Viewing Sparta, & Ancient Society More Generally

…disgust! But we can also look on the character of the élite’s relationships within itself all the way down. Is it a simple chain of domination, brutality, fear, and anger-management failures? Or can there be more? Worse or better, not so blameworthy or blameworthy, regressive or progressive aspects to past historical régimes—but all built on top of the force-and-fraud domination-and-extraction resource theft game that élites ran on the rest of their societies. Why did they run them? Because it was the only way they could get enough for themselves and their families, given that they did not have looms that wove by themselves or lyres that played themselves or the autonomous AI catering carts of Hephaistos or the robot blacksmiths of Daidalos…

Reasons Not to Tell þe Thermopylai Story:

I can think of four reasons why we should not tell Herodotos’s and Steven Pressfield’s versions of the story of Leonidas and the 300 Spartiates at Thermopylai:

The first is that the Spartans are simply not fit models for us to admire—at all, in any way, for any purpose.
The second is that it, over and above that, is a story that glorifies the social practice of war, and humanity should not be in the business of doing that.
The third is that Herodotos’s story is not historically accurate, and yet people will take it to be so, for we inevitably read it—and historical fiction based on it‚not as mythology or fiction or fantasy but as true history.
The fourth is that the story will be destructively misread by the weak-minded—that even though the story itself is a fascinating one, too many people h weak minds and will misread it to their (and our) great detriment.

I covered (2), (3), and (4) in:

To recap, briefly: (4) The “misreading” story is not something I have an answer to; I can only (a) it is certainly illiberal, but (b) the dodge that if we add more speech by discussing misreadings we can fix the problem is just that—a dodge—; (3) I agree we should teach Leonidas as seen by Herodotos and Pressfield and others not as history but as the mythology the Spartans told others and told themselves; and (2) I reject: war is a human social practice, and we ill-serve ourselves by attempting to ignore it by not talking about it, and thus not grappling with it.

But that post ended with: Sparta, and Ancient Society More Generally: And now, finally, I have come to the end of my list of objections. But this is already too long. So I will deal with the question of how we should view human predecessor societies—especially Sparta—some other time.

I simply ran out of steam, and said that I would return to it later…

Well, now is later…

Share Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality

Typical Lives in the Early Days of Civilization, -3000 to 1500

Well, now is later:

The post-agriculture post-metalworking pre-industrialization pre-globalization human economy is a good place to start our narrative of the history of economic growth. So let us ask: What was human life like in the early days of civilization, in the long Agrarian Age of bronze and iron and writing, after the discovery of metals and writing but before reliable trans-oceanic travel, in the years from, say, -3000 to 1500?

Our standard of living back then? If we had to slot it into emerging-markets standards of living in the world today, then for typical people—not the élite—we might call it $2.50 a day. Back then technological progress was so slow and resource scarcity so great that if the average human population grew at 8% per century—which it did from -3000 to 1500—potential benefits from technology enabling better use of resources and thus higher productivity would be offset by scarcer resources per capita and thus lower productivity. From -3000 to 1500, I cannot see any significant difference in the material standard of living of the typical person. (Of course, the élite of 1500 had lives far outstripping in wealth those of -3000, and the typical person in 1500 had much greater cultural wealth accessible to them, if they could grasp it, than their predecessors in -3000.)

Now civilized human populations growing at an average pace of 8% per century for 4.5 millennia should make us sit up and take notice. We know a preindustrial pre-artificial birth-control population that is nutritionally unstressed will triple in numbers every 50 years or so. That was the experience of the conquistadores and their descendants in Latin America. That was the experience of the English and French settlers coming in behind the waves of plague and genocide that had decimated the indigenous Amerindian population in North America. That was the experience of the Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian settlers on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, after the armies of the gunpowder empires, most notably of Yekaterina II Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov (neé Sophie), Tsarina of All the Russias, drove out the horse nomads and opened the black-earth regions to the plow.

And yet it took not 50 but 1500 years for human populations to double in the long Agrarian Age of civilization from -3000 to 1500.

Thomas Robert Malthus taught us that there are two ways that a human population can be kept from exploding—from doubling every fifty years, and multiplying by a thousand-fold every 5000. There is the positive check: people so poor and malnourished that children’s immune systems are compromised so that they get carried off by the common cold, and women so poor and hungry that ovulation becomes hit-or-miss. And there is the preventative check: late marriage for women, social shunning of those who engage in extra-marital intercourse, and conscious fertility limitation by couples so that you can live relatively well without the population exploding.

Back in the Agrarian Age, the check for the typical family was overwhelmingly the positive one: poverty, malnourishment, hunger, and their consequences.

Why? I blame, among other things, patriarchy: