When you go see renaissance cultural stuff romanticizing the ancient romans and greeks do you crap all over it on the basis that the societies they're romanticizing had spicy takes on women or that their economies were comparatively primitive? Are you going to complain that they didn't have running water and electricity in the old west while you're at it?
The past was generally rife with problems that hadn't yet been solved. Some of those were technical and some of them social. But dismissing it all as racism or whatever is misleading at best. People (generally, I'm sure there's a few exceptions) aren't romanticizing the racism or the violence or the outhouses or the lack of antibiotics or any other negatives that have since been solved or improved upon, when they romanticize these periods of history.
The Romans are 'ancient history' and not directly connected to current events in the US. Sure, we have some cultural inheritance from them, but they're many, many generations removed from us, whereas some of this 'western lore' stuff is not, really. I have a photo of my own great grandfather on a horse with a rifle in Montana. He was a ranger with the Forest Service.
And I talked with my great grandmother about her family providing meals to visiting tribes on their farm in Iowa, and how there was some sort of marker indicating that they were a welcoming farm for traveling tribes. The majority of people in the frontier were northerners/immigrants looking to create a better life, not ex-Confederates looking to take out their being complete losers on the frontier. These were people often rejected by their own society for having the wrong religion (my family were German/Irish Catholics who were literally driven out, the Irish part arriving as orphans because their families died on the boats over), living in very rugged/primitive situations, dependant entirely on their individual ability to survive. There was very much an individualism yet a 'look out for others' ethic among these people whom had had no one look out for them (to the point their home countries had left them to die) and a very strong appreciation of America having providing them a place where they could go.
The Fascists did romanticize (a distorted version of) the Roman Empire.
There's a similar and misplaced admiration of Sparta, which is wrong headed since Sparta wasn't even all that good at military matters, and, compared to other city states of the time, a failure at everything else.
What. Sparta, in its heyday, had one of the mightiest infantries in Greece, and that's saying something. One does not simply defeat Athens in a thirty years war without having serious military capabilities.
They were fascist assholes who murdered slaves as a rite of passage, but they were also good soldiers. No reason to deny that.
I'm basing my opinion in this analysis of ACOUP (Brett Deveraux), who's a military historian and specializes in dismantling this kind of pop culture myths.
While the Spartans weren't a disaster, and in some respects they were marginally better (but in others, worse), the statistics don't lie: they had an average track record, certainly not on par with their current reputation. They didn't excel at any particular strategy, they were just hoplites like every Greek at the time. Their track record is disappointingly average:
> We get 12 victories, 11.5 defeats and 0.5 draws
Hardly impressive, right? And this is excluding naval battles, if we include them the Spartans do slightly worse.
> Sparta had a formidable military reputation, but their actual battlefield performance hardly backed it up. During the fifth and fourth centuries, Sparta lost as often as it won. Spartan battlefield tactics were a bit better than other Greek poleis, but this is damning with faint praise. The spartiates themselves were mostly like every other group of wealthy Greek hoplites. But the Spartan military reputation was extremely valuable – the loss of that reputation during the Peloponnesian War does much to explain the rough decades Sparta would experience following its end.
He also explains Sparta was also a self-defeating, ever-shrinking society, which ultimately proved to be its demise. But you're not disputing this, so this is just a side note.
>> We get 12 victories, 11.5 defeats and 0.5 draws
Without the context of the relevant battles those numbers mean nothing. E.g. Thermopylae was one of the losses but it would be hard to interpret it as evidence of the Spartans' average military capabilities. War is not football, to keep score. Rome lost more battles to Hannibal than they won, but they erased Carthage from the face of the earth.
As to Bret Deveraux, my opinion is that he's a fucking idiot. You say he "specializes in dismantling this kind of pop culture myths". What he really specialises in, with respect to Sparta, is trying to troll nenoazis and other idiots who are the Spartans' biggest fans, by pointing out what fucking losers they were (the Spartans; but also by extension the neonazis). That's an easy win.
Nobody thinks Sparta was some great beacon of civilisation, except perhaps for people who take all their history from watching 300. It was Athens that was a beacon of civilisation, Athens who went down in history for its contributions to science and culture, Athens whose glorious ruins are visited today by millions every year, when Sparta is lost forever, not even its location known. And good riddance to those fascist assholes.
Anyway Deveraux is writing a blog and you shouldn't mistake blogs for sources of historical truth.
Don't worry about the downvotes, they seem to be drive-by style.
I agree with your comment, and also agree it's not exactly the same situation. The romanticization of the Old West is much closer to the current political climate in the US. There's also the baggage of the "Lost Cause" that still permeates their politics, sadly.
It was mostly a nitpick, I just wanted to point out this kind of misguided fascination for old history has also impacted the Roman Empire, Sparta (which I mentioned because there's a kind of rightwing admiration for "Spartan values", which is hogwash), etc.
Texas is a little bit closer to home, if you will. There are still people alive today who believe that aspects of it -- mythical or real -- are fundamental to our culture, or a model for contemporary society.
It's not crapping all over history. If it was engaged with in a rigorous manner, nobody would have a problem with it.
The problem is that they romanticize it, paint an inaccurate picture of it, and also try to draw conclusions about modern life based on these misconceptions.
It's not about mocking them because of the outhouses.
I will push back on people who romanticize and emulate those societies,
and in the US in the 21st century there are plenty of folks who would like to see the country return to when times were supposedly "great".
I’m glad that the status quo works for you, but it doesn’t work for most people which is why there is so much upheaval right now. It’s screwed up that our society makes raising children so hard. It’s screwed up that our society is so low trust. Those are two things that were much better when we were setting the west and it’s worth exploring how we can return somewhat to those times.
By the way, I don’t think anyone wants to return fully to those times. The question is, on what ways can we return and get the maximum benefit for our people? That is a conversation worth having.
You are engaging in romanticism right now. You’ve made a bunch of qualitative statements that are based on a history that likely isn’t real. In what ways do you think it was easier to raise children when the west was settled, why do you believe that trust levels were higher? Why do you think the status quo is worse for more people now?
You need to make some of that quantitative to even have a reasonable discussion about it or we are just talking about mental images, whether that be little house on the prairie or the artful dodger.
No, this discussion doesn't have to be qualitative. You dismiss Little House on the Prairie, which is ironic because Laura Wilder quite literally wrote an exact biography that had some details (like the death of her brother) that were left out in the child-friendly books. I'm so thankful that she wrote both kinds of books so that folks can't honestly dismiss the "bad old days" as objectively worse than the present.
Your chronological snobbery reminds me of a similar blindness that modernity has for the "women and children first" policy when the Titanic was sinking. When they made the movie, the director deliberately altered the story because he believed nobody would believe the truth. Yet the truth is, women and children were a whole lot more likely to survive than men, indicating that policy must have taken place[1].
The reality is, if you read first-hand accounts of the west, you see an incredible optimism, an incredible amount of sacrifice and an incredible amount of shared community on the west. That is so alien to our modern culture, where most people know a prophet of doom and gloom, people think that "community" is something you can purchase with a membership or find online, and conspiracy theories (real and imagined!) are a constant hot topic.
The Little House on the Prairie books? Today they are categorized as autobiographical fiction or Roman à clef. Try reading Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser[1]. Wilder's books negatively portray Native Americans, and gloss over her family's illegal occupation of land what was then still Osage Nation's territory.
You can read about optimism, sacrifice and shared community now. You can experience it even…
It’s interesting that you’re accusing me of snobbery when I’ve made no quality arguments at all. Yet you have very specific descriptions of now that villainize it in as broad strokes as you praised the past.
> When you go see renaissance cultural stuff romanticizing the ancient romans and greeks do you crap all over it on the basis that the societies they're romanticizing had spicy takes on women or that their economies were comparatively primitive?
So, pointing out ethical failures accurately is "crapping all over it"?
> Are you going to complain that they didn't have running water and electricity in the old west while you're at it?
I'm going to suggest that objecting to enslavement, and objecting to having a well with a bucket, are not anywhere on the same spectrum.
You seem to be arguing from a truly dishonest, and fundamentally immoral, basis.
The past was generally rife with problems that hadn't yet been solved. Some of those were technical and some of them social. But dismissing it all as racism or whatever is misleading at best. People (generally, I'm sure there's a few exceptions) aren't romanticizing the racism or the violence or the outhouses or the lack of antibiotics or any other negatives that have since been solved or improved upon, when they romanticize these periods of history.