Ecstasy

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Our ecstasy was stuff as rare

and just as fleeting, so it seemed,

as whispers melted into air

which quickened beating hearts that dreamed.

 

We sensed each subtle side-effect

long months before our souls evolved,

and judged each other God’s elect

so long as earth did not revolve.

 

If only we could freeze the days

as ecstasy dammed up our tears,

we two could live within a haze,

be spared the judgment of the years.

 

We kissed for nothing but the fun.

We shared like lovers ought to.

Before we sickened with the sun

and lied like we were taught to.

 

Our tangled limbs wilt where they lie

but nature never ages.

At every summer’s start, I’ll sigh

and think of both our cages.

 

But now adventure calls for you,

and strangers call for me.

These manacles might chafe, it’s true,

but shackled, we are free.

Drowning in You

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Old rhymes insist sublimity is this:

eternity transposed on the abyss;

the Ocean set against a band of sky;

the timbre of a mother’s lullaby;

a snowflake’s gleam destined to disappear;

a whispered prayer that nobody will hear;

and you, a mortal with immortal grace,

the splendor of your wit matched in your face.

My stalling heart quickens as it is wrenched,

while dazed I dare to stare at you unquenched,

your eyes twin torrents lethal as the sea,

as wondrous turquoise as eternity.

Drowned in your gaze, how could I help but try

to gulp life’s breath once more before I die,

and helpless sing the fatal ocean’s praise

before I perish mute beneath the waves?

Your face recalls the world I’ll never know,

when sinking I plunge fathoms down below:

your blush the russet dusk before it wanes;

your smile the dawning sun after it rains;

your lips twin rubies polished in the deep;

your hair the fur of corns stalks freshly reaped.

Horizons tie the sea and sky to earth,

but destiny unbinds my longing’s worth,

and dooms me to imagine what’s not true,

and scrawl dirges for love I never knew!

But darkest veins obscure red gemstones’ birth,

and blackest night contains Apollo’s girth.

No dawn or gloaming’s russet veil of gold

can make the scarlet shimmer long take hold.

Even the roots of cornstalks cling to hell.

Divine for now, you’ll know time’s rot as well.

The fool of fortune drooping by the hour,

with you unseen, untouched, beyond my power,

surrendering to gravity and guilt,

inert I’ll watch both of our flowers wilt.

Then sighing sink below as Cupid’s clown,

til angels’ voices wake us and we drown.

Thoughts on Historical Causality, “Inevitability,” and the Origins of the Peloponnesian War

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Part I: The Dangers of Questions Dealing With Historical Causality and Inevitability

The question of when the Second Peloponnesian War became inevitable, like the related question of who or what was directly responsible for its outbreak, is a dangerously broad query. It seems to demand a specific answer, yet one can imagine multiple beautifully argued, well supported theses all standing like ducks in a row in stark contradiction to each other, with no systematic way for a reader to evaluate the relative truth of any of the claims. One could plausibly argue, for example, that Spartan fear of Athens made the conflict inevitable the moment the Persian War ended in 479 BC; or that Pericles’ commitment to imperialism in the Aegean was to blame for the struggle, symbolized by the movement of the treasury of the Delian League to Athens in 454 BC; or even that commercial rivalry between Corinth and Athens guaranteed a pan-Hellenic war in the late 430s. All of these theses and countless others like them can be supported to some degree or another by evidence from the surviving ancient sources. Because we cannot go back in time and “rerun” history from a plurality of starting points to see how different hypothetical timelines would have played out, no single explanation about causality and inevitability can be definitively challenged.

In trying to evaluate the truth of these sorts of theses, an historian is left with a battery of lame tropes, particularly reasoning by false analogy. For example, one might claim that the intensity of commercial rivalry with Corinth is an inadequate yardstick for deciding when war became inevitable because at previous points on the timeline, it did not lead to war; for example, Sparta did not immediately attack Athens when the conflict over Corcyra erupted, and at an even earlier point in history, Corinth supported Athens during its suppression of the Samian revolt (Thuc. 1.40). This sort of reasoning, however, is specious, comparable to saying “the question of when World War Two became inevitable does not center on the Nazi-Soviet relationship because at an earlier point in history, the nations were in treaty with each other.” The fact remains that commercial conflicts with Corinth were indeed a major factor when the Peloponnesian War finally did break out, whatever the situation was in the past. It is either the case that the question of inevitability intrinsically has an infinity of potentially correct answers that cannot be meaningfully evaluated against each other, or that the Second Peloponnesian War became inevitable once it was declared and the fighting had begun.

Of course, this seems like a singularly unsatisfactory answer akin to rhetorical sleight of hand. Our intuitions tell us that causality is usually more complex than literally proximate causes like the declaration of the war itself. Yet long term causes like “the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta” (Thuc. 1.23) only seem meaningful given the benefit of historical hindsight. For example, it is easy for us now, knowing that the Peloponnesian War took place, to claim that in the extreme long term, as Thucydides said, Spartan fear and Athenian imperial progress were to blame for the conflict. Yet during the fifty year interval separating the Persian War from the Peloponnesian War, we neither find Athens aggressively pursuing an explicitly imperial policy at all times, nor Sparta equally willing to go to war at all times; indeed, even when Athens eventually allied with Corcyra, it was explicitly a defensive compact, and the assembly at which the Spartans at last voted to go to war was too close to call by acclamation (Thuc. 1.87). If World War 3 had broken out between the USSR and the USA in 1962, one might have said that the differences between the capitalist and communist worlds made the war inevitable. Yet war did not break out between the USSR and USA, and the battery of attractive-sounding arguments suggesting it was inevitable would be demonstrably false. This is also the case with Thucydides’ famous claim.

This question of historical inevitability can drive one up a wall; proximate causes are inadequate in themselves (“the war became inevitable when Athens and Sparta declared war”), and long term causes only seem decisively fateful with the benefit of hindsight. For this reason, theses about when war became inevitable often say more about the tastes of the author making the claim than the meaningful answer to the question at hand. How, then, is one to approach such a challenge beyond pointing out its puzzling subtext?

Part II: Patterns of Behavior and Ideological Conflict Make Wars Increasingly Likely But Never Inevitable Until They Are Declared: The Peloponnesian War as a Case Study

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If a man decides on January 1st to eat only the gristle of bacon for the rest of his life and has a heart attack after breakfast on June 1st, one would probably not blame the final breakfast for his demise, or say that the heart attack was inevitably going to take place on June 1st. The best that one could say is this: given the establishment of a repeated pattern of dangerous behavior, a disastrous result became increasingly likely as the timeline progressed after January 1st. Although World War 3 did not break out in 1962, such a conflict was probably far more likely at that moment than, say, during the years of the Clinton Presidency. This analogy enriches the possibilities for answering the question “when did the Peloponnesian War become inevitable?” We know that it was only inevitable once it was declared; however, we can also say that after certain points on the timeline, patterns of behavior were established that were sufficient to lethally drive up the likelihood of a conflict between Athens and Sparta.

The remainder of this paper seeks to present two points. First, potentially lethal patterns of behavior were well established before the conflict of 431 BC, making war very likely by that point. Second, ideological conflict between Athens and Corinth on the difference between a subject, an ally, and a colony effectively exacerbated tensions in 431 BC to provide a pretext for the war. The fact remains, however, that it might have been avoided at any time just as the hypothetical World War 3 was avoided, or at least delayed. A diet of gristle does not guarantee a heart attack; it only makes it very likely.

In the same way, we can say that the Peloponnesian War was caused by dangerous patterns of behavior established over time that made disaster more and more probabilistic at every moment (though, emphatically, never inevitable). Oligarchic, conservative, land-locked Sparta was deathly terrified of democratic, innovative, maritime Athens’ growth yet continued to have confidence in the superiority of her land forces. Indeed, confidence in the age-old superiority of hoplite warfare to all other forms of military organization was an inextricable aspect of the Spartan mindset, and the Athenian defeat at Tanagra in 457 and the Egyptian disaster later that decade likely lived on in the collective consciousness of the Greek world for a long time afterward. Thus, Athens simultaneously seemed infuriating and vulnerable to many conservative Spartans. (In On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, Kagan writes that “the Athenians simply did not have enough manpower to create an offensive threat.”) At the same time, Periclean Athens was confident in her Long Walls and the power of her navy and simultaneously committed to an imperialistic policy in the Aegean upsetting the power of Sparta’s allies. Considering the fifty year interval separating the Persian from the Peloponnesian War as a whole, Thucydides was certainly correct when he wrote: “that the whole period…with some peaceful intervals, was spent by each power in war, either with its rival, or with its own revolted allies, and consequently afforded them constant practice in military matters, and that experience which is learnt in the school of danger” (Thu, 1.18). It takes no Thucydides to realize that this was a potential recipe for disaster, with warfare between Athenian and Spartan interests the rule rather than the exception throughout the period. In fact, even before the Battle of Sybota, the Siege of Potidaea, and the ultimatum over the Megarian decree, the people of Corcyra could meaningfully warn the Athenians that war was “all but upon (them)” (Thuc. 1.36).

In such a climate, the Peloponnesian War might have broken out at many points in history. After decades of hostility and memories of many unavenged loved ones dead on the battlefield, war probably seemed very likely indeed by the time of the crisis over Epidamnus in the late 430s. Was there perhaps a point along the timeline in which the probability for long-term peace was at its maximum, or at least significantly greater than by the time of Sybota? My intuition is that the Spartan rebuffing of Athenian aid at Mt. Ithome in 462 BC significantly worsened the climate—perhaps beforehand the conciliatory policies of a man like Cimon might have found some workable middle ground with the Spartan oligarchy. The outbreak of the First Peloponnesian War soon afterward in 460 BC is surely no coincidence, and this too poisoned the waters—once war was declared once, it was significantly more likely that it could happen again in the realm of everyone’s imaginations. Indeed, Athens and Sparta were by some standards still in a theoretical state of war even after the conflict nominally ended: after all, the struggle was concluded by a supposed 30 Years Peace, which is really a euphemism for a ceasefire, not an eternal truce. It was within this volatile atmosphere that two conflicting ideologies concerning the very nature of spheres of influence would prove sufficient to spark a second explosion.

The First Peloponnesian War was an indecisive affair, and Corinthian interests and commercial rivalry with Athens continued to cause great travail. The Peloponnesian League was a loose defensive network led by a hegemon; the Delian League was a network of subjugated states. Corinth, a member of the Peloponnesian League armed with an ancient name and great pretensions, was neither a real hegemon nor the leader of an empire. Desirous of sway in her own right, she seems to have perceived her colonies as more than simply sister cities sharing quaint historical and religious associations, which was otherwise the rule for Greek colonial relations. Athens saw Corcyra as a neutral state free to make its own choices; Corinth did not concur.

Corinth’s grounds for her high expectations for her colonies were, however, shaky—the best the Corinthian representatives at Athens could say about defiant Corcyra was that proper respect was not paid to the metropolis at games and sacred assemblies, which seems less than compelling as grounds for war (Thuc. 1.25). However, the claim that Corinth’s other colonies acquiesced more readily to her will (Thuc. 1.38) and the assertion that Epidamnus theoretically belongs to the Corinthian sphere of influence because she is the daughter of a daughter city (Thuc. 1.25) prove that there existed a unique Corinthian conception of what it meant to be a metropolis. At 1.40, the Corinthians explain that their city supported Athens’ suppression of the Samian revolt because “every power has a right to punish its own allies.” The implication is that Athens should leave well enough alone and let Corinth do what it pleases to Corcyra—however, the secondary implication is that in Corinthian eyes, “ally,” “subject,” and “colony” are interchangeable terms. Of course, one could claim that Corinth was simply grasping at straws because she feared what would happen if Corcyra’s navy joined the Athenian fleet. However, the trouble over Potidaea, an Athenian ally but also a Corinthian colony, suggests that fundamentally, the Corinthians were sincere in their belief that colonial ties implied the existence of sacred spheres of influence, and that defending these rights was worth dying for.

Kagan’s suggestion that “had it not been for Corinth the Spartans would have taken no action whatever” (307) is in harmony with the claim of Elizabeth Meyer that the conservative Spartan state as a rule did not intervene in Athenian affairs, even when Athens established military garrisons (Meyer, 40). Corinth’s power at League meetings was likely very great indeed if the story is true that she once deterred Sparta from supporting Samos and now forced the city’s hand by shaming its leaders as unhelpful and indecisive at the council to decide for war. However, one should not underestimate an independent Spartan willingness to fight. According to some sources, Sparta first considered going to war when Dorcis was rebuffed; it demanded that Athens neglect its walls during Themistocles’ heyday; at 1.101, Thucydides suggests that it nearly went to war with Athens over the issue of rebellious Thasos, and the same situation certainly took place during the Samian revolt; Cimon and his party were rebuffed at Mt. Ithome; the First Peloponnesian War was fought!

Ultimately, Kagan is likely correct when he says that the Corinthians “accepted the division of the Greek world into two parts as a lasting and workable arrangement” (Kagan, 175). However, a fundamental disagreement over just where the borders of those “two parts” were located made conflict with Athens a continuous reality and war with Sparta a very likely attendant outcome. The indecisive conclusion of the First Peloponnesian War sowed dangerous seeds, just as the First World War would in many meaningful ways pave the way for the Second in the 20th century.

Had the cities of Carthage and Alexandria ultimately fought a “Punic War” in an alternate universe, one could write endlessly of its inevitability: conflicts between Greek and Punic culture, access to the lucrative grain markets of North Africa, and even geographical location could be used to justify such a theoretical conflict. The fact that such factors were not sufficient to even cause diplomatic ripples in our universe proves that history works probabilistically but not fatefully. I maintain that the Peloponnesian War never became inevitable until it was declared. However, repeated conflict over the nature of allies, colonies, and subjects made violent solutions extremely probabilistic, particularly after the outbreak of outright hostilities for the first time in 460 BC. But the ultimate choice for the war—and ultimate blame for it—lies in the hands of the individual statesmen who failed to come up with a more imaginative solution to the problems at hand.

 

Some Cruel Epigrams in the Roman Style

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I wrote these poems inspired by Catullus and Martial as a freshman at Harvard. Their wit is mean-spirited but sharp, like the Roman originals, and the collection as a whole is meant to be taken light-heartedly. I apologize if anyone finds these vulgar or offensive; the poems are juvenile, but there’s something about them which makes me smile.

***

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Dear Neighbors

This school being Harvard, why do you still need this warning?

Turn your fucking music off at night and in the morning!

We’ve begged and we have pleaded, but our efforts are discarded.

You’re either quite forgetful or you’re either quite retarded.

NB I would never use this language now, and apologize for the offensiveness. It’s from 2001 and in the tradition of vulgar Latin epigrams which were very crude. I actually wrote this on the whiteboard outside my neighbors’ room, just as I wrote the subsequent poem outside the bathroom.

***

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On Jason

Jason is a sportsman boasting muscles taut with power

and recently has taken up cavorting in the shower.

I couldn’t help but notice that you recently smell clean,

But humping girls in common baths is dirty, low and mean.

We do not want, oh Hercules, to bathe ourselves in sperm,

So find another puddle when your pants begin to squirm.

With any luck you’ll meet a partner worthy of your class,

An inchworm longer than your dick who’ll crawl right up your ass.

***

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On Jonathan

You creep in rooms, dear Jonathan, and vanish into air,

but tragically, you lanky sneak, your stench proves that you’re there.

They say that you are part giraffe, but I say that it’s foolish,

for while they only sport black tongues, the whole of you is ghoulish.

***

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On Trisha

I hear that you sport hairy legs, just one of many fibs.

Your legs are smooth, but not the slime that clings against your ribs.

***

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On Patrick

Patrick hasn’t got a chin, but when it comes to farts

that fellow’s stench has all the power of a pygmy’s darts.

His new girlfriend, Evangeline, is always where he goes,

for while he hasn’t got a chin, she hasn’t got a nose.

***

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On Erica

Erica is fetching as she paints her luscious lips,

fetching as a dog with hairy jowls and giant hips.

Why spend so much time applying makeup to your face?

It’s all to no avail, since your buck teeth smell of mace.

***

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On Robert

You’re always late to section and your questions waste our time.

In my eyes you’re nothing more than pock marks greased with slime.

***

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To the Dancing Woman at the Club

Dancing to the rhythm of the music is an art,

but not when you’re a floozy over sixty and a tart

whose partner is a pumpkin who can only move his back.

Your dancing isn’t dancing, but a rhythmic heart attack.

 

 

Beyond the Mountains of the Moon: Reflections on Two Months in Egypt, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo

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In the summer of 2017, I embarked on a trip to every source and outlet of the Nile from Egypt to Rwanda. The following are the updates I posted to Facebook along the way and a sampling of my photographs. See more on Instagram, where I’m spqrkimel.

Part 1: Egypt

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“What does a white man go looking for in Africa?” asked my grandmother when I finally told her the truth about my summer plans. “The answer is trouble.”

“No. The answer is adventure, and myself.”

Reluctant to inform Safta of my prospective itinerary along the outlets of the Nile, I delayed conveying the news to her as long as possible. Some scruple prevented me from withholding the truth indefinitely, though. I wasn’t surprised by her dubiety, as I myself wondered if I would have the wits and stamina to complete the adventure. Maybe that’s why I decided to embark on this journey in the first place. If I possessed half the energy I did in high school, its marriage to knowledge and experience would be a potent combination.

Instead, my identity had long since eroded—having delayed ending graduate school as long as possible, I was no longer the President of my own publishing company, no longer the coach of the debate team, no longer anything, really. Facing the prospect of embarking for God knows where in 2018, I tried to enliven 2017 by doing so on my own terms. I told myself that following in the footsteps of Speke and Livingstone would rejuvenate me.

But I didn’t find what I was looking for in Egypt. The country had tragically declined since my visit last summer. I was the only man in the Great Pyramid. The vendors surrounding the site pleaded with me to buy their wares, with more than one whispering as if confidentially, “I want to kill myself.” The economy had evidently imploded—inflation had driven the value of the pound into the ground, and salaries had not adjusted to the plummet. Vendors distributing free snacks and water along the road aside, the spirit of Ramadan was ruined by the ubiquitous sense of tension. Along the Suez Canal and all along the road toward the Delta, military checkpoints dotted the landscape.

Sleeping in a houseboat by the Kitkat mosque, I found a guide to bring me to the Faiyoum and the mouth of the Nile at Rashid. Tarek spoke to me at length about how the tourism industry had waned since the twilight of the Arab Spring. The collapse would have been worth it had true democracy come, he said. Then there was a long silence.

I saw the bones of prehistoric monsters in the Sahara, whales so ancient they still boasted rudimentary arms and legs. I saw boats glide along the Suez Canal. I breathed in the spray of the Nile where it mingled with the Mediterranean, saw the river’s waves crash northward at war with the southward currents of the sea. I met strangers and invited them back to the boat. We profaned the holiday in sundry ways. I woke up alone and stared at the river. Encountering children and animals beaten on the street and ubiquitous misogyny, I reflected on the limits of cultural relativism. A man by the side of the road held a dozen exhausted birds by the feet, shaking them violently until they were half dead, peddling them to passersby before snapping their necks. I bought the liveliest looking pair and told him to release them for the sake of Ramadan. He told me that they were too enervated to fly now, but that he would release them before he went home. I wondered if he was telling the truth. Tarek said the vendor had honest eyes.

Then I left Egypt for Zanzibar, where adventurers embarked into the unknown when there were still places left to discover in this world.

Part 2: Tanzania

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Between its moldering stone fortresses and steaming markets of elbow-to-elbow traffic, Zanzibar seemed to me like the kind of town that Tintin would have visited. But having purchased a T-shirt illustrating his presence in Stonetown, I was subsequently informed by some well meaning chefs in the Forodhani Gardens that he in fact never made an appearance there in any of the original comics —the T shirt which I bought was meant to swindle muzungu tourists, they explained. I assured them that the fact the picture was original only made the shirt more valuable to me. They laughed in response. I echoed them, and this proved to be prelude to a smoke in the ruins of the old fort. It was one of the first times I’d interacted with locals in Tanzania without the specter of capitalism haunting us. The friendliness of my guides was always tempered by desire for tips; that of shopkeepers by hopes of exorbitant prices; that of local children by hunger for charity. But it was only by night during my last evening on the island, bewildered into a sense of intimacy by billows of fumes, that the locals and I spoke as humans rather than actors in a commercial transaction.

They asked me how I felt to be a member of a racial minority for a change. I thought of a Facebook post I wrote a couple of years ago when I expressed the idea that all the brouhaha over color on the Yale campus was misguided. I recall I’d wondered then whether anyone had read Foucault and realized that racial identity was only one social construct among myriad others. I will never forget that one of my students explained that, realistically, race made a formative difference when it came to how people were treated on a day to day basis, and so had an inescapable quality that rendered attempts to look beyond it evidence of privilege rather than insight. I spoke to the chefs about my time in Korea, the only other extended period of my life in which the majority of the people looked differently than I did. I spouted some clichés about the tragic power of superficial differences, and the fact that one only realizes its extent when he is in the minority. An old man opined that my education was limited, since whites were welcomed on the island and there was no negative stigma associated with them; the sting of prejudice, he said, was the only way to truly understand the experience of being a minority. But a younger man shook his head; muzungus were cheated on Zanzibar because they were uniformly considered wealthy; this, he said, was an education in itself. I found his insight to be revelatory. Somehow I’d not made the connection between my race and the fact that I was charged 300 dollars for a repair to my camera I was subsequently assured would have cost a native 20. Still, I understood that poverty is often a more compelling force than hospitality when it came to determining the texture of one’s interactions in a developing country.

The entire first portion of my journey to Africa was cursed by nausea. I’d thrown up in Egypt when our car got stuck in the Sahara and we were forced to push it down the road for kilometers in the midday sun. Then I’d thrown up again with equal violence while searching for dolphins on the Red Sea; by the time we reached them I was too exhausted by retching to jump in the water with them. I fully expected to puke on Kilimanjaro too, but was delivered from this fate by the kindness of my guides, who constantly reminded me to go slowly and helped me to bear my physical and emotional loads along they way. I spoke with them about their families and probed some of their hopes and dreams; I was more reticent about my own. The mountain taught me its lessons—to focus on each individual step and not be daunted by the distance to the destination; to realize that the tortoise beats the hare when others fitter than I became ill from exhaustion who were once faster than me on my first days on the mountain; to step in the footprints of those who knew the path better than I. A woman at the peak asked me if climbing Kilimanjaro was on my bucket list, a lifelong dream. I told her honestly that I’d never even thought of climbing it until I realized I’d be passing in its vicinity, and since it was there, I might as well test my limits. I regretted parting from the guides; I also regretted not being able to tip them more, as did they.

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I headed to the wilderness next. The parks of Northern Tanzania are justifiably famous: Tarangire and its swarms of elephants; the Serengeti and its countless miles of hideous wildebeests, Ngornongoro crater and its menagerie of creatures trapped in the largest pothole on the planet; Lake Manyara (Hemingway’s favorite) choked with birdlife. Since Tanzania was my first experience on a game drive, I didn’t realize just how rare the sheer density of wild animals was. The effect was not equally impressive on all visitors, though. I saw a jaded kid yawn when he saw a lion. “We could have gone to the zoo,” he said, going on to lament the unstable Wifi at his lodge.

But it was different for me, caught up in a days-long version of Where’s Waldo seeking out animals against the silhouettes of baobab and acacia trees. More than one lion turned out to be a tree stub, but the skill of my driver amply compensated for my well-meaning incompetence. (Perhaps I’m too caught up in my own imagination to be a very good spotter.) This driver pitied me when I invented the story that my long-term girlfriend had broken up with me to avoid explaining why I was traveling alone—it was too complicated to explain that most of the kids my age had kids of their own and couldn’t afford two months in the bush, to say nothing of untangling the tortuous vagaries of my private life. But my story was grounded enough in truth to prove poignant, and he felt so badly for me that he drove me to the north Serengeti to see the Great Migration even though technically it was off our itinerary.

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Somewhere along the way, we saw an eagle snatch up a mongoose. A troop of monkeys subsequently chased after the pair screaming bloody murder. The raptor plunged from the sky like a bolt of lightning; the violence was too instantaneous to film. This would prove to be the most action I’d see in the Serengeti. Spoiled by National Geographic documentaries, we are, I suppose, conditioned to believe that the wilderness is one great adventure, with mating, murder, and life-or-death chases visible at every angle. Only in the wild do you realize that nature is a state of war—and like all wars, the majority of time is spent sitting, waiting, and watching. I thought to myself that the trip was teaching me discipline and patience again after the dizzying hedonism of grad school. I wondered if I had anything more to learn.

Then I left Tanzania and headed for Uganda by way of three stopovers, arriving in the middle of the night and heading to bed for just three hours before visiting an orphanage on the outskirts of Kampala.

Part 3: Uganda

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Two weeks into my trip to Uganda, I found myself hanging onto a 70 degree incline on a glacier on the Mountain of the Moon, clinging to its grimy surface by nothing but my ice axe and a single crampon. The one on my left foot, improperly adjusted, had plummeted down the sheer face of Mt. Stanley. As I sensed the energy draining from every tendon, my guide began the long clamber below me to retrieve and reattach the other shoe. I had no choice but to cling to the frozen surface of the mountain for over half an hour listening to the crackling of the melting ice, a casualty of climate change. I was secured by nothing but a carabineer and a flimsy rope attached to the man dozens of meters beneath me, with little but his strength to save me if I plunged below his unsecured position (after al, fixed stakes are impossible given the rapidly shifting and increasingly steep surface of the glacier, which will soon become impassable). I found it odd that I felt no rush of adrenaline. I was reminded of a debate trip where a car almost careened into my side of the van and I did nothing but sigh, “Well, that was unpleasant.” One of the students said he could imagine me as a Roman general nonchalantly surveying the carnage of an ancient battlefield, an observation I found a great compliment at the time. Now, I wondered whether growing up with cats had addled my mind (they evidently secrete a parasite that makes men more daring and women more nurturing, or so I had read online.) Gradually succumbing to enervation, I stared at the pale band of the Milky Way in a strange combination of exhaustion, anxiety, and wonder. No country had ever tested my physical and spiritual limits as Uganda did. Even Kilimanjaro was a cakewalk by comparison.

On my first day in the country, I’d felt the most acute sense of culture shock I’d ever experienced when I saw more than one van plastered with Osama Bin Laden bumper stickers. Having only slept three hours, my frayed nerves drove me to a greater sense of intolerance than that to which I’m accustomed either when abroad or otherwise, and I found myself truly insulted by the tasteless display. I dwelled internally on what kind of a combination of ignorance and malevolence would lead to such a choice of decoration until I reached an orphanage. Then anger gave way to self-consciousness when I met a dozen children ranging from three to 14 who had lost their parents to AIDS, many of whom were suffering from HIV themselves. When I arrived, they spontaneously surrounded the car and began to embrace me. I reciprocated the gesture after half a moment of hesitation, reminded of when Princess Diana startled the paparazzi and the world by hugging ill children, confounding the rumors that this was enough to spread the virus. I was later informed that not every tourist was so accommodating, and could only imagine the psychic wounds the young might have incurred in the wake of people physically recoiling from them.

I had expected to meet older children and lecture about debate, but many of these kids were toddlers with limited English skills. I served them soft drinks and told them each “Shikamoo,” an honorific Swahili greeting usually reserved for one’s elders and superiors. Eager to connect on at least some level, I sang Rogers and Hammerstein songs to them. This proved to have an almost magical effect, and soon, they were singing for me as well, even breaking into indigenous dances far surpassing my rudimentary abilities at rhythmic movement. When our time was up, a little girl who was initially afraid to embrace me scampered in my direction and threw her arms around my neck. My own self-consciousness had given way to a very different feeling, though not, as might be expected, a sense of appreciation for how lucky I was relative to certain people; after all, pity implies condescension, which I did not feel toward my equals, and true sympathy was beyond my power because I could never understand and access anything like their worldview and body of experience. Rather, I felt a sense of non-judgmental comradeship bound to our common love of music, which transcended age and culture. I promised to send them holy water from Israel and was silent on the car ride home.

Over the course of the subsequent days, I ventured to the source of the Nile and white-water rafted on Grade 5 rapids there, figuring that the risk of bilharzia was worth the adventure and ultimately benefiting from the ballast on the boat supplied by the hulking English rugby players who constituted the remainder of its crew; I stumbled on an endangered Shoebill Stork on a canoe in the bogs of Lake Victoria; I clambered over the Murchison Falls and saw the Nile squeezed into a gorge barely wider than my body, resulting in a magnificent display of power shooting spray and rainbows into the air; I tracked elusive leopards and tree climbing lions in the savannas of Queen Elizabeth Park; I spent an entire day working with researchers to habituate a troop of wild chimpanzees until the animals trusted me enough to descend from the canopy and join me by a puddle for a drink of water. The experiences and strangers I met along the way are too numerous to fully remember, let along capture in a Facebook post. I can only hope that some of the pictures do them justice.

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But the Mountains of the Moon tested me as no other destination did. My crampon re-secured to my leg, I eventually reached Margarita Peak straddling the border with the Congo at about 5200 meters above Sea Level. After my photo opportunity, I succumbed to a combination of weariness and altitude sickness and made the decision to descend back to the base camp as quickly as possible, facing two days worth of 15 hour hikes. I braced myself for my next destination, which had inspired my entire journey in the first place: the Congo, a world teetering on the brink of the unthinkable. I planned to climb the Nyiragongo Volcano and track gorillas in the Virunga Park, the oldest natural preserve in Africa and its most imperiled by a harrowing combination of climactic and political turmoil.

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Part 4: The Congo

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Check the timeworn myth that the Congo is the heart of darkness. I’ve never been to a country more luminous—the russet glow of lava in the Nyiragongo Volcano, the rainbow colored squawkers of the tropical forest, the teal and vermillion gowns of village-women, the canopies of dense jungles so green they might as well be blue, the glimmer of stars so numerous one can’t tell at times if the sky is black or white at night. It was the DRC which had inspired this trip in the first place. I reread Conrad and for some reason was inexorably drawn to the hellish landscape he described—I wondered if there was more to the country than the misery he immortalized. On the cusp of my journey, the news filled me with dread. All I found were warnings about Ebola and cholera, butchered do-gooders in Kasai, ambushed rangers, guerillas encroaching on the territory of gorillas; in short, a country on the brink of collapse. Remember, warned a friend, that everything and everyone there wants to kill you. What I discovered defied such prophecies. I can’t deny the Congo is cursed by political fragmentation, disease, poverty, and corruption. But it’s also the soul of Africa, a sprawling landscape the size of Western Europe, home to millions of peace-loving dreamers, the breeding ground for the continent’s most magnificent art and music (forbearers of abstract art and rock and roll), and a testing-ground for heroes who defy the darkness and stand all the brighter for the shadows surrounding them.

It was only in the Congo that I had the time to breathe deeply for a moment and consider the full scope of this impractical odyssey I can in no way afford, promising to imprison me in credit card debt for the foreseeable future. Did I really climb Kilimanjaro and the Mountains of the Moon, raft the foaming rapids at the mouth of the Nile, traverse the scorched plains of the Serengeti, and all on my own too? Did I actually track tribes of gorillas in the Virunga mountains and stare at the bubbling molten rock inside the calderas of volcanoes until mists obscured the lava and all that remained were bursting ribbons of color of the kind you see when you squeeze your eyes closed with all your might? Did I dance with pygmies before carving through the waves of the poisonous Lake Kivu? Had I galloped on a horse through the dusty villages and undulating emerald hills of Masisi (the locals had improbably promised me a ride on “sheep,” but apparently mistranslated the word)? It all seemed like some kind of feverish reverie, but it was a dream which I had made my reality for a fleeting moment, living for the present rather than the past and future where my thoughts are accustomed to linger as an ancient historian and transhumanist.

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When I left the DRC for Rwanda, I met a couple from Canada who told me about some associates they’d met who’d just returned from Goma. These friends had regaled them about an unusual traveller they’d encountered who’d climbed Mt. Stanley despite the danger of the melting glaciers and made the trek up Nyriagongo without a sleeping bag, and who, back in the real world, went to Yale, writing his dissertation on Roman orgies; they wondered whether he hadn’t brought the sleeping bag deliberately so that he could engage in research for his thesis. My heart skipped a beat when I heard myself described by strangers as if I were a stranger. I sounded like a cool guy, and when I examined myself in the mirror, dressed in filthy khaki, face bronzed by mud and sunshine, for the first time in a long time, I actually felt like one. I’d begun the trip considering that I was about to graduate with no idea of what to do next, that I was no longer the debate coach, or the president of a publishing company, or any other specific social-role. But now I discovered that I was more than an actor going through the motions defining his public persona. It was sufficient for me to be myself—a lone adventurer and the author of his own novel. I’d originally considered the trip a kind of escape from a world I’d outgrown, but it unexpectedly braced me to face the uncertainties of the future as an adventure in their own right. For this, above all other places I have traveled, I will forever be grateful to the Congo.

I crossed the border overland at Cyangugu and headed to Rwanda and Ethiopia next, the final destinations on a journey of a natural-born storyteller with an enraptured audience of one.

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Part 5: Rwanda and Ethiopia

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When I was a little boy, I recall reading a book called Uncle Wiggily’s Fortune in which the eponymous rabbit discovers at the end of his adventures, Ulysses-like, that the greatest treasure is a long awaited homecoming. As a child, I remember considering that this was hokey, so I fixated on the crop of oversized carrots that had grown up in his absence as his real fortune. Yet my thoughts turned to the novel when I finally returned to Israel after one last week in Africa exploring the sources of the White Nile in Rwanda and the Blue in Ethiopia. My father and sister met me at the airport and drove me to my grandmother’s house. There, I found a framed photograph of me at the summit of Kilimanjaro hanging over my bed. After my safe return, Safta’s doubts about my trip melted away, I suppose, in the face of admiration for its successful completion and happiness that I’d lived to tell the tale. Of all my relatives, it was only she who expressed any interest in seeing my full album.

I could assure her now that she was quite right when she suggested several months ago that many whites had historically gone to Africa looking for trouble—“scratch the surface of any catastrophe here,” one Congolese man had told me, “and you’ll find a white man profiting.” I now knew more than ever about the Machiavellian dealings of Portuguese slave traders, the depredations of Stanley’s entourage across central Africa, and the horrors of Leopold’s rubber-hungry minions in the Belgian Congo. But I also learned of Dr. Livingstone’s crusade to end the East African slave trade, Mark Twain’s sponsorship of humanitarian organizations to check the excesses of the imperialists, Dian Fossey’s ultimate sacrifice to habituate mountain gorillas, and Emmanuel Merode’s decision to relinquish his wealth and status as a prince in Belgium to lead the rangers of the Virunga Park. I was neither so villainous nor heroic—just a mundane tourist peeking over the edge of the cradle of humanity in search of Experience with a capital E, which I was privileged to discover before the trip receded into the indistinct annals of my memory, memorialized only on Facebook.

I wasn’t in Rwanda and Ethiopia for long, but was moved by the experience of traveling among some of the most resilient people of modern history, survivors of famine and genocide. Ethiopia defied my expectations. Conditioned by the Western media, I expected a parched wasteland and instead discovered a nation so lush and green you might have told me I was in Ireland. The country was a sensory overload, from the unmistakable taste of injira pregnant with yeast, the magnificent glare of the ivory garb of Orthodox priests, and the pungent scent of frankincense and myrrh wafting through rainbow colored churches. I was particularly struck and, to be honest, somewhat flattered by the appropriation of Israeli history on a national scale, with the royal family said to have descended from Solomon and the Ark of the Covenant to be hidden in a northern monastery. “We are cousins,” I was told more than once, though this enthusiasm usually waned when they pressed me about Jewish opinions about Jesus in modern Israel.

As for Rwanda, Kigali was at least superficially the most developed city I’d visited on my travels, boasting modern infrastructure and spick-and-span streets, plastic bags even banned by law. But I came to consider that these shows of modernity were just that—glossy scar tissue over deep and persistent psychic wounds incurred by the unimaginable slaughter of the 1990s. The country is exemplary for the proven capacity of its population to forgive each other and cooperate toward a better future, at least superficially shunning the former alliances exacerbated by European colonial overlords that led to catastrophe. But Kagame’s rule, however welcomed by the majority, seems founded as much on fear as love in many circles, and Tutsis (whether members of a “tribe” or a “social class,” as opinions seem to vary passionately and widely on this most politically incorrect question) seem to monopolize positions of power. Many, fearing the harassment that the visibly impoverished face from police officers, limit their daily wardrobe to a single unsullied suit. I appreciated, though, the urge to push beyond “tribal” identity politics in favor of embracing a nationalist ideology, particularly given the xenophobic arrogance with which the word “tribe” was often misused in academic and political circles alike.

I learned a great deal from Africa: to be disciplined, to be patient, to be observant, to be tolerant, to live for the moment, to be daring, to be resilient, to be silent, to be alone, to be proud. Sometimes late at night, though, as I struggle to replay the adventure in my mind, I wonder, what did Africa learn from me? I don’t mean that I poetically ponder, as Karen Blixen did, whether the lion casts a shadow that resembles my head, or the wind rushes through the branches of the acacia tree with a whisper like mine. Rather, I wonder, was my halting eloquence enough to disprove theories about reptilians and the Illuminati, the detritus of Youtube mashed together with traditional animist beliefs and taken for the flower of truth? Was I at all convincing when I defended the equality of women and men, told more than once that the former’s proper role was to look after the home, that short skirts were invitations for assault, and that rape was a surefire cure for lesbianism? Did my words have any impact when I opined that God was wherever love and peace were, and that literal belief in ancient testaments caused more suffering than joy? And were my thoughts at all memorable when I tried to counter the adage “If you want to hide something from an African, put it in writing” with references to Achebe and Emecheta and Marechera? For all that inspired me, there was also a great deal that shocked and angered me, beginning in Egypt where I recoiled at physical violence against children and animals. I realized the truth in Tennessee Williams’ suggestion that deliberate cruelty meant solely to uphold the power of the strong at the expense of the weak was unforgivable in any time or place, and considered that battles won in my own neck of the woods by the Susan B Anthony’s and Martin Luther King’s and Audre Lorde’s of the world would have to be refought from scratch by the heroes of an as-yet anonymous generation raging against the dying of the light.

I will surely forget a great deal of my odyssey, and will have no one with shared experiences to resurrect the fading memories either. But above all, I will try to remember the Nile in all its glory, where the tide of the Mediterranean was at war with its northern current, where it clung as snow to the Mountains of the Moon, where it poured out of Lake Victoria and tripped and fell over rapids which I challenged on a raft, where it dripped one droplet at a time from its most remote source in Rwanda and I swallowed the totality of the river, and where if flowed gently from Lake Tana in a great muddy puddle before spilling over the cliffs of the Blue Nile Falls and carving through the highlands with all the insistence of fate. As a boy, I swam here when I sailed on a felucca through Upper Egypt. Now I returned and found inspiration: the realization that writing was my calling and that the sense of malaise haunting me at the beginning of the trip was largely grounded in having no audience. But every river, even the greatest, I learned, begins with a single drop.

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The Seeker, the Stoics, and the Transhumanist

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The following is a transcript of a memorable discussion on Facebook. Henry van Wagenberg poses a question to Massimo Pigliucci, noted Stoic, and then to his friend, the Transhumanist David Vincent Kimel. Jimmy Daltrey and Donald Robertson, Stoic experts, are also on hand.

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Henry: Massimo Pigliucci, how do you get around the problem of Hume’s Is/Ought Problem or Naturalistic Fallacy and Stoic Philosophy? The Stoic argument, as for so many of the Greek schools, building on Socrates, is that Nature is the good. The Stoic virtues are all built on this foundational argument. But Hume demonstrated that this is false – that what is natural and what is good are not the same – thus paving the way for modern philosophy. How do you reconcile this foundational problem?

I’ve been able to read the chapter in Becker’s book on Stoicism which addresses this question. His answer is that “agency” is the true good. He writes, “As biological organisms we arc through the processes generation, growth, development, reproduction, and degeneration… We ceaselessly organize and re-organize our biological lives into endeavors… We hold that, considered as an end, Virtue consists in perfected agency. To the extent that this activity — the exercise of our agency — is our maximally comprehensive and controlling endeavor, its end is our final end” (Chapter 6: Virtue). This is an intriguing solution to the problem. I will reflect more on it. However one obvious problem is that if “perfecting our agency” is our goal, what should we use our agency for? If, as Becker argues, “agency” is the “final end”, then by this reasoning we should use it… to increase our agency. So we should increase our agency in order to increase our agency. It certainly seems to me that becoming an active, free agent, which the Stoics sort-of call for even if we are in a determinist universe, is likely a part of a virtuous life. However my question would still be… to what end?

Massimo: Henry, Hume did not demonstrate the falsity of going from is to ought, he only pointed out — reasonably! — that if one does that then one needs a justification. The Stoics provided a justification in their developmental theory of morality and their concept of oikiosis….

Henry: Thanks kindly. I’ve read parts of the developmental theory in Julia Annas’ “The Morality of Happiness” and I read the summary in your book. Unfortunately I think there is a huge problem, which is that there is extremely strong and convincing evidence that violence is also an element of our species’ nature. Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, for example, offers a survey of archeological evidence for how murder was more commonplace among our distant pre-settlement ancestors than it is today. Freud’s “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur” and his general investigations raise questions about the connection, for example, between violence and sexual pleasure. Camille Paglia in her “Sexual Personae” raises deep questions along these lines, and writes “Rape and sadism have been evident throughout history and, at some moment, in all cultures. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning but by a failure of social conditioning. Sex is power. Nature is a hard taskmaster. Sex has always been girt round with taboo, irrespective of culture. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges. The Indian nature-goddess Kali is creator and destroyer, granting boons with one set of arms while cutting throats with the other. She is the lady ringed with skulls.” Recently a book about sexual dominance, submission and power called “50 Shades of Grey” sold more copies worldwide than Harry Potter. It seems far too common for violent elements in pornography across cultures for it to be an accident. What percentage of films watched by young men all over the world contain violence? 90%? 100%? I absolutely agree that there is also strong evidence that we are also a cooperative species, but if we argue from the empirical side as you do in your book, then I think we have to acknowledge that our Nature also includes a strong propensity to violence. And then our argument for Stoic Philosophy along empirical lines is broken, because now we can no longer argue for cooperativeness in Nature, without arguing that violence is also a virtue. Therefore if we want to argue for Stoic Philosophy we do need an excellent deductive argument for it. Thoughts?

Massimo: Henry, any philosophy is established on axioms. The Stoic ones are good enough for me. One can argue that different axioms yield a better philosophy, like Epicureanism. Maybe, but there are good arguments developed by the Stoics against other philosophies. Moreover, I think the quest for a philosophy that is universally true and based on indisputable axioms is a fool’s errand, and we shouldn’t waste our time with it.

Henry: David Vincent Kimel, thoughts?

Kimel: Thanks for thinking of me, Henry. You always throw out the most provocative questions, and you are never satisfied with anything less than the truth, or at least a clarifying approximation of it, which is the best philosophers can provide balancing upon each other’s shoulders like the world’s ugliest but most thought provoking cheerleading squad. I think that in the evolutionary scheme of things, my species of Transhumanism is closer genetically to Epicurus, Bentham, and Hume than the beasts of the Stoic school and its offshoots. But as a good Romanist, I’m fascinated by the Stoics, and always find something interesting to think about when I engage with their texts, especially on the subject of freedom and its limitations (more on this later).

The classic formulation of Stoicism is of course that one should live in harmony with Nature. But why? Perhaps Epicurus can help us. Well, first, what is Nature? One possible definition is “the Natural order of things,” which I take to be the realm of real world outcomes that are at the mercy of Fortune. If this is how we understand Nature, it’s clear that it’s actually an extremely harsh environment and far from “good” by many metrics—volcanoes erupt, free republics become tyrannies, etc. The justification for living “in harmony” with its brutality is that from an existential perspective, we are dogs being pulled by our master, Fortune, and if we don’t keep up with her punishing pace, our collars will start to choke us and she’ll drag us over the rough road; so, we’d better keep up in harmony with her, if we can. The only entity that we can personally control in the face of adversity is our reaction to adversity—hence, reasons the Stoic, we should detach ourselves from emotional attachment, and find true freedom in a kind of indifference as we accept whatever Fortune brings us. Under this reasoning, perhaps the argument in response to Hume would be something like, “Nature is actually full of evil from a human perspective because it’s bound to random Fortune, but at least we have the power to control our emotional reactions to its outcomes, which are the true origin of suffering; given that real world outcomes are all we have to work with, a good philosopher should focus on moderating his or her emotional reaction in ‘harmony’ with Nature if he hopes to avoid pain.” For the Stoic, this is our only chance for freedom in a world of bad outcomes—and freedom is better than slavery to an emotional attachment connected with a worldly outcome, because any worldly good can always be taken away, and if it is the sole source of your spiritual sustenance, you will be lost. For the Transhumanist, of course, there exists hope of a higher kind of freedom.

However, there is a tension here leading to a kind of puzzle. Can’t this attitude lead to passivity in the face of the horrors of reality? (In other words, if Fortune’s domination over natural outcomes is so terrible, why should we be in harmony with it if this leads to the perpetuation of unjust outcomes—which goes back to the spirit of your original critique, Henry.) At the same time, what about all the Stoics who wrote about living in harmony with Nature not from the perspective of “we’d better be in harmony with Fortune because it’s all we’ve got, and by ‘harmony’ we mean the numbing freedom of indifference,” but, “Nature is actively noble and synonymous with God’s plan, so we should live in harmony with it”—hence, for example, we see Seneca going to great lengths struggling to try to prove that men should live in harmony with their natures (marked by wisdom, reason, prudence, etc.) , but that anger is UNNATURAL—strange, considering how universal it is, and how easy it is to fall prey to it without the vigorous training of Stoic philosophy to help arm us against it.

There’s no easy response to the debate at this point. The truth is, the Stoic, like the Zen Buddhist, seems to be in danger of falling prey to apathy rather than crusading in the name of Progress, for he mistakes spiritual numbness for the greatest good, when the elimination of pain and the promotion of the imagination through attempts to understand and control nature leads to more capacity for love and happiness for human society at large (to say nothing of the benefits of sometimes losing oneself to passion for the sake of an existential thrill). At the same time, because “Nature” was simultaneously hugely brutal but at the same time the source of the argument that humans were different from animals because we were “naturally” endowed with the capacity for virtue and logic, I’ve always thought there was a tension at the heart of the Stoicism when it comes to the proper attitude toward Nature, Nature’s relationship to Fortune (are they synonymous?), and the relationship of Nature to the Nature of Human Nature. There’s so much equivocation it becomes difficult to sort it all out.

However, in my opinion, no philosophical lens is equally clarifying in all situations, but that doesn’t mean we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Stoicism emphasizes the freedom that comes from controlling our reactions to the tortuous aspects of Nature, and the importance of embracing Nature’s noble aspects, like our natural capacity for Reason. The suggestion is that with emotional freedom in the face of the harshness of Fortune, humans can become AUTHENTIC, since this is an actualization of their natural Reason, which dictates indifference to losing anything worldly as the only rational stance to take, since it will surely be lost in the end. This can provide a great clarifying lens when you’re in situations beyond your control, when you are becoming too passionate about something transitory, etc. It is perhaps less helpful a clarifying lens when thinking about other situations, like the need to increase justice in the world and the importance of existential abandon for true happiness. It’s not good to be a Stoic at all times, but there are times when it can be hugely emancipatory.

As a kind of afterward, I also wanted to mention that in Roman history, far from being passive, the Stoics were the most courageous senators who often had the balls to commit suicide rather than live under the tyranny of the worst autocrats. They refused to live “unfreely” and silent in the face of evil—they “embraced their natures” as free men and died courageously (think Cremutius Cordus, Seneca, the Stoic martyrs of the Flavians, etc.) There was a strong emphasis on fulfilling one’s duty, on rejecting worldly materialism, and on realizing the fundamental spiritual unity of all humans, regardless of their rank. It brought hope to the oppressed, from senators to slaves, and by the looks of this message board, it continues to inspire people to this day.

Massimo: Well, David appears to be under a number of (common, I must say) misconceptions concerning Stoicism. First, “living according to (or in harmony with) nature” doesn’t mean that nature is kind to human beings or that anger is not “natural” in the sense of being an instinctive reaction to certain situations. It means living in accordance to the best of human nature, i.e., that of a social animal capable of reason.

Nature for the Stoics isn’t good or bad, it just is. Yes, the ancient Stoics believed in “Providence,” but they didn’t mean anything like the Christian variety, they meant whatever happens as a result of cause and effect. So I don’t see the tension that David sees.

Second, no, Stoicism is in no danger to become a philosophy of apathy. It should be very clear from pretty much everything the Stoics wrote. Buddhism doesn’t risk that either, if I understand their tenets correctly.

I honestly don’t see why Stoicism isn’t helpful in terms of social justice. One of the four virtues is that of justice, and the Stoics affirmed the principle of cosmopolitanism that they inherited from the Cynics. Did they go out fighting revolutions in the modern progressive sense of the term? No, but then nobody did at the time, so this isn’t a problem specific to Stoicism.

‪Finally, I don’t have a particularly good opinion of transhumanism: Why we don’t need transhumanism.

Kimel: Massimo, LOL, there is no misconception because there is no single version of Stoicism. My engagement with the core ideas of the philosophy were both sound and valid, and that’s where the real debate is–not how “real” Stoics define these terms, according to you. Also, you can’t have it both ways–you can’t simultaneously say “Nature isn’t good or bad, it just IS” and at the same time say that the “good” is living in harmony with it–where did “the good” come from (especially if Nature can be changed and we’re not necessarily stuck with it?) I actually provided Henry a reason that we should live in harmony with Nature from a certain perspective bound to maximizing freedom and avoiding pain, and I think many Stoics would not have disagreed with me. I also admit the reality of its unfortunate/tragic aspects of Nature, which are actually central to Stoic thought when it comes to avoiding their emotional repercussions. And finally, I show that living “in harmony with Nature” can end up down problematic roads. As for Transhumanism, we’ll see which of is is on the right side of history after a millennium of genetic engineering and cyborg technology.

Jimmy: David, when you say, “Also, you can’t have it both ways–you can’t simultaneously say “Nature isn’t good or bad, it just IS” and at the same time say that the “good” is living in harmony with it–where did “the good” come from (especially if Nature can be changed and we’re not necessarily stuck with it?),” you misunderstand what the Stoics meant by Nature. In modern parlance it would be the algorithms that lie behind the laws of nature, would be the laws of nature…you can’t modify them, unless you pop next door across the mulitiverse and see what they’ve got going on over there. And I said this to Henry : you have misunderstood what the Stoics mean by nature. It doesn’t mean nature as sharp in tooth and red in claw, rather the apparent rational order within the cosmos. More understanding the algorithms behind physics and applying them to ethics, not letting it all hang out like apes.”

Kimel: I don’t think I have misunderstood anything. I think I have pointed out that from a rational perspective, Nature can mean different things to different people, and its ambiguous relationship to the injustice of random outcomes from a human perspective is actually one of the central themes and challenges of Stoicism (though its negative aspect is sometimes relegated to “Fortune”). Massimo’s line of thought seems to erase the reality of evil in the “physical outcomes of the universe” by detaching it from moral significance (I’m not surprised he’s not a Transhumanist, since we believe in the inherent good of Progress in defiance of random physical outcomes); Jimmy’s line of thought tries to say that Nature isn’t something changeable and organic like “human nature,” but the general laws of physics, which evidently can give us moral insight all of a sudden. But neither of you actually answered Hume or Henry’s queries.

Jimmy: How can something random be unjust? How can something without intention be evil?

Kimel: Think of a baby being born with a genetic illness we could have eliminated with medicine. From a HUMAN perspective it is unjust. I know what a Transhumanist would say about the proper attitude to the randomness, but what would a good Stoic say? I also want to point out that sometimes the Stoics use Nature to mean the laws of the cosmos, but sometimes they equivocate and use it as a shorthand for human nature, and often as a further shorthand for “the best in human nature.” There’s not a stable or coherent single definition. Also there’s no one version of Stoicism!

Jimmy: Genes are evil?

Kimel: Yes, ones causing outcomes leading to curable physical torment are evil from a HUMAN perspective.

Jimmy: So you believe in Satan or by evil do you mean undesirable?

Kimel: I define evil as curable physical torment that leads to no utilitarian ends. Progress is its elimination and the creation of the capacity for more art, love, health, and scientific understanding. Evil is always undesirable in some ways but not in all ways by all people; and the undesirable is not always evil (as anyone on a healthy but yucky diet knows). Evil and undesirable are related ideas but are not synonyms. Imagine the Roman Empress Livia poisoned the heirs to the throne Gaius and Lucius, which was certainly undesirable to them and arguably an evil act, but it wasn’t undesirable to her since it fulfilled her selfish ends of making her own son emperor. She tries to justify it to her grandson Claudius in Graves’ novels by claiming it was for a utilitarian rather than a personal end–ie it was for the good of the empire–and thus tries to exonerate herself.

Jimmy: Can we row back to there being evil without agency? ‪A coconut falling out of a tree is not evil, if it falls on someone’s head or not. ‪Similarly a genetic mutation is blind. Neither good nor evil.

Kimel: I think we’re getting into a battle of semantics here. Permitting the evil effect to continue is what’s evil, if agency must come into it. But also… an event or gene can have evil effects, and to that degree it is evil even without autonomous human agency guiding it. Sir, if this is leading down a road where you try to use rhetoric to deny the importance of human agency in the relief of physical torment, I think you’re kind of proving some of the points in my original argument about how the Stoic attitude toward “Nature” is not always helpful.

Jimmy: We agree that human inaction could be evil. ‪If you were walking under the tree and I failed to warn you that a coconut was about to fall, that would be wrong, evil if you like.‪ Would you cure sickle cell anemia?

Kimel: I’d leave it up to parents to weigh the risks of using the medicine, which will lessen over time as the medicines get better. At first there will be linked genes, etc., that make genetic engineering riskier, but insofar as we empower parents to force their children to be born in the first place (and to be born with genetic illnesses at that) and to make major health decisions all the time, it will lead to progress and less sickness in the long term. (For example, sickle cell anemia has anti malarial properties, doesn’t it? Parents would be unwise to remove the gene in some circumstances. But in the future we can perhaps eliminate the disease and still keep the linked benefit.)

Massimo: David, it’s a bit hard to take seriously a comment that includes LOL, but I’ll try. Stoics didn’t equivocate between human and cosmic nature, they clearly meant both. It’s also clear that the latter is to be used as guidance in human life. ‪So there is no contradiction at all in saying that Nature (the Cosmos) just is, but that it is also good to act in certain ways for human purposes. The fact that ancient and modern Stoics disagree on some aspects of the philosophy is neither surprising nor problematic. Do you know of any philosophy (including Transhumanism) for which that’s not the case ‪Transhumanism itself means a lot of different things to different people, and “ending up on the right side of history” is hardly a litmus test for being ethically right. And no, cancer is not evil, by any reasonable definition of evil. It just is. But obviously we, as humans, try to counter it if possible. Again, no contradiction.

Jimmy: The gene that causes sickle cell gives immunity to malaria. I thought you might know that.

Kimel: Obviously I know that. I mentioned it in my answer! And Massimo, please see the whole preceding discussion about how I define evil and progress. I go into it in my article too. Also, it’s Facebook, not the Ritz. Who cares about LOL. Do you think Socrates would have cared about how people spoke? It’s the content of an argument that makes it serious or not, not the style, and not how many Likes it gets. The Stoics did not always mean a single cosmic and human nature which was all one thing and all morally neutral–why else did Seneca work so hard to show anger was UNNATURAL? ‪We disagree about the definition of evil. If your definition leads you to the conclusion we don’t need Transhumanism, I’m not very compelled by the relevance of Stoic philosophy to our modern world as you understand the philosophy. Luckily, though, there is no one Stoicism. Anyway, peace out! Off to party with the Epicureans…

Jimmy: My bad David.

Kimel: Sorry if this got heated–I’m a debater by training. You guys are clearly very brilliant and have great insights, and I think there are ways to reconcile Stoicism and Transhumanism.

Jimmy: Not at all heated.

Massimo: David, no worries about getting heated, though I do think calm conversation, rather than debate, is what’s useful. ‪Okay, the LOL thing is trivial, but just because we are on Facebook that doesn’t mean we can’t have a conversation as adults. No need to be at the Ritz… ‪I did *not* say that the Stoics always meant the same thing by cosmic and human nature, on the contrary. But just because those are separate concepts they don’t need to be contradictory. Both the cosmos and humans are “natural,” which means not intrinsically good or bad. They just are. But as human beings we care about certain things (“good”) and want to stay away from others (“bad”). Seneca thought that anger is unnatural in precisely the sense that I meant: not that it doesn’t “naturally” (i.e., instinctively) occur, but that it is contrary to reason. *That* is what the Stoics meant by human nature: the nature of a social animal capable of reason. It’s not just that we disagree about the definition of evil, I know few people who think that natural phenomena deserve moral labels. Morality is a human invention, so for me it makes no sense to talk about evil cancer. And perhaps you are under some misunderstanding about my issues with Transhumanism, which is why I linked the essay above. I certainly don’t object to curing diseases.

Kimel: Sir, first you said: “Stoics didn’t equivocate between human and cosmic nature, they clearly meant both. It’s also clear that the latter is to be used as guidance in human life.” ‪But then you said: “I did *not* say that the Stoics always meant the same thing by cosmic and human nature, on the contrary…” So did they mean the same thing or not? The answer is, sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. Depends on the author and context; fortune, nature, and the best in human nature stand in an ambiguous relationship to each other. Your intuition that it’s impossible to assign moral categories to physical outcomes which stand beyond human autonomy (like plague, pestilence, war, etc.) is not universally held. Events can be evil in light of their effects and the subjective repercussions they bring. But whether we define the event as evil or inaction in its face as evil is perhaps a moot point. Also, I like using informal language. It makes philosophy more accessible. If it’s good enough for Catullus, it’s good enough for me. A conversation, like a poem, isn’t a treatise.

Massimo: I’m afraid we are running quickly toward the end of a useful thread. Still: despite your protestations to the contrary, there is no contradiction in either the Stoic or my position: human nature is a subset of cosmic nature, obviously. So a Stoic may refer to one or the other. If to the broader, then the narrower is implied, if to the narrower, then that stands on its own and doesn’t imply the broader. You can call it an “intuition,” but it makes no sense to attribute moral valence to things that don’t have agency. It’s a category error. But of course you do that by bringing in the “subjective repercussions” brought on by natural phenomena. So it’s not really the phenomena in themselves that are evil, but our judgment of them. Which is precisely the Stoic position, incidentally. And I think there is a huge chasm between Catullus and LOL…

Kimel: Didn’t Catullus use the language of the street, even specific verbs for different kinds of sexual gratification? So LOL indeed. Of course an act in itself can have moral valence without autonomy in light of its relationship to pleasure and pain, depending on how we define the act itself. Consider “murder” versus “killing.” Isn’t one definitionally evil? Isn’t the other only potentially so? If Stoics equate nature with either everything that happens (which includes bad stuff from a human perspective) or human nature (which includes very destructive urges, many of which can be rationally justified), then saying “live in harmony with nature” as a first principal  isn’t a very persuasive starting point. (And that’s why Henry started this thread). But my formulation actually provided a valid response to Hume informed by certain Stoic perspectives, while acknowledging the limitations of a Stoic perspective in some other contexts.

Massimo: Use all the LOL’s that you like, it’s a dispreferred indifferent to me. ‪”Murder vs killing”? Those are *obviously* human judgments. Do you think a lion kills or murders the cubs of another lion whose harem he has taken over? It’s not an either/or, it’s a both! But they are not identical. If it’s not a persuasive philosophy to you that’s fine, that’s outside of my control. But it is a beautiful and meaningful one for lots of people. ‪The Stoics already had a response to Hume (so to speak), in their developmental account of morality.

Kimel: Well, you try to argue that murder and killing are hard to distinguish so it’s just a value judgment, but it’s like saying the color orange doesn’t exist because it’s an illusion between red and yellow in a rainbow with no clear beginning or end. But “orange” is still “orange” despite attempts to explain it away. Murder is an example of evil in action because we define it as an unjust killing (and injustice in the world increases pain and diminishes happiness). Actions can be evil in themselves depending on how we define the action. ‪I think a better approach to railing against transhumanism is to try to find ways to reconcile traditional philosophies with a progressive and futuristic outlook; the link between Transhumanism and the Stoic’s ideal of a universal city, for example, is intriguing, as others have pointed out. I never said Stoic philosophy didn’t persuade me. I said the answer to Hume on this thread was insufficient, and I provided an alternate one (albeit one that could be further refined along more Transhumanist lines). ‪Every philosophy is a prism that is helpful in some circumstances and less so in others. It always helps to consider the Stoic approach, but there are situations where it’s not good to be a Stoic. We have to be passionate sometimes about taking nature into our own hands to crusade against evil outcomes.

Jimmy: Hume thing is easy. ‪Smoking is a cause of cancer, you ought not to smoke (assuming you don’t want cancer as an a priori) ‪It isn’t rocket surgery. ‪All the Stoics are saying is “if you want to live well, you ought to live wisely, courageously, prudently.with temperance.” That it is in our human character to aspire be be wise, to tend to a greater understanding of ourselves and our place within the cosmos isn’t really a ridiculous hypothesis and is well argued by Stoic thinkers..

Donald: I actually agree with a lot of the comment from David. I disagree with the interpretation of Stoicism (?) in his first para. The Stoic goal isn’t to live in agreement with nature in order to “avoid pain”, rather living in agreement with nature is conceived of as an end in itself. The reason Stoics believe anger is unnatural (para 2) is that it’s not in accord with reason, being, according to their analysis, a value-judgement holding that some external thing is morally bad. (Their premise is that only our own actions can be judged good or bad.) ‪Para 3: It seems to me that Stoic apatheia is not the same as “apathy”. It’s the overcoming of unhealthy/irrational passions, not complete indifference toward external things or total lack of desire and emotions. It’s perfectly compatible with human affection and a desire for justice, etc. See the numerous references in Marcus Aurelius, on every other page, to natural affection, brotherhood, philanthropy, cosmopolitanism, justice and kindness.

Kimel: My first paragraph provided an answer to Hume by marrying Stoicism to some Epicurean thinking; many of the arguments are variations on real Stoic arguments, though. The whole point of the thread is that saying be in harmony with nature as an end in itself isn’t sufficient for Hume as a first principal for a phisophy. ‪Violent urges can also be justified by reason and lead to horrific outcomes. As for apathy and indifference… it depends on the author. Some Stoics said to practice not loving things, even your own children. EDIT: They didn’t say not to love, they said not to care when something is removed, which is kind of paradoxical if you really think about it, and really means not to fully love.

Jimmy: I think you might find it was rather practicing imagining their children having died, to learn the impermanence of all things. The Roman Stoics at least are shot through with love and kindness. Marcus in particular.

Massimo: I don’t think any Stoic said you should not love your children. They said you should accept that they are mortal and are going to die. As for merging Stoicism and Epicureanism, it’s impossible, they are mutually exclusive. As Dan often puts it, they both valued virtue and avoidance of pain, but the Stoics put the first on top, the Epicureans the second. It’s either one of the other.

Kimel: I think it’s disingenuous to say you can love something truly and not regret its loss. I think Epictetus said to begin training yourself to be detached at the thought of loss by thinking about your attachment to a jug and then working up to your attachment for your family. I don’t deny that Stoics like Marcus Aurelius emphasized love and compassion, but to be fair, Stoics can’t completely have their cake and eat it too–telling us to love something passionately, but not to care when it’s ripped away from you.

Stoicism and Epicureanism are not mutually exclusive in all ways; as you mention, they even value many of the same ends. Implicit in in my opening post was the idea that we need recourse to a discussion of pleasure, pain, and its avoidance and an honest appraisal of the evils of nature from a human perspective in order to answer Hume’s objection to Stoicism. Otherwise you are left with the problem that Nature and human nature (whether they are the same or not–I believe you shifted your opinion on this a bit) might be “natural” but are not necessarily good to embrace. I thought your attitude toward Transhumanism (whose practitioners are surely the heirs of Bentham and Epicurus) was telling, and might speak to it being problematic to use a Stoic lens in all situations–sometimes, it’s better to rail against Nature, or transcend it.

‪What is virtue? If someone read this thread from the beginning, it would be hard to say “be in harmony with Nature” instead of “be a transhumanist and eliminate unwanted torment.” The elimination of torment IS a high form of virtue.

Donald: This line of argument surprises me. People try to argue that it’s simply self-evident that to accept the loss of something is incompatible with love but it seems to me there are a great many ordinary people (non-Stoics) for whom that just seems like common sense or facing up to the realities of life.

Kimel: I guess a lot of people don’t permit themselves to love something to the point of being really dependent on it, then. Kind of sad in a way–it’s being so ruled by fear of loss, you don’t let yourself get really lost in emotion.

Henry: Great to read this debate. Many fun thoughts. I have just caught up on it with the time delay across the Atlantic.

David, as you point out, my question is still unanswered. Isn’t the empirical argument for Stoic philosophy broken because — while cooperation appears to be a part of our nature — violence is, too?

Therefore, the argument “it is our nature empirically” fails as a justification for the Stoic virtues and for the purpose so often cited by, for example, Marcus Aurelius, “The fruit of this life is a good character and acts for the common good” (6.30).

I suspect, however, strongly that Marcus Aurelius is in fact correct and that living rationally, i.e. with integrity, i.e. with “good character”, is the right way to live, and furthermore that this will entail cooperation with all other reasoning beings. I propose that we need a strong deductive argument. I propose no less audacious a claim than that, in order for Stoic philosophy to live again, for us to truly live out its claim to live rationally, we must discover or invent a rational argument bridging Hume’s observation that he has never found an argument between is and ought.

Jimmy: Henry, we have visited this already. ‪That there is violence in nature does not make it a virtue. Humans discriminate between what is desirable, and what is not. ‪It is not a blank appeal to nature wherein we should be violent because there is violence. ‪Virtues can only be good and pursued as ends in themselves. The pursuit of wisdom or love of our neighbor as an end in itself will not result in badness, whereas violence at all is badness, regardless if it being pursued as an end in itself. The pursuit of virtue is synonymous with pursuing nature as our nature is virtuous. ‪If you want to pursue the Stoics for holding virtue as an end in itself, you will have to take down Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as well. You misread Hume, he says oughts are frequently derived from is without justification, not that it is impossible, in fact it is perfect banal when qualified. ‪Yellow snow is dogs’ piss. ‪Is it desirable to drink dogs piss? ‪Depending on your view you ought or ought not to eat yellow snow.

Henry: You write, “Humans discriminate between what is desirable, and what is not.” How many millions of people throughout the history of our species have concluded, as a result of that discrimination, that it is their desire to kill? That it is their desire to commit an injustice? That is their desire to act with violence? Just last night here in Berlin I walked past a park and caught a glimpse of a a group of teenage boys drunkenly attacking a public construction sign with punishing kicks.

In fact, as the great Martha Nussbaum describes in her Neo-Stoic explorations of the Hellenistic schools in “The Therapy of Desire,” the Stoics want to use rational argument to guide our behavior – not to follow our desires. In many cases this leads to (from the outside) bizarre behavior from the Stoics in terms of “what is desirable” and “what is not” — for example, Cato committing suicide, Socrates drinking the hemlock, or Seneca eating only crusts of bread and a glass of water despite a great fortune and all the food he could want — in other words, a philosophical therapy of their desire based on reason.

You write “the pursuit of virtue is synonymous with pursuing nature as our nature is virtuous”. What is the reason that life “red in tooth and claw” as you write is excluded from your definition of nature? Why is that rational to exclude it?

As for taking down Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – yes, tragically, that is exactly what Hume did. Hume showed that this foundational idea of the Greeks, that what is natural is good, is false / irrational — or at least he showed that we haven’t found an argument for it… yet.

Jimmy: One thing at a time. Here’s Hume. ‪In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given. ‪A reason should be given, not that the project is impossible.

Henry: I totally agree. I don’t see a reason why it’s impossible. Has an argument been discovered or invented for it yet, that you know of?

Jimmy: If you are truly interested Henry, look into Socrates and see how the thinking developed. The Stoics are kind of an offshoot of the Cynics.

Henry: Socrates and the Cynics believe that what is natural is good. This Ethical Naturalism article you cited explains, “Ethical naturalism encompasses any reduction of ethical properties, such as ‘goodness’, to non-ethical properties; there are many different examples of such reductions, and thus many different varieties of ethical naturalism. Hedonism, for example, is the view that goodness is ultimately just pleasure.” In other words, apparently, Hedonism can be justified just as easily by ethical naturalism as the Stoic philosophical life and its virtues. How can you use this “Ethical Naturalism” to defend the Stoic virtues?

Jimmy: This is the core of your misunderstanding. ‪Only human intentions, human actions can be good or bad. Nature/Cosmos/Logos is rational and providential. This is general nature. ‪Let’s use logos as a synonym for nature, they are one and the same.

Our particular logos is a subset of the general logos, so to accord with the logos we should (if we so desire) align our particular logos with the general logos. Then we will experience eudaemonia, spiritual well being.

‪That people are violent is true but violence is neither rational nor does it act towards the general good and is thus against the logos, is against our true nature.

These people are acting in error, they think they are doing good, as they see it, but this is the opposite of wisdom, Amathia (great word) disknowledge, unlearning.

Henry: I think this is all beautiful but I think we’re just back to the same problem as before. If the general logos is the source of reason, and the general logos has imbued its subsets, including ours, with violence, then why shouldn’t violence be rational? Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge is also a system of virtue ethics, I suppose. Teachers working in the fields until they die is one of their virtues. I’m reluctant to use such a strong example, but perhaps you get my drift – there are lots of possible systems of virtue ethics, i.e. seeing particular things as ends in themselves. ‪What we’re after is a reason-based virtue ethics. That’s the original promise of Socrates and Stoic philosophy.

Jimmy: The Epicureans “follow nature/follow virtue” no less than the Stoics. There is simply that the Epicureans think virtues necessary for pleasure, whereas the Stoics find them sufficient.

Henry: Both the Epicureans and Stoics, and all the Greek schools, are undermined by Hume’s argument

Jimmy: Hume says is that an explanation is required and having goals provides explanations. ‪Hume is a caveat to moral arguments, not a divine law forbidding them….

Henry: What is the reason to pick one goal over another? ‪What is the reason to pick one of the four Stoic virtues as a goal instead of the goal “kill that person” over there?

Jimmy: I have to go, that we don’t pick goals that fuck things up is the key, and we can learn how to do that. ‪Killing people generally turns out badly in terms of personal guilt, harm to other people and harm to society. ‪Stoicism is all about not fucking up. It’s supposed to be practical. ‪Should you run people over when driving to work? If not, why not?

Henry: Socrates was given the opportunity to leave Athens rather than face the trial. It would have been practical for him to do so. Instead, he stayed in Athens, and he drank the hemlock. Cato, too. Seneca, too etc.

Yes, Stoic philosophy is practical in the sense of “living out a practice,” but its ends can be extremely impractical, demanding that we act according to virtues like courage that require great difficulties and dangers. And it relies on the argument that its particular and (to outsiders) peculiar ends, its virtues — which can even entail suicide — are good and rational.

Is your argument that I wouldn’t run people over while driving to work that Stoic Philosophy is, so to speak, common sense? It seems to me that “common sense” is exactly what Socrates, the Cynics and the Stoics attack in their drive to live a reason-based life.

Jimmy: Nobody said it was easy. You asked why we don’t decide to kill people and I replied. It is generally common sense, we consider our actions, the urges that push us to action.

Massimo: Henry, I see lots of comments already, but the answer is actually simple: the Stoics were concerned with the *best* attributes of human nature, which are cooperation as social animals and ability to reason. They were perfectly aware that human beings are also naturally violent, angry, etc.. But they thought it empirically obvious that we do great things when we cooperate and use reason, not when we destroy things out of anger and greed.

Henry: Massimo Pigliucci… Thanks kindly – good thoughts.

‪In this crazy-long comment-chain — I have never been in a longer one in my life I think — we did already touch on this question of *best* attributes.

I absolutely agree with you that the ancient Stoics believed this as you describe, that violence was a part of our nature, but not the *best* part.

The question is, is the argument behind that crucial judgment correct / reasonable?

Moreover even if it is correct / reasonable, how do we discriminate between the things we do through cooperation that we might suspect are “not great” (Pol Pot’s soldiers cooperating to sweep away the teachers of Cambodia to the countryside, for example) and the ones that are?

More important though is the first question. Why is it empirically true or obvious that the things we do through cooperation and reason are “great things” and the ones we do through, say, violence are not?

One idea that comes to mind would be that empirically human beings are able to do, create, build, grow, etc. more by cooperating.

‪It certainly does appear that from nature, cooperation is the true killer app / naturally selected trait. By certain measures, we are the most successful species on the planet. By the measure of pure biomass, its ants. But either way, ants or humans, it’s a species that thrives on cooperation.

‪But that still seems flawed, because then the argument is that the root of Stoic philosophy is cooperation because it enables our species to grow more. First of all, that would not make cooperation an end in itself — our species growth would be the true end. But if that was our true end, then there might be all sorts of weird logical consequences: for example, maybe each man should marry 6 women, as suggested in the imagined bunkers of Dr. Strangelove; birth control should be abolished, or other such measures.

Jimmy: The two Stoic axioms are that

‪a) Humans are rational

‪b) Humans are social.

‪Never ending population growth after a point would be an irrational goal as it is not sustainable and would ultimately be harmful.

Massimo: Any philosophy is established on axioms. The Stoic ones are those listed by Jimmy above. They are good enough for me. One can argue that different axioms yield a better philosophy, like Epicureanism. Maybe, but there are good arguments developed by the Stoics against other philosophies. Moreover, I think the quest for a philosophy that is universally true and based on indisputable axioms is a fool’s errand, and we shouldn’t waste our time with it.

Henry: Thank you for your words that Stoic philosophy for you is established on axioms. I acknowledge that, just as a Christian philosopher can develop arguments from a Kierkegaardian “leap of faith,” so, too, can a member of a Hellenistic school. And they can have a certain circumscribed integrity on the other side of that leap, acknowledging that it is held on the other side by faith or a decision to believe.

‪Nevertheless I charge that the great strength of Socrates and the Stoic philosophy that followed him is that they did not say, “just do it because it’s listed in my axioms on this tablet (from god, or from myself)”, but rather used arguments and reasoning to discover axioms that were, so far as they knew at the time, true.

Through that they won a true integrity (wholeness) – acting rationally, acting in the way that is right – that it’s hard for us, in this post-modern age where picking a philosophy or a religion might as well be a trip to the shopping mall, to even imagine.

‪If the axioms on which we build Stoic philosophy are false – i.e. not “universally true” and “indisputable” then how can we build “good arguments” against Epicureanism, Hedonism, racism, or any other type of system?

If it isn’t true that the Stoic virtues are ends in themselves, but rather a matter of preference, then how can a system of philosophy that argues virtue is the true good help us to live with integrity?

Jimmy: Nobody said Stoicism wasn’t falsifiable in principle. It is scientific in that regard. ‪You are free to argue that a life lived foolishly is superior, by whichever criteria you choose, to one lived wisely. Stoicism is very robust and above all coherent.

Kimel: ‪What I want to suggest to you here is that Bentham was right, and every great philosophy is secretly built on an Epicurean basis—that is, they all come down to assertions about “the Good” from a human perspective based on unnecessary torment being “the Bad” (and I want to suggest to you that its elimination is at least “the Good” even if whether Pleasure is the only Good is another story.) In this case, from a deductive framework, I could argue that virtues are Good from a rule utilitarian perspective because when people act bravely, wisely, judiciously, etc., there is more happiness overall and less pain in society. Virtues are “good” because of their effects.

‪I think that until now in the history of philosophy, different schools have dueled each other trying to prove that each was the One. But the truth is, the world is complex, and just as we can view reality through a telescope, a magnifying glass, or even a distorting lens, we can consider human relations from the perspective of different philosophical schools, and only act after weighing the pros and cons from a variety of different frameworks. E.g., while one might not be a Marxist, applying a Marxist lens to questions about social change can help to illuminate specific dynamics associated with, for instance, class struggle. This is why so much of the work of people like Freud remains interesting and relevant despite the fact that few psychiatrists today subscribe strictly to his specific model of the human spirit; applying his model, however bizarre it sometimes appears, can help to emphasize and clarify the role of forces like family interaction in early childhood and repressed memories in shaping character. Ideally, scholars should use a variety of thematic lenses to examine a subject from different vantage points; many, however, stick strictly to their favorite set of glasses, stubbornly ignoring the microscopes and binoculars of the world and complaining that such apparatuses blur vision because they cannot learn to refocus their vision. You know my interest in using the lens of complexity theory, which accentuates the role of the unexpected, the contingent, and the probabilistic on history.

‪If we use this model, I think that the argument I gave in my first response provides an answer to Hume, even if we need to use a little Epicurean logic. To me, there are two separate but related themes of Stoicism. One emphasizes the importance of enduring adversity with a calm mind, and the other talks about being in harmony with Nature. The Stoics draw the conclusion you should endure adversity with a calm mind from the principle we should be in harmony with Nature, and that is why the two branches exist—they’re interrelated. But an Epicurean is perhaps the opposite—he begins from the deductively defensible position that pain is the bad (“because it just is”), and then shows that by enduring adversity with a calm mind and being balanced in our dealings with existence, we reduce pain. From here, I tried to bridge back to Stoic arguments; the way to endure adversity with a calm mind and be balanced in our dealings with the world is to detach ourselves emotionally from the idea of loss and practice virtue ethics. I don’t know if any Epicurean philosopher ever put it quite like that, but that line of reasoning actually seems pretty implicit in this school of thought—and this, Henry, is the reason that in practice, the Stoics and Epicureans behaved in the same way, even though they argued about first principles.

‪But according to the model I just presented, we can provide a deductive basis for major themes in Stoicism from an Epicurean foundation, and the philosophies aren’t at odds. The only people who think they’re at odds are the insistent people on this thread who won’t let go of the idea that “being in harmony with nature is good” doesn’t need to be questioned as a first principle. The first principle I give you is better—pain is bad from a human perspective and its removal is good. Unnecessary torment being bad (at least in part) is the only question to which the answer “it just is” is sufficient–it’s how we feel.

Jimmy: The big axiomatic difference between Stoic and Epicureans is that Stoics thought the principle of all life was self preservation and that pleasure was secondary, a marker if you like, roughly equating to pleasurable stuff is likely to be helpful… My favorite quote by Epicurus:

‪Therefore wisdom is a more precious thing even than philosophy ; from it spring all the other virtues, for it teaches that we cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, honorably, and justly; nor live wisely, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly. For the virtues have grown into one with a pleasant life, and a pleasant life is inseparable from them.

Kimel: There are other pleasures beyond those accessed through virtue, no matter what the ancient Epicureans said. The idea that Nature/virtue are synonymous might be a Stoic axiom, but it’s an unsound principle, no matter what the ancient Stoics said. Henry and Hume’s challenge was to defend Stoicism on first principles, which requires more than presenting the arguments of ancient authors. The closest I’ve seen is a vague reference to the idea of oikeiosis and the idea that survival is a better first principle than eliminating pain and maximizing virtue. But I think my “neo-Epicurean” answer to Hume is more effective.

Jimmy: We’ve been through that, Hume’s challenge is surmounted by postulating goal directed behaviour.

‪In order to achieve X we ought to Y.

‪It is no different for Utilitarians or Stoics or Transhumanists in fact….

Kimel: You’re just reasserting that nature is the good. It’s not a sound argument.

Jimmy: Nature being synonymous with wisdom, the axiom is that being wise is better than being dumb….Would you take issue with that?

Kimel: Yes, because nature is not exclusively synonymous with wisdom. And notice how you Stoics use “nature” in this slippery way where sometimes you refer to the laws of physics, sometimes to human nature, and now evidently to wisdom.

Jimmy: Phusis is the ancient Greek word for “nature,” cognate with the verb “to grow” (phuein ); as in English, it can be used both for the natural world as a whole and for the “nature” (i.e., the essential or intrinsic characteristics) of any particular thing, which it has “by nature” (phusei ). We are Homo sapiens.

Kimel: Yeah, a species that murders, lies, etc. Its nature isn’t exclusively to be wise, and the nature of the world around it is hugely cruel. Your only answer now must be, we must maximize the wise to maximize the good. But honestly, what is the good? I define it as the elimination of pain and maximization of love, etc. You seem to think virtues are good in themselves (Milton’s Satan must be an exemplar for you, as he is brave, wise, independent, ambitious, etc.) Truly, the virtues are not good in themselves unless married to ends that maximize happiness and minimize pain. Yet whatever the case, the idea we should “be in harmony with nature to maximize survival” leads to Machiavelli, not virtue ethics. Another thing Stoics now try to do is show that things like anger are “unnatural” to get away from the idea that our nature is anything less than the Good, which they define as the logical and unemotional.

Jimmy: You are throwing out a lot of stuff there. The onset of anger is natural, to give in to it, to nurture it unwise…

Kimel: Always?

Jimmy: Have you not read Seneca?

Kimel: Yeah, but he’s wrong.

Jimmy: Is that your whole hypothesis? Under which circumstances is it best to nurture anger? To be carried away by it?

Kimel: There exist circumstances in which it is right to be angry, like perceiving deliberate cruelty for its own sake being perpetuated and doing nothing about it. The initial spark of anger can inspire efficacious action to best correct the injustice. Anger needn’t be untempered by wisdom. So Anger too has its place. Also, when you get carried away by anger, there’s sometimes cathartic value. The momentary release of anger perhaps creates scope for more moderation later.

Jimmy: You have just paraphrased Seneca.

Kimel: I don’t disagree with everything in Seneca. I just disagree with him that anger is unnatural.

Jimmy: But you are saying the same thing as Seneca… Protopassions.

Kimel: Did he say anger is natural and it leads to a cathartic release potentially making more moderate and wise behavior more likely afterwards? I don’t think so. Also even if anger is manifested viciously, it is still 100% natural.

Jimmy: Honestly David, I might suggest that you find out what the Stoics actually thoughts before you attack what you think they thought.

Kimel: Cool. Nice chatting!

Jimmy: Cool…

Kimel: The way to answer me from a Stoic perspective wasn’t to argue about ancient authors and who is better read and understands them better, but to try to derive deductive arguments for being in harmony with nature from first principles without recourse to pleasure and pain.

Jimmy: Because the individual is defined by the society in which they live. Harm to the one is harm to the whole, harm to the whole is harm to the one…

Kimel: Nature is more beautiful than good.

Jimmy:  “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.” J S Mill

Massimo: I really don’t think Bentham was right, and an Epicurean philosophy is highly problematic, as it includes a withdrawal from public and political life.

‪As for the Stoic axioms, they did defend them with arguments, they didn’t just pluck them out of nowhere. But philosophers tend to agree these days that every argument at some point runs into a floor below which there is no further justification. Like in geometry, either the axioms are self evidently true or useful or they are not. I find the Stoic ones to be both true and useful, but of course opinions vary.

Kimel: That sounds like an excuse not to provide justifications for being in harmony with nature from first principles without recourse to pleasure and pain, and somehow deriving virtue ethics from that.

Jimmy: You might try somes scholarly sources for that: I’m not an academic. It is a very robust philosophy that held sway for around 500 years, it would be a shame to write it off as bollocks before having a good look. You might even find inspiration. https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Companion…/dp/0521779855

Kimel: I never, ever said it was bullocks. Read over my original comments again. Sometimes a Stoic prism is useful, but to try to provide it with a deductive basis, you need recourse to pleasure/pain. Good discussion!

Jimmy: Are you simply saying that any ethics that isn’t utilitarian is impossible? Bit dogmatic. Utilitarianism itself is far from without criticism.

Kimel: I’m saying that all philosophies involve “the good,” the elimination of unnecessary pain and the maximization of virtuous pleasure is clearly “the good” from a human perspective, and pain and pleasure (broadly defined, including love, a free imagination, a fully articulated and varied existence, etc.) are the correct first principles to work with.

Jimmy: All? Only consequentialist ethics. Not virtue ethics or deontological ethics. Locke and Kant didn’t work like that.

Massimo: David, again, most philosophers don’t think there is such thing as “first principles”. Try to provide an example and you’ll see I can always come back and ask “why?”

Kimel: Virtue ethics can only be justified from a utilitarian perspective in the end, I think.  The virtues are good because when generally applied, they make society have a greater capacity for love and happiness. But let’s not get into it. Anyway, I’m not interested in rehashing the arguments of the old philosophers. I’m interested in truth. Intense thread! Massimo, if that’s your answer to Hume and you’re sufficiently confident, then that’s dope (by which I mean chill, not dumb), but it requires a leap of faith.

Massimo: David, maximizing pleasure is very obviously not the highest good.

Kimel: Depends how we define pleasure, doesn’t it…? Aren’t love and contribution to the maximization of artistic and scientific progress examples of some of the highest pleasures, and the elimination of unnecessary pain a virtue? And anyway, Transhumanism increases the capacity for the Good by increasing the potential for pleasure, wisdom, and sundry other virtues.

Massimo: David, if you want to play sophistic games with the definition of pleasure I’m not joining you. But to claim that virtue ethics can only be justified on utilitarian grounds is to profoundly misunderstand both virtue ethics and utilitarianism.

Kimel: Then please justify virtue ethics for me on the basis of first principles other than pleasure and pain. But when you say be in harmony with “nature,” don’t play the same sophistic games you suggest I play with “pleasure.” Also, the idea that all people inspired by Epicurean philosophy should withdraw from political life because some ancient Epicureans did is bad logic. We can debate about how to maximize and experience different forms of pleasure, including the pleasure of participating in a democratic community (as a Transhumanist I identify pleasure with the elimination of unwanted torment and the maximization of progress through art and science), but you can’t provide any justification for virtue or Stoic principles without recourse to pleasure and pain. At least not on this thread.

Jimmy: What are your thoughts on Kantian ethics?

Massimo: And David, did you miss the part where I said that nothing can be justified from first principles? ‪As for my allegedly bad logic, we agree that a modern Epicurean doesn’t have to accept everything Epicurus said, though I would then like you to extend the same courtesy to the Stoics.

Kimel: That’s why I’m a Transhumanist, not an Epicurean, but we and the Utilitarians are their evolutionary descendants… Jimmy, the categorical imperative is unsound. There is no justification for why universalizing an action and its hypothetical effects should decide whether it should be morally permissible to me as an individual. It’s based on the intuition that it’s bad to make moral exceptions for ourselves, but as a general formula for deciding on an action’s morality, it clearly fails–think of the example of lying to a murderer to prevent his killing his next victims. That example always causes Kantians a lot of trouble… however, given that I think we should use different philosophies non-mutually exclusively to gain insight on how to act, and it’s worth considering Kant’s perspective too. Also please see earthasitis.com for my refutation of Kantian aesthetics (it’s under “philosophy”)

Henry: One thing I will say, this thread is the most intense that I’ve ever been in.Massimo you write of Stoic axioms, “they are good enough for me” and “I find the Stoic ones to be useful.” What is the measure you use for useful and good enough? ‪It can’t be happiness. That is, we both agree, not the measure that the Stoics use for themselves. It’s a more Epicurean measure and as you write, and I agree, “Epicurean philosophy is highly problematic.” ‪It can’t be reason, because we’ve already ascertained that they are not “universally true” or “indisputable” – i.e., in more simple words, they are not true. ‪One of the great insights of Stoic philosophy is that we cannot hold two contradictory impressions in our mind at the same time. We must waver between them in a kind of painful cognitive dissonance. This is one of the reasons that reasoned integrity can bring us joy. Thus we cannot find something to be both true and not true at the same time. Either the logic behind Stoic axioms is true, or it is false. Our mind cannot handle a middle ground there – at best it could waver between them. What is the measure by which you determine that Stoic philosophy’s axioms, in light of Hume, are good enough or useful?

Massimo: Henry, because they resonate with my understanding of human nature, and if followed provide meaning to my life and make me more useful to society. What else would I want?

Kimel: Problem is, I can say that any philosophy or religion “resonates with my understanding of human nature;” it’s subjective, and dependent on my life experience and upbringing. The idea of Stoicism adding value to life through more meaning and leading to more “usefulness” for society sounds pretty Epicurean/utilitarian to me–the reason it’s “good” is that it leads to more happiness for you and society.

Henry:‪ Yes, I agree with you David. “Resonates with my understanding of human nature” – do you mean it subjectively or objectively? It sounds subjective to me. And “more meaning” sounds like a term that, when carefully scrutinized and broken down, would turn out to be “happiness.”

Massimo: Okay people, please give me an example of any philosophy that doesn’t resonate “subjectively.” What, are we talking math now?

Kimel: Massimo, I agree with you–but some philosophies have stronger rational foundations than others, and are hence more appealing to logical thinkers across cultures–they “resonate” more strongly because their foundational principles are rigorously sound.

Massimo: Indeed, and the Stoic one is one of the strongest I know of. That’s not at all mutually exclusive with its tenets “resonating” with me at a subjective level, no?

Kimel: Well, it speaks highly to your character that you took the time and energy to engage in a multi-day debate on this topic examining the underpinnings of your belief system. We might not agree on lots of things, but I think that your participation shows great depth of character and patience on your part, and I thank you for it. Without question, this is one of the most thought provoking discussions I’ve been involved in…

Henry: Massimo, I can absolutely respect and honor that as a leap of faith as David referred to it earlier, just as I respect my best friend who is a Catholic, and who has many reasoned arguments built upon his leap of faith. ‪It seems to be problematic philosophically though for two reasons.

‪First, it seems to me that we cannot capture the deep and profound sense of integrity that the ancient Stoic philosophers lived out. To them, their virtues were “absolutely true”, the fruit of pure reason. That integrity of being empowered them in all kinds of ways. It made them into teachers. Above all, I think it really motivated them. For our minds, as mentioned above regarding contradiction, there is all the difference in the world between, “in my opinion cooperation is a good thing, but I respect your opinion that non-cooperation is good” and “Cooperation IS the good. I respect you as a reasoning being. And while my reasoning may be incorrect, would you like to reason-out together whether cooperation is good?”

‪Second, there seem to be real reasons to question your understanding of human nature — as much as I really want to share it (and in many ways I do share it, because I do believe that cooperation plays an enormous and beautiful role in our being). It appears that violence / power, as I described at the beginning of this thread, is a major element in us that plays a role in all kinds of ways, even in our fundamental sexuality. If we are going to call our reasoning cooperativeness higher than that, the increasingly decadent post-modern world is going to ask us why. And we should go out to them with beautiful reasons.

Jimmy: To quote Marcus Aurelius, If thou findest in human life anything better than justice, truth, temperance, fortitude, and, in a word, anything better than thy own mind’s self-satisfaction in the things which it enables thee to do according to right reason, and in the condition that is assigned to thee without thy own choice; if, I say, thou seest anything better than this, turn to it with all thy soul…

Henry: Jimmy, this is probably my favorite passage from Marcus Aurelius. Thanks for quoting it. As he summarizes, “and, in a word, anything better than thy own mind’s self-satisfaction in the things which it enables thee to do according to right reason…”

‪No, I haven’t found anything in human life better than that, better than “my own mind’s self-satisfaction” in the fruits of “right reason.” That is exactly the reason why I am here, participating in this argument: because my “right reason” demands reasons for my actions. Only then can I enjoy my “mind’s self-satisfaction in the things which it enables me to do according to right reason.”

‪Justice, truth, temperance, fortitude – all depend on each other, and all depend on truth. Are the axioms behind Stoic philosophy true? Or are they just a subjective matter of opinion?

Jimmy:‪ It’s a bit of a tough question to answer since you don’t appear to want to do the heavy lifting yourself.

‪If you had an end of year exam question, “What did the Hellenistic philosophers mean by Phusis” I strongly suspect your reply might be “Well I didn’t read any of the big books and those assholes on Facebook wouldn’t give me a straight answer”

‪If you want a logical proof you can look to Becker’s work, which you can get now on Kindle.

‪Is virtue true?

‪The Greek word is Arete, which I think is better translated as “excellence”, excellence of one’s kind.

‪Should we try to be “better people”, I think so, what is the counter argument?

‪If you want to know what that means, to be a “better human”, I think once you have asked the question you are on the way to being a Stoic.

That as axioms the stoics have

‪a) Humans are capable of rationality: Pretty self-evident

‪b) Humans are social animals: Pretty self evident.

The body of Stoic philosophy is a mish-mash of deduction, observation, a dash of logic, but the thing, epistemologically, that makes it all hang together is its coherence.

Kimel: Henry is exceptionally well read and no dilettante, and he’s brave enough to interrogate the logical underpinnings of the philosophy instead of taking them for granted. Why are the virtues good? I argue that when applied from a rule utilitarian perspective, they maximize happiness and minimize the unhappiness of injustice. Obviously you guys don’t agree with me (and neither does Henry.) But there’s no easy answer to Hume’s objections in any of the writing of this thread, though a lot of condescension. (For example, you say Henry and I are unread and don’t understand, and Massimo even wrote an article trashing my entire philosophical school when it’s clear he’s not very familiar with actual Transhumanist thinking–imagine I wrote, “Why we don’t need Stoicism” and actually wasn’t informed at all.) If ya’ll want to preach to the choir, go for it, but Socrates would not approve.

Jimmy: David: we discussed Hume, if there is a telos is to ought is easy.

‪Basketball players ought to be fit.

‪Where is the problem?

Kimel: Because that statement is not logically equivalent to “Humans ought to live in harmony with nature as a first principle.”

I think what Henry was looking for is probably something like this. Let’s define Nature in the broadest sense—encompassing both human nature and the natural order of things.

‪Take it as a given that self awareness + logic = will to preserve oneself OR, Take it as a given that self preservation = “the good” (Jimmy was on the right track that this is a workable first principle, even if a problematic one–a machine could become conscious and logically conclude it wants to die, for all we know.)

‪How is one best able to preserve oneself? Let’s say the answer is, “One should live in harmony with one’s nature and the nature of the world around it.”

Well, humans are civilizing, logical, and virtuous by definition (that is, humans are distinguished from “Creatures” qua their humanity by these virtuous tendencies; they are what it means to be a human and not a beast—the other aspects exist, but they are held in common by lower beings, and only humans by definition civilizing, logical, and virtuous)

Hence, humans should live cooperatively, rationally, and virtuously in harmony with their nature and Nature.

We could even take it further and say that to act virtuously is in harmony with the natural order of things, which are often random and cruel from a human perspective. But by cooperating, we minimize that randomness and maximize the potential for freedom and virtue.

‪I do not agree with the above, but it’s at least a start. (Rationalism is not always the appropriate response if you hope to lead a fully textured emotional existence; self preservation as “the good” is a subjective judgment; I think that happiness and the elimination of torment are much better first principles than the mere will to survive, which actually leads down a Machiavellian road; the idea that what makes human human is their unique capacity for virtue is not only problematic, but ignores the refined wickedness of which we are not only uniquely capable, but can sometimes actually helps us to survive from a rational perspective; at the same time, under an honest lens, the virtues are really such because they inherently maximize happiness and minimize pain from a rule utilitarian perspective–that is a more satisfactory answer as to WHY they are good than “they just are.”)

Jimmy: You missed “all acts should be directed towards the social good”

Kimel: I disagree with that idea so strongly I didn’t even want to mention it. I think it’s been used to justify a lot of evil historically. I could argue that one of our primary obligations is to our own imaginations and maximizing the capacity for its freedom, etc. The Stoics take too much for granted. What about “fun” as an end in itself?

Jimmy: What about cocaine and pizza?

Kimel: I prefer onions on my pizza.

Henry: David I think that the Stoic philosophers were on to a major discovery about happiness which undermines Utilitarianism, roughly speaking the Hedonistic Paradox. The Stoic argument to pursue what is right & good, i.e. virtue, and that through that, as a side-effect, we will experience happiness or joy – appears to be correct and is, in my opinion, one of their wisest insights. As Thoreau, a great reader of the Stoics, writes from Walden Pond, “Happiness is like a butterfly. If you chase it, it will fly away from you. But if you put your mind on other things, it will come and land gently on your shoulder.” More specifically the Stoics your mind shouldn’t just be on “other things”, but on virtue. The Wikipedia page for it has a wonderful collection of observations along these lines. I am going to paste them here below because they are delightful. Even John Stuart Mill noticed this effect.

Kimel: I’m afraid I don’t have time to get into a defense of Epicurus or Utilitarianism today, but I’m a Transhumanist and recognize we belong to the same evolutionary family. I can give you arguments starting from the first principle that unnecessary torment is “the bad” to build up to a philosophy which endorses not only virtue ethics, but the promotion of scientific and artistic progress as one of the highest goods. And I can do it from sound first principles.

Ben: Your first principle is problematic for a few reasons. In fact nearly every word in the sentence is problematic in a first principle…

‘Unnecessary’ is only a straight forward matter in toy cases. As soon as rubber hits the road, you may have a problem justifying this prescription without reference to some far more fundamental principles.

Secondly, ‘the’ bad, rather than ‘a’ bad is a very hard position to defend. I can think of many bads that are unrelated to physical torment.

Thirdly, why specify physical? it seems that the most painful situations for us humans are often psychological.

Fourthly, why torment itself, rather than the wilful inflicting of torment? This would certainly make more sense if, as you claim, you wish to develop frmo this principle into a for of virtue ethics.

Kimel: You’re right, it’s “a bad,” but one we all agree upon as rational humans, so it’s a hot starting point. Unnecessary means things like the pain of disease–some things are more unambiguously unnecessary than others. Eliminating the pain of illness is a great place to start. Also, torment can be physical or emotional. Finally, torment can be inflicted by inanimate things like genes. I don’t buy the Stoic argument that non animate things cannot be evil–they can be evil to the degree they participate in the torment of humans.

Ben: Why is disease unnecessary, out of interest? You mean treatable diseases? That seems to lead to a position in which pharmacology is the most ethics route one can take with one’s life. Should we also remove the possibility of physcal harm whenever that possibility arises, seeing how it avoids such a big evil in the world?

Why do sane and happy people put themselves in positions to hurt themselves every day? Why do kind and brave people die every day, willingly? Must it be a hedonic calculus, whirring away underneath the conscious mind, as a final cause?

Would we say that a kind woman, who had been brave and reflective in her convictions, who had loved and cared for many people in her life, but who dies of Hepatitis C at the age of 60 has lived a bad life? If not, what countervailing forces of good are at play, which render the bad so ineffectual? Wouldn’t these forces, then, be a better place to start in our inquiry into the bad and the good?

Would we say that a kind woman, who had been brave and reflective in her convictions, who had loved and cared for many people in her life, but who dies of Hepatitis C at the age of 60 has lived a bad life? If not, what countervailing forces of good are at play, which render the bad so ineffectual? Wouldn’t these forces, then, be a better place to start in our inquiry into the bad and the good?

Kimel: You pose some great questions. I don’t want to hijack this thread, since this is super off topic at this point. So let’s agree to fight this out another day. But this is what I’ll say.

Pain is bad, but boredom is a kind of pain too, etc. And a society with everyone involved in one kind of job, for which many are unsuited, would not be a very happy or interesting one. The idea isn’t just to eliminate torment (for then I could blow up the planet and it would be free of torture), but to maximize the capacity for love and the freedom of the imagination. And I can argue that this only comes from maximizing the production of inspirational art, science, etc–we value “meaningful contributions to progress,” progress being defined as an increasingly lucid understanding of reality forged from the insights of autonomous contributors whose imaginations are liberated (high IQ, curable diseases treated, etc) .

Self sacrifice is beautiful because it comes from love, which is another good in itself in many circumstances. By cultivating the freedom of the imagination, I can argue we will maximize chances for love in the long term.

The woman who died lived an existential life–the whole thing wasn’t good or bad objectively, that’s a subjective judgment. But the circumstances of her ending were bad qua unwanted pain.

The last thing I’ll say for today is that Bentham was profoundly right about at least one thing–all philosophies talk about “the good,” and insofar as that’s true, it follows we should think about how to maximize it. The question is how to define the good–physical pleasure is one good, but not necessarily the only good in all circumstances. But Transhumanism maximizes the capacity for the good in general by liberating the human imagination from the constraints of the genetic and circumstantial wheel of fortune, empowering us to understand the world and manipulate its parts to good ends (ends maximizing the power of the imagination and minimizing physical torment) with increasing power and efficiency.

Jimmy: Is L Ron Hubbard involved?

Kimel: Why are you so intolerant of transhumanism? This is the cliff notes version of my formulation.

The first principle has to involve a quale, because that’s a unique entity where it is sufficient to say “because it just is” as an answer to why it is what it is. And unwanted unnecessary physical and spiritual torment being bad from a human perspective is the result of its identity qua being a quale. Then, think about how nature is bad from a human perspective to the extent that there is a lot of unwanted  torment that serves no good end for humans, and also because the imagination is enslaved to the circumstantial and genetic wheel of fortune, which leads to more torment, and less ability to maximize the good (less pain and more possibility for freedom, love, imagination, and happiness) through virtue, etc. But man’s nature is logical, artistic, and cooperative–so he should use his intellect to maximize the power of science to eliminate unwanted pain while simultaneously liberating the imagination from the genetic and circumstantial wheel of fortune, leading to more scientific progress, art, love, and freedom in the future.

Jimmy: I’d never heard of transhumanism before you mentioned it. At first glance it strikes me as more Marvel than Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King or Mandela. It has echoes of Buddhism no? Life is suffering, salvation from the wheel of life, transformation into superior beings.

Kimel: The way I see it, part of it is about making sure all people get access to the amazing advances in medicine unfolding now, not just elites. No one is superior to anyone, but some people are lucky to be healthier and have more active powers of imagination than others… It’s a very noble philosophy at its best, but like all schools of thought, I’m not the only Transhumanist, and to be fair, my understanding of the movement is unique to me. I didn’t read that defense of it somewhere, I just thought it up.

Jimmy: The pessimism is very Buddhist. I think life is great.

Kimel: So do I! That’s why we should maximize everyone’s chances to pursue happiness in their lives with as little torment as possible. Funny, how we both “accused” each other of Buddhist principles on this thread. The truth is, I’m no expert in it.

Jimmy: I’m no psychoanalyst but you seem to be rather more dark in your views. Not too hot, not too cold, water falls from the sky, food comes, out of the ground, we are here to support each other. La vie est belle.

Kimel: Again, nature is more beautiful than good. Perhaps not thinking about the torment of existence is an example of philosophical privilege… but anyway, Transhumanism is the philosophy that leads to the most happiness and fun through scientific progress, amazing simulations, great conversations between geniuses, etc. There’s a whole lot to counterbalance the bleakness we are fighting to overcome.

Jimmy: I take it you know the anthropic principle. Bleakness? Where do you live?

Kimel: New Haven, Connecticut! I am a human being, so the welfare of the human imagination and its capacity to contribute to progress is what concerns me. On earth as it is, there’s a whole lot of bleakness that we take for granted bound to our enslavement to the genetic and circumstantial wheel of fortune. Stoics are good at smiling through thunderstorms. Transhumanists dare to imagine controlling the weather. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.

Roman Decadence and Complex Systems Theory: Toward a New Teleology of Historical Progress, Collapse, Modernity, and Futurism

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Post-Post-Modernism

Discourse on the link between the erosion of traditional moral values and political collapse during the era of the Roman Republic and Julio-Claudian dynasty nurtured the ideology that just as “capitalism” is often conceptualized as a ubiquitous bogeyman in the eyes of some contemporary critical theorists, in antiquity, “free love” was a similarly corrosive force beguiling individuals into losing a sense of allegiance to the state as they succumbed to their petty perversions.[1] This vision of the ancient world, perhaps best epitomized in the moralizing histories of Sallust and Tacitus, haunted the Western imagination forever afterward, with “perversion” thematically bound to the idea of social collapse. This final chapter stands as a rejoinder to such notions, defending the practitioners of vilified forms of sexual expression from the ridiculous allegation that they provoked the fall of Rome or will cause modern culture to descend into anarchy, instead proposing a very different model of historical change in the ancient world.

The idea of Roman history as the cautionary tale of a society where sexual transgression sparked the conflagration of civilization at large has found various forms of expression over time, alarmingly often in modern political contexts. In May 1971, for example, President Nixon complained that All in the Family was promoting homosexuality and declared:

You ever see what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. Aristotle was homo, we all know that. So was Socrates. The last six Roman emperors were fags. Neither in a public way. You know what happened to the popes? They were layin’ the nuns; that’s been goin’ on for years, centuries. But the Catholic Church went to hell three or four centuries ago. It was homosexual, and it had to be cleaned out. That’s what’s happened to Britain. It happened earlier to France. Let’s look at the strong societies. The Russians. Goddamn, they root ’em out. They don’t let ’em around at all. I don’t know what they do with them. Look at this country. You think the Russians allow dope? Homosexuality, dope, (and) immorality are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the communists and left-wingers are pushing it. They’re trying to destroy us![2]

Nixon’s bizarre understanding of history is grounded in terror at the idea of society slackening as its individual members kowtow to their personal inclinations rather than the cisgendered heteronormative patriarchal rules of the game. Depressingly, the idea of Rome falling in the wake of the normalization of homosexuality has remained something of a trope in conservative circles. According to his 2012 book America the Beautiful, future Presidential candidate Ben Carson wrote that “as a Bible-believing Christian, you might imagine that I would not be a proponent of gay marriage… I believe God loves homosexuals as much as he loves everyone, but if we can redefine marriage as between two men or two women or any other way based on social pressures as opposed to between a man and a woman, we will continue to redefine it in any way that we wish, which is a slippery slope with a disastrous ending, as witnessed in the dramatic fall of the Roman Empire.”[3]

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These kinds of cockamamie theories have often been promulgated by “scholars” too. For example, Roberto De Mattei, the deputy head of Italy’s National Research Council and a “prominent…historian” claimed as recently as 2011 that the “contagion of homosexuality and effeminacy” destroyed Rome after it subdued Carthage, which was apparently “a paradise for homosexuals.”[4] Other scholarly metanarratives about ancient history, love, and historical collapse have proved to be equally dark and outlandish. Perhaps no schema linking political disintegration and sex seems to be so misguided in retrospect as the work of Joseph Vogt, whose “Population Decline in the Roman Empire” (1935) and “Race Mixing in the Roman Empire” (1936) popularized the original theory of Arthur de Gobineau that racial mixing was responsible for the decline of Rome, with the originally “Aryan” conquerors increasingly diluted by inferior Semitic and African genetic influences.

In the wake of these kinds of revolting models, no wonder reputable historians have increasingly turned away from the construction of grand schemas and have instead accentuated the nuance and complexity of micro-systems, overseeing increasingly specialized and compartmentalized studies of the past (and writing for increasingly small audiences). In 1979, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge challenged the underlying validity of sweeping explanatory schemas fumbling to account for complex phenomena like the onset of political disintegration. He characterized the postmodern condition in general as one of skepticism toward metanarratives, rejecting their old-fashioned emphases on “transcendent and universal truth.” According to Lyotard and critical theorists inspired by his legacy, such metanarratives invariably downplay the naturally existing complexity of various systems, and they are often created and nurtured by oppressive power structures begging to be deconstructed. In short, since grand metanarratives tend to ignore the heterogeneity of the human experience, theories of human progress as historical development toward a specific goal are ultimately deemed inadequate by most of my academic peers.

Nevertheless, while I realize that to propose a metanarrative schematizing historical progress in 2017 is to invite a barrage of criticism since the very definition of progress has been destabilized by critical theory, the merits of the theoretical approach outlined in this paper speak for themselves. Its themes stand as a strong retort to millennia of hysterical discourse demonizing non-normative sex as the cause of civilization’s ills. The fact that any given metanarrative can be problematized does not mean that metanarratives in general cannot still be useful as thematic prisms through which to view a complex social process, providing a simplifying yet clarifying lens that can often prove revelatory when it comes to accentuating unexpected dynamics of open-ended questions.[5]

Though this chapter is grounded in original research in complex systems theory, the underlying thesis is not unprecedented. In the eyes of Jose Ortega y Gasset, for example, the modern world was liberated from a tendency toward chaos and collapse due to the inherently progressive nature of technological evolution and its marriage to the scientific method, ensuring an increasingly vibrant standard of living for an increasing number of people over the long run. According to his view, a failure of “technique” [6] rather than non-vanilla sex doomed the Roman Empire. In the language of complexity theory, the system tended toward a state of collapse because the pace of technological and scientific progress was ultimately retarded before it could gain the unstoppable momentum it seemed to attain after the Italian Renaissance. The remainder of this chapter defines these terms, summarizes the themes of complex systems theory, and applies this lens to the subject of “historical progress” in the ancient world. I conclude by proposing falsifiable hypotheses that could test this framework, providing evidence against the idea that either sex or Christianity was at the root of Rome’s collapse.

Defining Terms: Progress and Modernity

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Once writing was invented and the memories of past thinkers could be stored and readily accessed, a long conversation was initiated between generations of brilliant individuals who, in long discussion and debate with each other’s ghosts, were ultimately able to further and further clarify humanity’s collective understanding of the empirical characteristics of reality, to say nothing of how its constituent elements could be carved up, recombined, and harnessed to serve utile human ends. Tragically, throughout many periods of history, voices were deliberately excluded from this evolving dialogue and even denied basic education, which consequently resulted in a lower quality of debate, less discourse, and slower advancement in the arts and sciences in general.[7]

Be this at it may, once history began (that is, once representational symbolic records came about), a long conversation between ingenious contributors was initiated which led to what I want to call “progress.” The invention of writing enabled a conversation to take place that could be sustained across multiple generations about questions to which there seemed to be no obvious answers, but to which meaningful contributions could nonetheless be made that served a useful, clarifying role. Is there a God? How is motion possible? Why does it rain? What is art? How can I maximize the yield of my crops? Different people have different perspectives on these kinds of open-ended questions and diverse ways of schematizing the problems and solutions. Once their perspectives are added to the evolving discourse, these people’s contributions can never be erased. If what they articulated was meaningful and clarifying, it will inspire new, micro-discourses in turn. Over the course of time, thousands of meaningful contributions lead inevitably to what I want to define as progress—an increasingly lucid understanding of the nature of reality and how to harness its constituent elements toward (hopefully) good ends such as the alleviation of physical torment. Across the millennia, if enough people are welcomed into the conversation of great minds, there will be millions of meaningful contributions which can never be erased, and this will inevitably lead to advancement over time as battles will rage in the marketplace of ideas and only the best ideas (those most bound to meaningful contributions from the perspective of the most people) will survive.

What do I mean by modernity? In this chapter, I mean a condition in which political institutions valuing both autonomy and stability, economic institutions catering to the distribution of “money,” and academic institutions governing scientific research create synergistic platforms where discursive progress can take place. Foucault, of course, reminds us that the influence of institutions on discourse can be oppressive, but in fairness, the great institutions of civilization can also provide stages upon which meaningful contributors can interact with one another and usher in an increasingly accelerated and exponentially growing rate of progress.

According to the teleology of modernity as imagined in this paper, and contrary to the idea that most premodern Iron Age civilizations were fundamentally similar in nature, I will argue that a formative moment for the West took place in the polytheistic, “democratic” civilizations of Greece and Italy and Asia Minor and not in the monotheistic or monarchic contexts of other civilizations. I will also suggest that the medieval contribution to modernity is in some ways being overstated in contemporary scholarship, though the preservation of ancient knowledge and the creation of the university-system would of course contribute immeasurably to the synergy between academic, political, and economic institutions which this paper associates with modernism.

Complex Systems Theory and Historical Change

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 According to complex systems theory, certain events such as rises and declines in the number of living species unfold according to a process of punctuated equilibrium, with spurts of sudden advancement or collapse associated with changes in the organisms’ relationships to their environment. The rule of the day is long intermediate periods of stable predictability interrupted by sudden catastrophic plunges, then a series of unpredictable oscillations before a new homeostatic balance is reached. I want to suggest that a similar lens can be applied to thinking about the process of historical change in the form of political collapse (the elimination of old institutions and the leadership roles associated with them) and reconsolidation (the creation of new institutions and the subsequent rise of novel opportunities for political dominance by new factions of people.) The system can be conceptualized as a zero-sum game for power expressed in the form of individual “players” scrambling to attain limited institutional positions; over time, individuals maneuver and form alliances to gain such positions, and preexisting hierarchies can be upset by changing environmental conditions.

Complex systems theory is an emergent area of scientific investigation. While chaos theory, a subset of the general field of complexity, has been enriched with quantitative theorems since the emergence of sophisticated computer technology in the 1970s, the study of complexity as a broad principle in itself is, as of yet, largely limited to qualitative descriptions of the dynamics of non-linear systems marked by sensitive dependence on initial conditions. In my opinion, these qualitative descriptions, while frustrating to mathematicians seeking specific formulae to describe the evolution of complex systems, are in fact an ideal prism through which to view the periodic transformations of civilization without reducing the infinite nuances of the phenomena involved to anything analogous to a neat set of simple rules. Fundamentally, in order to comprehend the behavior of a non-linear system, one must in principle examine the system as a whole and not merely investigate its parts in isolation. For this reason, a description of change over time in a civilization demands a somewhat sweeping chronological approach, whatever the detractors of metanarratives in history might say. Antiquity uniquely provides us with several useful examples of cultural evolution over whole millennia.

The essential idea of complex systems theory is that the interactions of individual parts within a whole can result in so-called self-organizing criticality. This is to say that the changing relationships between diverse constituent elements of a complex system can spontaneously result in great changes in the whole, potentially characterized by radically distinct emergent properties. The complex whole exists in a fragile state of equilibrium in a “critical state” on the “edge of chaos.” Changing environmental factors can tip aspects of the complex system into chaos itself through “cascading events,” resulting in the sudden onset of turbulence, tumult, and disorder. Eventually, according to chaos theory, the complex system should settle into new points of equilibrium rather than simply collapsing altogether—chaos is turbulent and unpredictable, but it is not synonymous with a complete and total breakdown of order. The new equilibrium, however, similarly exists at a critical point on the “edge of chaos” until new environmental forces again tip it toward chaos and the eventual emergence of a new state of homeostasis similarly radically divergent from the preceding initial conditions. The entire process is one of punctuated equilibrium-by way of analogy, imagine a graph that shows exponential growth, a period of stagnation, and then either a period of collapse or a resumption of growth; the horizontal axis would be time and the vertical axis would be some measure of the level of progress (which I suggest can be measured in such potential ways as surviving written records per year, patents produced per year, deaths by disease each year, institutional roles available per year, etc.)

According to information systems theory, the emergence of chaos can result from exceedingly slight shifts in environmental forces, minutiae like the emperor Claudius’ choice of a successor, or unpredictable migrations of whole barbarian tribes. Such forces precipitate the rapid emergence of unpredictable, fast-changing sets of information that have the capacity to overwhelm traditional governmental structures and contribute ever more to a slide toward a chaotic breakdown. Nevertheless, according to chaos theory, this breakdown should not be complete, but rather characterized by the emergence of new equilibrium points which are always themselves on the edge of chaos. This process perhaps explains phenomena like the restoration of imperial hegemony in the form of the “Dominate” in the third century AD after a period of civil war, the permanent splitting of the empire into eastern and western regions of governance, and finally, the tripartite division of the Mediterranean region into Western European, Byzantine, and Muslim spheres of influence. We can think about the history of the Roman Empire as a narrative of punctuated equilibrium; during eras of “chaos,” individual efforts by the government to restore the old order resulted in diminishing returns, reflective of the theories of Joseph Tainter, but clarifying when they actually come into play.[8]

In my opinion, the question of why certain eras are characterized by such diminishing returns has everything to do with the emergence of chaotic patterns complicating previous states of equilibrium until a new homeostatic balance is eventually reached, potentially far less complex than the initial system. The old ways of carving up and dividing resources are upset by demographic and environmental changes and shifting cultural expectations. During periods of turbulence associated with the onset of chaos, complex systems whose central organizing structures are burdened by an overflow of information tend to disintegrate—whether they were organized as a multiparty system, a monopoly by a single party, or a dual party system, old organizational structures built to accommodate old fashioned flows of predictable information quickly become outmoded. New factions rapidly form. However, as any single faction gains an upper hand, it is in the interest of all smaller factions to join together against it. This leads inevitably to a bipolar tension, with the creation of a two party equilibrium and the ultimate emergence of a single party system or a new multipolar equilibrium themselves susceptible to collapse and always tending toward bipolar cleavages. In this chapter, I will call this the factional nature of political change.

Insights from chaos theory can help to make sense of the largest questions in world history from a fascinating new perspective. Turbulence and transformation are the order of the day rather than decline and fall. The unexpected appearance of chaos belies the linear biases of traditional models of history. Violent fluctuations and oscillations cannot be casually dismissed by mono-causal theories; they are in fact a fundamental aspect of any system at a critical point on the edge of chaos.

As mentioned before, there is currently a decided movement among historians in the direction of micro-history. But there is nevertheless great value in a global approach to world history and the exploration of supposed periods of “decadence.” Broadly speaking, the very nature of causation itself is more complex than contemporary historiographical accounts of things like the “decline and fall” of the Roman Empire suggest.

In other words, a core set of beliefs in the field of history about the nature of complexity and causation are ultimately incorrect. Traditionally, it is assumed that simple systems behave in simple ways, and that as long as such systems could be reduced to a few perfectly understood deterministic rules, their long-term behavior should be stable and predictable; it is also asserted that complex behavior implies complex causes, and that a system that is visibly unstable, unpredictable, or out of control must be governed by a multitude of independent components or subject to random external influences. Now, however, physicists, mathematicians, biologists, and astronomers have created a new set of ideas. Simple systems can give rise to complex behavior, and complex systems can give rise to simple behavior. Moreover, contrary to the idea that the stories of the rise and fall of individual civilizations are fundamentally unique, it is now believed that the laws of complexity hold universally, whatever the constituent parts of the system.

Questions about causation need to be approached probabilistically (what forces worked to raise the odds that a specific outcome took place, and to what degree did they raise the likelihood of the outcome?) and inclusively (what diversity of explanations can help to explain an outcome rather than a mono-causal model?). The following three sections illustrate this approach toward describing history.

Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel and Phoenicia Versus the World of the Poleis

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In the beginning was the Stone Age. It last for an obscene number of millennia. A rock is only so sharp and strong, and during agonizingly long eons, humankind struggled to carve up and recombine the constituent components of nature, powerless to harness them toward useful and progressive ends. But then, civilization began in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China beside great rivers where agricultural surplus could be harnessed by the sundry institutions required to organize labor. The use of bronze was fundamental to this shift because it enabled the creation of objects like axes, ploughs, and swords, tools that could not be chiseled out of rock. Such devices enabled nature to be carved up more efficiently, leading to further surplus and the possibility of the creation of a leisured class devoted to discursive inquiry rather than the brute struggle to survive. Now, progress was born, and “history” proper began with the invention of writing. The pace of technological progress was incredible, particularly in the intercompetitive monarchic city-states of Mesopotamia, where the boat, writing, and the wheel were pioneered. I believe that the decentralization of the region was key to its innovativeness. Whenever one city-state innovated by creating a new invention, other city-states either had to adapt and improve the invention for their own ends or lose their territory and be winnowed out.[9]

Ultimately, however, these early Bronze Age Civilizations did not evolve institutions in which politics, economics, and academics lined up to create modernistic synergy along the same kind of radical lines to be seen in Greece and Italy and Asia Minor. After the great burst of inventiveness around the time that bronze was first forged, there was a sudden stagnation. In other words, a kind of equilibrium was reached after exponential growth (which could be measured according to such factors as numbers of inventions created per century, the number of new cities founded, etc.) The reason why is that the very institutions that created the platforms upon which meaningful contributors acted suddenly became oppressive, forming rigid class structures which excluded voices from discourse and emphasized the creation of rules where the goodies could be monopolized by the elite.[10] Subsequently, authoritarianism, rigid class structures, and oppressively dogmatic religious institutions barred, exploited, and excluded people from contributing to discourse (for example, all non male elites). This inherently retarded progress, since the voices of geniuses went silenced: for example, there were thousands of anonymous women who never got the chance to be Aristotles, though they had the capacity to do so.

Between the age of the pyramids and the birth of Thales of Miletus there extended a tragic 2000 years—approximately the length of time separating us from Cleopatra. But then, iron came, and a new age dawned, with a sudden rise in progress. When we mastered iron, we literally forged a new future for ourselves—stronger tools which were more productive, resulting in more utility (stronger armies, more crops yielded per acre, etc). This rise in productivity allowed the goodies to be spread to more people than traditional elites, and suddenly, new classes began to arise. These new classes for the first time could contribute to the development of political, economic, and academic institutions, leading to more progress. This promise would prove to be most fully actualized in the Greco-Roman-Semitic world.[11]

The cultures of the poleis of Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor did not have religious institutions strong enough to sanction or to ban provocative debate about the nature of reality. At the same time, in that society, inherent values of the government were grounded in the celebration of debate, equality, and the inherent importance of every man’s contribution. The city states were fiercely agonistic, yet their people spoke dialects of the same language, so everyone could simultaneously compete with each other and imitate each other’s innovations. Finally, the society was composed of disparate, far-flung colonies that were inherently at competition with the societies around them and forced to govern themselves without the help of age-old institutions. One man in this society declared that everything was made of water. Another man questioned the hypothesis of Thales. This led to a debate which progressed toward proto-scientific notions. The origins of “modernity” were not bound to be found in Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor, but rather probabilistically likely to be brought into being there thanks to institutional features of those territories, to say nothing of their geographically central location on the easily accessible Mediterranean Sea. Enriched by iron tools and metal coins, utile goods could be distributed to more people than ever before, and more and more brilliant positive contributors could make a difference to their communities.

Greece and Italy are in a culturally diverse spot in the Mediterranean Sea near the spot where one group developed the alphabet (the Phoenicians), another group pioneered centralized bureaucratic organization (Egypt), another group developed coined money (the Lydians), and still another group refined ideas about monotheism (the Jews), making the area a diverse hodge-podge including the voices of many different people with many different perspectives. Ultimately, the institutions of the Greco-Roman world created a unique situation where political, economic, and academic institutions could welcome a greater plurality of voices with a greater variety of ideas than in other contemporary states. Compare the situation to that in other ancient cultures:

The Egyptians: They essentially invented the idea of the centralized monarchic state and refined techniques of massive stone architecture in concert with the Mesopotamians. But their 3000 year old civilization was one of the least progressive in the history of the planet despite the enormous productivity of the land of Egypt itself. This is because political, economic, and academic institutions all aligned to impoverish the vast majority of the country and retain the goodies for a small minority who monopolized all education (it took years to learn hieroglyphs—difficult to do that if you’re a peasant). It boggles the mind to think of all the women, non-elites, and foreigners deliberately excluded from discourse—and many of them extraordinary thinkers! One of the sole examples of real political innovation took place under an elite despot (Akhenaten), and his legacy of “novelty” in questioning whether there were one god or many was vilified forever afterward in Egyptian lore. Tellingly, however, when Greco-Roman civilization came to Egypt and Alexandria was established as a polis, it became the greatest center of science in the ancient world because it welcomed a cosmopolitan congregation of voices debating the nature of reality in a way that was never possible before, and all in the presence of the bounty of the Nile River, which could feed enough people to provide a great deal of leisure time. Even women were sometimes allowed to participate in this academic discourse.

The Jews: Arguably, as a whole, Jews have made the most meaningful contributions to human progress from the perspective of individual ingenious contributions to life on this planet. But I think that ideas about religion and politics in ancient Judaea made it probabilistically much less likely that a “scientific revolution” would take place there rather than in Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor (the world of the poleis). This is because more people and more ideas were inherently excluded from discourse in the Jewish culture due to ideas about politics and religion, leading to less internal progress. In Jewish culture, there was no place for discourse questioning whether certain elements of the Law could be broken (though debates about the meaning of the law could, and did, take place, admittedly showing that what superficially seems dogmatic can often run much deeper.) A rigid priestly caste monopolized power and education, meaning that many voices which might have been brilliant went uneducated while a small group of individuals monopolized the learning for themselves. Much scientific progress was bound to discourse on the Law and its meaning, with a neglect of areas of study about the atomic nature of reality. After all, the Bible inherently answered certain kinds of questions (“God made it that way.”) The Jewish idea that God chose them, loved them, and had a special covenant with them sowed the seeds that would one day grow into the concept that there is fundamental goodness in the world and all people are inherently worthy of redemption and made in God’s image. Yet science and philosophy as we now know them began as a branch of Hellenic paganism and not monotheistic Judaism.

The Phoenicians: The Phoenicians are the most similar to the Greeks of any other Mediterranean civilization. They lived in mercantile-oriented small city-states; there was no single governing monarch; the people were seafaring and polytheistic; and they established colonies in the Western Mediterranean. They were also an inventive culture, pioneering glass, dye-making, and most importantly of all, the alphabet, which not only hastened economic transactions, but also made education more readily available to more people than ever before, and hence led to great material progress. There were even institutions resembling the ecclesia or comitia of the Greco-Roman world.

Yet while the Phoenicians were great explorers and agronomists, there seems to have been absolutely no tradition of philosophical discourse and debate in their society. Why? One of the reasons is that the Romans annihilated Carthage and its books, but we have to look deeper than this—there were no famous Phoenician philosophers (though Zeno of Citium might have been of remote Phoenician ancestry.) We must look to religion, economics, and politics, I think, to say nothing of social attitudes toward abstract philosophizing versus practical knowledge. The Canaanite form of polytheism was one of the world’s most brutal, at some times in history evidently mandating child sacrifice even among elites during times of hardship—this more than anything shows a brutal commitment to religious principle at the expense of reason, for all of the institution’s social-leveling power. The Phoenicians formed a narrow mercantile ruling oligarchy over polyglot city-states where the bulk of the non-Punic population was denied political rights. In the Phoenician homeland where there was the most scope for “equality,” overmighty empires like the Persians and Assyrians conquered the cities and set up restrictions to ensure that society was oriented toward the production of ships and money, not knowledge. Culturally practical knowledge was valued much more than silly, impractical “abstraction,” which was conceptualized as something fundamentally Greek.

Because we cannot rerun history as a simulation just yet, it is impossible for us to test hypotheses about what might have happened in other times and places and in other contexts. But the fact remains that in the history of our world, the Greece-Italy-Asia Minor axis created a certain synergy associated with democracy, empiricism, and coined money that proved hugely historically influential. Political, economic, and academic institutions were inherently more inclusive of more voices and ideas than in the case of their Mediterranean counterparts, and this made more scientific progress more likely. The fruits of that progress constitute the core of Classics.

From the Grandeur That Was Rome to the Squalor of the Dark Ages

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Between Thales of Miletus and the period of the height of activity in the Library of Alexandria under the early Roman emperors there existed a period of approximately 800 years. Toward the end of the period in Alexandria, Aristarchus was the first to propose heliocentrism and Hero invented the steam engine; early “computers” like the Antikythera Mechanism boasted the sophistication of eighteenth century Swiss clocks.

Aristotle’s work had long set the stage for empiricism and the development of the scientific method. “Modernity” seemed to be on the cusp of something great. Then, the unexpected took place. Among a perfect storm of other forces, the repercussions of a single man’s unjust crucifixion would reverberate through the centuries—history’s greatest example of the Butterfly Effect in action.

Earlier in this dissertation, I have addressed the topic of decadence from the perspective of the common but outmoded belief that sexual perversion was the destabilizing influence in Roman history around the time of Christ. Contrary to the opinions of scholars like Blanshard, I have argued that behavior which might be considered licentious did in fact exist in the Late Republic as a response to changing political and economic conditions in which the sexual availability of slaves and prostitutes coupled with the rise of totalitarianism by divine right upset traditional patterns of morality. However, I have also shown that the idea of sexual license itself as a chaotic influence on Roman history is a case of mistaking causation and correlation. Free love did not vitiate the Roman Empire. The inadequacy of its cultural hierarchies in the face of the turbulence of history did.

While the study of antiquity is inherently interesting for its own sake, it is perhaps particularly valuable because it represents a long stretch of time in which myriad historical changes took place, with the entire history of the system existing in a kind of metaphorical laboratory. The height of the Roman Empire and its subsequent decline are particularly fascinating because the sophistication of the Mediterranean world ultimately faltered, and the Roman Empire and the barbarian cultures surrounding it finally blended together into a single, largely similar culture. Why did the sophistication of the ancient world lapse so horrifically, and why was the recovery rate following this collapse so slow? The theory of complex systems provides the answer: the “parochial” elements of the ancient economy described by historians like Moses Finley ultimately hindered the development of historical momentum toward industrialization until the entire system collapsed over the edge of chaos into increasingly less complex states of equilibrium. Society was transformed from the single-party domination of the Principate to the multiparty chaos of the Dominate; then, society re-stabilized as the two-party Eastern and Western Roman Empires before the Western portion distintegrated and the Mediterranean was divided into the multiparty three civilizations of Islam, Western Europe, and Byzantium. The periods between the eras of stable hierarchies (the second century and the fifth century and the seventh century) are the ones associated with the onset of chaos; the conclusion of this chapter provides a means of testing the thesis.

Mono-causal explanations for Roman decadence such as “perversion” are ultimately fruitless. In fact, the era of the greatest sexual license in Roman history is ultimately the one of its greatest economic and territorial expansion. Instead, complexity theory provides a very different answer to the question of why the Republic fell and the Principate replaced it: a plethora of forces existed that pushed the old multipolar equilibrium represented by the checks and balances of the earlier Republic and its feuding dynasts over the so-called “edge of chaos” into a simpler new “homeostatic state” marked by the monopolar despotism of a single family, very much like those of their Hellenistic neighbors (and hence less complex than a unique Roman political system artificially distinct from the institutions of the civilizations around it).[12] The history of the transitions along the way are classic lessons in the factional dynamics of the organization of power, shifting between single-party and multi-party modes of organization with a marked tendency toward dualism: hence we see patrician versus plebeian, optimates versus populares, cives versus socii, Marians versus Sullans, the dictatorship of Sulla, the First Triumvirate, Caesarians versus Pompeiians, the dictatorship of Caesar, the Third Triumvirate, Octavian versus Cleopatra, and the ultimate rise of the dictatorship of the Julio-Claudians, the union of the two most influential families of the late Republic.

We have seen that throughout history, changing relationships between humans and the metals with which they forged their tools contributed to chaotic transitions and the emergence of new forms of social organization accommodating increasing numbers of people in dominant roles. In the late Roman Republic, however, as the Republic ripened (or rotted, depending on one’s perspective) into the Principate, it was not a change in humans’ relationship to metals but rather an information-overflow associated with the repercussions of Roman imperialism that destabilized the national government to the point of Civil War; the autocratic monopolar system which followed was both simpler (less complex) than the earlier multipolar system which preceded it and also far more similar to the surrounding civilizations (organized under monarchic rule by divine right), as if by a process of osmosis which diluted the institutions of the Republic. By the same token, when the Western Empire collapsed, the cultures on either side of the Rhine and Danube became fundamentally more similar: Christian, de-urbanized, and dominated politically by German tribes. The tortured intricacies of the late Dominate collapsed into simpler states more similar than dissimilar to the civilizations surrounding them.

Of course, the Middle Ages was not a single Dark Age, but we have to admit that the level of progress was retarded for some time. It seems to me that the period as a whole in the West can best be defined as an age of stagnation and decline at the end of the Iron Age that eventually settled into an equilibrium and then began to hit upon an upward trend again after the crisis of the Black Death created another pivot point on the edge of chaos at the end of the period. According to my formula, fewer voices must have resulted in less discourse for some time, and less discourse must have resulted in less progress in the form of meaningful contributions to questions about the nature of reality. Institutions must have become less welcoming of difference and more oppressive and oriented toward self-preservation rather than the creation of meaningful platforms for debate. At the same time, there must have been no new significant advancements in metallurgy to radically improve the potential for creating new sources of utility to fuel the development of new social classes. I understand that medievalists regret that classicists historically derided their era’s contributions and are right to emphasize that the era they love was a dynamic one in some ways, but it’s important to understand that the period between the fall of Rome and 1000 AD really was a Dark Age despite some cultural continuity. It serves as a sobering lesson for all ages—the momentum of material and technical progress can never be taken for granted.

According to complex systems theory, there existed at least a small probability that the Roman Empire might have industrialized at their pivot point c. 180 AD. Why did they fail to do so? Was it due to their penchant for licentious sex? How can historians even begin to go about answering these kinds of counter-factual questions in the first place?

Rather than branding ancient cities fundamentally primitive or modern in nature in the tradition of Max Weber, I want to examine the various forces working for and against the increasing specialization and application of productive technologies in the Roman Empire. My conclusion is that while aspects of the ancient Roman economy were in fact quite “modernizing” and might have led to a technological revolution under different circumstances, there existed sufficient forces in society hindering the momentum of material progress and rendering an industrial revolution in antiquity far less likely than one in late eighteenth century Britain.

Of all eras of world history, the period of the Roman Empire boasted many of the prerequisites for a commercial and industrial revolution. The Roman world contained some sixty to one hundred million inhabitants living in largely peaceful conditions. A single currency was employed throughout the Mediterranean, disseminated by bankers and professional financiers. The very existence of the Mediterranean as a great central lake facilitated trade and communication, as did the existence of a fine road system overseen by the policing power of the Roman army. Sprawling urban centers like Rome and Alexandria boasted populations in the hundreds of thousands, their populations demanding a steady stream of material products in order to sustain themselves. Great opportunities existed to serve increasingly globalized markets. At the same time, individual merchants enjoyed a set of circumstances marked by relatively free trade, and the capacity to make massive amounts of money by participating in the commercial life of the Empire. In places like Alexandria, intellectual elites cooperated to pioneer potentially world-changing technologies like Hero’s rudimentary steam engine. From the perspective of complex systems theory, all of these forces might have tipped the Roman Empire into a state of industrialization, and the “proto-modernity” of several aspects of the ancient world cannot be denied. As I suggested earlier, the world of the poleis is where institutional “modernity” was born and then refined and extended to the West by the Romans.

Nevertheless, several factors existed rendering an industrial revolution unlikely—the high Roman Empire was an era of equilibrium and eventually stagnation in world affairs. All of the following elements, from the perspective of a computer simulation, would lower the probability of progress and raise the probability of stagnation.

The language required to describe and conceptualize economic growth was relatively rudimentary. The cumbersome system of Roman numerals rendered mathematical calculations arduous and difficult, hindering the development of practices like double-entry bookkeeping, which is virtually unattested in antiquity. At the same time, ancient manuals on the field of “economics” usually emphasized the importance of maintaining the self-sufficiency of plantations, with expenditures kept lower than income. This stands in stark contrast to the later emphases of early modern economic theorists, who advocated catering to the rules of supply and demand to maximize fiscal profits. Ancient economic theorists downplayed the desirability of investment in trade, which was seen as inherently riskier than pooling resources in real estate.

There existed fundamental bias among the most politically powerful classes toward manual labor, commercial investment, and applied technology. Finley exhaustively categorizes these trends in his famous books on the ancient economy. While modern critics are correct to point out that these conservative biases were not necessarily universally felt in Roman society, their existence among the classes of society with the greatest ability to invest in new material resources surely acted at least in part against the chances for industrialization. In antiquity, slaves, freedmen, and non-citizens were responsible for most economic activity. The political powerlessness of these groups is remarkably conspicuous, particularly when their situation is compared to that of their counterparts in the Middle Ages; in medieval Florence, for example, membership in a trade guild was a prerequisite for political participation in the state.

In the late Republic, free enterprise and what Weber called “merchant capitalism” were at their height. Limited liability joint stock companies even existed in the form of conglomerates of entrepreneurs who pooled resources to win the rights to tax farm various provinces. In the early Roman Empire, however, there existed an increasing preference for the use of appointed officials for such activities, and the legal underpinnings of corporate cooperation failed to further develop. Thus, there existed no overlap between the era of the greatest commercial sophistication and freedom (the late Republic) and the era of greatest economic expansion and opportunity (the early Empire).

There existed several bars to the application of new technologies. While current archeological work admittedly points to the widespread implementation of certain technologies (windmills, etc.), there existed no patent law in Roman antiquity to spur on technological innovation. In fact, narratives exist of Roman emperors actively discouraging technological progress for fear that mechanization would result in unemployment, and hence social instability. For all of its revolutionary potential, Hero’s steam engine was viewed more as a toy than an implement of social change. Techniques of metallurgy stagnated in an era of universal peace, as did the need to create new weaponry for the sake of a competitive edge over enemies. At the same time, the omnipresence of slavery similarly served to deter investment in new machinery, since investments in slaves and real-estate promised the safest returns.

The very unity of the Mediterranean world stifled innovation. Consider the example of Roman Lusitania. Merchants in that province had access to the entirety of the Mediterranean basin to sell their wares. In the Middle Ages, however, geographical fragmentation denied the state of “Portugal” a Mediterranean coast. Thus, merchants were forced to turn to the Atlantic Ocean in hopes of finding new products and markets, spurring the development of radically new shipping technologies. No such incentives existed in the unified, relatively non-competitive world of Roman antiquity.

The existence of amphitheaters drained economic resources, particularly in the West (which, interestingly, had far more amphitheaters than the Roman East, which was traditionally more economically vigorous than the West and survived much longer). Rather than investing in economically beneficial infrastructure, local elites poured money into the celebration of gladiatorial games, importing professional fighters and exotic beasts to satiate the interests of the populace. However, all of these resources were ultimately wasted despite spurring limited economic activity. In the same way, the existence of grain doles similarly retarded economic growth, as major metropolitan centers invested most of their resources on defense and feeding the unproductive urban populace, who remained in a permanent state of economic non-productivity. In my opinion, these historical forces provide some validity to Weber’s insistence on the “parasitic” character of ancient cities, which generally consumed resources from the countryside rather than producing materials to be redistributed to suburban markets (though exceptions admittedly existed to this rule.) At the same time, though, the Romans’ emphasis on the importance of the distribution of the bounty of the government back to the people and the emperor’s promotion of fun on public holidays were, in my view, admirable features of their culture, if only the spectacles didn’t cause so much pain and heartbreak to their victims.

There existed virtually no notion of “historical progress” in the Roman Empire. Although many at least sensed that the order of the Roman world was preferable to barbarism, major historians advocated cyclical views of history, or the notion that the true “Golden Age” was in the distant past, before urbanization and the use of tools corrupted humankind’s primordial naïveté. With the civilization at large devoid of the sense that the world could actively be improved over time through the evolution and application of radical new technologies, the momentum of increasing material progress was actively retarded.

According to my model of the Roman Empire as a complex system existing on the edge of chaos, ancient civilization was able to survive for a remarkably long period of time at a “critical point” of great material prosperity so long as the army remained loyal to the emperor and the citizens of the realm agreed to pay the taxes required to support its infrastructure. In terms of the punctuated equilibrium of progress, it was an era of equilibrium after one of growth. Broadly speaking, the Empire can be compared to a snowball that could maintain its structural consistency so long as it continued to roll, but begins to melt when its journey down the hill comes to an end. In the same way, so long as the Roman army was able to incorporate new territory into the Empire and redistribute booty in the form of slaves, booty, and various forms of material resources, the civilization was able to subsist at the edge of chaos despite its lack of internal momentum toward industrialization. However, once the civilization’s territorial growth came to an end, the costs of maintaining the defenses of the sprawling realm proved to be immense, and the system became remarkably unstable. As instability led to the emergence of chaos, efforts by the emperors to preserve the structure of their civilization resulted (as Tainter suggests) in diminishing returns on investments in social complexity. Why is this the case? In the long term, chaos theory suggests that the system was bound to collapse into new states of less sophisticated equilibria unless the momentum of scientific and technological progress overtook the abiding forces of stagnation and “decadence” mentioned throughout the dissertation. The story of the “decline and fall of the Roman Empire” is actually a tale of turbulent dynamics upsetting the ancient society and resulting in a new homeostasis similar to the old order in some ways, yet fundamentally distinct in others.

According to world systems theory, the fall of the Roman Empire cannot be understood as an isolated phenomenon. The third to seventh centuries AD were in fact marked by cascading patterns of turbulence throughout all of Eurasia unleashed by the outbreak of plague, environmental degradation, and aggressive migratory patterns by individuals formerly content (or compelled) to exist on the fringes of civilization. After the period of the Antonine Plague, emperors became increasingly reliant on marginalized ethnic groups and finally barbarian hordes to man the Roman army. This resulted in a massive influx of foreigners into the empire with only marginal allegiances to the state, ever ready to resort to violence for the sake of promoting the interests of a local warlord. At the same time, as uncivilized tribes across Eurasia spilled into each other’s territory, barbarian groups saw their ancestral lands taken from them and were compelled to venture into new countries. The prosperous civilized territories surrounding the Mediterranean seemed increasingly attractive to such immigrants. Migrations were associated with the sacking of major urban centers, terrorizing the local populace into retreating into the countryside and destroying the traditional bases of Roman tax collection.

Chaos theory suggests that the onset of chaos produces more information than a stable state of equilibrium; for example, each new number in the numerical pattern 121212121… represents less new information than each new number in the chaotic, seemingly random series 173749724… As the Roman Empire slipped over the edge of chaos, the central government began to be flooded with information concerning the destruction of cities, the emergence of rebel groups, military disasters, the migratory patterns of barbarians, and the outbreak of diseases. Even as it was burdened by this information overload, it began to lose internal consistency as civil war swept through the empire and loyalty to the central government became increasingly divided. Unlike the situation in the Han civilization, Roman dynasties were usually helmed by individual emperors with a great deal of personal power as opposed to the largely ceremonial kings of China, ruled by a narrow oligarchy of Confucian bureaucrats. As the empire slid into civil war, the individual charisma of the Roman emperors was increasingly undermined, and the relatively feeble bureaucratic institutions of the central government proved incapable of juggling the dilemmas at hand. To make matters worse, as increasing numbers of would-be emperors attempted to finance their campaigns and new sources of precious metals dried up, massive inflation began to undermine the economy, and several areas of the empire reverted to bartering and trade-in-kind. While traditional historians often point to individual elements of this chaotic breakdown as an explanatory cause for the transformation of Roman society, chaos theory instead suggests that they are all fundamentally interconnected symptoms of a movement over the edge of chaos after a long homeostatic/stable period of self-organized criticality.

The leaders of the Roman Empire were confronted by major problems, and they were in no position to stem the tide of chaos despite their best efforts to do so. Just as chaos theory predicts, however, the system did not collapse entirely overnight, but began to re-solidify at new points of equilibrium according to the creation of new party-systems tending toward bipolar duality. Thus, the dictatorial Roman Dominate replaced the relatively gentle rule of the Principate, as military figures attempted to cement the structure of the collapsing society by imposing mandatory liturgies on local aristocracies who had once given freely in a process of euergetism, requiring children to follow their fathers’ professions, and mandating religious uniformity throughout the empire. This new state of homeostasis, imposed by brute force and driven by an increasingly de-urbanized economy, proved far more precarious than the old order, and unsurprisingly, the system again slid into chaos as the barbarous nations on the fringes of the Roman world created entirely new kingdoms within its borders. A division between East and West after a brief division in four would prove to be abiding.

In 1776, Edward Gibbon famously pioneered the view that Christianity was ultimately a symptom of decadence, and one of the principle causes of the collapse of the Roman Empire. He reasoned that its emphasis on peacefulness and passivity vitiated the ancient martial spirit of the Romans, and that its insistence on non-material causation served to hinder the development of the ancient scientific method. Thus, in the tumultuous third, fourth, and fifth centuries AD, thinkers increasingly turned to un-judicable philosophical debates about the nature of divinity rather than taking steps toward the refinement of the scientific method. Eventually, thought was “canonized” by the government, and discourse shut down altogether, relegated to the realm of “commentary” and “copying.”

There is some truth to this narrative. Yet ultimately, I believe that complex systems theory problematizes these claims, to say nothing of the fact that most of the warlike barbarian hordes who overran the provinces of the Roman West were themselves Christian, rendering the idea that the religion necessarily resulted in a state of martial enervation somewhat non-compelling.

First, I plan to explore the historical forces that gave shape to Christianity in the first place from the perspective of complex systems theory. The “Butterfly Effect” is a fundamental principle of chaos, which stresses the interdependence of the constituent parts of a complex whole, sensitivity to initial conditions, and the potential for cascading effects. On the most basic level, the life and death of Christ, an anonymous carpenter in a backwater of the Roman Empire, had the potential to revolutionize the entire Roman world due to its nature as a complex system sensitive to the Butterfly Effect. At the same time, the emergence of the idea that humans were naturally sinful served to incentivize parents to baptize their children, since the prospect of sprinkling water over an infant represented a low cost when it came to forestalling the possibility of eternal torture in hell. Moreover, in a world marked by widespread poverty, a philosophical system stressing God’s love of the poor was surely an attractive alternative to the official state religion, which accentuated the worship of brute power. As the structures of Roman government fell into increasing disequilibrium following the Antonine Plague of the late second century, the apocalyptic message of Christianity perhaps seemed increasingly instructive, as well as its emphasis on the promise of a better world in the hereafter. Roman culture’s traditional emphasis on exemplarity also likely facilitated the rise of Christianity, as martyrs met their deaths heroically in the face of persecution by the state, ultimately forming a new canon of exemplary figures replacing traditional Roman personae such as Lucretia and Cincinnatus. And the Christians were on to something in their aversion to the ubiquitous violent sexual exploitation permeating ancient society—unfortunately, this intolerance extended toward all elements of human sexuality, throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

In the short term, Gibbon was surely correct that the rise of Christianity led to a loss of momentum in the development of the ancient scientific method due to its emphases on supernatural causation and obedience to the Bible as the literal, unquestionable word of God. However, in the long term, I believe that Christianity in fact represented a major source of power for the West, embodying one of the reasons that the equilibrium of the Middle Ages ultimately metamorphosed into a new and more vigorous state of homeostasis in the Renaissance following a period of chaos in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, ripe for a new era of development in the unfolding of the punctuated equilibrium of discursive progress.

Unlike the situation in the Roman Empire, there existed opportunities for common men and women to become priests and nuns during the Middle Ages, greatly broadening the net when it came to the number of individuals contributing to intellectual discourse. It must be remembered that the possession of great intelligence and even genius is randomly distributed. Consequently, given the nature of ancient demographics, it stands to reason that most great minds were either enslaved or members of severely disadvantaged classes with little access to education. The rise of Christianity began to mitigate this problem, adding more knowledgeable voices to scientific discourse.

During the height of the Roman Empire, the greatest intellectual achievements associated with scientific development were associated with the Library of Alexandria. Why was this the case? Uniquely, it provided a centralized infrastructure through which scholars could share ideas, research the best writings of the past, and find rewards for new theories. Unfortunately, such centers were few and far between in the Roman world. However, the rise of medieval universities as schools for studying the Bible enabled numerous such centers to come into being in the long run, greatly facilitating the growth of the scientific method. Unlike in the pagan Roman Empire, there existed major incentives to provide access to such centers of learning, as knowledge of the precise Word of God was a prerequisite to enter heaven. At the same time, these centers often specialized in the copying of ancient texts, broadening their dissemination.

The system of Roman education was largely geared toward an education in rhetoric and debate, emphasizing relativity and a lack of absolute truth. At the same time, during the height of the Roman Empire, it was difficult to enjoy a career devoted to the pursuit of science and literature for its own sake unless you came from an especially affluent social background. The growth of Christian centers of learning altered this state of affairs, providing the possibility of education to more members of society (and hence more geniuses) than ever before. The Church’s emphasis on the possibility of the existence of Truth with a capital T coupled with the concomitant study of ancient literature emphasizing the rudiments of the scientific method eventually created a unique synergy paving the way for the achievements of figures such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes.

It seems clear to me that the emergence of Christianity can be explained by complex systems theory as a variation of the unpredictable Butterfly Effect, with the cascading repercussions of Christ’s life and teachings increasingly prevalent throughout all levels of Roman society. As the late Roman Empire succumbed to chaos, the religion’s teachings appeared increasingly attractive to an ever-expanding core conservative group, who proved unwilling to compromise their major beliefs even in the face of widespread persecution. While Gibbon is perhaps correct that in the short term the rise of the religion led to a retardation of the development of the scientific method, in the long term, the presence of the Church in Europe served as a major stimulus toward scientific growth, to say nothing of representing a major step forward when it came to social attitudes toward coming to the aid of the poor and helpless.

Historical periodization is, admittedly, a somewhat arbitrary science—thus, for example, some have even hazarded to suggest that the Classical world ended with the fall of Athens at the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War. In my eyes, however, there is great validity to Henri Pirenne’s thesis that the true end of the ancient world took place after the Battle of Tours in 732 AD, which halted the expansion of Muslim armies into Europe. Modern historians have questioned this thesis, suggesting, for example, that it conceptualizes the Islamic World as an Other. However, from the perspective of complex systems theory, 732 AD represents a significant date marked by the creation of a radically new equilibrium in which the Mediterranean was divided into Western European, Byzantine, and Muslim spheres of influence, and the unified system of currency came to an end; fundamentally speaking, the date marks the final and permanent fragmentation of formerly unified economic zones. Formerly, the most stable points of equilibrium involved either the political unity of the entire Mediterranean basin (the Principate and the Dominate) or a division between the Latin speaking West and the Greek speaking East (the Late Roman Empire). Now, for the first time, the economies of Western Europe would be left to develop on their own in a crucible of geographical fragmentation and intense internal competition. A new equilibrium had come about. The new civilization would ultimately give rise to a dynamic culture which, when pushed out of equilibrium over the edge of chaos by the Black Plague and Great Schism, arrived at a new homeostatic state enriched by the discoveries of the Renaissance and the resources of the Americas, empowering it to set forth and conquer the world.

Modernity and Futurism

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 By the end of the Middle Ages, urbanization had sprung up again and an inter-fragmented collection of nation-states loosely created by the tribes who inhabited the fallen Roman Empire were all competing to make meaningful contributions to ensure cultural survival; many meaningful contributions also came from the Muslim and Chinese worlds as well, who were no less involved in the struggle to survive, understand, and harness and recombine the world’s elements toward utile ends. Yet unlike the unified Chinese empire or the great Muslim monarchies, after the fall of Rome, the West was blessed with an inter-competitive edge much like that of ancient Mesopotamia, when a city-state had to innovate or be annihilated. After the Black Plague, there were so few people left alive in society and institutions had become so inherently weakened that the stage was set for an era of true rebirth. All the ingredients were there for renewed progress: competition, a demand for new elites and experts, the necessity of welcoming of new voices to the table, and higher wages for the living. Now, progress began to quicken, and the development of steel weaponry and maritime navigation made possible the discovery and exploitation of the New World. Descartes improved upon Aristotle, and the experimental method was eventually articulated and led to the possibility of Newton finally answering Parmenides’ questions about how limits and infinity should be conceptualized.

On a macro scale, the economic history of the West is until the nineteenth century largely the story of a loss of precious metals to the East in return for luxury items, a trend first undermined by the discovery of the New World, and then finally put to rest in the nineteenth century Opium Wars. The eventual emergence of full fledged European capitalism proved particularly productive to the development of new technologies. In the midst of intense competition, there existed major incentives to produce wares quickly, differentiate them, and deliver them to market more rapidly than competitors, all of which would be facilitated by more efficient productive technologies. In the Roman Empire, despite the intensity of urbanization, categorical bars existed to the development of such technologies. Max Weber’s model of “merchant capitalism” is particularly revealing, because it suggests that commercial agents had incentives to ensure that local production remained rudimentary so that there would continue to exist increasing demand for foreign products unable to be manufactured closer to home; this state of affairs was undermined in the capitalist age, when the political fragmentation of Europe rendered the geographical scope of merchants’ activities much smaller. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, England had twice as many people as Rome, huge international markets, knowledge of advanced science, and a particularly conducive environment to the exchange of free capital. Thus, the probability of an Industrial Revolution was much greater than in Roman antiquity. The forces working against Roman industrialization would ultimately render the “critical point” of its equilibrium on the edge of chaos increasingly precarious. In a sense, then, economic stagnation represents the heart of Roman decadence.

We are now in the midst of an era of great scientific development. In terms of the punctuated equilibrium of progress, we have all of the ingredients suggesting that we are neither in decline nor at an equilibrium, but in the midst of a rise—an era like the golden age of Athens, or Augustan Rome, or the Renaissance.

  1. We are transitioning into a new age of metal—the Silicon Age. The ability to process information and enhance the human body with computers will increase the potential for more and more people in society to enjoy sources of utility. This will inherently lead to more and more voices joining discourse, and more meaningful contributions over time.
  2. For the first time in history, women and non-elite males are being welcomed by academic, political, and economic institutions. This will inherently lead to better discourse and more progress over time for all of the reasons brought up throughout this paper: more geniuses will now contribute.
  3. There exist many new inventions every year, which is indicative of a high degree of technical innovation and experimentation.
  4. Wars are not being fought between dying superpowers. The era from the Boxer Rebellion to the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of crisis in which nuclear weapons might have annihilated material progress and shown its dark side, temporarily halting progress (but perhaps, like the Black Death, enabling the creation of progress in the future as the survivors experimented with new technologies to live on in the wreckage of the earth.) At the moment, the probability of major metropolises being destroyed by nuclear weapons is much lower than it was at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I define Futurism as the belief that close alignment should be forged between political, economic, and academic institutions to harness the most progress possible in as short a time as possible to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, particularly in the form of advancements in medicine and the development of cyborg technology, cloning, and genetic engineering. In the face of the threat of the “singularity” and a destabilization of the superpowers imperiling the world through nuclear war, Futurism is the only hope for harnessing the exponential power of progress for good rather than toward self-destruction in the form of the retardation of progress.

Concluding Thoughts: Simulations and Falsifiable Hypotheses About Ambiguous Questions of Causation

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 A major advantage of the theoretical model proposed in this paper is that it lends itself to the creation of “simulations” to explore open-ended hypotheses about causation, which is always a matter of a storm of different probabilistic influences, some more direct and major than others (in other words, certain forces raise the probability that an event will take place more directly than others). Assume that the unfolding of Roman political history from the Principate to the barbarian successor states represents the evolution of a complex system sensitive to initial conditions and the Butterfly Effect; it was one in which individuals engaged in a long term zero-sum game for power expressed in the form of a limited number of political and cultural offices and institutions, with conflicts represented by battles such as those mentioned in the (imperfect) historical record.

We will consider two hypotheses. The first is whether gay sex caused the Roman Empire to fall; the second is whether Christianity was the culprit. First we must consider how to model the questions at hand by constructing crude and imperfect simulations of history drawn from quantitative data when possible; next we need to justify what empirical results (what relationship between quantifiable variables) we would expect when examining the outcome of the simulation if a given hypothesis were true; then to say what we would expect if it were false; next what we ourselves hypothesize; and finally, how quantitative data drawn from the relationship between variables in the simulation sheds light on our assumptions, or defies them.

In the case of the first hypothesis, compose a list of years, listing battles per year. Also, search a database of literature (including legal literature) for mentions of gay sex. If it were probabilistically true that homosexuality largely precipitated the fall of Rome, the least I would expect is that the decades which saw the most battles would be associated with the most surviving mentions of individuals described as engaging in gay sex, and also the most surviving laws permitting institutions like, for example, gay marriage, relative to times of internal stability (measured by a lower frequency of battles per year). Yet if it were probabilistically unlikely that non-normative expressions of sexuality played a decisive role in corrosive social change, I would expect little alignment or even reverse alignment—individuals described in the historical record as having gay sex would be distributed evenly across the years, or their numbers might even decline as the empire entered into its most violent phases.

Of course, neither correlation necessarily guarantees causation—for example, perhaps as the empire declined, more religious hysteria arose leading more people to be falsely accused and demonized for homosexuality, generating an artificial rise in the historical record of how many times it is mentioned in surviving literature but saying nothing about its actual social prevalence or why society was collapsing. However, the specific information that the number of mentions of homosexual behavior declined in the final period of the greatest violence would be very problematic for the first hypothesis, because it would suggest not only that most instances of homosexual behavior come statistically from the late Republic and early Empire when there were the fewest battles and the civilization was strongest, but that the era of the final collapse was actually one of cultural repression toward gay sex, since one would expect that with all else being equal, the number of mentions should be equally distributed across the centuries, with highs and lows in the historical record reflecting various degrees of either cultural permissiveness or paranoia. (I actually hypothesize that the highest number of mentions of gay sex would come from the High Roman Empire, when the civilization was flourishing. Then, after an artificial rise associated with the rise of the hegemony of Christianity and discourse hysterically demonizing gay sex, laws banning it would lower the numbers in the final centuries of the Western Roman Empire, thus vitiating evidence for the first hypothesis.)

The second hypothesis made famous by Gibbon is even more challenging to model. Like the first simulation, we might compose a list of years, examine the number of battles mentioned as occuring per decade, and see if the most mentions of Christianity correlate with the years containing the highest numbers of battles. However, just as last time, there would be little revelatory information even if the number of battles correlated strongly with the most mentions of Christianity—after all, perhaps the civilization became Christian coincidentally while it was collapsing or as a response to the horror of the collapse, and this led to a rise in the number of mentions, saying nothing in either case about causation. However, just as with the first hypothesis, the specific information that mentions of Christianity declined during the time of the most intense violence might prove problematic for the theory, though it could also be a function of other forces as well, like so many people perishing, there was little literature produced during the final death throes of the culture. (I actually hypothesize that the data this time round would speciously vindicate Gibbon, with the most mentions of Christianity found during times of the most violence at the end of the Western Empire.)

In order to model the question more closely, we would need recourse to a wider comparison. Even if Christianity, which was unique to the Roman Empire and its environs, caused Rome to fall, we would expect it to have no effect on the history of another similar directly contemporary Iron Age empire such as, for example, Han China. Hence, if the hypothesis were true that it was Christianity that had the largest probabilistic influence on the collapse of Roman civilization of all other possible factors, we would expect it to have more of an effect on the outbreak of battles and their locations than, for example, Pan-Eurasian forces that might have affected both empires, such as the onset of plague or the migration of barbarian tribes or the widespread adoption of a new technology. If the hypothesis were false and Christianity’s rise had less to do with the fall of Rome than Pan-Eurasian factors, we would expect those forces to have more of an effect on the outbreak of battles. But how can all of this be modeled?

Imagine we were looking at a map of the Roman Empire and Han China, divided into many quadrants.

These are the elements that would be tracked:

1) the locations of iron deposits and other natural resources that can be pinned down with a fair degree of accuracy, including the locations of major mines (these are, of course, static)

2) The locations of recorded battles (these move about, and are thus dynamic)

3) The location of metropolises, major roads, and other geographical features (Mediterranean sea and the Rhine-Danube frontiers; major Christian centers, etc.)

4) The borders of the empire

I tentatively hypothesize that times of plague, rebellion, and civil war should show statistically significant changes in the relationships between the static and dynamic data sets as such periods would lend themselves to efforts to seize control of local mineral deposits and resource-distribution-centers.  By contrast, in times of relative internal stability, the Rhine-Danube frontier and the walled frontiers of China would be more likely to attract dynamic movement in response to external pressure along the borders. Permanent changes in spatial relationships would suggest watershed moments in Roman history. (Imagine, for example, if after a certain date battles suddenly never take place within a 50 mile radius of an area that once suffered from yearly violence.) The upshot of all this is that using the right mathematical tools, the relationship between these variables can be systematically evaluated, and we can investigate what various causal forces (internal or external) seem to have been primarily responsible for violence at different points in time.

Consider the question of Christianity’s influence on the fall of Rome. If it were true that Christianity was a major formative factor, we might expect major Christian centers to attract battles—this might be, for example, the result of sectarian violence between rival heresies, or barbarians sacking passive religious populations. We might hypothesize that the number of battles within a 50 kilometer radius of major Christian centers would rise over time as the empire collapsed, and we might even expect such centers to attract more battles relative to pagan cities untouched by Christianity or the fifty mile radius along the Rhine and Danube frontiers. By contrast, if it were not the case that Christianity were a major factor, we might see no such increase over time as we studied the decade by decade data. We might guess that the number of battles named in the historical record would remain highest within a 50 mile radius of the length of the Rhine and Danube, since the primary focus was on keeping out barbarians. (I actually hypothesize that the data this time round would again champion Gibbon, with the most battles found around cities, which were—albeit coincidentally—also Christian centers, since it was primarily an urban phenomenon.)

In order to disprove Gibbon, we might propose a new question—whether Christian centers or, for example, mineral deposits were greater probabilistic attractors of violence. If the urge to control mines was the primary determiner of where conflicts arose, we would expect the number of battles in the vicinity of mines (within a fifty kilometer radius) to rise during decades of turbulence, and we would expect the battles around Christian sites to either decline in number or show no statistically significant rise or fall at all. (In this case, I actually hypothesize that there would be no relationship between the locations of mines and battles at all; the number of battles in such locations would not rise over time relative to other indicators like whether an event is within 50 kilometers of a Christian center or 50 kilometers along the Rhine and Danube, since the late Roman emperors resorted to adulterating their coinage and hiring mercenaries.)

Our last resort might be to add Han China into the mix so that we could begin to see the limits of Gibbon’s view by considering Christianity’s impact versus that of pan-Eurasian forces, like the outbreak of plague, the spread of new technologies, and the migration of barbarian tribes. Comparing the two empires decade by decade, I would measure the number of battles per decade and whether they were within 50 kilometers of the borders of each empire (in the case of Rome, the Rhine-Danube frontier.) During times of internal instability, metropolitan centers and mineral deposits might be expected to attract battles more than the old frontiers, which are disintegrating (presumably because armed groups want access to the goods in the cities and countryside.) If Pan Eurasian forces were the largest probabilistic influence on the fall of Rome, I would expect the empires to both show an increase in the number of battles outside of the 50 mile radius along the frontier zones during the same period—the shape of the graphs (with more internal battles rather than frontier battles over time) would be expected to have the same shape over almost the same time frame. If a cultural force unique to Rome such as Christianity caused the fall, by contrast, I would expect no such relationship to exist between the datasets of the two empires, separated by thousands of kilometers.

Of course, any similarity or difference might be purely coincidental. Nevertheless, finding that both Rome and China were undergoing turbulence at the same time (measured by the number of battles in internal regions rising, to say nothing of the number of battles rising in general) would provide strong evidence for the view that Pan-Eurasian forces had a major formative effect, which itself undercuts the idea that the rise of Christianity was the vitiating factor. (This time, I expect that Gibbon’s argument would be undermined—turbulence in both Rome and China was probably caused at least in part by the same migratory phenomena affecting all Eurasia; in the language of this chapter, it was sparked by the complexity of an artificial border with a high degree of organization on one side and a low degree on the other collapsing into a less chaotic state of stable, simpler homeostasis with cultural similarity and less political sophistication on each side of the barrier. A heap of stones, however aesthetic, is no long-term solution to socio-economic and cultural division between neighbors in any time or place.)

 

[1] In the eyes of biographers like Plutarch, Mark Antony’s decision to divorce his Roman wife in favor of taking up with his Egyptian mistress and then dividing up Roman territories to their illegitimate children together might stand as the epitome of such forces in action. (Of course, from his perspective, he was only restoring traditional Ptolemaic territories to their rightful owners and leaving the Senate to govern Rome rather than imposing his will as a dictator upon it.)

[2] Quoted by James Warren, “All the Philosopher King’s Men,” Harper’s MagazineFeb, 2000. Accessed at http://harpers.org/archive/2000/02/all-the-philosopher-kings-men/

[3] See https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/not-exactly-edward-gibbon?utm_term=.hhZqb9xD5#.xd8nKZpE5

[4] See www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/8438210/Fall-of-Roman-Empire-caused-by-contagion-of-homosexuality.html

[5] E.g., while one might not be a Marxist, applying a Marxist lens to questions about social change can help to illuminate specific dynamics associated with, for instance, class struggle. This is why so much of the work of people like Freud remains interesting and relevant despite the fact that few psychiatrists today subscribe strictly to his specific model of the human spirit; applying his model, however bizarre it sometimes appears, can help to emphasize and clarify the role of forces like family interaction in early childhood and repressed memories in shaping character. Ideally, scholars should use a variety of thematic lenses to examine a subject from different vantage points; many, however, stick strictly to their favorite set of glasses, stubbornly ignoring the microscopes and binoculars of the world and complaining that such apparatuses blur vision because they cannot learn to refocus their vision. The lens of complexity theory accentuates the role of the unexpected, the contingent, and the probabilistic on history.

[6] José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses : Authorised Translation from the Spanish (New York: W. W. Norton & co., 1932).

[7] Discourse becomes impoverished in the absence of diversity for two reasons—first, geniuses who were born anything but elite males are doomed to a life where they cannot actualize their potential; second, the greater the diversity of voices and lived experiences at the table, the greater and more powerful the synergy can be created as unique perspectives are applied to age-old problems.

[8] In the language of this paper, during periods of “turbulence,” a situation envisioned by Tainter can readily arise in which individual efforts by the government to micro-manage a devolving state of affairs in the face of rapidly changing environmental conditions and information-overload can simply provoke more devolution.

[9] Shades of Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind.

[10] This is where Foucault’s greatness as a historian is most apparent, because he understood this phenomenon intuitively.

[11] Interestingly, after the Bronze Age stagnation, there was a temporary dip into chaos and misery at the onset of the Iron Age when barbarous tribes armed with iron ransacked civilization. Eventually, however, a long and productive equilibrium was eventually reached.

[12]

The Meaning of Roman History to Britain, Italy, and Germany on the Eve of the Second World War

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Yesterday, on June fourth, 1944, Rome fell to American and Allied troops. The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands. One up and two to go! It is perhaps significant that the first of these capitals to fall should have the longest history of all of them. The story of Rome goes back to the time of the foundations of our civilization. We can still see there monuments of the time when Rome and the Romans controlled the whole of the then known world. That, too, is significant, for the United Nations are determined that in the future no one city and no one race will be able to control the whole of the world… But Rome is of course more than a military objective. Ever since before the days of the Caesars, Rome has stood as a symbol of authority. Rome was the Republic. Rome was the Empire. Rome was and is in a sense the Catholic Church, and Rome was the capital of a United Italy. Later, unfortunately, a quarter of a century ago, Rome became the seat of Fascism — one of the three capitals of the Axis… Italy cannot grow in stature by seeking to build up a great militaristic empire. Italians have been overcrowded within their own territories, but they do not need to try to conquer the lands of other peoples in order to find the breath of life. Other peoples may not want to be conquered.[1](Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

The thematic content of this radio address by President Roosevelt speaks to the remarkable breadth and occasional notoriety of the legacy of the ancient Romans among their heirs, students and emulators. Over the course of Rome’s long history, the city experienced so many diverse phases of development that cognizance of contemporary parallels to at least segments of its story served to enrich the Western imagination ever since the twilight of antiquity in the fifth century AD. As Roosevelt explained, “Rome” in fact epitomized many paradigms at once. It was, in turn, a monarchy overthrown by Senators demanding the right to self-determination; a Republic corrupted by civil war; a universal Empire unconquerable in battle; a perverse culture that oversaw the enslavement of millions of people and the exhibition of lurid spectacles that disgrace its legacy to this day; a magnificent civilization that tottered and fell; the spiritual mother of Byzantine Orthodoxy and Latin Catholicism; an insistent reverie in the minds of would be Caesars from Charlemagne to Mussolini; and a living nightmare in the hearts of their victims.

We shall see that for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Roman history was endlessly adapted and reinterpreted through the prism of contemporary political beliefs about race, empire, and military might. For the British, the civilization’s rise often inspired a sense of pride in the value of struggling against all odds to maintain a polyglot global empire, and Rome’s fate served as a reminder that Civilization succumb to barbarism in the absence of proper vigilance. For the Italians, the nationalist unity of Augustan Italy (27 BC-14 AD) and the glory of the period’s art, poetry, and political precedents served as vital thematic inspirations for the development of Fascist doctrine as we know it (the name “Fascism” itself was of course a reference to the bundles of rods and axes grasped by Roman lictors, symbolic of the authority of magistrates to inflict absolute punishment in the name of the law.) Finally, at the hands of German propagandists, the fall of Rome was portrayed not as the result of barbarian invasions from Teutonic lands, but rather the inevitable consequence of infiltration by Jews and other provincial peoples flooding the supposedly Aryan hinterland of the civilization and weakening its very genetic fabric.

Considering the uses and abuses of Roman imagery in the first half of the twentieth century, it seems remarkable that references to the ancient civilization continued to enrich the propaganda of Axis and Allied combatants alike. Although Britain was once conquered by the Romans and Italy was its mortal enemy in the Second World War, references to the valor of ancient Roman culture were continually spoken with pride by the leaders of a civilization that found itself at the heart of an empire even larger than that of the Caesars. Though Rome ultimately faltered militarily and was conquered by Gothic hordes, Mussolini and his cadre aggressively insisted that the new Italian Empire was the very embodiment of the ideals of Augustan Rome, Vergil’s predictions of eternal glory overshadowing the unsavory reality that the civilization ultimately collapsed upon itself. And despite the fact that Germany was never a lasting province of the Roman Empire and that Northern European warriors were in fact the very men who sacked the metropolises of the Empire and propelled Europe into the Dark Ages, even Hitler and his entourage could not resist grandiloquent comparisons between their Reich and the Latin Empire. The twin facts that Roman history is so diverse and that the study of its language and culture served as the foundation for classical educations throughout virtually every nation in Europe likely resulted in the abiding popularity of references to the ancient culture even among enemy nations whose people had historically served as Rome’s victims and destroyers.

The Importance of Roman Imagery to Victorian and Early Twentieth Century Britain

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For nearly three hundred years Britain, reconciled to the Roman system, enjoyed in many respects the happiest, most comfortable, and most enlightened times its inhabitants have had…In this period, almost equal to that which separates us from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, well-to-do persons in Britain lived better than they ever did until late Victorian times… there was law; there was order; there was peace; there was warmth; there was food, and a long-established custom of life…To be a citizen of Rome was to be a citizen of the world, raised upon a pedestal of unquestioned superiority above barbarians or slaves.[2] (Winston Churchill)

The preceding Churchillian encomium portrays Britannia under the sway of the Pax Romana as a sort of progressive wonderland. The statesman explicitly calls the era “most enlightened” and suggests that, for the wealthy at least, the vita bona was unparalleled until the late nineteenth century. Churchill does not consider evidence that even the Georgian era was likely far more prosperous than antiquity, with luxuries made more widely available and basic goods cheaper than ever before in the thematic shadow of a sophisticated capitalistic structure, to say nothing of the benefits of improved medicine for rich and poor alike.[3] But the memory of Rome had always been associated with dazzling cultural heights, and the art of showering hyperbolic praise on the civilization boasted a lively tradition in English letters stretching to Gibbon and beyond. By the time of the outbreak of the Second World War, the glorification of ancient Roman imperialism as a noble, civilizing force coupled with an appreciation for the discipline required to maintain the scattered Empire were deeply engrained mainstays in the English educational system. Celebrated Britons lionized the ancient Romans and proudly compared their multi-racial, multi-national empire with its two thousand year old counterpart. Only after the First World War did a sense of ambivalence regarding the violence of Roman imperialism begin to come, subtly, into play in certain intellectual circles.

Writing of the pervasive influence of Roman classics on British education, Churchill declared that “not without pride” would the Romans discover that knowledge of Latin was necessary if one wished to enter the “famous universities.”[4] Influential educational theorists of the nineteenth century such as Thomas Arnold emphasized the importance of inculcating students with a love of ancient writers, also accentuating thoroughgoing training in the nuances of Classical philology; the discipline and confidence required to navigate the complex twists and turns of Latin syntax was said to be character forming. Criticism of the virtual deification of Classics at the expense of pragmatic sciences was voiced since the 1860s, but until the aftermath of the Second World War (and perhaps even beyond it, to the 1960s), it was widely believed by individuals perhaps self-consciously justifying their own youthful scholarly efforts that knowledge of Greco-Roman culture would uniquely “open the door to the study of literature and art and all politics, and are the foundation of the humanities; which, finally, are full of high types and examples of great deeds done and noble words said, peculiarly capable of impressing the mind in the impressionable years which mark the transition to adulthood.”[5] Until after the First World War, knowledge of Greek and Latin was required for admission to Oxford and Cambridge, to say nothing of its being essential to the acquisition of academic scholarships. In recognition of this reality, so-called public schools often focused their curriculums on Greco-Roman antiquity, and drilling in Latin formed an abiding if often monotonous tradition at leading institutions at Winchester, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Charterhouse, and Westminster.[6] Knowledge of Latin and years’ worth of drilling in classical authors who sang the praises of Roman imperialism were also necessary for success in the Home Civil Service and Royal Military Academy. In this thematic context, the reverence paid to Rome by myriad British thinkers comes as no surprise.

Although many have written at length on the important of classical Greece to late Victorian British identity, even the arch-Hellenist Frank Turner admits that for long periods of history, Rome somehow clung more insistently to the imagination: “Roman law and literature…dominated Europe’s cultural experience. Roman walls, forts, bridges, baths, theaters, roads, and aqueducts could be found in Britain and across the continent…Even the broad Enlightenment appeal to antiquity had concentrated on Rome.”[7] Though eighteenth century German polymaths such as Winckelmann and Goethe had pioneered renewed enthusiasm for Athenian culture, Rome remained entrenched in the hearts of the British people who, like their ancient colonizers, found themselves a small nation at the center of a multinational, global empire. The notion of the Pax Britannica as a force for good on the world stage was closely modeled on the notion of the Pax Romana as a virtuous predecessor.

 

While eighteenth century French and American authors discovered archetypes worth emulating in the foundational legends of the Roman Republic as they struggled to win popular sovereignty, late nineteenth and early twentieth century British writers found sources of inspiration in the achievements of the autocratic Roman emperors. Writing on “The Imperial Ideal,” Sir John R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, declared in 1883 that “there are many other good things in politics besides liberty,” and that the Romans in particular introduced “the modern brotherhood or loose federation of civilized nations”.[8] Echoing a generation of thinkers who praised their nation’s expansion into tropical climes as an example of the progress of modernism over barbarism, historians such as W. F. Monypenny described Roman expansion as “conquest that ultimately justified itself as a furtherance to civilization.”[9] The Earl of Cromer’s praise in 1910 for the Romans’ talent at integrating foreigners into their empire is also typical of a fawning mindset: “No modern Imperialist nation has… shown powers of assimilation at all comparable to those displayed by the Romans.”[10] Sir Charles Lucas lauded Rome’s racial harmony in particular, theorizing that a homogenous equality existed among all free men of the empire regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. Since slaves and freemen alike were of various colors, slavery itself was said to have contributed to a process of homogenization, drawing people of all ethnicities toward the imperial core, where they would eventually win their freedom and take their place as citizens. These emphases on class, color, and immigration were distinctly Victorian topoi.[11]

In contrast to German scholars who spoke of racial disharmony as the harbinger of Rome’s fall, there thus existed in Britain influential schools of thought that claimed quite the opposite—the strength of the Empire was its multi-national cohesion. Nevertheless, while progressive thinkers might have lauded the Romans for their color blindness, others found in antiquity a model validating the oppression of “barbarian” peoples. The notorious Cecil Rhodes enjoyed repeating the maxim of Marcus Aurelius: “Remember always that you are a Roman.” In fact, when ordering portrait busts of himself, he is said to have waxed lyrically upon similarities between his likeness and certain statues of Roman emperors.[12] For better or worse, Rome provided a model of despotic rule seemingly justified by the necessity of civilizing “barbarian” peoples, including, ironically, the ancestors of the British themselves. Nevertheless, a willingness to blindly emulate the methods of the Roman should not be overstated. In reference to Britain’s relationship with the English-speaking people of the dominions, historian Raymond Betts suggested that the Roman Empire was not worthy of comparison, since it was something “tyrannical and exploitive;” countries like Canada and Australia were predominantly inhabited by individuals of European stock, and there existed a sense that their people would not endure tyranny for long.[13] C. P. Lucas’s Greater Rome and Greater Britain (1912) is also typical of this trend when he writes at length about the difference between the administration of English-speaking dominions and tropical colonies—a constitutional framework is appropriate for the former, and paternalism for the latter.

Unfortunately, in the racially charged context of European men ruling over indigenous societies, some scholars were proud to look to Roman forbearers to justify their political control of other races. In 1883, the lecturer John Robert Seeley proclaimed that although Britain won its empire informally, there suddenly existed a moral duty to rule and civilize India, cautioning his audience to emulate the ancient Romans in their discipline but to resist their cardinal failure of developing tyranny at home as a response to expansion abroad.[14] The bureaucratic administration of India was in the hands of individuals steeped in myths of noble Romans civilizing barbarian hordes. So called “all-rounders” educated in the Classics, such as the Viceroy Lord Curzon, wrote of “the living influence of the empire of Rome” on the Indian subcontinent.[15] Sir James Stephen spoke boastfully at Eaton of the Indian empire being even “more populous, more amazing, and more beneficent” than that of Rome.[16] Indian Civil Service candidates in the mid-nineteenth century were required to be tested in a manner “not less severe than those examinations by which the highest classical distinctions are awarded at Oxford and Cambridge.”[17] For this reason, a grounding in the study of classical antiquity was held in common by most administrators. Proficiency in English language and literature was worth 1500 marks, Math 1000 marks, and Greek and Latin 750 marks each; Sanskirt and Arabic, though utile languages in India, were only worth 375 marks each, later raised to 500. The Royal Titles Act of 1876 established Victoria as “Regina et Imperatrix” over India, cementing the strange bond between the titles of ancient Roman despotism and those of British power over the Subcontinent.[18] For all of the crassly propagandistic abuses of Roman history at the hands of her Fascist enemies, Britain too thus had many sons and daughters who were willing to avoid the psychic repercussions of their aggressive imperial actions against other nations by imagining themselves clad in togas.

 

On the eve of the sobering horrors of the First World War and directly following that struggle, British scholars began to examine Roman history in an increasingly cynical and wry manner. Artists like Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves began to challenge the supposedly glorious images of Roman legions triumphing over savages, age-old motifs immortalized in the poetry of Horace, Martial, and other ancient masters. For example, Kipling’s poem “A Pict Song” begins:

“Rome never looks where she treads, always her heavy hooves fall on our stomachs, our hearts, or our heads; and Rome never heeds when we bawl. Her sentries pass on—that is all, and we gather behind them in hordes, and plot to reconquer the Wall, with only our tongues for our swords.”[19]

Now, for the first time, the authorial voice identifies himself with the victims of imperialism rather than its agents. By the same token, Wilfred Owen famously challenged Horace’s claim that it was dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, calling it “the old lie” in a poem written between 1917 and 1918. By the time that Graves published I, Claudius in 1934, romantic images of the imperial household were completely set aside, and the rulers of Rome were portrayed as prototypes of the corrupt, fascist leaders of the era before World War Two. In The Roman Revolution, the great classicist Ronald Syme wrote: “When a party has triumphed in violence and seized control of the State, it would be plain folly to regard the new government as a collection of amiable and virtuous characters. Revolution demands and produces sterner characters.”[20]

Nevertheless, for all this increasing awareness of the imperfection of ancient Roman government, the civilization somehow retained its attractive luster for decades following the Second World War. In the words of Churchill, a Roman “would have the same sense (as an Englishman) of belonging to a society which was threatened, and to an imperial rule which had passed its prime. He would have the same gathering fears of some sudden onslaught by barbarian forces…”[21] In victory or defeat, Roman precedents provided poignant counterpoints to the English experience.

Augustan Rome and the Origins of Italian Fascism

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Rome is our point of departure and our point of reference: it is our symbol, or if you will, our myth.”[22] (Benito Mussolini)

In 1932, an American professor of Classics by the name of Kenneth Scott wrote rather effusively in the “Journal of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South” comparing Mussolini to Augustus:

“It is an interesting coincidence that Italy’s premier is a journalist, a master of language, in speech or written word, a dramatist, a man who in spite of manifold duties can find time to write an autobiography and memoirs of his experiences in the World War. He is carrying on a tradition not only of Augustus, but of such emperors with literary talent as Claudius, Nero, Hadrian, or Marcus Aurelius and Julian.”[23] Mussolini also said: ‘Italy has had enough of liberty for a while. What it needs now is law. The people want peace, work, bread, roads, and water.’”[24]

Before the catastrophes of the Second World War forever disgraced the memory of the Fascist movement, an understanding of the phenomenon as a classicizing manifestation of hyper-nationalism seemed to many observers a viable, even vibrant alternative to the threat of popular communist revolution. In his creation of an ultra-patriotic state fuelled by propaganda, Benito Mussolini and his crew mined Roman history for all it was worth to associate the glory of their regime with the triumphs of their nation’s ancient culture. Symbols of Roman authority abounded in the nascent movement: the ceremonial rods and axes called fasces which gave the movement its name, the stiff-armed Roman salute, colorful imperial standards, and eagles with outstretched wings. Appeals to Romanitas, the “quality of being like a Roman,” were key to the nationalist agenda, the necessity of providing “peace, work, bread, roads, and water” calling to mind the achievements of the ancient Caesars.[25] The potential allure of liberalism and Marxism were dramatically overpowered by the state’s ability to command the people’s fanatical loyalties. Fascism was designed to bring about a permanent change in the European imagination, ascribing value to individual life only insofar as it was committed to service and obedience to the state. Tellingly, the fact that ancient Rome ultimately eviscerated itself with civil wars and over-expansion had no place in Mussolini’s appeals to the past.

The so-called First Party Congress held in Rome in 1921 helped to cement the popularity of Fascism as a movement calling for efficiency and militarism as an antidote to the creeping contagion of Bolshevism.[26] By 1922, Il Duce already had enough support among the hoi polloi to march upon Rome, self-consciously following in the footsteps of demagogues such as Sulla and Caesar before him. In the wake of the increasing spread of Fascist doctrine, the abstraction characteristic of Italian futurism in the arts was largely set aside for a return to classicizing motifs. Between 1922 and 1943, the fasces began to be imprinted on posters, bass reliefs, and military paraphernalia, symbolic of collective force; at the same time, statues of eagles, Roman-style military parades, and legionary insignia and standards were all resurrected to cement the power of the nascent state in the hearts of the Italian people, who were longing for greatness again. The spiritual renovation of the state was thus physically expressed through seemingly endless repetition of core motifs; indeed, some have suggested that Roman imagery was aggressively recycled in order to create a sort of brand or logo for the state, inspired by techniques of early twentieth century advertising.[27] It is important to remember that the early movement was not grounded in anti-Semitism; Margherita Sarfatti, an early influence on Fascism, was in fact of Jewish descent, though by 1938, anti-Jewish feeling had begun to taint the ideology. Before this, however, Italian Fascism seemed to many like a process of aestheticizing politics, slapping a classicizing Roman varnish on hyper-patriotism and fanatical commitment to a dictatorial figure.

Comparisons between Mussolini and Augustus were especially prominent. Both men had come to power after a period of civil disorder, and both stood at the center of a revolutionary autocracy built on the embers of what had once been a Republic.[28] Panegyrics by Giuseppe Bottai (the Governor of Rome from 1935-1937) and numerous works by E Balbo repeatedly emphasized similarities between Mussolini and Augustus, even drawing parallels between the first Roman emperor’s Iberian campaigns and the Duce’s support of Franco.[29] Mussolini himself hosted a major exhibition called the Mostra Augustea della Romanita on the 2000th anniversary of Augustus’ birthday, with Giulio Quirino Giglioli appointed to serve as the general director the exhibition.[30] Opened in 1938, an indoor fairground highlighted the historical developments that look place in Augustus’ lifetime, with a second and third series of antechambers devoted to the topics of “architecture and engineering” and “religion and society,” respectively. Meant as a sort of interactive museum, the halls of the exhibition highlighted models, maps, and artifacts charting the growth of the Roman Empire, but tellingly contained virtually nothing extolling the achievements of Senatorial rule or Republican virtue—some particular facets of Roman history were now politically incorrect. In the central room of the exhibit, eerily anticipating Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe in later history, sixteen portraits of Augustus were displayed in repetitive rows, with posters of the monuments of his age set alongside more recent constructions sponsored by Mussolini himself. The exhibition was meant to serve as a great rhetorical exercise in hyperbole, explicitly uniting Fascism and Roman Imperialism as a single, glorious tradition. Hitler enjoyed the exhibition so thoroughly when he came to visit Rome in May of 1938 that he even arranged for a return visit to study the displays in greater detail before the end of his trip.[31]

Until the eighteenth century, readers who were only familiar with Rome through their knowledge of the Classics often found that the city of their imaginations looked very different from the heaps of toppled columns that they actually found there.[32] Spending millions of modern dollars, Mussolini set out to revive the glory of the city’s ruins, often setting up enormous maps beside the renovations portraying the High Roman Empire on one side and the modern Italian Empire on the other. In the classicizing Hall of the Horatii and Curiatii, Mussolini delivered a telling speech on the occasion of the appointment of Filippo Cremonesi as governor of the city in 1925. He said:

“My ideas are clear, my orders are exact, and certain to become concrete reality. Within five years Rome must strike all the nations of the world as a source of wonder: huge, well organized, powerful, as it was at the time of the Augustan Empire. You will continue to free the trunk of the great oak from everything that still clutters it. You will create spaces around the Theater of Marcellus, the Capitol, the Pantheon…Within five years the mass of the Pantheon must be visible from the Piazza Colonna through a large space…The milleniary monuments of our history must loom larger in requisite isolation.”[33]

Within less than a decade, this vision of resurrecting the Augustan metropolis indeed became concrete reality. Begun in 1931, the Via dell’ Impero, now the Via dei Fori Imperiali, became the artery connecting the Piazza Venezia (site of Mussoloni’s office, the Sala del Mappamondo and the very hub of Fascist Italy) with the ruins of the imperial forums of ancient Rome.[34] The Ara Pacis, an Augustan altar dedicated to the peace brought about by the stability of his regime, was reassembled in 1938 and inaugurated on the 23rd of September, Augustus’ birthday. Finally, an entire suburb dubbed L’Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR) was constructed in 1937, its architecture Fascist and bombastic to the core, including a giant rhombus dubbed “The Square Coliseum” and a museum of Roman civilization in the city-center famous to this day.

Ultimately, this glorification of Augustan Rome was also manipulated to validate Mussolini’s programs of imperial aggression just as it had been harnessed to justify the loss of civil and political liberties in the name of peace and order. Speaking of the Italian Empire, Mussolini once ominously averred: “We can give value to two regions (Tripoli and the Cirenaica) which once were owned by Rome and which must grow to the greatness of their past.” Aggressive moves in the Aegean and North Africa were described as glorious re-conquests of regions that had once belonged to Rome, with Mussolini delivering them from generations of waste and misrule.[35] In 1937, emblematic of this trend, the film Scipione l’ Africano portrayed the ancient Carthaginian Empire as a corrupt regime ruled by what can only be described as loathsome Semitic stereotypes saved from themselves by Scipio’s victory in the Hannibalic War; it was awarded the so-called Duce Cup at the Venice film festival and declared a masterpiece.[36] Until the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, all this posturing was seen as par for the course when it came to the justification of foreign imperialism, and even bears some similarity to the interpretations of Roman history voiced by the classically trained administrators of British India. Indeed, before the mid 1930s, Mussolini and his classically inspired movement seem to have been viewed as something inspirational to the nations that would go on to topple him; Roosevelt was often compared favorably to Mussolini in the implementation of his New Deal, for example.[37] But when on the 9th of May, 1936, a second Roman Empire was proclaimed following the fall of Ethiopia, the stark realities of the fruits of autocracy began to chip away at their attractive, classicizing veneer.[38]

Nazi Racial Ideology and the Rise and Fall of Rome

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“In the historical department the study of ancient history should not be omitted. Roman history, along general lines, is and will remain the best teacher, not only for our own time but also for the future. And the ideal of Hellenic culture should be preserved for us in all its marvelous beauty. The differences between the various peoples should not prevent us from recognizing the community of race which unites them on a higher plane. The conflict of our times is one that is being waged around great objectives. A civilization is fighting for its existence. It is a civilization that is the product of thousands of years of historical development, and the Greek as well as the German forms part of it.”[39](Adolf Hitler)

Just as educated Britons waxed lyrically on the Roman antecedents to their Empire and Italians spoke with pride on the fruits of ancient Italian nationalism, Hitler and other German thinkers like him perceived Romanitas through their own particular political prism, obsessing about the racial continuity between themselves and ancient ancestors who ironically lived in an era before the concept of race had even come into full existence. The fact that the ancient Romans deemed the Germans barbarians was moot—that both civilizations shared a Caucasian identity was deemed more significant. Before the Second World War, the Germans even expressed admiration for the British Empire as a remarkable achievement proving the ingenuity and superiority of the white race over all others. In 1930, Hitler upbraided Otto Strasser for suggesting that the Nazis should provide aid to the burgeoning Indian independence movement, declaring that the Nordic British had a right to rule in the Subcontinent—“The interest of Germany demands cooperation with England since it is a question of establishing a Nordic-Germanic America, over the world.”[40] In the eyes of the crazed German leader, even matters of real politick were paltry concerns beside weightier matters of racial ideology.

Alfred Rosenberg and Hitler shared the belief that the course of ancient history revealed that Greece and Rome were the direct forbearers of contemporary Nordic civilization, with “Nordic” implying a “Caucasian” identity rather than a “Negroid” or “Mongoloid” one. The cultural achievements of antiquity were interpreted as the inevitable fruits of racial superiority unabashedly expressed over barbarian peoples. The story of the rise and fall of Rome was thus manipulated to justify the Fuhrer’s pseudo-scientific notions of race. The Romans were deemed “die Erstgeborenen der arischen Voelker,” a community of Nordic peasant farmers (Bauernstaat) that came to dominate the racially inferior people surrounding them.[41] In his writings, Hitler declared Italy “the original home of the concept of the state” and expressed awe for the rapid rise of Rome, employing ancient imagery such as eagles, fasces, straight-armed salutes, and legionary standards in his propaganda just as his neighbor to the South did.[42] Hitler found a source of inspiration in the order and militarism of ancient Rome, and a model for Berlin as a world capital.[43] In large part, with the exception of his memorable addition of the swastika to the canon of symbols, the imagery of German fascism was in large part deeply grounded in the classicizing tendencies of its Italian counterpart.[44] In his mind’s eye, Hitler seems to have envisioned himself as a sort of latter day Roman emperor, and he hungered to create a capital worthy of his imperial ambitions. Albert Speer recounts that Hitler saw himself above all else as a great artist, plotting to create a giant metropolis called Germania to be visually modeled on ancient Rome.[45] The imaginary city would have boasted a triumphal arch dwarfing Napoleon’s efforts in Paris and a Volkshalle on the model of the Augustan Pantheon that could have housed the entire Vatican within its walls. The structure was planned to be sixteen times the volume of St. Peter’s Basilica.

How was the Nazi government to account for the fall of the Roman Empire, which was of course precipitated by the direct ancestors of the German people? In the words of Mussolini, “thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil, and Augustus.”[46] In the eyes of Rosenberg, and Hitler like him, the emperor Caracalla’s granting of full citizenship to all the citizens of the Empire muddied the civilization’s racial waters, and ultimately, a Jewish cult conquered the state like a form of ancient Bolshevism before virtuous German tribes to the North re-invigorated Europe with their pure Aryan blood and set the stage for the achievements of modern history; the same echoes of the idea of an Aryan-Roman super-race can be found in the work of Italian Julius Evola, a formative influence on Mussolini. The narrative of the rise and fall of Rome was thus directly perverted to express contemporary Fascist beliefs about race, nationalism, and imperial force. Still, the discontinuity between a vision of an “Aryan Rome” and the reality of warfare between ancient Romans and Germans, to say nothing of the specific association of Romanitas with Mussolini’s Italy, meant that Rome alone would not suffice as a model for ancient valor. At the same time, certain influential historians were less than impressed by the achievements of Roman culture, interpreting it largely as a cautionary example; Oswald Spengler, for example, identified “Caesarism” as a symptom of cultural decline and underrated Roman military achievements after the Second Punic War. Heinrich Himmler, chief and police and minister of the interior, was admittedly more interested in occultism than Classics and attempted to mythologize the ancient, pre-urban German tribes.[47]

Yet as Helmut Berve wrote: “We are not Romans, and the world around us is different from the Mediterranean world. Nevertheless we can learn endless lessons from Roman history.”[48] Hitler was so thoroughly seduced by the idea of Imperial Rome that as late as 1941, he declared to Himmler that “the Roman Empire never had its like. To have succeeded in completely dominating all neighboring peoples! And no empire has spread so uniform a civilization as Rome did.”[49]

The fact that a bizarre racially charged interpretation of Roman history became so prominent in Germany speaks to the tragic rapidity with which Nazi ideology had taken hold of the contemporary imagination. For generations, Germany had been Europe’s leading center of Classical scholarship, producing works of timeless value and priceless insights. This was the country where Theodor Mommsen pioneered the very art of modern historiography as he systematically and objectively explored the intricacies of the Roman past.[50] Barthold Georg Niebuhr too was a trailblazer, one of the first to differentiate between the value of primary and secondary sources in historical research; for years, Leopold Ranke had his bust in his study, and Grote, Toynbee, and Arnold all paid homage to his legacy.[51] Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Karl Bücher’s Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft became one of the most important books in the study of economic history thanks to its detailed attention to the nuances of the ancient, medieval, and modern markets; later, Ed Meyer’s critique of his work added a still more nuanced understanding of the sophistication and complexity of ancient civilization. It became clear that inflation, civil war, and barbarian invasions by Germanic tribes caused the fall of Rome. All of this scholarship, however, paled before the racially charged myth of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and a country whose intelligentsia once boasted the most scientific approach to the study of the ancient past completely lost its bearings and succumbed to the allure of fairy tales. Non-German historians such as Numa Fustel de Coulanges attempted to redress the balance, writing the History of the Political Institutions of Ancient France in which he challenged the notion that ancient Germans had introduced political innovations to a “racially stalling” nation.[52] Tragically, however, the works of individuals like Joseph Vogt became much more common. His “Population Decline in the Roman Empire” (1935) and “Race Mixing in the Roman Empire” (1936) repeated the original theory of Arthur de Gobineau that racial mixing was responsible for the decline of Rome as an established fact. Those whose vision of antiquity was grounded in a search for truth rather than political expedience promptly found no place for themselves in the German university system.

Quo Vadis, Romanitas?

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“Yours is the first barbarian army in history to have taken Rome from the South.” (An anonymous Roman, said to the Allied commander in June 1944.)[53]

 

Since the fall of the Roman Empire, Romanitas and the Latin language became cultural touchstones held in common by all educated citizens—in a sense, from Russians calling themselves czars to Victoria being crowned imperatrix, the course of the continent’s history can be described as a long series of interpretations and reinterpretations of the meaning of a classical past held in common by all Europeans. For the French in the late eighteenth century, “Rome” was a byword for Republican freedom; for Italy on the verge of the Second World War, it symbolized devotion to a dictatorial ideal. The breadth and diversity of Roman history armed every historical epoch, whatever its nature, with a rich array of symbols upon which to draw. So long as European education was grounded in the study of the Greek and Roman past, the Greek and Roman past continued to shape the youthful minds of students imagining themselves as ancient heroes. On the eve of World War Two, never did “Rome” become associated with “wickedness,” because all parties in the struggle were imperial, and all identified with the same ancient past.

 

Thus, seldom did the British draw unfavorable comparisons between Roman aggression and the actions of Mussolini; rarely did Italians dwell on reasons for Rome’s decline; never did the Germans accept responsibility as one of the forces that precipitated that collapse. Instead, we have seen that allusions to Roman history were almost universally employed to imbue contemporary beliefs about race, politics, and imperial conquest with an air of authenticity, with each fresh reinterpretation of the past serving to virtually supplant the true facts of the city’s rise and fall in the popular imagination.[54] Ultimately, much the same can be said of the collective European enthrallment with the imagery of Roman history as Frank M. Turner once wrote about the meaning of allusions to ancient Greek culture to the Victorian mind, which transferred a “moral outlook…to the ancient past and then, in accordance with their humanist aims, upheld that past as a source of wisdom for current ethical and cultural conduct.”[55] In this case, however, it must unfortunately be admitted that the aims of many of the men who appealed to the shadow of the Roman past were far from “humanist,” whether in the form of the British attempting to justify their Empire, Italians their hyper-nationalism, or Germans their xenophobia. Greek history once supplied an inexhaustible source of erudite, artistic references; Roman history, by contrast, came to serve as an inexhaustible trove of symbols able to be mass marketed for purposes of propaganda and pseudo-science.

[1] “Address of the President on the Fall of Rome,” June 5, 1944, 8:30 pm, E.W.T. Radio Broadcast, accessed at http://www.mhric.org/fdr/fdr.html.

[2] Winston Churchill, The Birth of Britain, His: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (London,: Cassell, 1956).

[3] S. J. Bastomsky, “Rich and Poor: The Great Divide in Ancient Rome and Victorian England,” Greece & Rome 37, no. 1 (1990).

[4] Churchill, The Birth of Britain.

[5] Cyril Norwood and Arthur H. Hope, The Higher Education of Boys in England (London,: J. Murray, 1909). Pp. 343.

[6] Ibid. Pp. 344.

[7] Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. Pp. 2.

[8] Raymond F. Betts, “The Allusion to Rome in British Imperialist Thought of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Victorian Studies 15, no. 2 (1971). Pp. 150.

[9] Ibid. Pp. 151

[10] Evelyn Baring Cromer, Ancient and Modern Imperialism (London,: J. Murray, 1910).

[11] Charles Prestwood Lucas, Cambridge University Library., and Adam Matthew Digital (Firm), “Class, Colour and Race.” (Marlborough, England: Adam Matthew Digital, 2007), http://www.empire.amdigital.co.uk/contents/document-detail.aspx?sectionid=654.

[12] Richard Faber, The Vision and the Need: Late Victorian Imperialist Aims (London: Faber, 1966). Pp. 25.

[13] Betts, “The Allusion to Rome in British Imperialist Thought of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Pp. 154.

[14] John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England : Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1883).

[15] Betts, “The Allusion to Rome in British Imperialist Thought of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Pp. 151-152.

[16] Ibid. Pp. 155.

[17] Catharine Edwards, Roman Presences : Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789-1945 (Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Pp. 93-94.

[18] Betts, “The Allusion to Rome in British Imperialist Thought of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Pp. 149.

[19] Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill, Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling (New York Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906.).

[20] See the final chapter of Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939).

[21] Churchill, The Birth of Britain.

[22] Edwards, Roman Presences : Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789-1945. Pp. 205

[23] Kenneth Scott, “Mussolini and the Roman Empire,” The Classical Journal 27, no. 9 (1932). Pp. 656.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Edwards, Roman Presences : Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789-1945. Pp. 189.

[26] Emilio Gentile, The Origins of Fascist Ideology 1918-1925 (New York: Enigma, 2005). Pp. 158-159.

[27] See Steven Heller, Iron Fists : Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State (London ; New York: Phaidon Press, 2008).

[28] See Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, Jerome Lectures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).

[29] Alexander Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture : The Impact of Classical Antiquity, Monographs on the Fine Arts (University Park: Published for College Art Association by the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990). Page 10.

[30] Lewine, Annie Esmé (2008) “Ancient Rome in Modern Italy: Mussolini’s Manipulation of Roman History in the Mostra Augustea della Romanitá,” Studies in Mediterranean Antiquity and Classics: Vol. 2: Iss. 1, Article 5. Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/classicsjournal/vol2/iss1/5

[31] Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture : The Impact of Classical Antiquity. Pp. 28.

[32] Berland, “Review: A City Endlessly Rewritten: Some Versions and Appropriations of Rome in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Pp. 288.

[33] Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture : The Impact of Classical Antiquity. Page 9.

[34] Nelis, Jan, “Constructing Fascist Identity: Benito Mussolini and the Myth of Romanitá,” Classical World 100.4 (2007). Pp. 408.

[35] Edwards, Roman Presences : Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789-1945. Pp. 290.

[36] Ibid. Pp. 209

[37] Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals : Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939, 1st ed. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). Pp. 21-22.

[38] Henry Ashby Turner, Reappraisals of Fascism, Modern Scholarship on European History (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975). Pp. 73.

[39] See Adolf Hitler, Alvin Saunders Johnson, and John Chamberlain, Mein Kampf, Complete and Unabridged, Fully Annotated (New York,: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940). Chapter 2, Volume 2.

[40] Milan Hauner, India in Axis Strategy : Germany, Japan and Indian Nationalists in the Second World War, 1. Aufl. ed., Veröffentlichungen Des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London = Publications of the German Historical Institute London (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981). Pp. 25.

[41] Ibid. Pp. 20-21.

[42] Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture : The Impact of Classical Antiquity. Pp. 14.

[43] Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture : The Impact of Classical Antiquity. Page 2.

[44] Heller, Iron Fists : Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State.

[45] Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1970). See the chapters Our Empire Style and The Globe.

[46] Institute of Jewish Affairs. and Boris Shub, Hitler’s Ten-Year War on the Jews (New York,: Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress, World Jewish congress, 1943). Pp. 283.

[47] Christopher Hale, Himmler’s Crusade : The Nazi Expedition to Find the Origins of the Aryan Race (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2003). Pp. 87.

[48] For this quote, see the introduction to Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture : The Impact of Classical Antiquity.

[49] Edwards, Roman Presences : Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789-1945. Pp. 225.

[50] Betts, “The Allusion to Rome in British Imperialist Thought of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” Pp. 151.

[51] For a summary of early twentieth century historiography on Roman history, see Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition; Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, A Galaxy Book, (New York,: Oxford University Press, 1957). Pp. 472-479.

[52] See Coulanges Fustel de and Camille Jullian, Histoire Des Institutions Politiques De L’ancienne France, 6 vols. (Paris,: Hachette et cie, 1888).

[53] Wiseman, T. P. (1992) ‘Of grammar and grandeur’, TLS (May 29). Pp. 11- 12.

[54] Kevin Berland, “Review: A City Endlessly Rewritten: Some Versions and Appropriations of Rome in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 2 (2001). Pp. 288.

[55] Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). Pp. 51.

Glittering Translucence: The Glass Menagerie in Previews at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway

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The stage at the Belasco Theater was so empty it was naked. The set amounted to an ugly table with chairs, some cluttered shelves, and a phonograph. The backdrop was the stark brick wall of the theater itself. When Joe Mantello first appeared onstage, I mistook him for a techie until he began delivering his opening monologue, tackling a role usually played by a much younger man in a much better costume. I already found myself mulling over inevitable comparisons with the production of The Glass Menagerie at the Booth Theater in 2013 starring Cherry Jones (Amanda), Zachary Quinto (Tom), and Celia Kennan-Bolger (Laura). I wondered whether it was worth revisiting the play so soon after that great success, which was the first production I’d seen to portray Tom as a gay avatar of Tennessee Williams himself, adding new and unexpected dimensions to the proceedings; his arguments with his mother about where he was sneaking off to at night were never quite so poignant.

 

In that production, the tragedy of the Wingfield family played out on a literal island circumscribed by rippling ebony ooze. Laura seemed to materialize out of thin air, unexpectedly popping out of a couch with all of the suddenness of a half-forgotten memory that somehow intrudes on the consciousness again. This time, though, there was nothing but emptiness. In the shadows, Sally Field (Amanda) and Madison Ferris (Laura) were already visible as they waited in the orchestra to climb onstage. Bracing myself with the reminder that this was still in previews, I had no idea that I was about to be totally transported and enthralled.

 

A long silence ensued as the performers went through the cumbersome process of lifting Ferris’ wheelchair onto the stage. My heart skipped a beat. I had no idea that a performer with muscular dystrophy had been cast as Laura, who is described in the script as “crippled.” Out of her chair, back arched, and down on all fours, she moved with an indescribable elegance, flowing like water across the stage. I’d never seen a production before where the physical components of Laura ‘s handicap were explored with such nuance. Both the challenges and elegances of physical movement are so central to Ferris’ characterization that it almost feels at times like a dance performance (I was not at all surprised to read in the program that the Broadway newcomer has dance experience.) There is no awkwardness on display here, usually par for the course in performers’ interpretations of the shy and fragile character. Ferris’ Laura is long acclimated to the challenges of her difference. She owns them. And in her space, Laura moves confidently, uniquely, and even elegantly. Rather than her own inner demons, it is largely society’s cruel pigeonholing that forces her into the role of a pariah.

 

If Eugene O’Neill is the American Aeschylus and Arthur Miller some iteration of Sophocles, then Tennessee Williams is our Euripides. Both were celebrated for their multi-dimensional female protagonists, their powerful abilities as storytellers, their lines dripping with poetry, and their exploration of the forces of Bacchanalian wildness that always lurk just beneath the veneer of polite society. Needless to say, all of this is pure dynamite for actors. The Glass Menagerie is one of the great ensemble pieces in American theater, and the synergy between the members of this cast was particularly electric. I was initially unsure about Mantello’s interpretation of Tom, which in some ways couldn’t help but disappoint after Quinto’s revelatory queer reading of the role. Over time, though, the dichotomy between Tom’s maturity and the relative youth of his sister and mother highlighted that shimmering, slightly unreal quality that William hoped to capture in the play. If Quinto played Tom as the play’s author trapped claustrophobically in his own memories, Mantello portrays him something like the play’s director, separated from the past in time and space but putting on a show for us in the audience in which he selectively interacts with his former ghosts. The understatement of his performance attractively highlights both the intensity of Fields and the subtlety of Ferris.

 

Speaking of Fields, she is a force of nature as Amanda, a caged eagle. In her blind rage against the bars of her enclosure, she wounds herself and everyone around her. Now she is driven by a sense of rage over the isolation of her daughter and the selfishness of her son; a moment later, she is soft and maternal; at still other times, she’s lost in obsessive memories of better days. Fields’ Amanda channels the great heroines of world theater, echoing the rambling desperation of Blanche, the imperiousness of Lady Macbeth, and the spiteful wit of Hedda. There is a dangerous undercurrent to Field’s performance bound to her acute awareness of the desperation of her position. Her Amanda is nostalgic for the past but far from delusional about her present. She realizes that she is burdened with an alcoholic son who is about to abandon her and a handicapped daughter she cannot support. The prospect of a gentleman caller is the only hope that can save the Wingfields from themselves. But when her daughter balks in terror at this caller when he finally arrives, Amanda herself becomes the flirtatious center of attention. While she hosts him at dinner with her daughter quivering with embarrassment in the other room, there is an effect such as I have never seen before in any theater. The emptiness of the stage is suddenly revealed to be translucence, a fitting quality for a play named for glass sculpture. Without giving it away, I’ll say that it conveys the same idea of symbolic gulfs evoked in the previous production at the Booth Theatre where the family was literally trapped on an island.

 

The entire final act was illuminated by true candlelight, providing the scene with an ethereal, almost ghostly ambiance. Earlier in the play, Ferris portrayed Laura as a slightly spoiled young woman whose life’s meaning was reduced to subtle shows of rebellion against her mother’s will. Ferris obsessed over her glass figurines not with an air of insanity but one of triumph, lording over an imaginary world in which, for once, she could be in control and ignore the admonishments of the world around her. At last, though, she invites the gentleman caller into this world, where he finds that he has been set up as a kind of idol deified since high school. In this space, the way Laura moves and the way she uses her imagination are completely natural, and at least for a fleeting moment, he sees the beauty in her existence and not the stigma associated with it. The chemistry between Laura and her “suitor” (a bright eyed and bushy tailed Finn Wittrock) is sizzling, the most sexual of any interpretation I’ve seen. Their tender dance was the emotional climax of the night, symbolic of the themes of the entire production.

 

Like the casting of deaf actor John McGinty in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ferris’ casting proves that physical difference or disability not only should be no bar to the display of talent, but can even bring new life to classic roles. As wonderful as Michael Arden was as Quasimodo and Celia Kennan-Bolger was as Laura (a sublime performance, in fact), there is something special about the truth that actors bring to parts when they share aspects of that character’s identity in real life. Many actors can try to imitate a limp, but few can move with the combination of grace and dexterity required by someone with muscular dystrophy, let alone one as gifted in physical storytelling as Madison Ferris.

 

Famously, The Glass Menagerie ends with Tom’s injunction for Laura to “blow (her) candles out.” Perhaps fittingly, this performance was the first I’ve seen in which she flat out shakes her head and refuses to do so. This production will linger in my imagination for a long time.

 

So That It Burns

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Upon the cusp of evening shade suffused

with rays of twilight sleek and luminous

my love lingers beyond the ashen span

which glistens on the bed of Tithonus.

As summers wane and dusk invidious

imbues the wilting arch of firmament,

so equally my nimble ardor swells

to drench the stars, gleaming and permanent.

When autumn showers form a breathless mist

which clings upon the face of cobblestones,

the lovestruck poet should not hope to list

what nature and imagination loan.

He drafts within his heart unspoken songs

of boundless pitch which no page could abide,

when transient moments grow a bit more long

and deathless beauty walks along his side.

These subtle metamorphoses run deep

inside our souls before we get too old,

when kindred hearts both skip a single beat

and friendly glances grow a bit more bold.

But little else is crueler to discern

than gusty changes once their course has run,

that fan a feeble heart so that it burns,

but blow out fire in the other one.