penal code in bronze. By the standards of the time, this was absolutely shocking, an upending of the existing order
>...
Gosh, that must be awful. Imagine ruling over a people who know what the law is and are able to avoid being punished unjustly. Imagine being able to be held to your own standards instead of having yourself *be* the standard so you can do no wrong. Can't imagine what it must be like. Such chaos and anarchy.
> And none of the thinking beings in the Zuozhuan, for all their debates and worrying about the world, could’ve understood the additional forces of change beginning to awaken in their own era. This period is also the beginning of China’s Iron Age, a prerequisite for the tools for increased agricultural production and the weapons for mass infantry that would enable the dynamics of the Warring States.
> I’ve seen one reader exclaim that the people of the Spring and Autumn era read like demonic spirits. Figures from even a century or two later argue from nice rational self-interest in ways that are comprehensible to us today, but for the people in the Zuozhuan, especially the early figures, the world spun on different axes. That’s not to say they didn’t understand self-interest, or that their high-flown speeches couldn’t disguise ruthless calculation, but they interfaced with the world through concepts like Heaven’s Mandate and ritual propriety, truly believed in them the way medieval Europe believed in Hell and heresy. Only, while medieval thinkers at least had ideas from the Classical world to draw on, the thinkers of the Spring and Autumn had no predecessors from more advanced societies than theirs.
These 2 sections remind me of the Bronze Age Collapse, around 1200 BC, and of Scott's review https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ about the alleged development of consciousness around the same time. One of the proposed causes for the Mediterannean Bronze Age collapse was the development of iron, which, as was presumably also the case in China, was much more accessible to small, isolated states than bronze was (bronze is an alloy of multiple metals from different places, and thus access to it requires a substantial trading network).
Heaven's mandate and rituals seem to map roughly onto Greek gods or personal spirits (summoned by rituals). Maybe the same thing happened in this period in China as happened in the Mediterranean world a few centuries prior?