Ascribing the decline of state capacity in the Roman Empire to the shift from light-weight early empire to bureaucratic late empire seems to be supported by many economic historians. The real question is what the major root causes are. One argument is that the failure of the empire to provide low-conflict succession led to succession crises which led to depletion of resources which led to barbarian crises. The recovery from that requires a higher level of resource extraction,l over a smaller economic base. That’s the one I buy. But there are others. For example, Justinian’s plague seems to have had much the same effect as the perpetual succession crises. I’ve seen the silver argument made, but that was 35 years ago. It has presumably improved since then, but my core objection to it is that it ignores price mechanism.
I found this review of Henrich interesting in attempting to understand "wokeness" in a different way than Warby's grand unified narrative, which I have a hard time with because of my own perspectives and differences.
Arnold notes he is no fan of activism, and comments: ...Warby is vulnerable to whataboutism. Aren’t Chrisopher Rufo, James Lindsay, and Warby himself just as motivated to encourage people to feel as fearful and threatened as possible?
Woke activism is aimed at establishing and maintaining control and power over others, and securing rents (grift); in contrast Rufo, Lindsay, and Warby are trying to give people the intellectual resources protect themselves against the toxic ideologies that are used to justify wokery. People ought to feel threatened by those ideologies; they generate the hobgoblins that are the justificatory framework for woke social predation.
One major difference (among many) between "woke" and Christianity in this analogy is that early Christians seem to have been what modern day conservatives would call very “pro family”, ie high birthrates etc. Modern progressivism doesn’t seem to share that philosophy.
With regards to the what-about-ism of the apocalyptic doom-sayers on both sides, I absolutely agree. All sides of any political divide have their firebrands and doom-sayers whipping up the emotions of their faction mates in a bid for attention, power, status, etc. We would do well to remember that we all are as prone to such manipulation as those on the other side.
Yet there is also a distinction to be made about the relative accuracy of the prophets of doom. The Woke's priesthood crying out about oppression of women and such are more obviously wrong; when you can see academic job postings specifically asking for female applicants you can intuit that women are not being oppressed. Whereas outraged claims that elementary school teachers are "grooming" young kids for whatever LGBTAFGJERGM<ADFG is important to them are, as it turns out, largely true.
I suspect the outcome of all this is that as a factions' prophets of doom start to become more extreme, and thus farther from reality, that faction starts to lose status. It then follows that a faction ought to be careful to "police" its prophets, holding them accountable for accuracy and the like, lest the prophets take the faction down with them.
What we (people who write on Substacks like these) call "The Anointed", the Unanointed (those driving around in proverbial white vans) call "people full of shit". That, in truth, is what we think too but feel the need to be more analytical about it.
I personally worry that many of those who want to deflower The Anointed (Rufo et al) fail to face up to just how abundant they are in 2023. In the UK (always at the forefront of social change) it is probably now approaching 50% of the population - and rising. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
I’m alway curious about why people wanted the Western Roman Empire to survive. Most of its cultural contributions were done by the end of the 2nd century and it was pretty much just an oppressive tax collection scheme after that. I also think Gibbon had it backwards. The Roman Empire allowed Christianity to spread. If there’d been no imperial control, it’s highly doubtful it would have been anything other than another sun cult.
One reason to lament the passing of the Western Roman Empire was what happened after it fell: massive population collapse. Western Europe didn't recover its population for centuries after Rome fell, and Rome itself didn't until the late 19th-early 20th century.
Now, I am pretty skeptical of population counts of those early days, but even with pretty big error bars that is a lot of humans who stopped being for quite some time. The Romans, who I agree had become largely a stagnant big government, still were providing a the environment for a lot of growth. Compared to the alternative they were still the way to go it seems, if not the way it went.
A case can be made that climate change and plague drove a lot of the decline in the empire. Roman Italy after the deposition of the emperor wasn't that different then what came before, but really hit a downward spiral in the 500s (when the climate was atrocious and the war between the Goths and the byzantines ravaged the land).
Yea, the cooling period does seem to have caused a lot of the problems, but then war (as always) didn't help, and the collapse in trade really hamstrung things too. I think the latter exacerbated the cooling as well, as regions with bad harvests couldn't get grain from those without. A robust supply network does wonders for staving off starvation.
It is definitely a fair point to say that the Western Empire fell because they had bad emperors who were bad at running a bureaucracy that was itself bad at running an empire, and saying that it would have been better if it hadn't fell is effectively saying it would have been better if they didn't have so many who were so bad at doing their jobs. Well... yes, but... :D
The proper take home message is probably "You need to remove the bureaucratic parasites before the empire starts to collapse, because by the time things are falling apart it is too late to avoid the really bad outcomes."
Rome couldn't seem to solve its civil war problem. The crisis of the third century was "solved" by increasing the power of the emperor and bureaucracy. Maybe that was the price to pay to keep the empire going another century.
I just happened to be reading visions of the anointed right now. It's an amazing work. Self-evident truths that weren't evident to me yet. Say climate change caused (any) forest fires and it's true by default. But say that restrictive zoning makes housing expensive, and all of a sudden it's a complex multi-causal problem that can't be attributed to any one factor. Only policy solutions are considered and only if they add more policy.
In about AD410 the Rhine River froze over, allowing a flood of Germanic barbarians to cross into the Roman Empire's domains. The barbarians had been suffering at the hands of Asian tribes, and were both hungry and desperate for their lives. The border had been poorly and ineffectively defended by Germanic mercenaries ostensibly loyal to Rome, who likely would not have been able to stop the flood, but they didn't try anyway. Roman citizens had forsaken military service as a noble pursuit, and Roman society and politics were corrupt in many ways. Rome withdrew its forces from Britain at the same time, because the military was stretched too thin to defend the empire effectively. In the 2020s America is reliving this history. Oh, and within a year the Goths (or perhaps the Visigoths) had sacked Rome, at the heart of its empire.
<i>In the cultural struggles over Trans, the big divide is between those who treat “gender” (actually sex) dysphoria as psychological dysfunction and those who treat it as an identity. For the latter, to think of such dysphoria as a psychological dysfunction is to commit blasphemy, to mark oneself off as a moral infidel.</i>
I suggest a different division. Let the academics have the silly question of the nature and cause of "gender dysphoria." The important distinction is whether the person who uses the label transgender merely intends to live as an ordinary person of his new alleged sex, or is an "abuser" whose purpose in advertising himself as trans is to violate other people's reasonable boundaries such as the privacy of women in bathrooms and locker rooms, the expectation that the person you're trying to pick up in a bar is really the sex he appears to be, and the segregation of women's sporting events so that they don't always lose (comparable to the weight classes in boxing).
I believe that this new generation of "trans" people, at least the noticeable ones, are abusers, and they will soon wear out their welcome in the wider "woke community." I also hope that this will lead people of all preferences and private-part configurations to rediscover the benefit of not bragging about either. I simply don't need to know either of those facts about you unless one of us is trying to get into the other's pants.
Perhaps we should solve the pronoun question the same way. Address everyone using male pronouns "neutrally," as correct English already allows, and retire the rest.
Sowell is helping lots of people through this as is Warby and others.
A friend of mine in his late 30s, successful in the modern capitalistic sense, couldn't understand how ' all this ' has come about. I talked about some world history and classic writers that we read at school in the 70s and 80s and he said that he wasn't taught stuff like that at school. What did you learn? I asked. He replied - not much, the teachers were pretty much crowd control.
Parents passing over raising their kids, but not wanting them disciplined in the traditional corporal sense would have contributed? But this was the plan.....
Norman Mailer wrote in 1956 in his book" The White Negro'"-
"No matter what its horrors the Twentieth Century is a vastly exciting century for its tendency is to reduce all of life to its
ultimate alternatives. One can well wonder if the last war of them all will be between the blacks and the whites, or between the
women and the men, or between the beautiful and ugly, the pillagers and managers, or the rebels and the regulators. Which of
course is carrying speculation beyond the point where speculation is still serious, and yet despair at the monotony and
bleakness of the future have become so engrained in the radical temper that the radical is in danger of abdicating from all
imagination. What a man feels is the impulse for his creative effort, and if an alien but nonetheless passionate instinct about
the meaning of life has come so unexpectedly from a virtually illiterate people, come out of the most intense conditions of
exploitation, cruelty, violence, frustration, and lust, and yet has succeeded as an instinct in keeping this tortured people alive,
then it is perhaps possible that the Negro holds more of the tail of the expanding elephant of truth than the radical, and if this is
so, the radical humanist could do worse than to and brood upon the phenomenon. For if a revolutionary time should come
again, there would be a crucial difference if someone had already delineated a neo-Marxian calculus aimed at comprehending
every circuit and process of society from ukase to kiss as the communications of human energy—a calculus capable of
translating the economic relations of man into his psychological relations and then back again, his productive relations thereby
embracing his sexual relations as well, until the
crises of capitalism in the Twentieth Century would yet be understood as the unconscious adaptations of a society to solve its
economic imbalance at the expense of a new mass psychological imbalance. It is almost beyond the imagination to conceive
of a work in which the drama of human energy is engaged, and a theory of its social currents and dissipations, its
imprisonments, expressions, and tragic wastes are fitted into some gigantic synthesis of human action where the body of
Marxist thought, and particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital (that first of the major psychologies to approach the mystery
of social cruelty so simply and practically as to say that we are a collective body of humans whose life-energy is wasted,
displaced, and procedurally stolen as it passes from one of us to another)—where particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital
would find its place in an even more Godlike view of human justice and injustice, in some more excruciating vision of those
intimate and institutional processes which lead to our creations and disasters, our growth, our attrition, and our rebellion."
Some other amazing insights on the current insurgence of psychopathic behavioural acceptance as well. Note - the poisoning of the peoples minds with drugs of both forms has also played its role in people being born empathicaly damaged or becoming damaged.
Just alcohol was bad enough to damage me for 30 years.
Ascribing the decline of state capacity in the Roman Empire to the shift from light-weight early empire to bureaucratic late empire seems to be supported by many economic historians. The real question is what the major root causes are. One argument is that the failure of the empire to provide low-conflict succession led to succession crises which led to depletion of resources which led to barbarian crises. The recovery from that requires a higher level of resource extraction,l over a smaller economic base. That’s the one I buy. But there are others. For example, Justinian’s plague seems to have had much the same effect as the perpetual succession crises. I’ve seen the silver argument made, but that was 35 years ago. It has presumably improved since then, but my core objection to it is that it ignores price mechanism.
I found this review of Henrich interesting in attempting to understand "wokeness" in a different way than Warby's grand unified narrative, which I have a hard time with because of my own perspectives and differences.
"So when it comes to individualism, wokeness is not only WEIRD, it’s hyper-WEIRD." - https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-weirdest-people-in-the-5a2
Arnold notes he is no fan of activism, and comments: ...Warby is vulnerable to whataboutism. Aren’t Chrisopher Rufo, James Lindsay, and Warby himself just as motivated to encourage people to feel as fearful and threatened as possible?
Woke activism is aimed at establishing and maintaining control and power over others, and securing rents (grift); in contrast Rufo, Lindsay, and Warby are trying to give people the intellectual resources protect themselves against the toxic ideologies that are used to justify wokery. People ought to feel threatened by those ideologies; they generate the hobgoblins that are the justificatory framework for woke social predation.
One major difference (among many) between "woke" and Christianity in this analogy is that early Christians seem to have been what modern day conservatives would call very “pro family”, ie high birthrates etc. Modern progressivism doesn’t seem to share that philosophy.
With regards to the what-about-ism of the apocalyptic doom-sayers on both sides, I absolutely agree. All sides of any political divide have their firebrands and doom-sayers whipping up the emotions of their faction mates in a bid for attention, power, status, etc. We would do well to remember that we all are as prone to such manipulation as those on the other side.
Yet there is also a distinction to be made about the relative accuracy of the prophets of doom. The Woke's priesthood crying out about oppression of women and such are more obviously wrong; when you can see academic job postings specifically asking for female applicants you can intuit that women are not being oppressed. Whereas outraged claims that elementary school teachers are "grooming" young kids for whatever LGBTAFGJERGM<ADFG is important to them are, as it turns out, largely true.
I suspect the outcome of all this is that as a factions' prophets of doom start to become more extreme, and thus farther from reality, that faction starts to lose status. It then follows that a faction ought to be careful to "police" its prophets, holding them accountable for accuracy and the like, lest the prophets take the faction down with them.
"I would wager that within a decade the Anointed will feel it necessary to move on from the Transcult"
I would hope you are correct, but I believe you are wrong.
What we (people who write on Substacks like these) call "The Anointed", the Unanointed (those driving around in proverbial white vans) call "people full of shit". That, in truth, is what we think too but feel the need to be more analytical about it.
I personally worry that many of those who want to deflower The Anointed (Rufo et al) fail to face up to just how abundant they are in 2023. In the UK (always at the forefront of social change) it is probably now approaching 50% of the population - and rising. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
I’m alway curious about why people wanted the Western Roman Empire to survive. Most of its cultural contributions were done by the end of the 2nd century and it was pretty much just an oppressive tax collection scheme after that. I also think Gibbon had it backwards. The Roman Empire allowed Christianity to spread. If there’d been no imperial control, it’s highly doubtful it would have been anything other than another sun cult.
One reason to lament the passing of the Western Roman Empire was what happened after it fell: massive population collapse. Western Europe didn't recover its population for centuries after Rome fell, and Rome itself didn't until the late 19th-early 20th century.
Now, I am pretty skeptical of population counts of those early days, but even with pretty big error bars that is a lot of humans who stopped being for quite some time. The Romans, who I agree had become largely a stagnant big government, still were providing a the environment for a lot of growth. Compared to the alternative they were still the way to go it seems, if not the way it went.
I guess the question is what caused the collapse.
A case can be made that climate change and plague drove a lot of the decline in the empire. Roman Italy after the deposition of the emperor wasn't that different then what came before, but really hit a downward spiral in the 500s (when the climate was atrocious and the war between the Goths and the byzantines ravaged the land).
Yea, the cooling period does seem to have caused a lot of the problems, but then war (as always) didn't help, and the collapse in trade really hamstrung things too. I think the latter exacerbated the cooling as well, as regions with bad harvests couldn't get grain from those without. A robust supply network does wonders for staving off starvation.
It is definitely a fair point to say that the Western Empire fell because they had bad emperors who were bad at running a bureaucracy that was itself bad at running an empire, and saying that it would have been better if it hadn't fell is effectively saying it would have been better if they didn't have so many who were so bad at doing their jobs. Well... yes, but... :D
The proper take home message is probably "You need to remove the bureaucratic parasites before the empire starts to collapse, because by the time things are falling apart it is too late to avoid the really bad outcomes."
Rome couldn't seem to solve its civil war problem. The crisis of the third century was "solved" by increasing the power of the emperor and bureaucracy. Maybe that was the price to pay to keep the empire going another century.
Bought these in bulk back in the day. Gifted them to the best students in my classes.
I just happened to be reading visions of the anointed right now. It's an amazing work. Self-evident truths that weren't evident to me yet. Say climate change caused (any) forest fires and it's true by default. But say that restrictive zoning makes housing expensive, and all of a sudden it's a complex multi-causal problem that can't be attributed to any one factor. Only policy solutions are considered and only if they add more policy.
In about AD410 the Rhine River froze over, allowing a flood of Germanic barbarians to cross into the Roman Empire's domains. The barbarians had been suffering at the hands of Asian tribes, and were both hungry and desperate for their lives. The border had been poorly and ineffectively defended by Germanic mercenaries ostensibly loyal to Rome, who likely would not have been able to stop the flood, but they didn't try anyway. Roman citizens had forsaken military service as a noble pursuit, and Roman society and politics were corrupt in many ways. Rome withdrew its forces from Britain at the same time, because the military was stretched too thin to defend the empire effectively. In the 2020s America is reliving this history. Oh, and within a year the Goths (or perhaps the Visigoths) had sacked Rome, at the heart of its empire.
<i>In the cultural struggles over Trans, the big divide is between those who treat “gender” (actually sex) dysphoria as psychological dysfunction and those who treat it as an identity. For the latter, to think of such dysphoria as a psychological dysfunction is to commit blasphemy, to mark oneself off as a moral infidel.</i>
I suggest a different division. Let the academics have the silly question of the nature and cause of "gender dysphoria." The important distinction is whether the person who uses the label transgender merely intends to live as an ordinary person of his new alleged sex, or is an "abuser" whose purpose in advertising himself as trans is to violate other people's reasonable boundaries such as the privacy of women in bathrooms and locker rooms, the expectation that the person you're trying to pick up in a bar is really the sex he appears to be, and the segregation of women's sporting events so that they don't always lose (comparable to the weight classes in boxing).
I believe that this new generation of "trans" people, at least the noticeable ones, are abusers, and they will soon wear out their welcome in the wider "woke community." I also hope that this will lead people of all preferences and private-part configurations to rediscover the benefit of not bragging about either. I simply don't need to know either of those facts about you unless one of us is trying to get into the other's pants.
Perhaps we should solve the pronoun question the same way. Address everyone using male pronouns "neutrally," as correct English already allows, and retire the rest.
Sowell is helping lots of people through this as is Warby and others.
A friend of mine in his late 30s, successful in the modern capitalistic sense, couldn't understand how ' all this ' has come about. I talked about some world history and classic writers that we read at school in the 70s and 80s and he said that he wasn't taught stuff like that at school. What did you learn? I asked. He replied - not much, the teachers were pretty much crowd control.
Parents passing over raising their kids, but not wanting them disciplined in the traditional corporal sense would have contributed? But this was the plan.....
Norman Mailer wrote in 1956 in his book" The White Negro'"-
"No matter what its horrors the Twentieth Century is a vastly exciting century for its tendency is to reduce all of life to its
ultimate alternatives. One can well wonder if the last war of them all will be between the blacks and the whites, or between the
women and the men, or between the beautiful and ugly, the pillagers and managers, or the rebels and the regulators. Which of
course is carrying speculation beyond the point where speculation is still serious, and yet despair at the monotony and
bleakness of the future have become so engrained in the radical temper that the radical is in danger of abdicating from all
imagination. What a man feels is the impulse for his creative effort, and if an alien but nonetheless passionate instinct about
the meaning of life has come so unexpectedly from a virtually illiterate people, come out of the most intense conditions of
exploitation, cruelty, violence, frustration, and lust, and yet has succeeded as an instinct in keeping this tortured people alive,
then it is perhaps possible that the Negro holds more of the tail of the expanding elephant of truth than the radical, and if this is
so, the radical humanist could do worse than to and brood upon the phenomenon. For if a revolutionary time should come
again, there would be a crucial difference if someone had already delineated a neo-Marxian calculus aimed at comprehending
every circuit and process of society from ukase to kiss as the communications of human energy—a calculus capable of
translating the economic relations of man into his psychological relations and then back again, his productive relations thereby
embracing his sexual relations as well, until the
crises of capitalism in the Twentieth Century would yet be understood as the unconscious adaptations of a society to solve its
economic imbalance at the expense of a new mass psychological imbalance. It is almost beyond the imagination to conceive
of a work in which the drama of human energy is engaged, and a theory of its social currents and dissipations, its
imprisonments, expressions, and tragic wastes are fitted into some gigantic synthesis of human action where the body of
Marxist thought, and particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital (that first of the major psychologies to approach the mystery
of social cruelty so simply and practically as to say that we are a collective body of humans whose life-energy is wasted,
displaced, and procedurally stolen as it passes from one of us to another)—where particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital
would find its place in an even more Godlike view of human justice and injustice, in some more excruciating vision of those
intimate and institutional processes which lead to our creations and disasters, our growth, our attrition, and our rebellion."
Some other amazing insights on the current insurgence of psychopathic behavioural acceptance as well. Note - the poisoning of the peoples minds with drugs of both forms has also played its role in people being born empathicaly damaged or becoming damaged.
Just alcohol was bad enough to damage me for 30 years.