|
SlothfulCobra posted:Weirdly while people contrast Sparta's nominal authoritarianism with Athens's nominal democracy, they're a lot more similar in structure than you'd expect. I think Athens and Sparta actually have a lot more differences than you may give them credit for, because how their magistrates are selected is incredibly different. Greek political philosophy split governments (especially of poleis) into monarchies, oligarchies, and democracies. While Sparta was nominally a monarchy, it really functioned more like an oligarchy and is kind of the prime example of the type: actual power is held by a small group of select men who are the wealthiest and oldest of the already select body of citizens. There is an assembly of all the citizens, but they function more as a rubber stamp. Notably, the property requirements for membership in this citizen body are extreme: spartiates are aristocrats and pointedly and proudly do no labor at all. Athens by contrast is a democracy, which means something a little different in a Greek context than how we use the term. Like in Sparta, power is held both by bodies of men and by magistrates, but how these groups are selected is entirely different. The proportion of Athenian citizens is much, much higher than in Sparta and they even started paying people to show up to the assembly to combat its dominance by the wealthy. Also, their magistrates and members of the boule (the actual government) are chosen by lot rather than being elected; elections were seen as oligarchic by nature as they tended to select for wealthy, charismatic men. The only elected positions were generalships. So, while on paper the governments of Athens and Sparta look pretty similar, they are actually quite different in practice.
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2024 19:07
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 07:07 |
|
|
FAUXTON posted:I'm not being cute and couldn't if I tried, and no game is being played. You seemed to be carving a very unique narrative through history there and I wanted to know your thoughts on the role of industry or technology (or even mass literacy) on the whole process, since I don't want to go off assuming I know exactly what you meant by chattel slavery. I'm at work writing this between emails and poo poo so excuse any inconsistencies or whatever. I would say the relevant technology is the development of the techniques needed to be capable of oceanic navigation and the discovery of the new world. I am not espousing some unique argument here and the idea that the slavery practiced in the new world is linked to the creation of the concept of race is not something I am coming up with and there are a bunch of books and academic work on the topic. Chattel slavery as practiced in the new world was unique from the prior types practiced in that it was race based, was heritable, and freed slaves were not full citizens. Slaves had no rights whatsoever and families were routinely broken up with children being sold off. Freed slaves were second class citizens at best and could at most hope for a position of some wealth in an area less hostile to them. That persisted after slavery via Jim Crow. A Roman slave was indeed property aka chattel, but it was not linked to any "race" of people, and freed slaves were citizens (denied the right to hold office) and freedmen children were 100% normal Roman citizens. Roman slaves could also earn money and work to buy their freedom, similar to indentured servitude. There were also various customs and social mores wherein slaveowners would give slaves manumission after 10, 15, 30 years or whatever. By the 1400s, Roman style slavery had been mostly a thing of the past for a long time with serfdom being the primary form of forced labor. Serfdom is essentially slavery but a serf's direct link to the land is significantly different and again was not based on ethnicity. A serf's family would stay together and landowners were not selling serf children to one another, barring exceptions im not aware of being its a practice that existed for a thousand years. In the New World the slaves being used were first Native Americans (worked to death or killed via disease) and then Africans that were being treated in a wholly unique and horrific manner. that is a large part of what led to the creation of the concept of race as a way of excusing those atrocities. That concept takes off as feudalism finishes dying in the 1600s and the slave trade truly gets going. By the 1700s there is a fully formed concept that africans and native americans are inferior, whites are a different and superior race, etc etc all of the lovely nonsense we still deal with.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2024 19:18
|
|
|
Political participation of poor men is actually a significant difference, and a feature of Athenian democracy that is fairly uncommon. One thing that Athenian sources do make pretty clear is that this political participation was not just theoretical. The class of men who rowed ships in the Athenian navy were frequently discussed as an important political factor, such that multiple times oligarchic politicians tried to take action while the fleet was deployed so that thousands of poorer men would be absent from the assembly during voting. The fact that the bloc of poor men could swing key votes was a pretty big difference from Rome, where the voting system was structured to make the votes of poorer citizens only relevant in the case of deadlock among Rome's wealthier citizens, and especially from Sparta where poorer men had no vote at all.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2024 19:25
|
|
|
WoodrowSkillson posted:I'm at work writing this between emails and poo poo so excuse any inconsistencies or whatever. Yeah that's more clear, I had the impression that you'd wanted to kind of string what's basically xenophobia and some forms of slavery in the ancient world as a sort of prototype on the basis that they had some components in separate places, as we'd define them from today. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Jan 3, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2024 20:06
|
|
|
Tulip posted:I guess where I'm going with this is that its very, very easy to overestimate the public understanding of the ancient past. Until a few years ago I thought the Marian reforms were a thing despite them being very obviously silly, because I learned about them in Rome: Total War when I was 15 and never really dug into it. A lot of historians believed this for a long time, don't be too hard on yourself.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2024 23:14
|
|
|
One of the key things that distinguishes the modern idea of race is that it was initially based in the misapplication of Darwinian ideas to argue that humans had evolved into numerous subspecies which had notably different physiological characteristics. The fact that people from different parts of the world look different was taken to mean that there must also be deeper, more fundamental differences between the "races" such as strength, intelligence, and other attributes. The idea being that while there was obviously variation within populations, broadly speaking different races could be said to be better or worse at different things. Basically, D&D-style racial attributes were accepted as scientific fact. (Which is also why people have been uncomfortable with the way D&D, etc. handles race—it posits a world where this racist worldview is literally factually True.) While it has plenty of commonalities with other discriminatory frameworks, this is a unique and historically situated idea. Europeans are suddenly traveling all around the world meeting all types of people and it would be very helpful to have a new way to classify themselves as The Best Guys, since doing that with religion has gotten very complicated after the Reformation. In a post-Enlightenment world where everyone's very excited about rationally categorizing the world, a "scientific" explanation emerges and catches on. This is what people mean when they say that racism is a modern idea, was invented in the 16th century, etc. They're talking about this specific type of "scientific racism". I think part of why this tends to get muddled is that now that these ideas have been roundly debunked and discredited, people are generally not going to be splitting hairs between this type of Real Racism and other similar forms of discrimination. They're all broadly understood to be wrong and bad, so if someone's specifically being xenophobic and you call them racist, well, close enough. But it is an important distinction when we're talking about history, because different types of discrimination operate differently and lead to different outcomes. For example, Roman-style extension of citizenship wouldn't really make sense if they'd had that modern conception of race as being a biological fact. Roman-ness has to be a social/legal/cultural thing for it to be as open to newcomers as it was, it can't be an inborn, unchanging fact of your person in the way that race is constructed as being.
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2024 23:29
|
|
|
rome took a marked turn toward increased prejudice in late antiquity and it was a pretty big factor in the collapse of the western empire imo. the early empire would not have made the fatal mistakes that the late empire did in handling situations like the migration of the goths
|
|
#
?
Jan 3, 2024 23:32
|
|
|
Eldoop posted:One of the key things that distinguishes the modern idea of race is that it was initially based in the misapplication of Darwinian ideas to argue that humans had evolved into numerous subspecies which had notably different physiological characteristics. The fact that people from different parts of the world look different was taken to mean that there must also be deeper, more fundamental differences between the "races" such as strength, intelligence, and other attributes. The idea being that while there was obviously variation within populations, broadly speaking different races could be said to be better or worse at different things. Basically, D&D-style racial attributes were accepted as scientific fact. (Which is also why people have been uncomfortable with the way D&D, etc. handles race—it posits a world where this racist worldview is literally factually True.) While it has plenty of commonalities with other discriminatory frameworks, this is a unique and historically situated idea. Europeans are suddenly traveling all around the world meeting all types of people and it would be very helpful to have a new way to classify themselves as The Best Guys, since doing that with religion has gotten very complicated after the Reformation. In a post-Enlightenment world where everyone's very excited about rationally categorizing the world, a "scientific" explanation emerges and catches on. This is what people mean when they say that racism is a modern idea, was invented in the 16th century, etc. They're talking about this specific type of "scientific racism". So…. Skin color isn’t an adaption to better balance the intake of vitamin D? Sickle cell doesn’t offer enough protection to help humans survive long enough to create the next generation? I’m either being too nitpicking about traits(?) or I simply misunderstanding?
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 00:02
|
|
|
The big innovation that comes with racism in the early modern is the idea of race itself, especially the concepts of "whiteness" and "blackness" as inherent and immutable qualities. This predates the "scientific" racism of the Victorian era which is really a post-hoc justification for the same kind of stuff. Race arises from the early modern's pretty horrific colonial practices and a need to justify them in some way.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 00:19
|
|
|
Jazerus posted:rome took a marked turn toward increased prejudice in late antiquity and it was a pretty big factor in the collapse of the western empire imo. the early empire would not have made the fatal mistakes that the late empire did in handling situations like the migration of the goths …maybe in the sense that the early empire would have massacred them at the outset? I don’t really see a lot of reason to believe the later empire was more prejudicial than before. More afraid, maybe. Late antique sources are more hysterical about the barbarians, but they’re like that about everything, not just the barbarians. I don’t know if it really represents a big change from Caesar casually bragging about how he whacked 400000 Germans.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 00:21
|
|
|
Crab Dad posted:So…. Skin color isn’t an adaption to better balance the intake of vitamin D? Adaptations to disease resistances or dietary factors (such as lactose tolerance) likely have real population/origin genetic links, but due to the aforementioned Hitler-rear end motherfuckers, they kind of have to be kept to private health care topics. e: They are also not universals; they are like observing that red hair is much more common in Ireland than it is in Thailand. e2: to be clear here I am not suggesting you are a hitler-rear end motherfucker; you are describing what are, at least, plausible explanations for various minor adaptations in local populations of Homo sapiens. However, the topic does not get discussed in that terms because the Hitler-rear end motherfuckers smell it and come running to start sticking some Measurehead poo poo in. Nessus fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jan 4, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 00:34
|
|
|
Crab Dad posted:So…. Skin color isn’t an adaption to better balance the intake of vitamin D? These phenotypic differences don't match very well with scientific racist ideas of race. (Especially in Africa, which is very genetically diverse compared to the rest of the world.) Skin color matches latitude pretty closely, but people living at the same latitude aren't necessarily closely related nor do they always share other phenotypic similarities. Pale skin is associated with high latitudes but no one would ever confuse Fuegians, Inuit and Norwegians. There are some traits that seem to clearly be convergent evolution, like dark skin, broad noses, and kinky hair showing up in most (but not all) residents of the tropics -- but these aren't a very good guide to ethnicities! You wouldn't confuse a Dayak and a Fijian, even though they both live near the equator not far from each other, but you might confuse Fijians and Africans, even though they live on opposite sides of the planet. That was a problem that immediately cropped up scientific racism. As knowledge of the world improved you ended up with a totally unmanageable catalog of races that eventually got grouped into impolite categories that you might recall like "negroid" or "mongoloid" that made up most of the planet and flattened ethnic differences to an incredible degree. You had the ludicrous proposition that the Irish and the Armenians were somehow more related than the Irish and British, and infamous pronouncements like Ben Franklin saying that only the British and *some* Germans were really white! Genetic analysis hasn't helped the situation either for those who want to partition humans into races. The better tools you invent and the closer you look the blurrier the lines get. It turns out people are pretty dang mobile over prehistoric time scales, and many phenotypes have evolved in multiple places over the millennia, and some mutations like blue eyes or epicanthic folds or blond hair just kind of show up and nobody is really sure why they're distributed the way they ended up. So in the end it's all just one big tangled mass of family briars instead of an orderly tree. There are genetic differences but they aren't evenly distributed geographically or by ethno-linguistic groups. Scientific racism is just one of those bad ideas that kind of refuses to die because it gives people an excuse to argue that their preferred social cause is "natural" and therefore right. I suppose there's another factor in the persistence of the idea of race: people like simple answers that confirm their biases, and the real science of heredity has none to give. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Jan 4, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 00:44
|
|
|
Not to mention humanity probably had a fairly tight genetic bottleneck relatively recently (~70k years). On a species level we're all pretty closely related.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 00:58
|
|
|
There are some adaptations to different environments on Earth, no one seriously disputes that, but the point is they're overall minor. Humans are remarkably genetically similar to one another compared to many other species, which is often attributed to a major drop in human population at some point then a recovery from that small group.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 01:02
|
|
|
There's a whole lot of wild speculation on various traits being part of environmental adaptations, but only a few really make sense without a lot of weird bending and twisting that gets more uncomfortable the longer than you linger on it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 01:32
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:There's a whole lot of wild speculation on various traits being part of environmental adaptations, but only a few really make sense without a lot of weird bending and twisting that gets more uncomfortable the longer than you linger on it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 01:51
|
|
|
High altitude adaptation is the most interesting one to me. The genetic mechanisms are a pretty recent discovery and the Tibetan and Andean versions are distinct from one another, so it's an example of human convergent evolution.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 01:56
|
|
|
Crab Dad posted:So…. Skin color isn’t an adaption to better balance the intake of vitamin D? The claims made in the name of "scientific" racism aren't things like minor environmental adaptations, they're much broader. They'd argue for example that people from Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole are better suited to manual labor because they're naturally stronger and less intelligent than other people. Whereas Western Europeans should be in charge because they are, as a population, smarter, better leaders, more creative and innovative, etc. Thus the enslavement of Africans by Europeans is, it turns out, not just totally fine but actually natural and *good* for everyone involved, because everyone gets to play their part and do what they're best at. It's those sorts of arguments that have been consistently shown to be completely false on their own terms, on top of simply being self-evidently evil and wrong as a way to think about human beings.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 02:14
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Pretty much the only one that makes sense to me other than the skin-tone/latitude thing and stuff that has obvious direct connection to immunity, is lactose tolerance/intolerance; and I bet you that has more to do with regular exposure and gut bacteria than some kind of milk_OK trigger. That's one's a pretty textbook darwinian thing. It's just a few nucleotides and if you're a pastoralist it has an obvious fitness value. Obviously all placental mammals have the lactase gene (losing it is a lethal mutation) so you just have to turn a few switches to leave it on in adults. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Jan 4, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 02:29
|
|
|
There's a decent amount of evidence that a number of peoples process foods differently, which I guess might not even be a thing that would be part of human DNA what with how much gut fauna is involved with digestion.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 02:41
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:High altitude adaptation is the most interesting one to me. The genetic mechanisms are a pretty recent discovery and the Tibetan and Andean versions are distinct from one another, so it's an example of human convergent evolution. I thought the Inuit have some genetic advantage in lung capacity too.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 02:53
|
|
|
darwinian ideas weren't really an influential factor in creating pre-Civil War racism since Darwin hadn't published anything of note until just before the war
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 02:54
|
|
|
Crab Dad posted:I thought the Inuit have some genetic advantage in lung capacity too. I do not know about that. Apparently there are some people in Ethiopia who also have a third distinct altitude adaptation, neat.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 02:55
|
|
|
Tunicate posted:darwinian ideas weren't really an influential factor in creating pre-Civil War racism since Darwin hadn't published anything of note until just before the war
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 03:06
|
|
|
Tunicate posted:darwinian ideas weren't really an influential factor in creating pre-Civil War racism since Darwin hadn't published anything of note until just before the war Correct, though Darwin wasn't the originator that different traits within a population was possible. Thomas Jefferson posted:I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people....” I am not aware of when or from where the concept of "races" or "nations" (generally the term used pre-1800s) began but it stretches well back before Darwin. Darwin's main contribution to scientific theory was the concept of natural selection in the creation of species through adaptation.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 05:01
|
|
|
Eldoop posted:One of the key things that distinguishes the modern idea of race is that it was initially based in the misapplication of Darwinian ideas to argue that humans had evolved into numerous subspecies which had notably different physiological characteristics. Considering the modern form of racism arose with the Caribbean sugar plantation system, which really took off in the 1600s, and Charles Darwin was born in 1809, I take some issue with the word I italicized here  MikeC posted:Darwin's main contribution to scientific theory was the concept of natural selection in the creation of species through adaptation. Even on this subject, he was preceded by Patrick Matthew in On Naval Timber and Aboriculture three decades earlier.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 07:57
|
|
|
Nessus posted:I think a lot of people think Sparta were good guys since they were so rugged and manly and got some zingers off. Athens afaict just wrote a ton of poo poo down. Postocracy. The USA, France, and Germany all identified with Sparta as the good guys vs Athens in the past. You know, humble salt-of-the-earth farmer-soldier types pitted against a perfidious mercantile thalassocracy. Athens as the goodies is relatively recent.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 12:24
|
|
|
skasion posted:I don’t really see a lot of reason to believe the later empire was more prejudicial than before. More afraid, maybe. Fear is exactly what leads to prejudice, though. If you're not scared of group <x> because you can trivially oppress them, you tend not to hate them as much, because they don't matter to you.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 12:35
|
|
|
Judgy Fucker posted:It's usually what's taught in American public schools. Sparta were the militarist bad guys, Athens invented democracy. No discussion about the fact that the only ones who could vote were free males, making up what, 20-30% of the population or so? Free citizen males, even, and importantly you had to be born into that status by having a citizen as a parent (or both parents as citizens, later on). 'Foreigners' can gently caress off with some incredibly rare exceptions, even if their grandparents were the ones who moved there. There are some modern analogies to this in other countries, but in a US context imagine if green cards are still a thing, but there is no path from that to US citizenship ever for you or your kids unless you win a Medal of Honor or something.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 12:43
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Fear is exactly what leads to prejudice, though. If you're not scared of group <x> because you can trivially oppress them, you tend not to hate them as much, because they don't matter to you. Yeah but it’s not like the earlier Romans weren’t scared of barbarians. They were just less likely to find themselves living alongside them as relative equals, in a situation where they were obliged to defend their identity intellectually as opposed to just slaughtering and enslaving the other any chance you get. Late antiquity is a period in which Roman and barbarian identities in the western empire merged and assimilated to each other. this coincided with the regional fragmentation of the empire and a lot of violence, but it wasn’t genocide. The Romans of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa weren’t all so prejudiced that they chose not to accommodate the military elite developing non-Roman ethnic identities. They complained, like that letter of Sidonius Apollinaris where he moans about being kept awake all night by old gothic women carousing under his window, but they also put up with it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 14:28
|
|
|
I was aware that the later Empire (4th-5th c.) was more xenophoic than earlier. Is there any literature or discussion about why that may have happened?
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 14:34
|
|
|
Xenophobic is not the same thing as a modern racist tho I suppose they share some similarities Edit Not gainsaying anyone, just thinking about the issue
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 14:35
|
|
|
Judgy Fucker posted:I was aware that the later Empire (4th-5th c.) was more xenophoic than earlier. Is there any literature or discussion about why that may have happened? i know bret devereaux had a big blog post broadly about this subject. since right wing freaks online love to say that Rome fell because of being Too Woke And Accepting (lol), he lays out the argument that the literal reverse is true, their problem was much more that they ceased being able to effectively incorporate foreign populations into their citizenry
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 15:05
|
|
|
eke out posted:i know bret devereaux had a big blog post broadly about this subject. since right wing freaks online love to say that Rome fell because of being Too Woke And Accepting (lol), he lays out the argument that the literal reverse is true, their problem was much more that they ceased being able to effectively incorporate foreign populations into their citizenry Except I gather the collapse was so slow moving that unless you personally got pillaged it looked like 'well, when I was a young man we sent the taxes to Rome, but now we send it to the nearby governor, and I guess the baths are getting pretty beat-up.'
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 15:43
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Except I gather the collapse was so slow moving that unless you personally got pillaged it looked like 'well, when I was a young man we sent the taxes to Rome, but now we send it to the nearby governor, and I guess the baths are getting pretty beat-up.' Depends on where you were. The collapse in England was near total, to the point of losing several technologies.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 16:08
|
|
|
Triskelli posted:Depends on where you were. The collapse in England was near total, to the point of losing several technologies.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 16:14
|
|
|
Triskelli posted:The collapse in England was near total, to the point of losing several technologies. But enough about Brexit.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 16:21
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Except I gather the collapse was so slow moving that unless you personally got pillaged it looked like 'well, when I was a young man we sent the taxes to Rome, but now we send it to the nearby governor, and I guess the baths are getting pretty beat-up.' I few years ago I read a book about Merovingian France, and the author included an anecdote about a landowner in the Rhone Valley in the 6th century who was utterly incredulous when told there was no Western Emperor on the throne, illustrating 1) how ineffectual the Western Roman state had become in its later years (didn't even notice when it was gone) and 2) the socioeconomic isolation of late antiquity/the early middle ages; dude was 75ish years behind the news
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 16:27
|
|
|
Thinking about Marc Antony: Why did his name get anglicized that hard? Was Shakespeare the first guy that did it? There's a weird mix of Roman historical figures where we use their Latin names, like, say, Julius Caesar, and then there are guys who we use anglicized nicknames like Ovid or Horace. Anyone got any theories to how that all shook out? Why don't we call that one guy Marc Bruty? Probably more knowably, in a society in which nicknames become official names, how did informal nicknames in Rome work? I guess more broadly, what was the manner of address you made to a friend vs. a colleague? Did people call Cato only "Cato" to his face or was there a certain number of names you had to say because of protocol
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 16:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 07:07 |
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:But enough about Brexit. I always did find it ironic that Boris Johnson would be one of the main architects of Brexit, given his classical background.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2024 17:05
|
|