BRIEFLY NOTED: 2023-06-23 Fr
Devereaux on þe historiography of þe "Fall of Rome"; Yglesias watches PodcastTechBros behaving very badly; Martin Wolf wonders how to save democratic capitalism; & me, Summers & al., Anderson, &...
…Teachout on post-Roman Empire Italy, Ukrainian future reconstruction, leftist hallucinations, and surveillance economies.
MUST-READ: Fall of Rome, Continued…
My long-time friend Mike Levitin recommends the extremely thoughtful Bret Devereaux on arguments over the fall of Rome:
Bret Devereaux (2022): Rome: Decline and Fall?: ‘[The historians’ Counter-Reformation] narrative… seeks to update and defend the notion that there really was a fall of Rome… that… was quite bad…. My own sense… is that while nearly all ancient historians will feel the need to concede at least some validity to the reformed ‘change and continuity’ vision, that the counter-reformation school is the majority view among ancient historians at this point (in a way that is particularly evident in overview treatments like textbooks or the Cambridge Ancient History (second edition))…. The [historians’] reformed school tends to be strongest in the study of the imperial east rather than the west… in religious and cultural history; the counter-reformation school is stronger in the west than the east and in military and political history… [plus] archaeology along with demographic and economic history, at which point the weight of fields tends to get more than a little lopsided….
Roman emperors, generals and foederati kings—all notionally members of the Roman Empire—feuding, was the pattern that would steadily disassemble the Roman Empire in the West…. Culture is one of the areas where the ‘change and continuity’ crowd have their strongest arguments: finding evidence for continuity in late Roman culture into the early Middle Ages is almost trivially easy…. [And] most of the old Roman aristocracy seems to have adapted to their changing rulers… the barbarian warrior-aristocracy and the Gallo-Roman civic aristocracy… melded into one…. [The] new kingdoms… lacked the resources… [so] central administration largely failed in the West, with the countryside gradually becoming subject to local rural magnates…. The economic decline of the fifth century (which we’ll get to next time) came with a marked decline in literacy…. Urbanism declined severely….
“Things”—economics and demographics… is the decisive part… what the experience of the collapse of Roman authority was like for the vast majority of people in the Roman world who do not write… were not rich or powerful and who are thus very difficult to see historically.… Even if the collapse of Roman political authority was a neutral or even potentially beneficial experience for the elite stratum at the top of society—and it is not clear that it was, mind you; those elites themselves that write to us certainly did not think so—if it was catastrophically bad for the non-elite population, their experience utterly swamps the elite experience by sheer dint of numbers. And as those of you who have noticed the trend in how this series is organized may have already guessed, it was catastrophically bad…
I think that clarifies it. You can truthfully say “continuity and transformation” and “Rome continued” only if you are narrowing your focus either to high culture or to the Eastern Mediterranean. Otherwise, you have to say “Fall of Rome”—if, that is, you want to be truthful.
ANOTHER MUST-READ: Real Tech Bros Behaving Very Badly:
Matt Yglesias: A vaccine discussion worth having: ‘It’s really sleazy and gross for the hosts of the All-In podcast [Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, and David Friedberg] to be engaging in this Kennedy boosterism as a bank-shot way of harming Joe Biden’s reelection prospects…. Kennedy represents precisely the strand of progressive thought that right-of-center businesspeople have rightly spent the better part of a century bemoaning—his is an anti-progress, anti-technology, ultimately anti-human worldview that stands against biomedical progress, against energy progress, and against human flourishing. If they do succeed in supercharging Kennedy’s campaign, they will greatly set back the state of political argument in the United States…
But isn’t this the standard mode of operation on the right since the collapse of the intellectual case for supply-side economics? They do not want to say: we want a more unequal society that is worse for all of you because it is better for the small number of us. So the alternative strategy is to confuse people by flooding the zone—with bullshit lies. In this context, a high-quality progressive opposition is to be feared. Better have one that is composed of bullshit lies itself.
ONE IMAGE: Time to Get a Bigger Computer!
ONE AUDIO: Martin Wolf on Trying to Save Democratic Capitalism:
<https://www.ft.com/content/2a801534-f3a5-4d0c-8b4f-a790ffa4d702> 48:07
<https://www.ft.com/content/6c5bd126-4f27-48ad-a85b-99283b03bb9e> 45:00
<https://www.ft.com/content/dc289293-c6b6-464e-852f-79e7c0d1b13d> 44:43
<https://www.ft.com/content/def64183-2881-4242-abd8-c546883bcf1e> 43:15
<https://www.ft.com/content/e6b691f9-25bb-4a16-9990-f2a73eb00de1> 21:23
Very Briefly Noted:
Dan Drezner: Weakest. Petition. Ever: ‘Madeleine Albright stands accused of.... what, exactly?… As a professor who wants the academy to demonstrate some degree of sanity to the outside world, however, I hope Georgetown goes through with its plan…
James J. O'Donnell (2005): The Fall of the Roman Empire; The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization: ‘Reformers speak more often of the east… religious and cultural history…. Counters focus… on the west… military and political… have an Eeyore-like preoccupation with declines and falls, and are in the main untouched by “theory”…. The evanescence of Rome led to a significant decline in… complexity… and… prosperity…
Sarah Jones & Jason Eastley: SCOTUS For Sale: Samuel Alito Is The Latest Bought And Paid For Conservative Justice: ‘This Supreme Court is in a race to the bottom to see which justice can put the final nail in its legitimacy coffin. It’s Justice Samuel Alito this time…
Joan Walsh: Just Another RFK Jr. Lie. I Know, Because It’s About Me: ‘I edited Kennedy’s error-ridden piece on a vaccine-autism link, which Salon later retracted. We caved to the truth, not Big Pharma…
Max Chafkin and Dina Bass: Microsoft’s Sudden AI Dominance Is Scrambling Silicon Valley’s Power Structure: ‘The company has quietly cornered the emerging software market, and it’s preparing to cash in…. “It’s ‘Copilot,’ not ‘Autopilot’…. But that said, if you watch it, it might write half your document or half your presentation. We’d take that”…
John Timmer: Intel to start shipping a quantum processor: ‘The 12-qubit device will go out to a few academic research labs…
Chad Orzel: Top 40 Radio and the Punditsphere: ‘Someone is always just tuning in…
Jennifer Ouellette: 3D muscle reconstruction shows 3.2 million-year-old “Lucy” walked upright: ‘As proficient at bipedalism as we are…
Georgia Iacovou: We are experiencing platform decay: ‘The Reddit blackout gives us one less channel of information…
Ken White: ‘Now Chris Licht ascends to the Intellectual Dark Web, met at the gates by Bari Weiss holding high the Lamp of Truth and Ben Shapiro to double-check his genitals…
¶s:
A “transformation” of society in what had been the Western Roman Empire, but what kind of a transformation? If Saint Augustine had not seen Rome as Falling, he would have written a very different book and not taken the line he took in the “The Polity of God”—that the barbarians are, indeed, God’s scourge to lead humanity from trust in this-world sinful human polities to faith in the Polity of God: Brad DeLong (2022): Þe Late-Antiquity Pause, & þe “Bright Ages!”: ‘In ex-Roman Italy, we have: a pure military occupation for the first two generations, "strong pressure" to convert people to Christianity (and we know how that goes), kings trying to convince a subject population that they are more than barbarian bully boys by claiming that they are of Rome's Flavian clan—that is, kin in some sense to the late-00s Roman Empire Titus Flavius Vespasianius (as claiming status as kin to a Roman princeps et imperator of the past was a thing to conjure with)—the near-collapse of urban life, a substantial reduction in the ability of the rural population to purchase cheap mass-produced conveniences that make life comfortable from urban workshops, possibly a reduction in exploitation to feed a now much-shrunken upper class, certainly a loss-of-status as small independent farmers who can no longer trust in the pax Romana. What was the alternative, then? To go to the local bullyboy, and put yourself in bondage as a colonus or a villain…
We very much need postwar Ukraine to be a stunning economic success, for reasons of justice and also of strategy to produce a peaceful and prosperous future world. And it would be very nice if Putin and his enablers could be made to pay the cost of reconstruction in Ukraine. It may happen. It is definitely something that should be part of our negotiating position, alongside our insistence on Ukraine’s territorial integrity and security. But be clear-eyed here: the task is to negotiate an end to the war, which requires that potential key decision-makers in Muscovy come to a belief that they are better off ending the war than continuing it. Which means we have to negotiate: Lawrence H. Summers, Philip Zelikow, and Robert B. Zoellick: A New European Recovery Program: ‘economic and political reconstruction. But it would help secure a lasting Ukrainian victory. An ambitious recovery program that recalls the Marshall Plan would sustain Ukraine, make Europe more secure, brighten the future of surrounding regions, and revitalize the European project itself. That would be a real triumph over Russia’s effort to plunge Europe back into a darker age. To give this plan credibility, Western countries should prepare to use frozen Russian assets…. One way or another, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government, not Western taxpayers, should bear most of the costs…
The thing to understand about the “New Left Review” has always been and remains that its core belief is not an intellectually sophisticated, true, or empirically relevant one. Its core belief is that everything truly evil arises out of the United States, and everything that arises out of the United States is truly evil. And this leads, often, to massive hallucinations. The motivating purpose of Biden’s green energy policies is to start the task of halting Global Warming, not to militarily contain China: Grey Anderson: Strategies of Denial: ‘The Biden Administration’s industrial strategy…$4 trillion…. the geostrategic rationale… a militarized bid to outflank China…. The anti-China orientation of US industrial policy is not an unfortunate by-product of the green ‘transition’, but its motivating purpose…. When Pelosi staged her jingoistic démarche to Taiwan, Democratic apparatchiks downplayed its consequence…. Denial takes the form of silence… barely consider the relational logic between expanded domestic spending and an increasingly aggressive Pacific policy…. Adam Tooze[’s] calling for a strategy of accommodation to China’s rise… [is] liable to be judged ‘either treasonous or non-planetary’ by the present White House…. When Chinese authorities announced a tit-for-tat ban on the use of microchips manufactured by Boise-based Micron Technology, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo declared that the US ‘won’t tolerate’ the decision. ‘We see it as, plain and simple, economic coercion’. Coercion or prudence, ‘preserving our edge in science and technology’ or ‘modernizing the kill chain’, ‘market-distorting practices’ or support for the ‘American worker’, ‘environmental justice’ or atomic showdown over the Taiwan Strait? Critical assessments of Bidenomics ought to be sure which is which…
The legal status of the paterfamilias and of private property under the Roman Republic and Empire continues to cast a long shadow. In the absence of a strong union movement and the political pressures it generates, there is very little countervailing power curbing the growth of the surveillance workplace. As one worker in the Las Vegas airport told me at midnight in December 2000: “I need to keep my hands within the view of the camera: big Brother is watching us, and he has no friend of mine”: Zephyr Teachout: The Boss Will See You Now: ‘We are experiencing a major turning point in the surveillance of workers, driven by wearable tech, artificial intelligence, and Covid…. The political implications of ubiquitous employment surveillance are monumental. While bosses always listened in on worker conversations, they could only listen rarely—anything more was logistically impossible. Not now. Employees have to assume that everything they say can be recorded. What does it mean when all the words, and the tone of those words, might be replayed? Whispering has lost its power…. The speech rights of workers are practically nonexistent except as they explicitly relate to labor organizing, which, [Elizabeth] Anderson argues, is effectively a dead letter these days because of the difficulty of enforcement and the fear of challenging the boss’s tactics. How did things get so bad? Anderson believes the root issues that enabled the current dystopian workplace go back generations. When the Industrial Revolution shifted the “primary site of paid work from the household to the factory,” it imported the long tradition of wholly arbitrary power within the household, in which children did not have freedom vis-à-vis their parents, and wives had limited freedom vis-à-vis their spouses. The Industrial Revolution could have provided an escape from the private tyrannies of home life, but instead it replicated them…. Work is not an afterthought for democratic society; the relationships built at work are an essential building block. With wholly atomized workers, discouraged from connecting with one another but forced to offer a full, private portrait of themselves to their bosses, I cannot imagine a democracy…
I loved the Devereaux series, but I really had to admire his restraint. The potted summary of the "change and continuity argument" runs like this:
"Did you know that when the Roman empire supposedly 'fell', the political state continued to function for centuries in the east, and that even in the west, many of the empire's inhabitants survived? Furthermore, they continued to speak the same language, practice the same religion, and maintain the same elite families. There was no sharp linguistic or cultural break."
It's not so impressive when you put it like that, is it? It just reminds me so so much of the "punctuated evolution" debate, which has been justly forgotten now.
"…. Kennedy represents precisely the strand of progressive thought ..." - Matthew Yglesias
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is of course in no way shape or form 'progressive': he is a hard right wing reactionary. Yglesias here is scoring some cheap points with the sensibly sensible centerists [self-described centerists that is] and not writing any reality-based description. Really disappointed to see this quoted here uncritically.