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I remember acoup guy being a huge smartass and his articles are mostly well acktuallys that let him sound smart. He totally writes like he's talking down to his audience.
I remember his series on ancient greece was getring shared around a lookoong time ago and he had an article mostly about "well acktually spartans sucked, actually" and every other paragraph he would go "look at how bigoted these stupid racist spartans were. Maybe with some more diversity and feminism they wouldn't have sucked so bad!".
But anyways I find his writing extremely hard to take seriously. In a sense he's kind of like the lazerpig of history blogging because he hides his lack of rigor under a veneer of self deprecation ("unmitigated pedantry" - "low tier youtubing") yet will get incredibly defensive and lash out whenever someone criticizes his stream of hot takes.
I remember his "fremen mirage" series, and being left with the strong impression that he was playing word games in an attempt to obfuscate a fundamental reality he found unpalatable. Particularly, his four-part definition in the beginning of the first part more-or-less immediately convinced me that he was not operating in good faith.
What do you think the fundamental reality he is trying to obfuscate is?
The Fremen mirage series is very clear that it is rejecting the "Hard times make strong men" thesis, and the first two posts present evidence that it false (in post 1, that states usually beat non-state societies, and in post 2 that richer states usually beat poorer ones). Nothing is being obfuscated here - Devereaux might be wrong, but he isn't obfuscating his argument.
Very briefly, central examples of the "Hard Times Make Strong Men" thesis do not claim that non-states usually beat states, or that poorer states generally beat richer ones. Devereaux is attempting to frame the thesis this way because if he can bake absurdity into his audience's understanding of the argument, then it's all over but the sneering, which is pretty clearly what he's primarily interested in doing.
"Hard Times Make Strong Men" exists as a thesis because we can directly observe that rich, powerful states often actually do decline, that states are defeated by non-states, and rich states are beat by poor states. Not all the time, not as the expected result, but often enough that very clearly wealth, population, or whatever other technocratically legible KPI one prefers are not deterministic. Why is this? What causes upsets? What causes the mighty to decline? What injects mortality into the putatively super-mortal? This is a fascinating question, but Devereaux appears mainly interested in cauterizing such interest in anyone he can, and is enthusiastically willing to employ the argumentative dark arts in doing so.
Here are two paragraphs:
...This is propaganda. The person writing it likes you stupid. To the extent that you not of my tribe, the more you listen to him, the better for me.
This does not constitute support for "Hard Times Make Strong Men" or disagreement with Brett Devereaux. I don't think "Hard Times Make Strong Men" has to be parsed as "Hard Times Make Strong Men 100% of the time", but given the rest of the meme it should at least mean "Hard Times Make Strong Men more often than good times." If you agree that states usually beat non-states, and rich states usually beat poor states (as you seem to suggest with "not as the expected result") then you agree with the core factual claim of the Fremen Mirage series. In which case what is it that "Hard Times Make Strong Men" means that you find both true and interesting? "Hard Times sometimes Make Strong Men, even if that isn't the way to bet" is trivially true and uninteresting.
I don't think Devereaux is uninterested in this question - he wrote another long blogpost series on the Fall of Rome. But he doesn't see it as directly in his wheelhouse as a military historian - like most modern historians, he blames the Fall on internal political and economic factors (in his case including climate change) and not on a decline in the quality of Roman soldiers relative to the enemy. The point of the Fremen Mirage series is to debunk a specific theory of imperial decline which is seen as fully general by its more extreme supporters - that empires decline due to "decadence" (i.e. a loss of the martial virtues) brought on reasonably predictably by excessive wealth. He doesn't propose an alternative fully general theory of imperial decline because there isn't one.
You claim that Devereaux is (a) wrong and (b) obfuscating this. You have not stated a concrete point where you disagree with him, or a false belief you think he is trying to insinuate. I think he has a very clear agenda (that the set of views about masculinity and martial virtue he calls the "cult of the badass" is widely held, wrong, and actively harmful in a liberal democracy) and his opponents on this thread are the ones trying to obfuscate the actual disagreement.
I think the more accurate formulation would be "Hard times make strong men inevitable. Good times make weak men inevitable." This formulation not only seems obviously consonant with my understanding of history, but the reasons why it should be so likewise seem obvious: Good times impose reduced consequences on weak men for their weakness, and greatly reduce the amount of free energy by which strong men might exercise their strength. By contrast, bad times impose many consequences on weakness, and often provide an abundance of free energy through which strength might be exercised, not least the general population's desire to organize their collective power and resources to change things for the better.
But of course, this requires us to take the terms "strong" and "weak", "good" and "bad" seriously. Likewise words like "decadence", which Devereaux seems to believe contain no semantic content of significance, and so declines to even engage with in any meaningful fashion.
I think a culture can build an effective military force, such that they win a disproportionate number of their engagements, not merely through technocratic KPIs (amount of money available, population size, etc), but through specific cultural features and norms. I think such a culture can then replace those cultural features and norms with a new set, and as a consequence begin to lose a disproportionate number of their engagements, even though it now has more money, more population, and a greater share generally of the technocratic KPIs than it did when it was winning. Further, I think this signal is strong enough that predictions can be made in advance.
By contrast, it seems to me that Devereaux aims to convince his readers that military affairs are largely deterministic, with a layer of luck on top. Therefore, empires are born because they got a streak of good RNG hits, and Empires die because they got a streak of bad RNG hits, and human decisions are not really terribly decisive either way.
"Hard Times make strong men, strong men make good times" is interesting because it provides a firm historical basis for hope. The problems we face are not inevitable, insurmountable. Things can change. Often the hardships we face can shape us to better change them.
"Good times makes weak men, weak men make hard times" is interesting because it warns us that there is no permanent victory, that good times are not stable, that preserving and extending them requires effort and constant vigilance. And this is not a general warning: the hazard is specified, so it can be recognized in advance and action can be taken accordingly.
Here are two paragraphs:
A brief search confirms that this "moment" covers two centuries, and the entire point of the meme is that cultures change over time. It's possible that there's a valid argument to be made here, but he's pretty clearly chosen not to make it.
Is self-sufficiency and flexibility a bad thing? Is there such a thing as overspecialization or excessive complexity as legible cultural problems? Are the average men in societies, populations, or tribes more or less capable of becoming soldiers en masse, due to the culture they've been shaped by? Does this problem show up even from the perspective of men who appear to, in fact, be quite strong? Fuck that noise, questions are for dweebs! Let's round it to "all men in the society are warriors", that sounds way less complicated.
"Literate". Why portray "literate" and "intellectually decadent" as synonyms? Could it be that arguing against "intellectual decadence" is a hell of a lot harder than arguing for the merits of literacy, and so he finds it most convenient to substitute the former for the later? Can we wait two more sentences to find out?
...And there's your answer.
"moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success". What a disgusting example of intellectual cowardice.
Nothing always leads to battlefield success, so it's good to see that he's really putting himself out there with the bold claims.
And yet, character, of both leaders and followers, very obviously matters immensely in leadership, and leadership matters immensely in all domains of large-scale human conflict. I am pretty sure that "moral purity", in the sense that he very clearly is framing the term, would not be a very good way of describing the phenomenon, which is why I find his framing choices so execrable. But in actual fact it is obvious that Morale and Morals/virtue/character are pretty clearly linked, and that even central examples of Moral Purity in the sense he frames it have in fact been used historically to build winning armies. Discipline is incredibly important in all forms of military affairs. Commitment. Loyalty. Determination. "The moral is to the physical as three to one." We know what amoral armies look like; there is a reason people don't want to rely on them. And yet, even that last link opens up a whole vista on how morality or its absence change war, how morals/character/virtue cannot be done without, the lengths leaders must go to in generating makeshift analogues in their absence, all in the context of a problem that, by itself, greatly illustrates the reality of decadence as a sociopolitical force.
More recently, we have the truism that "no one is going to fight a war on behalf of an economic zone." While we haven't tested this principle hard yet, I know which way I'd bet.
I reiterate: This is propaganda, and worse it is stupid propaganda. You should not trust him to describe or diagnose "cults" of any description, and you should re-evaluate whatever lessons you have drawn from his writings.
I think perhaps instead of weak men, it would be more correct to say bad men, as you seem to run with later in your post. I think a more central way to look at it is the one Zvi identified in his Immoral Mazes Sequence; good times allow and to some degree require intermediation of reality by social systems, enabling negative-sum extractive enterprises exploiting the mismatch between what's legible and what's true, which (may) eventually consume more than all of the societal surplus leading to collapse (which then resets the maze level, as mazes are not viable in unintermediated reality).
Agree with your characterisaion of Devereaux, though.
I love this.
I can take credit for the phrase, but not the idea; as noted, the idea is from Zvi (that sentence is essentially a summary of this post in that sequence).
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Notice the caveats, that you wrote yourself. Notice that ACOUP argues against the typical way in which the "hard men" theory is presented. The dudes with Greek statue profile pictures aren't doing nuanced historiography, they actually want to camp out in the bailey. They want to claim that moral rigidity/orthodoxy, avoidance of "luxuries" and a focus on martial prowess uber alles is an easy short-cut to civilizational dominance. Setting the bailey on fire, as Devereaux does, means there's little Motte left to defend.
His points are, broadly:
Hell, I'll give up on summarizing it, and focus on his own definition:
First: That people from less settled or ‘civilized’ societies – what we would have once called ‘barbarians,’ but will, for the sake of simplicity and clarity generally call here the Fremen after the example of the trope found in Dune – are made inherently ‘tougher’ (or more morally ‘pure’ – we’ll come back to this in the third post) by those hard conditions.
Second: Consequently, people from these less settled societies are better fighters and more militarily capable than their settled or wealthier neighboring societies.
Third: That, consequently the poorer, harder people will inevitably overrun and subjugate the richer, more prosperous communities around them.
Fourth: That the consequence of the previous three things is that history supposedly could be understood as an inevitable cycle, where peoples in harder, poorer places conquer their richer neighbors, become rich and ‘decadent’ themselves, lose their fighting capacity and are conquered in their turn. Or, as the common meme puts it:
That is what he's arguing against. That is actually how people use the phrase.
More importantly, I did not get the impression that:
And I've read the whole series. Devereaux does excellent scholarship, studies a variety of different cases, and provides citations. Rome is typically used as an example in "favor" of the HTWM theory, and luckily for us, he's a classical historian. He covers several hundred years of Roman history:
He uses shipwreck archaeology, ice core analysis of atmospheric lead, and epigraphic evidence to track Roman wealth over time. He outlines a clear pattern (supported, as far as I know, by other period experts): a period of rising affluence in Italy in the Middle and Late Republic, followed by a long period of prosperity in the early empire, disrupted by the Crisis of the Third Century, with another period of economic stability (but at a lower level of prosperity) in the fourth century.
Guess what? : no part of Roman military 'decline' follows this patternz. Rome's military power was greatest when it was getting wealthier and more urban was growing, and began to decline in a period where the empire seems to have become somewhat more rural and poorer.
Even better: Romans were complaining about decadence the entire time! Polybius, Cato the Elder, Sallust, Tacitus, all moaned and bitched about declining Roman virtue.
(Sallust wrote about decadence two centuries before the peak of Roman power under the Nerva-Antonine emperors.)
Over eight centuries, Rome fights dozens of "Fremen" peoples. The Samnites fought three wars with Rome all of which were tough and in many cases the Romans lost battles and struggled, but Rome ended up winning each war.
The Gauls in Cisalpine Gaul? Crushed at Telamon, then systematically smashed one by one after Hannibal's defeat. Caesar had a great fucking time up there. The Celtiberians in Spain? Three wars, all Roman victories. The Germanic Cimbri (Marius stomped) and Teutones? Effectively annihilated. The Helvetii? Near-total genocide. All we've got left of them is a font, the poor bastards.
The successful "Fremen" invaders at the end of the Western Empire make a relatively short list: Senones, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks, Angles/Saxons/Jutes, Alamanni. That's seven successes against dozens of failures. Most of them were Romanized too!
If it's not obvious, to survive, an empire must continue winning indefinitely. To lose, it can take as little as one war. It's the KDR that counts dawg, if you live long enough, common cold, cancer or a car will end any winning streak, and we've got several thousands of years of history to measure the life expectancy of empire.
The quotes you picked do not demonstrate Devereaux “baking in absurdity.” They are him accurately describing the common version of the claim, including the decadence framing, then openly mocking one specific implication (virtue leads to battlefield performance).
He then does the opposite of propaganda: he tells you to watch out for selection effects and to ask about win-rates, not vibes. And he summarizes his conclusions in a way that is falsifiable: if the “Fremen” were systematically superior, you should see them winning more often, not losing more often than they won.
That destroys the bailey and salts the fields. If there's a more sophisticated version hiding in the Motte (one that merely says "states can decline for complex reasons including but not limited to overextension, internal political dysfunction, and occasional bad luck") then congratulations, you've described basic history. And that version doesn't need the "hard men" framing at all.
If you disagree with his central thesis, then I welcome actual arguments.
Here you go. My children's bedtime interrupted my furious attempts to edit them into the original post. I left them out of the initial post because I thought they were honestly too obvious to need elaboration, but that's never a good bet.
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Devereaux is excellent at finding some idiotic thesis a couple guys (he would say "bros") on Twitter hold, claiming it's the bailey to a sensible motte, burning down the bailey, and claiming he's destroyed the motte.
You know who's actually really good on this particular historical topic?Deleuze
I promise you that it's more than "a couple of guys". My Twitter is schizophrenic enough that I find myself looking at their posts more often than I consider ideal. Oh well, it's good ethnography if nothing else. They're thriving out there, posting inspirational quotes and bad history takes when they aren't recovering from parasitosis after the consumption of raw meat.
You'll find plenty of examples on this very forum, if you use the search functionality.
The thing is, there is no Motte! Or rather, there is no interesting Motte. Empires rising and falling because {many reasons} is the boring yet correct explanation.
I do not blame Devereaux for targeting the version found in the wild, the meme tuned for maximum virulence. If there is a counter-thesis of comparable scholarship arguing in favor, well, I haven't found it yet. Sometimes, one side of a debate really does have a disproportionate number of idiots alongside little factual merit, see the Flat Earth community for an existence proof.
They're preparing a padded cell for me already, I've booked one with good wifi reception.
If you have an argument about why empires rise and fall you believe is indisputable, you should write it. You would solve one of the most hotly-contested controversies in all historical scholarship. Spengler Tainter Gibbons Ibn Khaldun Toynbee Diamond Montesquieu Burckhardt Mommsen Braudel Wallerstein Marx etc etc
"There is no interesting Motte"? This sounds so absurd to me I have to assume you're describing twitter reply guys and not the broader scholastic field of studying imperial collapse, where there are absolutely a million mottes. Which is the exact problem with Devereaux: he turns all his historical training on random internet anons to fight a culture war, probably because his historical chops are not strong enough to actually make a dent in the field of study.
The Motte is that there are dozens of factors at play, many of them heavily contextual and localized, requiring exhaustive research. I'm describing history.
I do not have to be a historian to observe that a historical "theory" is implausible, and I largely defer to Devereaux in this particular topic. If you have any concrete examples of him being incorrect, especially here, I'm all ears.
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He's insanely strawmanning the idea of "good times create weak men" and "hard times create strong men"
Ain't nobody saying that because they think "weak men" can't swing a sword, shoot a gun, or push a button just as well as "strong men".
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That article is just ... wow. He's purposely avoiding the point of a bunch of things just to construct his made up term.
Anyways there's no such thing as the "fremen mirage" as a trope. Anything that might fit that label also fits into the trope of "scrappy inderdog team takes on the powerful big bad and wins through the power of friendship, hijinks, gorilla warfare, ingenuity, and just dumb luck. You can rattle off tons of movies that fit this: the matrix, red dawn, zootopia 2, ready player 1, star wars, terminator, etc. 1% of the stories in this category might fit into acoup guy's "fremen dawn" idea but that's basically just a coincidence.
Anyways fuck that guy.
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Same. I kept seeing ACOUP linked in discussions about ancient/medieval/fantasy warfare (classical Greece, classical Rome, LoTR, Game of Thrones, etc.), which is right up my alley, so I decided to try his series of seven articles on Sparta. Every other paragraph was about how evil and oppressive and patriarchal the Spartiates were. Making the point, once, that what we usually think of as "Spartans" were a tiny aristocratic elite and that the majority of the population of Lacedaemon was helots, would have been fine. This was... not that.
I am not in school. If I am spending my free time reading about Sparta, it's because I think Spartans are cool, and I want to learn more about them. Reading post after post from a guy who clearly hates Sparta and everything that is associated with it in the public imagination was decidedly unpleasant.
I finished the series, but I'm not gonna read anything else this asshole puts out ever again.
One of these things is not like the others - the Spartans were slightly less patriarchal than other Greek city-states, and Devereaux acknowledges this. But yes - the whole point of the Sparta series is to make it clear just how badly Sparta sucked. What else is there to say about Sparta? The Spartans themselves were clear that they didn't even try to not suck off the battlefield. Once you establish that Spartan troops have a mediocre win-lose record against peer competitors (and were not worth shit against Macedonians, despite the equal tech level) the only remaining interesting questions are
Both of which Devereaux offers answers to, although not particularly thought-out ones - as you say, he is far more interested in explaining just how badly Sparta sucked. Most of this is drumming in what the facts you used to learn in prep school classical studies actually imply - just how much suckitude (even relative to the baseline of pre-modern suckitude due to the lack of antibiotics and steam engines) is implied by the abusive nature of the agoge or a society with 80+% slavery. Neither of these facts is a secret, but classics teachers don't encourage you to stop and think about them.
If you think Spartans are cool, then you are wrong. Pop quiz - name a famous Spartan military victory not involving an alliance with Persia. Not a pop quiz - you can't name something other than military victories that is plausibly cool about Sparta. Devereaux wrote that many blog posts because he thinks that making people like you less wrong is important.
A big part of Devereaux's project is to push back against a specific wrong idea of martial virtue - what he calls the "cult of the badass" - of which Sparta is the ur-example, and Pete "Leaking war plans to journalists doesn't matter if you look as good shirtless as I do" Hegseth is the MAGA-era personification. In so far as acoup.blog has a political message rather than being a fun place to laugh at bad movie military history, that message is that you don't need to trade off the creature comforts of civilisation in order to build badassitude, because civilised beats badass on the battlefield more often than not. A number of other posts in the thread are asking about the question of "why did someone who is obviously not a conventional left-idiotarian humanities scholar get so rabidly anti-Trump?" and I think this is the answer - MAGA assumes that the pre-requisite to making America great again is to make America badass (or at least to put people who embody badassitude in charge with no consequences for testosterone-fuelled misbehaviour). Devereaux thinks that this involves giving up things that matter and not getting any strategic advantage in exchange.
I'm British, so I have the luxury of admiring the fuzzy-wuzzy's martial virtue from my armchair after my compatriots kick his arse. A lot of former world leaders who were gay for Leonidas looked at the British and thought "they may have the men, ships, and money, but we have higher testosterone so we can beat them". It is one of the ways world leaders become former.
No, the win-lose record actually doesn't imply what you think it implies, and this is the central flaw in Devereaux' argument.
A "batting average" in a sports league works because two conditions are met:
In battle, neither of those are true. Various methods of gaining an advantage like bringing more numbers, occupying a good position, attacking enemy logistics, launching a surprise attack and various other stratagems are commonplace. The "quality" of the soldiers is only one factor in many deciding the outcome of the battle.
Secondly, a general can choose to decline battle. As Devereaux himself detailed in his series on gneralship, battle normally only happens when both generals think they have a reasonable chance of winning (although there are ways for a good general to try forcing a battle anyway).
What does this mean? It means unless there's a consistent skew in the judgment of the generals, the expected outcome in a battle, and therefore the expected win-loss-ratio of a faction, will be 50:50, no matter the relative quality of the soldiers!
If one side is reputed have the better soldiers, then the other general will decline a "fair fight" and instead only offer battle if he believes he has a way to make up for it. Maybe he waits for reinforcements to gain a numbers advantage or occupies a advantageous position like a hill. Meanwhile the spartan general might see those odds but believe the valor of his men may carry the day anyway. So battle will be given once the odds are, on average, equal, after accounting for the soldiers' skill. A stronger faction will not win through winning more battles, but through having more ability to give battle, for example by simply marching up and giving siege, without the enemy ever seeing an opportunity to stop you. And if the mismatch is too great, the weaker side will consider sueing for peace rather instead of going to war at all.
So, with that in mind, what does the mediocre win-loss ratio of spartans tell us? It tells us that the reputation of spartan hoplites was more or less accurate! If they were consistently overestimated, then we'd see a streak of losses for Sparta, as overly cautious enemy generals would stack advantages before they dared to give battle, and overly confident spartan generals would happily accept those bad odds because they believed their troops could handle it, and then the reality of the stacked deck would assert itself. Of course, such a losing streak would rapidly tank the spartan reputation, allowing the perception to realign itself with reality, at which point the win ratio levels again.
So, the conclusion from the data would be the opposite of what you and Devereaux think. The elite reputation was deserved, and Sparta gained influence by winning wars because they could offer battle where others could not, or simply by bullying their neighbors into concession with the threat of their army. And if they overdo it, their neighbors start allying against them, thus gaining a numbers advantage to cancel out individual prowess.
(The alternate explanation would be that spartan generals were consistently superior, and everyone falsely attributed their success to their troops, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim that.)
And to be clear, this doesn't mean Spartiates were supersoldiers. But it does appear as if they were at least noticably better than their peers.
It also doesn't mean the "300" memes are accurate, because it doesn't tell us where their advantages lay. Maybe it's simply the better maneuverability and tactical flexibility Devereaux mentions, or any other martial virtue.
One last thing to consider, an elite reputation, even if (mostly) undeserved, is itself a material asset. If everyone believes Spartans are invincible supersoldiers, this will boost their morale and drop their enemies' just from the prospect of fighting them, and morale decides battles. This could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But that doesn't change the conclusion. An average win ratio means at least the generals know how good they are.
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If you want to judge the Spartans as "they suck" because you don't agree with them, you're not really engaging with the spirit of history. Your assessment of the Spartans doesn't tell us anything about Sparta, it tells us about your particular modern ideas. You might as well as not be doing history, you're not doing history, your assessment of the Spartans was pre-determined from your moral priors. What about this strikes you as worth doing? You already know what you think.
Look I don't want to be mean but this style of writing codes to me as so decidedly unserious that I'm not actually sure what you think you're doing. It conjures up to me a whole stereotype of ironic millennials can't say what they mean because the style is more important than the substance. This attitude often exists in a discourse where arguments are not even considered as arguments but as exercises in taste, you're not just wrong if you don't like Obama or Vietnamese food or Black Lives Matter, you're a bad person. Maybe that's just me projecting something onto you of which you are totally unrelated. But I feel the need to explain this because, again, it's hard for me to otherwise model the mental universe of someone professing to discuss history seriously while using concepts like "suckitude" and "badassitude".
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Look, I get that Sparta hecking sucks and Lysander was a freaking pissbaby chud. But Devereaux just can't accept that the ancient world had fundamentally different values from ours, and their best men admired Sparta for reasons which would get them instantly banned from /r/Hellas.
Sorry bro the agoge was metal. As for battles, there are three aspects to this. The first is the battle of Sardis, if you need an answer to your quiz. The second is that asking for a Spartan victory, or even battle, not involving Persia is like asking for a French battle not involving England (actually, to torture the metaphor, the typical relationship was something closer to Persia's Britain and Sparta's Prussia. Persia had fingers in every pie, and even victories against them usually had some element of deal-making. The third is that the whole neatly-counterintuitive anti-Spartan reading of the Peloponnesian War fundamentally misunderstands Spartan strategy. Sparta had a high-quality army that they knew was very difficult to replace. This led them to essentially adopt a sea command/fleet-in-being strategy on land. The Spartan army could go where it wanted and do what it wanted as long as it didn't commit to a protracted siege or risky battle, and, since they didn't want to give battle either, the Athenians were reduced to a naval strategy which ended up overextending and destroying them at Syracuse and Aegospotami. Devereaux is on firm ground when he claims that Spartan society is unacceptable to modern sensibilities, and that the Spartan setup was fundamentally unsustainable because of their inability to absorb casualties in pitched battles, but he'd have to be a much better historian to "well ackshually" Thucydides and Xenophon.
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Spartans were the eminent military power in greece for some time, whatever they did certainly wasn't just sucking. Other groups certainly did it better, and that's why the spartans are gone now, but that doesn't mean they specifially sucked at fighting.
In fact saying "peer competitors" is already loaded because all of those cities that sparta kicked the ass of aren't considered peer compwtitors anymore.
And look at your empire now. It's certainly a prime example of how weak men have created hard times.
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This seems like an odd take to me? We have very few surviving writings from Sparta itself, because the Spartans did not esteem writing, but if we look at classical admirers of Sparta, it is very rarely the case that they admire Spartan merely for being militarily successful. Plato's admiration of Sparta is not for military strength alone. The case for Sparta is merely that they won all the time, particularly because they demonstrably did not, but that Sparta was in some way a uniquely virtuous society.
It should go without saying that we're not talking about a concept of virtue that a modern Westerner would wholeheartedly endorse, or that most people after the Christianisation of Rome would endorse, but it is nonetheless something that Sparta's contemporaries admired. It was the Spartan constitution and set of laws. Lycurgus was not praised for victory alone. It was the discipline of the spartiates themselves. It involved art and poetry - Tyrtaeus was highly lauded! One of our primary sources for Sparta is Xenophon's Constitution of the Lacedaimonians, which is extremely complimentary, and not focused entirely on military conquest. He praises the moderate appetites of the Spartans, their civic duty, their lack of greed or hedonism, their educational system, and so on. Xenophon is the one who tells us that the Spartans, unlike most poleis, lacked the institution of pederasty, and this is presented as a sign of the Spartans' virtue in valuing boys for their moral character, rather than in fleshly terms.
Should we take that all at face value? Probably not. Much of Xenophon's work is likely a veiled criticism of Athens itself, holding up a semi-imagined Spartan history in order to indict his present society. My point is just that it's plainly not true to say that the only thing Sparta was lauded for was its military record.
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If you don't read his writing on LoTR you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Especially his sections on the books.
Yeah Devereaux's analysis on why the books are logistically realistic in a way the movies are not is one of his best analyses. It might redeem the rest of his blogging career.
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The Sparta piece was an outlier. The social-cultural-political spin of ACOUP keeps me from reading it regularly, so don't take this as an unqualified endorsement, but most of his pieces are not that bad.
Nah I also saw some people shared some of his pieces on game of thrones and he's just as much of a cunt in those as well.
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I hardly think that follows - one can be interested in monstrously evil societies because they're monstrously evil. A man who seeks out an in-depth exposé about the Spanish Inquisition or the Gulags or the Nazis probably is here for the lurid details and the frequent histrionics about how twisted and awful they were. By no means is this the only possible audience for a documentary series about Sparta, but there's no reason to assume that audience doesn't exist.
(Indeed, I myself as a boy, during the brief period where Sparta occupied a large part of my thoughts, pictured it as very much the City Populated Entirely By Nasty Drill Sergeants - it tickled my imagination as a city of insane-sounding joyless motherfuckers which I could scarcely believe had ever existed outside of a cartoon. Not something to be condemned with serious mournful expressions like the Nazis, but a nation made up entirely of heels. That's fun.)
I think that's also how it's portrayed in Asterix The Gaul, and if there's one IP I trust to use stereotypes in a way that's 100% accurate to real life...
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This is true, but acoup guy channels his hate to make spartans look lame in addition to evil. "Acktually as an initiation ritual, spartans had to sneak around naked with a dagger and stab a random unsuspecting peasant to death. Then they get to partyyyyy."
Which by all accounts is not how things worked. To the extent that mass murder actually happened in sparta it wasn't a bunch of guys wandering around with a knives just tryna get a kill squid game style.
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Don't forget his "REAL Historian Reacts to Paradox Games?!" posts.
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