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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29519 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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How much do we actually know about Bronze Age morality?

This is an honest question from someone who doesn’t know a ton about the era.

People here and elsewhere sometimes point out that the Bronze Age Mindset is a bit of a LARP, its followers mostly white collar workers idealizing an unrealistic world they would hate if they inhabited. It’s hard to take people seriously whose main experience with conflict is arguing on Twitter when they exalt the warlike morality of the Iliad or the Odyssey.

My question is: were the actual people writing the Odyssey and the Iliad also LARPing? These are books portraying the height of the Bronze Age civilizations by people who emphatically did not live in them, but rather in their ruins. Today we’re apparently Tanner Greer-maxing because I’m quoting another piece of his to you: “How I Taught the Iliad to Chinese Teenagers.”

I spend about 15 minutes outlining what we know about Mycenaean civilization through archaeological discoveries: the grandeur of their palaces, how they fought, their role in an entire ecosystem of Near Eastern civilizations. But most of all I focus on the mystery of their fall, the “Bronze Age Collapse” that littered the Greek isles with Mycenaean ruins, ruins that would have towered over the humble abodes of “Dark Age” Greece (pictures of Dark Age archaeological finds are included in the slides to drive home this point).

I then have students read Book IV.35-62. Here Hera declares that in exchange for the destruction of Troy, she will allow Zeus to destroy Argos, Sparta, and Mycenae without complaint. These three cities were devastated in the Bronze Age collapse. This gives us another way to think about the Iliad. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a popular genre with high schoolers. But if you actually lived in a post-apocalyptic setting… what would your fiction be about?

Homer’s Greeks lived in the ruins of a golden age. They had forgotten how to write and read, but they still remembered a time when the Aegean was full of great cities, wealthy kings, and enormous armies. The Iliad portrayed that golden world as it was imagined hundreds of years later—and explained why this golden age was no more. It is a true piece of post-apocalyptic fiction.

Do we expect the illiterate, post-apocalyptic Greeks to be the same morally and socially as their highly advanced ancestors? Can we be confident their portrayal of those societies is how the ancients would have portrayed themselves, or could they just be later cultures trying to insert themselves and their customs into that time period? I imagine ancient Greece was a more violent place than modernity, but the portrayal of its inhabitants as people who killed, looted, and enslaved without a second thought - was this really how they felt back then? Or was this the tribal, warlike peoples who came after them back-projecting their contemporary values onto the golden age? When I look up ancient literature in the Bronze Age I don’t see anything from Greece - how much do we really know about these people, how they felt, and what they thought?

Parts of their morality can be inferred, mainly from the time period's namesake: Bronze.

Some minor background for people that don't regularly go on history binges:

  1. Bronze is a very useful metal. It is easier to work and in most use cases superior to iron. Steel is best, but really difficult to make with their furnaces.
  2. Bronze was an economic innovation. Its an alloy of tin and copper. The mines for these two types of metals were not next to each other. To make the metal in any meaningful quantities you had to have a Mediterranean Sea spanning trade network.
  3. The end of the Bronze age is a frightening event. The "Bronze age collapse" happened suddenly. Scholars seem to think some kind of widespread invasion and war caused the collapse. The trade network of the Mediterranean collapsed within a short time period. Some archeology has found clay tablets from the time period asking for help to fight off invaders.

The people in the civilizations using Bronze were likely soft trader types. They likely had a morality that allowed for trading and interacting with foreign cultures. They probably weren't very war like (which would have made them bad traders, and it might have allowed them to fight off the invasion that ended the Bronze age).

Most of the rest of the world was full of hunter gatherers and pastoral farmers. The exceptions being in the other cradles of civilization, Indus valley, China, and possibly Mexico/South America.

I don't really know what Bronze Age Pervert, or any of the other "larpers" say about bronze age mentality. It would be interesting if they have come to similar conclusions, but what little I have heard makes me think they have a very different understanding.

Scholars seem to think some kind of widespread invasion and war caused the collapse.

I've heard an interesting theory that the widespread invasion and war was actually the result of a powerful volcanic eruption, Hekla 3, that threw up so much ash that it impacted on the global climate. The ash cloud and global cooling that resulted caused widespread crop failures and famines that were likely the motivating event behind the invasions of the Sea Peoples, as well as severely impacting the ability of the various civilizations to fight back. It sounds plausible to me, though there is some debate over the dating of the eruption.

Fucking volcanoes man.

The volcanic winter of 536 helped lead to the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of Islam.

The Thera eruption of 1600 BC may have caused the collapse of Minoan civilization (and the myth of Atlantis)

The Lake Toba eruption (Supervolcano VEI8) from 74,000 years ago may explain why humans and cheetahs have so little genetic diversity.

And that's before we even get to the Permian Extinction of 225 mya, the greatest mass extinction in world history.

I'm curious about the effects of a 536-like event once 40% of the world's energy production is solar.

For a partial example, you can look at the Texas electrical grid(which is partially separated from the rest of the country and experiences supply crunches on hot-yet-overcast days for exactly that reason. The solution to this problem suggested by a given politician is a pretty guide to where he stands in the Texas GOP’s internal factional disputes- technocrats want to build nuclear plants, rinos want to connect to the rest of the country, populists want to pollute more).

For a partial example, you can look at the Texas electrical grid...

I live just outside Houston, so I don't need to look very far. Unfortunately the Valentine Vortex would absolutely pale in comparison, I'm afraid.

Much overlooked in the interconnect and renewables conversation is the systemic nature of certain failure modes of solar, I feel like. Much like the 2008 financial crisis, where the odds of one mortgage failing were slim, but if it happened no big deal, one wind or solar farm underproducing or going offline is no big deal--but each one that is offline increases the chances of another being offline. If, say, all the solar in Texas suddenly has difficulty producing, it's highly likely that whatever the cause is stretches beyond Texas borders, be it weather pattern disturbances or atmospheric conditions or whatever, which sets up catastrophic and cascading failures. Interconnection advocates discussing the VV often gloss over the fact that neighbor grids didn't have power to spare either.

That's a troubling thought. Especially since the energy produced by solar panels is already so poor compared to the energy required to create them.

That's even ignoring the prospect of the next Miyake Event.

Even a mere Carrington Event could wipe out a lot of solar production.

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