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non_radical_centrist  10mo ago (astralcodexten.substack.com)   1101 thread views

Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga

astralcodexten.substack.com

It's a book review submitted to Scott Alexander's blog for his book review contest(not by me, I just enjoyed reading it). It a summary of an Icelandic Saga that's half-fable, half-historical record of a series of legal proceedings in medieval Iceland, and how society that teeters between civilization and barbarism.

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But freedom requires virtue, and the particular virtue it requires of you right now is the virtue of mercy and forbearance. Ancient Athens could do what it did because it was geographically and spiritually right on the productive edge between the German barbarians on one side and the decadent Oriental despotisms on the other. We’re trying to do the same thing here, surf the tiny space between civilization and barbarism where freedom can flourish.

This sounds right, but from what I've read Athens didn't have freedom in a sense an Icelander or most moderners would recognize. Freiheit of the German warband is about individual autonomy, libertas of classical civilization about group autonomy. The latter would look at the Puritan colony with its rigid social regulations and say they were free. Athens sounds like a regimented society that happened to be democratic.

The quote is more apt for our present situation. Behind, poverty so vast that only the nobility had freiheit. Ahead, Moloch.

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