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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.”
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?
In defense of the illiterate post-apocalyptic Greeks, given how much of their literature has survived to the present day they couldn't have been that illiterate.
That said, I think you raise an excellent point. In contrast with the classical age and early Christian era from which numerous primary sources have survived pretty much everything do we know of bronze age culture comes either from secondhand sources after the fact or has been inferred from archeological evidence. That doesn't mean we can't draw reasonable conclusions from recurring themes and motifs.
I actually started writing this as a reply to your post about Tolkien down thread, but this strikes me as an even better example.
I feel like this sort of commentary underlines just how provincial and illiterate our academic class has become. Tolkien didn't invent a new sort of hero, he was instantiating a very old (and very Catholic) sort of hero that 'most people today outside of the trad-right are simply unfamiliar with because modern culture is overwhelmingly secular and liberal. "Your will Lord, not mine, be done." Is just one of those sentiments that just doesn't compute to someone who's entire worldview/life-experiance has been filtered through multiple layers of irony, post-modernism, and their Jewish Poli-Sci Professor's theories about Freud, Nietzsche, and "the will to power". But it computed to Tolkien, and it evidently computed to a great deal of his audience.
I read academic commentary about how lines in Homer like "the wine dark sea" prove that bronze age people were color-blind and I want to ask, have you ever looked West over the ocean at sunset? I have. Maybe my brain is just less evolved but, on those evenings, when the reflections of the oranges and reds off the sky turn the water a grape-juice purple, comparing the sea to wine feels rather apt.
Come on guys, Get on my level.
It might be relevant that Tanner Greer himself who made the argumment is a devout Mormon. I think there's something more specific happening that I maybe did a bad job getting at, but tried to articulate downthread. It's not that Tolkien invented the reluctant hero, but that in the modern YA trope (that's taken off since then) you see a different kind of post-divine revelation, post-destiny, post-prophecy kind of relationship between purpose, power, and morality.
I think a hero who accepts their mission specifically because it was handed down from God is of a very different nature, this is someone who believes there is an absolute authority that can and will be answered to. The moderns protagonists don't believe that, which is part of why they're so uncertain about their mission and nervous about accepting. It's the very breakdown in authority and trust that partially defines their reluctance and their character. The fact that their worlds are exagerrated, disfigured pastiches of totalitarian governments and corporations is another sign their stories are reflecting the psychology of people inhabitating a highly modernized world rather than calling back more traditional themes and motifs.
Separately, surprised to see you joining the crowd here blaming modern malaise on the Jews. I thought you were pretty solidly in my camp against that kind of vulgar count-the-jew philosophy.
Again, an excellent point.
To be clear I am not blaming modern malaise on the Jews. I've got nothing against Israel or anyone who goes to Synagogue on Saturdays. That said one of the grand ironies of the motte is that (directionally at least) I probably agree with our WN interlocutors more than most other users here do. There really is a subset (emphasis on a subset) of Jewish intellectuals who resent everything about western culture and want to see it undermined and overthrown, but that subset isn't "the Zionists" or the ADL, it's the atheists, the intersectionalists and the grievance-mongers.
...and my opposition to them makes me an enemy of the wignats on the alt-right because when push comes to shove, they are far more concerned with their place in the intersectional stack than they are securing the future for their (or anyone else's) children.
...
I'm disappointed Hlynka. You started out on the right path, but flubbed the ending. Tolkien's heroes are Catholic heroes not just because "Your will Lord, not mine, be done." I think the more important part distinguishing Tolkien's protagonists (and the opposite for his antagonists) is the emphasis on acting virtuously and avoiding sin even in the presence of great temptation--the ends do not justify the means and the world can never be saved through sin. Do not chase great deeds, but act appropriately when circumstances make them necessary. This is very different than what Greer and @Soriek are describing.
I think we might agree more than disagree. That "the world can never be saved through sin" is precisely why I reject Identity politics and wignatism, much to consternation of folks like @2rafa.
I suppose I struggle to see why ‘the world cannot be saved through sin’ is not merely a slightly-higher-order form of consequentialism than ‘whatever it takes’. The logic on the Christian (or any Abrahamic religion’s) side just adds on the final level of consequence which is God’s judgment after death.
Basically what the aptly named @ThisIsSin said.
You don't overcome corruption by embracing corruption. You overcome it by building, by becoming better than this base flesh.
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No, it's more of a "Satan can't drive out Satan" thing. You can't out-corrupt those who are already corrupt; instead you must produce value elsewhere such that the influence and power of the corrupt is minimized (as the corrupt will always be there in the background).
One can see this as a common thread through history. In conditions where creating value is easy the impact of corruption is minimized (society has a pro-freedom emphasis- the value-producers are running the show here- usually characterized as a "golden age" after the fact); in conditions where this is more difficult, corruption dominates (society has a pro-control emphasis- the parasites are running the show here).
Of course, God does not care all that much under what earthly authority his followers are operating; the underlying difficulty of obeying his commands doesn't meaningfully change, but the incidentals can and do.
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