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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   31622 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Again, an excellent point.

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.

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.

it's the atheists, the intersectionalists and the grievance-mongers.

That's all stuff that's blamed on the Jews in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and it didn't start there. The idea that the Jews were trying to undermine White, Christian civilization is an old White nationalist trope. It's what the Nazis pushed as well. Just read a summary of the Protocols.

"White Christian civilization" died intellectually in the 18th century, when elite human capital of Europe rejected old Christian values and adopted Enlightenment ones.

"The Jews" played very small part in the process, unless you want to lay all praise/blame for enlightenment on Baruch Spinoza alone.

Politically, it perished since 1789. (((They))) held also minuscule role in these events.

Everything since then is just rearranging the rubble.

I think tales of it's death have been greatly exaggerated and even if it is dead, I'd place the date far later. It was still very much alive at the outset of the First World War, whether it died there is a matter of debate.

As Chesterton says, Christianity has died at least five times and rose again stronger from the tomb. It's almost as if there's a theme somewhere in the Gospels...

As Chesterton says, Christianity has died at least five times and rose again stronger from the tomb. It's almost as if there's a theme somewhere in the Gospels...

You probably mean Hillaire Belloc, writer even more prolific than Chesterton and one half of "Chesterbelloc" inseparable duo.

In The Great Heresies he boasts how the Church survived attacks of Arianism, Islam, Cathars, Reformation and modern unbelief and ends in rather optimistic tone.

Of this new tendency to sympathize with Catholicism--and in the case of strong characters to take the risk, to accept the Faith, and proclaim themselves the defenders of it--there can be no doubt. Even in England, where the traditional feeling against Catholicism is so universal and so strong, and where the whole life of the nation is bound up with hostility to the Faith, the conversions which strike the public eye are continually the conversions of men who lead in thought; and note that for one who openly admits conversion there are ten at least who turn their faces toward the Catholic way, who prefer the Catholic philosophy and its fruit to any others, but who shrink from accepting the heavy sacrifices involved in a public avowal.

...

Even the most misguided or the most ignorant of men, talking vaguely of "Churches," are now using a language that rings hollow. The last generation could talk, in Protestant countries at least, of "the Churches." The present generation cannot. There are not many churches; there is one, it is the Catholic Church on the one side and its mortal enemy on the other. The lists are set.

Thus are we now in the presence of the most momentous question that has yet been presented to the mind of man. Thus are we placed at a dividing of the ways, upon which the whole future of our race will turn.

The book was written in 1938 and, sadly for Catholic Church, Belloc's optimism turned out to be badly misplaced.

Catholic church rejected everything that would make it Catholic in Bellloc's eyes and is not looking very well.

Protestant churches are still there, and the churches that are thriving and growing are churches that would drive Belloc into rage and total despair, if he saw them.

As great sage said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

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