The Myth of Sparta

The Puzzle of Spartan Excellence

No one was more devoted to courage and to duty; no one trained with greater commitment and enthusiasm to achieve his ends. And no one was committed more thoroughly and relentlessly to the annihilation of self and of self-regard in service of the greater communal good. … The Spartans were narrow-minded, and narrow-minded by design. But what they did no one ever did better, and they did it with signal success for centuries on end; at once inspiring and appalling the hundred generations or so that have followed.
　　　– Timothy Shutt, A History of Ancient Sparta p. 5, 2009

I've thought for years how odd it is that communist and totalitarian states eventually self-destruct, except ancient Sparta [1].  Because Sparta seems to be the worst of a very bad bunch.  Sparta in the 5th century BC was, in many ways, the most-awful, least-human society ever built: one which relied on brutal slavery on a more-massive scale than the American antebellum South; with no art, literature, philosophy, or science (Millender 2001 p. 123 says Sparta had no writers in the 5th century BC, and only political propagandists after 400 BC); little music except by one composer, Tyrtaeus, who had been dead for nearly two centuries and had written only bloody-minded patriotic songs [2]; apparently no poetry but the lyrics of those songs; secret police who spied on everyone from aristocrats to slaves; no freedom of travel; very little trade; no free thought or speech; almost no family life; extreme wealth inequality which could not be spoken of; and the most-brutal institutionalized child abuse of any culture known to history (including obligatory homosexual pederasty). [3]

And yet, it had a glowing reputation with many ancient Greeks, and with many historians of antiquity, especially under Romanticism. This is why the apotheoses of Spartophilia and of Romanticism occurred at the same time, in the same state: Nazi Germany (Rawson 1969 p. 1).

I began reading about Sparta to see how close it was to Plato's Republic (answer: very close).  Knowing that Plato and Socrates supported Sparta during the war between Sparta and Athens turns out to be key to understanding both why Socrates was executed [4], and to interpreting Plato's Republic: it dispells both Plato's misleading account of Socrates' trial, and Plato's lie that Republic was about personal virtue and not actually about government at all.  Sparta was a powerful inspiration to totalitarian thinkers such as Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Hitler (Plutarch & Talbert 1988 p. ix), and to Western totalitarian political theories and governments [5], including the French Revolutionaries (Rawson 1969 chpts 15-17; Powell 2017 chpt 23) and the Third Reich (Kerstan 1983, Rawson 1969 chpt 19).

Now, the one thing the Spartans are famous for is being amazing, obsessive, super-human soldiers.  And yet, while reading (Jones 1967), I noticed the Spartans seemed to lose more battles than they won.  I went back and read the pages on battles again, counting; and, yes, they did lose more of the battles described in that book than they won.

It struck me only then that all accounts of Sparta's happy citizen-ants were filtered through the Spartans.  Outsiders were seldom allowed into Sparta except for religious festivals, and the few who came asking questions were probably fed propaganda.  Spartans were seldom allowed to travel outside their realm except to kill people.  Sparta actually had a word for "the policy of keeping Spartans in Sparta and expelling foreigners": xenelasia.  And we know that the history the Spartans told about themselves was bogus (which I'll get to later).  Early 6th-century Sparta was nothing like the 5th-century Spartans said it had been.  They conveniently wrote no histories and forbade writing down their laws, so they could change law and history whenever they wanted to.  So our accounts of Sparta are like the accounts visitors brought back of Russia in the 1930s.

And it had never sat right with me that they could be so good at war.  War is complicated.  Doing it well takes lots of smarts, knowledge, accountants, and logistics; and the Spartan life of doing what you're told and not thinking for yourself was uniquely ill-suited to producing smart or knowledgeable people.

The solution to that puzzle turns out to be:  The myth that Sparta had a great military is bullshit.

The Data

I went through the Wikipedia page "Category:Battles involving Sparta" and entered into a spreadsheet the name of each battle, its date, the opponents, and win / tie / loss counts.  It turns out the great Sparta won only 37% of its battles [6], and lost 57%.  Using the same measure, Athens won 52% and lost 43%.

Most of those few wins were partly due to Sparta's allies, who often supplied troops or money.

• The most-famous "Spartan" battle, at Thermopylae, was the plan not of Sparta but of the Athenian politician / general Themistocles.  The Spartans sent only 300 of the 7000 Greek hoplites who fought there, and only 10 of the 280 triremes protecting the coast to the rear of the battle.
• After the Persian wars, Persia adopted a political strategy of always supporting the underdog in Greece.  It was Persian money that paid for the fleet with which the Spartan Lysander finally won the Peloponnesian War against Athens at the Battle of Aegospotami.  The political equilibrium which usually held in Greece between the Persian Wars and Alexander the Great owed much to money from Persia and other non-Greek nations [7].
• If you count only the battles that Sparta fought with nothing but its own troops (with or without Persian money), their wins go down to 31% and their losses up to 62%, which may be the worst military record of any major ancient Greek city-state.

The Spartans didn't lose only when outnumbered.

• 11 Athenian triremes routed 77 Spartan triremes at the Battle of Naupactus (429 BC).
• The Athenian general Demosthenes beat a larger Spartan and Ambracian army in 426 BC at the Battle of Olpae using a particularly clever ambush.
• In the Battle of Pylos (425 BC), the Spartans failed to capture an Athenian garrison despite outnumbering it 5-to-1 in hoplites and 14-to-1 in triremes.  (The garrison's natural defenses were strong, but it could probably have been taken if the Spartans had made good use of ranged weapons.)
• In 404 BC at the Battle of Phyle, 700 Athenian democrats under Thrasybulus ambushed and destroyed a superior Spartan & Athenian-aristocrat force.
• Days or weeks later, at the Battle of Munychia, 1000 Athenian rebels routed 5000 Spartans and Athenian aristocrats in an epic phalanx-on-phalanx smashfest [8].  The rebels, with a phalanx 10 ranks deep, charged a Spartan-oligarchic phalanx 50 ranks deep, perhaps the most impenetrable and unstoppable formation ever fielded in classical antiquity, and smashed it.
• In the Battle of Tegyra (375 BC) the Spartans were beaten by a Theban army which they outnumbered 5-to-1.
• They again outnumbered the Thebans at the Battle of Leuctra (371), yet were routed with heavy losses by the Thebans' unconventional tactics.
• They were about evenly matched when the Thebans beat them yet again in the 2nd Battle of Mantinea (362 BC).

Nor did they lose due to a crippling devotion to honor and honesty.

• According to Pausanias, they won the Battle of the Great Foss (682 BC) by bribing the leader of their enemy's ally to desert when the fighting started.
• They were infamous for offering lame excuses for not showing up for a battle or arriving late, not honoring treaties or promises, committing sacrilege, and stalling negotiations.
• At the Battle of the 300 Champions against Argos (546 BC), each side sent out 300 champions to fight each other, and swore to honor the victory or defeat of these 300.  After the Spartans lost, they broke their oath, refused to honor the results, and made up a story claiming that they'd won the battle.

• Consider the career of the Spartan King Cleomenes I, one of their best generals:

  • At the Battle of Sepeia in 494 BC, he wanted to slaughter all of the surviving Argives who had taken refuge in the Sacred Grove of Apollo.  First he tricked many into leaving the grove (and being killed once out-of-sight) by saying they'd been ransomed.  When that stopped working, he ordered the Spartan slaves to burn down the sacred grove, so that the wrath of the gods for this sacrilege would fall on the slaves instead of the Spartans [9].
  • Immediately afterwards, he committed sacrilege again at the temple of Hera in Argos, where he had the priest who tried to prevent him from sacrificing there flogged.  (Again, he had his slaves do the flogging.)
  • He was strongly suspected of having taken a bribe from the city of Argos, because he conquered the city and its formidable army, then just left and went home.

  • He was eventually exiled from Sparta after becoming its sole king, because people found out that he'd become its sole king by bribing the Oracle of Delphi to help him depose his co-ruler Damaratus.

    • (Damaratus then fled to Persia, and helped the Persians in their second war against the Greeks.)
• In 427 at the Siege of Plataea, the city of Plataea surrendered to the Spartans on condition that each man among them receive a fair trial.  The Spartans gave them each a "fair trial", then killed them all.
• At the Battle of Olpae in 426 BC, the Spartan leaders secretly agreed to surrender their troops to be slaughtered if they themselves were allowed to leave.
• When the Athenians established a colony of former Spartan slaves near Spartan territory after the Battle of Pylos (425 BC), the Spartans, fearing their own slaves would flee there, reputedly commanded that all of the slaves who had fought for Sparta should report to a special ceremony to honor them, where they were honored with headgear, then marched out-of-sight and murdered.  (Nobody can know if this really happened; no one present could and would have recorded it.)
• After the Battle of Aegospotami (405 BC), the Spartan commander Lysander killed 3000 Athenian prisoners.
• After Sparta finally occupied Athens, they took the entire treasury of Athens for themselves, giving nothing to any of their allies in the war.
• I didn't draw any of these examples from (Herodotus 430 BC), which contains many other examples.  Historians often describe his Histories as having been written to show the Athenians their own faults, but another theme is the treachery and selfishness of the Spartans, possibly to warn all Greeks against trusting Sparta (Blösel 2018), which had cultivated an unearned reputation for honour.
• In their defense, after the Spartans won the Peloponnesian War, Thebes and Corinth wanted to burn Athens to the ground and enslave its people, and Sparta refused.  (They did, however, put some of Socrates' students in charge of the city and help them slaughter everyone in it known to be pro-democracy, in an attempt to remold it in Sparta's image (Whitehead 1983).)

Sparta's opponents often won using clever, innovative tactics, such as at the Battle of Phyle (404 BC), the Battle of Olpae (426 BC), the Battle of Cyzicus (410 BC), the Battle of Arginusae (406 BC), Battle of Tegyra (375 BC), the Battle of Leuctra (371 BC), and the 2nd Battle of Mantinea (362 BC).  The Spartans, so far as I have found in reviewing these 51 battles, never made a single creative strategic or tactical innovation.  They were sometimes clever; mostly through treachery and trickery.  Here's my complete list of the other clever things they did in 51 battles:

• According to Herodotus, at the Battle of Sepeia (494 BC), the Spartan King Cleomenes I realized that the Argives, on the defensive because of an unfavorable prophecy by the Oracle of Delphi, were eating their meals whenever the Spartan herald called the Spartans to eat theirs.  Cleomenes commanded that the next time the Herald called them to a meal, they should attack instead, and so they took the Argives by surprise.

  • Plutarch attributes this victory to Spartan treachery:  He wrote that Cleomenes made a 5-day truce with the Argives, then violated it with a surprise night attack, and justified himself by saying, "I said we'd have a truce for 7 days.  I didn't say anything about the nights."  But Plutarch is surely less-reliable than Herodotus.
• In the Battle of Lyncestis (423 BC), the Spartan general Brasidas managed to escape a terrifying enemy encirclement using good but standard tactics under a very stressful situation.
• Before the Battle of Eretria (411 BC), the Spartan admiral Hegesandridas had arranged for the city of Eretria to light a signal fire when it was a good time to attack the Athenian navy there.
• Lysander's strategy leading up to the Battle of Aegospotami (405 BC) was good, and the Athenians probably did something stupid.
• In 371 BC, a Spartan commander avoided taking the easy route to arrive at the Battle of Leuctra (but lost anyway).

More often, the Spartans seem to have been the Keystone Kops of battle.

• In the Battle of the Fetters (550 BC), the Spartans, wanting more land and more slaves, went to Tegea carrying shackles with which to bring home Tegean slaves.  They were sure of victory: they prided themselves on their military while Tegea did not, and the Oracle at Delphi had guaranteed them victory.  Instead, the surviving Spartans found themselves wearing the shackles they'd brought.
• According to Herodotus, in the Battle of Plataea (479 BC), the Spartans were officially in charge of the Greek troops, but when the Persian light infantry set up a line a short distance away and started killing the Greeks with arrows, the Spartans (who had never yet fought the Persians and lived) just sat there getting killed instead of either advancing or retreating (allegedly because they were still waiting for good omens from their sacrifices).  They did nothing until the Teagans charged the Persian line, shaming the Spartans into following.
• At the Battle of Pylos (425 BC), while the Spartans were failing to capture that outnumbered Athenian garrison, they forgot to use their enormous surplus of triremes to blockade the harbor, and set no watch for the Athenian Navy, which was thus able to surprise them from behind.

• 420 Spartan hoplites fled from the Battle of Pylos… onto an island which was surrounded by the Athenian navy, reachable only by ship or by wading onto a narrow stretch of beach directly across the water from the Athenian garrison that they hadn't been able to capture.  They had accomplished the feat, perhaps unparalleled in military history, of maneuvering into a position where they could be held captive deep in their own territory by an enemy force they outnumbered.  This led to the Battle of Sphacteria.

  • The Athenians had planned to starve them out until the Spartans helpfully burned down the entire island while trying to start a campfire, revealing their numbers and defenses to the Athenians.
  • The Spartans were taken by surprise by the Athenian assault because they forgot for the second time in one week to set a watch for the Athenian navy, even though the Athenians had demanded just the day before that the Spartans surrender or be destroyed.
  • The Spartans didn't have missile-throwing troops, so the Athenians just bottled them up using bows and spears, which the Spartans were helpless against until they finally got themselves dug into a good fortified position at the very north end of the island.
  • But the Spartans left a path to the rear of their defenses unwatched because they thought the terrain was too difficult.  It wasn't.

• In the 1st Battle of Mantinea (418 BC), the Spartan King Agis nearly got the entire Spartan army destroyed twice.

  • He was supposed to wait for allies from Corinth, Boeotia, Phocis, and Locris, but instead attacked prematurely because he felt it would harm him politically if he hesitated.
  • He couldn't force battle, and retreated–apparently without scouting ahead where he was going, because he marched his army directly into the Argive army he was trying to retreat from, which had circled around him and set up an ambush directly in his path where it exited a wood. (This was so that the Argive army could draw up their full battle ranks in the field beyond, yet the Spartans wouldn't see them until they were almost on top of them).
  • But the Argives outmatched the Spartans in errors this time.  They should have just remained in their strong defensive position and let the Spartans go, but their own soldiers had pressured the Argive commanders into pursuing the Spartans.  Their ambush resulted in a confusing and close battle in which half of each army routed half of the other army [10], but which the Spartans eventually won.
• In the naval battle of Cynossema (411 BC), the Spartans snatched defeat from the jaws of victory when, on shattering the Athenian battle line, the Spartan ships broke their own battle formation to each go off chasing different ships, as if it were a hoplite battle.

• At the Battle of Lechaeum (391 BC), which actually took place at Corinth, a Spartan commander leading 600 hoplites back towards Lechaeum decided to save a bit of time by marching them directly past the enemy's fortress city of Corinth.

  • This despite the fact that he knew that Corinth was at the moment hosting an Athenian army.
  • And the fact that the Spartan hoplites had neither cavalry, nor archers, nor javelin-throwers to protect them; these had all been sent on to Amyclae.
  • As at the Battle of Sphacteria, the Corinthians and Athenians sent out just their javelin-throwers.  They threw their javelins at the Spartan hoplites from far away, then ran away to get more javelins as the heavily-armored hoplites struggled to catch up with them.
  • They kept doing this, massacring the Spartans, running away without engaging, and then waiting for the Spartans to chase them again.
  • When a group of Spartan calvary finally arrived to protect the hoplites, instead of charging the javelin-throwers, they just trotted alongside the hoplites and got massacred with them until the battle was over.
• At the Third Battle of Mantinea (207 BC), the Spartan Tyrant Machanidas, a southern Italian mercenary who had somehow seized the crown of Sparta, left the Spartan infantry undefended while he and his Italian mercenaries chased, killed, and plundered the enemy's Italian mercenaries.  By the time he was done killing and plundering, and returned to the battle, the Spartan infantry had been destroyed.  (This was at least the 4th time a Spartan army was destroyed because it had nothing but hoplites.)
• But my favorite is still the battle that supposedly ended the Spartan practice of sending out both of their kings with the army and having them alternate command every other day:  The 2 kings disagreed on tactics, and so sent the army marching one way one day, and the other way the next, until they ran out of provisions and had to go home.  When I first read about this I thought it must be just a legend, but after reading more Spartan military history, it seems almost typical of them.

The Problems With the Spartan Military

• Their hereditary kings were their supreme military leaders.  Heredity is a poor method for picking military leaders.  King Cleomenes I was at least competent (though treacherous and traitorous), but the only really clever military leader Sparta seems to have had was Brasidas, who wasn't a king.

• Sparta always relied almost entirely on hoplites.  The Spartans themselves were all hoplites until 424 BC, when they first used cavalry (which AFAIK they never used very effectively).  Their perioikoi (literally "[those] living around [us]"), the second-class citizens in the Spartan lands, were also hoplites.  The Spartans relied on slaves (whom they didn't trust), allies, and mercenaries for ranged weapons, but never learned how to deploy, cooperate with, or cope with such units.  Their helplessness against light infantry with ranged weapons was a recurring problem (including at Plataea, Sphacteria, and Lechaeum), as was their ineptness in using or dealing with cavalry, or at fighting inside a city.

  • Their constitution, and their dogma of equality among citizens, didn't allow them to recognize any class of citizens other than Spartiates, who were hoplites.  They put off having any cavalry at all until a century after most of their opponents, because that would create a military force of soldiers who'd made greater monetary investments, and would thus (as cavalry always does) demand more political power.  AFAIK, there were never any Spartan slingers, javelin throwers, or archers.
  • This was much like the problems of the French military in the 14th century, which was very slow to learn how to use archers because admitting the usefulness of archers would have delegitimized the privileges of the wealthy knights.   Just like the French, the Spartans scoffed at ranged weapons as unmanly (Herodotus, Histories book 4, indirectly cited here).
  • Sparta did manage to build a navy, largely funded by the Persians, which required sailors, who weren't wealthy, and whose fighting wasn't usually considered "manly".  I don't know how they managed this, or who the sailors were.
• This near-complete reliance on hoplites meant that the extensive training Spartans allegedly had could make little difference.  Hoplite warfare is dead simple compared to archery, slinging, sword-fighting, horsemanship, or seamanship.  The scenes from 300 showing Spartans doing acrobatics in battle are a complete fantasy.  The most-prized combat skill in hoplite war was to have the discipline to avoid drifting to the right.  Other than that, all they had to do was hold the line and keep stabbing.

• They were notably uncreative and inflexible in battle.  They liked to march hoplites straight to their objective and have a hoplite battle, and dealt poorly with deviations from that plan such as cavalry, light infantry, city walls, or city streets.

  • Their soldiers took no initiative without orders, and would sometimes just stand in place while being slaughtered, as at the Battle of Plataea, and the cavalry at the Battle of Lechaeum.

• They didn't play well with others.  Spartan units didn't coordinate well with allied units, nor even with their own other units.

  • According to Thucydides, at the 3rd Battle of Mantinea (418 BC), the Spartan commanders Hipponoidas and Aristocles refused to obey King Agis' order to move their companies to cover a hole in the Spartan center.
  • If a Spartan army planned to meet up with another army, odds were good that the Spartans would either be late, or else arrive first and be too impatient to wait, as at Marathon (490 BC), the 1st Battle of Mantinea (418 BC), and the  Battle of Haliartus (395 BC).
  • They broke their promises and treaties if they found them inconvenient or dangerous, often pleading ridiculous technicalities or religious injunctions.  For very dangerous battles, they often showed up too late, or sent only a small force.

• They were poor at learning from their mistakes.

  • They repeatedly failed to use sentries or scouts.
  • They lost battles for centuries because they had nothing but hoplites in their army.
  • Their constitution and culture were designed to put old men in charge and enforce a conservative attitude about everything.  Recognizing and adapting to new circumstances was un-Spartan.
• They weren't good at capturing cities.  Unlike major earlier or contemporary armies (such as the Neo-Assyrians, the Persians, and even the Boeotians), they had no siege weapons, and nearly always dealt with cities and garrisons by besieging them, which didn't work well with Sparta's limited logistical support.

• Sparta didn't have much money, no matter how many cities they conquered, because they had no financial infrastructure for investments or enterprise.  Those who had money and power (the Spartiates) were forbidden to work.  They had to rely on their slaves to generate wealth for them, which did not encourage innovation.  The constitution was designed to frustrate the accumulation of wealth, and their anti-trade stance was meant to deprive Spartans of consumer goods, which would have exposed the wealth disparity in Sparta.

  • This especially hurt their navy; ships are expensive.
  • Rich Spartans nonetheless found ways to advertise their wealth.  One was belonging to a wealthy dinner club (male dinner clubs replaced the family in Sparta as the basic unity of society).  Another was by owning race-horses, which was a common pastime of idle young rich men in classical antiquity.  (Both methods were also favored by 19th-century Sparta-loving aristocracies, especially in Britain.)
• They always had to keep much of their army at home because they were outnumbered many-fold by their slaves, whom they controlled by treating them brutally and keeping them in a constant state of terror.

• They were nonetheless constantly at war.  Neither their birth rate nor their economy could sustain this.  The size of the Spartan army dwindled over time, even as the size of neighboring armies grew.

  • Some historians have suggested that this was because the Spartans always had two kings, who competed with each other for status by military conquests.  A similar political dynamic drove the Roman Empire's never-ending wars of aggression, and its resulting chronic shortage of money and soldiers, which was already insoluble by the time of Diocletian.

• Their intellectual growth was deliberately stunted.  Sparta's artistic golden age was 650-550 BC; yet by 500 BC, Sparta had (AFAIK) no philosophers, no mathematicians, no writers, no artists, and no poets.  Tyrtaeus, the one poet whose war-mongering poems they were allowed (and, in the 4th century, required) to recite, was said by most classical Greeks to have come from Athens.  We have no record of intellectual activity in Sparta after 500 BC other than propaganda.  They had almost no exposure to other cultures except in war; only their perioikoi were allowed to travel to other cities, and foreigners seldom travelled to Sparta.

  • When the Spartan king Lysander wanted poets to sing his praises, it appears he had to rely on poets from outside Sparta (Plutarch, The Parallel Lives, The Life of Lysander 18:4).
  • Aristotle wrote that the tough Spartan upbringing, exhausting the body and lacking education, turned Spartans into brutes rather than into brave men (Politics book 8 part 4).
  • Remember Brasidas, their one great general?  He used slaves and mercenaries more than he used Spartan hoplites.  His Wikipedia entry says, "Thucydides' characterization of Brasidas suggests that Brasidas united in himself the stereotypical Spartan courage with those virtues in which regular Spartans were most signally lacking. Brasidas was apparently quick in forming his plans and carried them out without delay or hesitation. Furthermore, the rhetoric in the speech of Brasidas to the Acanthians is of noticeably higher quality than the other Spartan speeches recorded by Thucydides (Thuc. iv. 84-89). It appears that Brasidas's un-Spartan virtues raised jealousy and suspicion at Sparta."

Why Spartans were Slow Learners

Sparta's underlying military weakness was its commanders, who were mostly dull, ignorant, or selfish.  This was ultimately by design.  Spartan society discouraged intellectual activity.  Perhaps more importantly, Sparta deliberately made itself a pre-historic society.

A prehistoric society is often defined as one without writing.  The Spartans never became entirely illiterate, but though they presumably produced lists and records, they produced no literature of any kind in the 5th century BC, and only political tracts after that (Millender 2001).  They wrote no histories.  They didn't even write down their laws.  Spartan apologists claim this was because memorizing the laws made them better citizens, but throughout history we find that tyrannical rulers strongly preferred not to write down their laws, so that they could say the law was whatever was most-convenient at the time.

Even though Sparta still counts as pre-historic by the usual definition, I think a more-useful definition is one by Michael Vassar, which highlights not the artifacts but the metaphysics of a culture:  A prehistoric society is one which makes no distinction between myth and history.  What matters is not whether myths were written down, but whether a people were conscious of the fact that their myths might not be literally true.  I don't mean just whether they doubted their myths, but whether they even had a concept of factual truth as distinct from mythic, pragmatic, personal, or ideological truth.

The classical Spartans were also pre-historic in this sense.  They had an oral history which had some key elements which might well be true, such as the Dorian invasion.  But this history is regarded by most historians as especially unreliable, even for oral history.  "Scholars have been inclined to consider almost everything the ancients believed about Lykourgos and early Spartan history as a historically worthless construction of 5th and 4th century authors" (Kõiv 2005 p. 236-237; but read the rest of Kõiv 2005 for a counter-argument).  This history involved the Greek pantheon, claimed their kings were descendants of Heracles (Hercules), and told two contradictory stories of the origin of Sparta's constitution (dictated by the oracle of Delphi and written down before the Greeks had re-invented writing, and 2 centuries before Delphi began to be an important oracle in ~600BC; or copied by Lycurgus from Crete and never written down).  This oral history was so tangled by ~430 BC that Herodotus wrote at that time, "There is so much uncertainty in the accounts which historians [outside of Sparta] have left us of Lycurgus, the lawgiver of Sparta, that scarcely any thing is asserted by one of them which is not called into question or contradicted by the rest."  The history and the constitution included rules which were important to the Spartans' self-conception, and yet seem to never have been enforced in Sparta, such as the constitutional provision banning the use of precious metals as money.  Sparta's artless, repressive, military character was attributed to Lycurgus ~800 BC; and yet we know Sparta had lyric poets, at least Alcman and probably Megalostrata, in the 7th century BC [11], and was an Archaic center of art production until about 550 BC.  It seems that the Spartans of 430 BC whom Herodotus interviewed knew less of 7th and 6th century Sparta than we do today.

True history is a solvent which dissolves mythic cultures.  The most-crucial task of a totalitarian government is to control history, and to suppress the understanding that knowledge lies in quantitative data rather than in absolute, context-free, unverifiable "eternal truths".  Reality is too messy to be fit by any theory simple enough to be understood by the common citizen.  Totalitarian ideologies are therefore always over-simplifications, and totalitarian governments are doomed always to force their subjects to act out the fantasy of some madman.

Understanding Sparta is important today because the pre-historic mindset is no longer in decline, but on the rise; and all of it descends from Sparta, through Plato.  Plato was also a pre-historic, inventing myths and using them as arguments.  Later totalitarian Western social systems were pre-historic as well, including medievial Christendom, the French Revolutionaries (following Rousseau, who used his own myths of pre-history not just as narrative, but as evidence), and all Marxist or fascist governments (AFAIK).

The replacement of history with historicism (re-casting history to fit an eschatalogical myth, and extrapolating the future from that myth), and of objective facts with "lived experience," "personal truths," and social construction, is endemic in the West today.  It was popularized by phenomenologists in the 20th century, and has completely dominated continental philosophy ever since fascists exterminated all other philosophy in continental Europe in the period 1930-1944.  The myth of Sparta as the noblest of cities is one of the supporting myths of this fascist philosophical legacy, which is politically stronger today than it ever has been since 1945.

Idealistic [12] cultures, from the Egyptians to modern communist states, habitually rewrite history, erasing from it people who had fallen from grace, and lying about battles they'd lost, in order to cover up why they had lost, or even the fact that they had lost.  Such cultures couldn't learn from their mistakes because they wouldn't admit to having made mistakes.

All of this suggests to me that Sparta was so bad at learning from its mistakes because it didn't remember them.  How could the Spartan commander at Sphacteria in 425 BC have known that lacking ranged weapons had been so disastrous at Platea in 479 BC?  How would the commander at Lechaeum in 391 BC have known that it had been so disastrous at Sphacteria?  The Spartans never wrote that history down, and tried to protect their citizens from the written records of their enemies!  Rewriting history has a cost.

Meanwhile, in Athens

Athens had a great military, because they had great leaders.  In stark contrast to Sparta, Athens elected as generals some of the most-brilliant men from the most-brilliant population the world has ever seen.  These included Alcibiades, the orator Demosthenes, the historian Thucydides, and Pericles.  The military problem that democracy caused them wasn't in picking good leaders, but in not killing them when they had bad luck [13].

I'm not surprised that Athenian democracy did better at picking generals than Spartan hereditary generalship, but I am surprised at how well the Athenians did.  One part of the explanation is that Athenian culture was deliberately set up to educate everyone who voted in the assembly.  All voters had to attend every tragedy and comedy performed at the annual Dionysius festival.  The plays selected for performance were at that time unique in world history for posing unresolvable problems.  Whereas every other culture I know of had by that time produced only art that praised themselves, the Athenians produced plays that criticized themselves, or raised troubling problems with their ethics.  This has been rare in world history; the other people who did it include Shakespeare, English novels starting with Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740, and Voltaire and other French philosophes.  When the reactionary aristocrat Plato criticized the poets for telling "lies", this Athenian state-sponsored questioning of authority and tradition was the sort of thing he had in mind.

Athenian culture taught that every citizen should be involved in politics, and should be able to do every political job.  This is curious, since Athens is in almost every other way the stereotypical free-market trading culture, which includes as a prerequisite the division of labor.  But not in politics.  Most of the important Athenian political offices were assigned by lottery, so every citizen needed to be capable at administration and decision-making.  I'm not surprised that election by lottery seems to have performed better than democratic election.  I wish we used it in America today.

---

[1] Sparta was communist only in the way the USSR, and all other communist societies, were communist: it proclaimed all citizens equal, yet had extreme disparities of wealth and power.  Sparta was the original society in which everyone was equal, but some were more equal than others.

[2] Tyrtaeus was very likely the source for the sentiment which Horace expressed as "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" (sweet and glorious it is to die for your country) in Odes 3 (Lindo 1971), and which Wilfred Owen cursed in his anti-WW1 poem "Dulce et decorum".

[3] Our only source for some of the things we find horrible about Sparta is Plutarch.  See (Kahl 2012, Powell 2001 p. xiii) for discussions of Plutarch's reliability.  However, some of those horrible things are also found in Plato's Republic, which for me corroborates Plutarch's account.

[4] Socrates wasn't executed for being a "gadfly"; other Athenians of the time, such as Euripides, insulted more-powerful people more-often and more-publicly than Socrates ever did and were never punished for it [4b].  He was executed for corrupting the youth, because he did: he taught them to admire Sparta and to despise Athens and democracy.  Many of them, including Xenophon, Critias, Charmides, Alcibiades, and probably Plato, either conspired to betray Athens to Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, or were associated with the bloody reign of anti-democratic terror imposed by Sparta on Athens for the year following the Peloponessian War.  Athens rose up and cast out the Spartans and their Athenian aristocratic allies, but never recovered culturally.  Socrates had taught his students well: they succeeded in destroying Athens and thereby snuffing out democracy for 1200 years.

[4b] Similarly, Aristotle was pressured into leaving Athens not because the Athenians objected to his philosophy, but because he was not just Macedonian, but had been a personal bud of Athens' newly-dead tyrant, Alexander the Great.

[5] AFAIK, neither the Soviet Union nor China explicitly pointed at Sparta as a model; but neither the Soviet Union nor China were Western.  See (Bernstein 1989) for some similarities between the USSR and Sparta.  Also note that Sparta seems to be the original inventor of having a secret police force large enough to spy on the entire population.

[6] The record was 19 wins, 2 ties, and 30 losses.  I counted the Battle of 300 Champions as a loss rather than as "disputed", because the Spartans lost, then claimed that one of their dead on the field had actually still been alive, therefore technically winning the battle for them, and crawled back home to Sparta before killing himself out of shame.  I added the Battle of Alyzia (a Spartan loss) to the list, because it had been described in the entry for the Battle of Naxos rather than having its own page.  I called the Battle of Piraeus a tie rather than a win for Sparta, because it was a tie: the Athenians attacked and were pushed back; then the Spartans attacked and were pushed back.

[7] This was obvious in the Corinthian War (395–387 BC), which began with Persia supporting a revolt by Thebes, Corinth, Athens, and Argos against Sparta's hegemony over Greece, and ended inconclusively  because Persia switched to supporting Sparta as soon as they started losing.

[8] Socrates' students Critias and Charmides were among the Athenian traitors killed in this battle.

[9] This isn't as bizarre as it sounds.  The idea that guilt requires intent is a modern invention, one even Christianity never accepted.

[10] This wasn't uncommon; it happened because phalanxes slide to the right, with the result that the right end of each army's line is likely to flank the left end of the other army's line.

[11] On the other hand, the 7th-century Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, and the 6th-century Spartan poet Chilon, were already pronouncing disciplinarian Spartan platitudes that would have been at home in the 5th century.

[12] In philosophy and history, the term "idealistic" denotes not having high ideals, but having ideals in the original sense, which is that of Platonic Forms.  Idealism consists mainly of the belief in perfection plus the attribution of the characteristics of any category, including life, to perfect, timeless, unchanging spirits / essences.  Examples include the Marxist concept of class, the Nazi or Social Justice concept of race, and the historicist concept of eschatology (the "end of history"), all of which descend from Plato, filtered through Christianity and then through the idealist philosopher Hegel.

[13] Whenever Athens had a major military defeat, some part of the assembly agitated for executing the general in charge, or at least exiling him.  Even after winning the naval battle of Arginusae, the Athenian assembly executed 6 of the 8 naval commanders, because they were angry that a storm had prevented the rescue of survivors from 25 disabled or sunken Athenian triremes.  Several famous generals didn't go back to Athens after losing a battle.  Even Thucydides was exiled after "losing" a battle (there had been no battle because he hadn't been able to get the army there in time).

---

References

Aristotle ~350 BC. Politics.

Aristotle ~340 BC. On the Lacedaemonian Constitution.

Alvin Bernstein 1989. Soviet Defense Spending: The Spartan Analogy. RAND corp., for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Wolfgang Blösel 2018. (Harrison & Irwin 2018) chapter 11, "Herodotusʼ Allusions to the Sparta of his Day."

Thomas Harrison & Elizabeth Irwin, eds., 2018. Interpreting Herodotus. Oxford U Press.

Herodotus ~430 BC. The Histories.

A.H.M. Jones 1967. Sparta. Blackwell & Mott.

Thorsten Kahl 2012. "Is Plutarch a Trustworthy Source for Archaic Sparta?" Journal of Unresolved Questions 2:2 p. 7-9.

Reinhold Kerstan 1983. Blood and Honor. David C. Cook.

Ben Kiernan 2007. Blood and Soil: A world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Yale U. Press.

Mait Kõiv 2005. "The Origins, Development, and Reliability of the Ancient Tradition about the Formation of the Spartan Constitution." Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, Band 54, H. 3: 233-264.

Locksley Lindo 1971. "Tyrtaeus and Horace Odes 3. 2." Classical Philology 66(4): 258-260.

Ellen Millender 2001. "Spartan Literacy Revisited." Classical Antiquity 20(1): 121-164.

Noble 2002. Foundations of Western Civilization: Sumer--Reformation, lecture 8, "The Greek Polis: Sparta". The Teaching Company.

Plutarch?, transl. F. C. Babbitt 1931. "The Ancient Customs of the Spartans." In Moralia volume 3, Loeb Classical Library, Macmillan.

Plutarch, transl. Richard Talbert 1988. Plutarch on Sparta. Penguin.

Anton Powell 1988, 2ed 2001. Athens & Sparta: Constructing Greek political & social history from 478 BC. Routledge.

Anton Powell, ed., 2017. A Companion to Sparta. Wiley.

Elizabeth Rawson 1969. The Spartan Tradition in European Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Rebenich 2002. From Thermopylae to Stalingrad--The Myth of Leonidas in German Historiography [1850-1945]. In Anton Powell & Stephen Hodkinson, eds., Sparta--Beyond the Mirage. London: Swansea, p. 323-349.

Timothy Shutt 2009. A History of Ancient Sparta: Valor, Virtue, and Devotion in the Greek Golden Age, course guide. Recorded Books.

Thucydides ~410 BC. History of the Peloponnesian War.
David Whitehead 1983. "Sparta and the Thirty Tyrants." Ancient Society V13/14: 105-130.

Comments

[Herald of Opera]

'm not surprised that election by lottery seems to have performed better than democratic election.

It takes effort to be worse than pure random chance.

[Pascoite]

Re: lottery versus election...

In the modern world, that would depend a lot on the duties involved. Some judge positions are elected, for example, and I wouldn't think assigning them to a random citizen would work out well.

[TheJediMasterEd]

"Oh, the mountains look on Marathon
And Marathon looks on the sea
And I look up at the Parthenon
And the Greeks look down on me."

--Flanders and Swann

[mishun]

And it had never sat right with me that they could be so good at war. War is complicated. Doing it well takes lots of smarts, knowledge, accountants, and logistics; and the Spartan life of doing what you're told and not thinking for yourself was uniquely ill-suited to producing smart or knowledgeable people.

The remaining mystery here is that good PR supposedly is even more complicated, and somehow they had the best

Idealism consists mainly of the belief in perfection plus the attribution of the characteristics of any category, including life, to perfect, timeless, unchanging spirits / essences. Examples include the Marxist concept of class

*camera suddenly shifts to hand punching out of glass coffin in Mausoleum
media.tenor.com/uV0D0JFbkVEAAAAd/lenin-must-crush-capitalism.gif

[Mockingbirb]

You know who else agrees that Sparta was a pretty terrible place? This expert on the history of ancient Greece. (acoup.blog link)

I thought about linking that when I wrote a story that's a parody of "300" (but has very little to do with the real Sparta.)

E"This is Spur-Tack!" (300 + 1)

• MLP: FiM

"This is Spur-Tack!" Fluttershy said as loudly as she could. "And friendship can't be beaten. Yay!"

• Alt. Universe
• Fluttershy
• Rainbow Dash
• Gilda
• Cheerilee
• Other

Mockingbirb · 1.7k words · 207 views

[Bad Horse]

5715561
Well, I certainly wouldn't want my dentist to be chosen by lot.
Judges? Probably not; they need to know the law (though some don't seem to today).
Police? Maybe.
President? Definitely.

I mean, consider this: There was only one Hitler in the world, and he got elected.

[Viking ZX]

5715569
Sparta had good publicity because, drumroll please ... Rome turned Sparta into a tourist trap.

No joke. That's actually what happened. It wasn't Sparta, but Rome, as a tourist attraction.

[mishun]

5715589
Hmm, that explains why it had good PR later, but not why it had good PR among other Greeks (and it had, series of blog posts linked 3 comments below mentions that)

[Pascoite]

5715585
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for a lottery when the position doesn't require specialized knowledge. But I wouldn't go so far as to say "hey, an election this one time turned out terribly, so it's obviously a bad idea to do it ever."

[Bad Horse]

5715590

The remaining mystery here is that good PR supposedly is even more complicated, and somehow they had the best

Yes, I wondered about that too. I think totalitarian governments have to be very good at PR, because the first people they have to fool with their propaganda are their own. But there's more going on with Sparta, because people continue to be attracted to it even today. A psychological explanation seems in order. Perhaps it's the same thing that makes young boys want to play graphic violent videogames. Testosterone, yes; but there seems to be more to it than that.

I strongly suspect that the Romans admired Sparta much more than Athens (recall Horace's dulce et decorum), and we probably have some cultural lock-in from that. It was the Romans who rescued Plato from obscurity, and Romans who are the most-admired ancient civilization by so many scholars of antiquity.

Another factor is that any aristocrat is likely to choose Sparta over Athens, and history was written by aristocrats and elites.

[Bad Horse]

5715589
Can you give more information or sources on that? That's interesting.

[Viking ZX]

5715606
I wrote a paper on what became of Sparta in college. If I still have the source paper, I could dig up the sources next time I'm online, but they were definitely books from the college library.

EDIT: You're in luck! It was on my backup drive! Left a new comment.

[Andrew-R]

.... well, if someone also thinks modern "totalitarian by money" system actually will fare better than "all those bad communists" ... I think this says something about domestic propaganda.

[Shakespearicles]

And it had never sat right with me that they could be so good at war. War is complicated. Doing it well takes lots of smarts, knowledge, accountants, and logistics; and the Spartan life of doing what you're told and not thinking for yourself was uniquely ill-suited to producing smart or knowledgeable people.

"The society that separates its scholars from its warriors
will have its thinking done by cowards
and its fighting by fools."
-- Thucydides

[MrNumbers]

Classical historian Brett Devereaux has a series of essays here that backs up a lot of the data and analysis. He also gives some explanations for why contemporary historians talk Sparta up so much that I think you'd find interesting - it was propaganda, basically, visiting accounts are written from the perspective of noble guests. It also follows up a lot more of the points you start looking into here.

I will admit, though, I find the comparisons to the USSR spurious at best - but I'm saying this to agree with you, mostly.

Because I'm not defending the USSR by any means, just that there isn't really a line of similarity. Sparta was a society of an equal aristocracy above a slave class - but it was a genetically pure aristocracy you could only ever fall out of, with only the rarest opportunities to advance into it. Its mythology was entirely on this aristocratic supremacy, with the opinion of the slave class being irrelevant. The better comparisons are to militaristic fascist regimes, which is what Devereaux - who is a liberal, I will emphasize - compares them to. It's also probably more relevant, because modern fascists fucking love the myth of Sparta.

The USSR, meanwhile, had entirely different problems over the course of its life. The 1920s, the 1940s, the 1960s and the 1980s are all cross-sections of entirely different catastrophes, none to my mind relate to the problems of Sparta. The justifications of the rulers are entirely different, the pretenses are entirely different. Whereas the USSR had pretenses of democratic elevation, the Spartans had a divine mandate from a powerful founding mythos - the USSR had an elevated elite on the justification that anyone could join, and the Spartans had an elevated elite on the justification of hereditary supremacy.

Their militarism, too, is oppositional. The USSR justified itself in defense, as under external siege - a temporary but necessary state of authoritarianism out of survival from external threats. Sparta was instead more recognizable as the fascist death-cult - its murderousness was to be celebrated, was the desired end-state, was the objective.

In the end, though, that's why the USSR collapses where Sparta lasts as long as it does. The former's pretenses of democracy means it was dismantled democratically. The latter made no such pretenses, justified itself only through brute force, and so lasted until it bred itself out of existence.

[MrNumbers]

Actually, if I had to give a tl;dr - at the time, and in the present, Sparta is a foil to Athens invoked by people who see democracy as a weakness to be discarded. Authoritarian communist states might have seen democracy as an existential threat - and were sometimes ultimately correct - but they were also sincere in seeing it as an objective.

Even today, China justifies itself internally as needing to win at capitalism to 4D chess galaxy brain overthrow global capitalism to enforce world communism. Is it going to do that? Hell no, lmao, but its saying authoritarianism now is a marshmallow test for having the MOST democracy later. It can't invoke Sparta because it has to at least claim it's reality is acting against its ideals.

[Viking ZX]

5715606
Okay, so I found my old bibliography. I don't remember which of these it was in, but the paper was on the downfall of Sparta. Though it didn't mention what became of it later, I recall reading that part of my research with both interest and amusement. Here were the sources, so it must have been one of these:

Cartledge, Paul. “Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta” History Today Vol. 36 Issue 7 (1986): 30-34. Web. March 1st 2011

Cartledge, Paul and Spawforth, Antony. Hellenistic and Roman Sparta. London and New York: 1989. Print

Cawkwell, G.L. “The Decline of Sparta” The Classical Quarterly Vol. 33 No. 2 (1983): 385-400. Web. March 3^rd, 2011

M. Kennell, Nigel. Spartans: A New History. Wiley-Blackwell: 2010. Print

Palagia, Olga. “Art and Royalty in Sparta of the 3^rd Century B.C.” Hesperia Vol. 75 No. 2 (2006): 205-217. Web. March 1^st 2011

[Bad Horse]

5715684

Their militarism, too, is oppositional. The USSR justified itself in defense, as under external siege - a temporary but necessary state of authoritarianism out of survival from external threats. Sparta was instead more recognizable as the fascist death-cult - its murderousness was to be celebrated, was the desired end-state, was the objective.

That's an important point--though I think it's more important to metaphysics than to body count. The USSR and China both ended up executing or otherwise deliberately causing the deaths of more people than the Nazis, and I think even more people per year. Maybe not a fair comparison; one should really ask about fraction of population.

The Nazis weren't factually wrong; they wanted to do terrible things, and figured out correctly how to do them. Whereas I think communist governments end up doing a lot of terrible things because they are, in one way or another, deeply wrong about reality. But ignorance is just as capable of producing evil as is evil intent.

I think the main factors that led to violence in both communism and fascism are certainty combined with historicism. Certainty of their moral rightness and factual correctness, plus the belief that they could make a better or even perfect State, which would last for a thousand years or forever, makes the moral math justify any means to that end.

(There's also the matter of both theories of government being designed only for brief revolutionary periods, or permanent revolution; and thus relying on seat-of-the-pants pragmatism rather than legal mechanisms for legitimizing authority. This makes tyranny very likely. This doesn't apply as much to the Spartans, who had a more stable constitutional foundation for their legitimacy. But then OTOH they forbade anyone from writing that constitution down, so it still wasn't a very stable foundation.)

The practical difference, from my POV, is that communists are trying to be factually correct about reality. They still believe in reason. So it's possible to reason with communists, but not possible to reason with Nazis, who would rather silence you or punch you than argue. This is also the most-important difference from my POV between communists and the Social Justice movement, which matured in the late 20th century and is therefore based more on Nazi than Marxist metaphysics.

BTW, the Spartans were moderately democratic. They had an assembly of citizens that could vote on various things, but they had, IIRC, no way for the citizens to propose legislature or actions. The ephors seemed to have most of the legally-authorized power, while their kings had little legal power, but a lot of "the troops will do what I say" power. IIRC.

[Bad Horse]

5715737
Thanks! I'm guessing the story about the Roman tourist Sparta is in Hellenistic and Roman Sparta.

[Viking ZX]

5715807
Perhaps? This paper was over a decade ago, but that's the source list I used for it.

[MrNumbers]

5715800

Again, I largely agree with that. I think the metaphysics is the most important part though. Just took me a morning to figure out why, to figure out an example.

Our current problem is a system that is democratic in matters of the state, but authoritarian in matters of industry and commerce. Like, you have no assumed democratic rights within your workplace, as one example. We're looking at a very possible near-future where human extinction comes down to fossil fuel companies enforcing their right to profit to the very bitter end - will see capitalism create a self-own death toll dwarving that of failed socialist states.

But I don't think it's useful to compare BP and Shell to the Great Leap Forward based on that, just because comparisons of outcome can be made. The similarities in method and outcome exist, but everything actually useful to understanding the problems of either comes from the wildly different motives.

[TheJediMasterEd]

5715800

So it's possible to reason with communists

Well, to a point. That point being when Stalin changed his mind, or when Khrushchev got purged, or when the Politburo reversed itself on one or another of Communism's equivalents of Browning's "great text in Galatians." Once you tripped on any such point, you were executed, worked to death in a labor camp, or sent to Siberia for 20 years and got out an old man.

But that's a relative quibble. Overall I think you've arrived at a truth I've heard stated thus: the difference between Nazism and Communism is that Communism has a philosophy, while Nazism just has propaganda masquerading as philosophy.

[publiq]

Since you mentioned the “end of history” in the hoofnotes…

publiq.space/history2.jpeg

[Bad Horse]

5715834
That's exactly what I was talking about. Fukuyama is a Hegelian. Both the Marxists and the Nazis got their notion of the End of History from Hegel.

[Bad Horse]

5715830
Metaphysics is hugely important. I think most seemingly irreconcilable disagreements are over metaphysics, and most people don't seem to ever notice this. Like, people in the abortion "debate" never argue over whether "life" is a Boolean property, a real number between 0 and 1, or a multi-dimensional function; or whether to use consequentialist or virtue ethics; or whether humans have immortal souls; or any of the other things that pre-determine their opinion on the subject.

In a way, the fascists won World War 2. The Allies got to impose their form of government. The fascists got to impose their form of philosophy. All continental philosophy today is descended from the philosophers that the fascists chose when they ruled continental Europe. The existentialists and the post-modernists tried to reject Nazism, but they never came up with any rational arguments against it because they were still working within Nazi metaphysics. Our graduates of Harvard and Yale sometimes spout liberal ideals, but they see the world through Nazi eyes. The foundation of Nazi metaphysics is phenomenology, an epistemology of subjectivity, which says that your inner phenomenological experiences are what is real. Hence personal truths, authenticity, lived experience--all Nazi buzzwords.

I think phenomenology is correct, technically, in pointing out that each person builds his or her own reality out of phenomenological experience. But then it stupidly assumes that the structures of our internal worlds must either be identical, or incommensurable (completely different), and therefore science is just another religion, etc.

One huge difference between Marxist and Nazi metaphysics is that Marxism usually assumes people are a kind of blank slate, and can be reshaped in any way (although I don't know how to resolve this with the idea that the bourgeoisie are just intrinsically evil and can never be reformed). Nazis believe just the opposite: that humans are animals, their personalities strongly shaped by genetics, hormones, and reproductive instincts, and their joy always grounded in animal phenomenological sensory experiences. They naively focus on just the most-violent emotions, hence their obsession with art, theater, hatred, and violence.

The Nazis are basically right about us being animals; but our culture vigorously denies everything associated with this idea because the Nazis believed it. This will bite us in the ass, if it hasn't already.

I am concerned about global warming, but it isn't an existential threat. I read the IPCC's last summary report from cover to cover--the same one that politicians and the media always cite as saying that we'll have disasters within a century if we don't do something right now--and while I can't say that isn't true, I can say that the IPCC's fifth summary report doesn't say anything remotely like that. It says ocean levels will probably rise by about a foot by 2100, there probably is no climate tipping point, a lot of shellfish and corals might die, and arable land will decrease by as much as, IIRC, 20% (not a problem if we eat less meat; also probably a bogus figure, because they counted arable land lost due to getting warmer, but not the arable land gained due to getting warmer, which will be much greater). The ecosystem changes that will occur by 2100 due to temperature change are negligible compared to the ecosystem devastation that's already happened. Even the most outrageously pessimistic scenario (which is that we decided to do something like double our carbon emissions 10 years ago--the projection in there is literally based on a scenario so worst-case that it isn't physically possible) is predicted to cause a 2% drop in economic output by 2100.

The report is, however, designed to sound alarming to people with bad epistemology. It deliberately avoids making quantitative predictions; it's full of scary statements like "there will be more climate-based migration, more climate-induced poverty, more climate-induced disease", but very few saying how much more. As a rule, when they do give quantitative estimates, their estimates for the negative impact on X of climate change by 2100 are less than the estimates other govt agencies give of the negative impact on X of Covid-19 in 2020-2021.

There's a line in there that emphasizes "we are not trying to predict the future". That's sort of valid wrt the report's supposed purpose, which is not to predict the future, but to compare different possible futures to guide policy today. But it's a bullshit dodge to let them incorporate unrealistically pessimistic scenarios and avoid saying anything quantitative about what will probably happen.

[MrNumbers]

5715841

I think Adorno and Horkheimer are where I go to for this one, but Chomsky makes the most cutting single example. The Herald Sun was the most circulated newspaper in Britain before ad-space revenue became the dominant model, out-circulating the Guardian, the Times and the Economist combined. Frequently the best journalism too. Entirely anti-corporate, left-leaning socialist piece. Went out of business when it couldn't price-match the competition that could sell ad-space, got bought out by Murdoch, and is now the Sun, the worst tabloid in the game.

Even in academia, a lot comes down to hiring and firing power, and schools are run as businesses in this framework. So these ideas do get opposed, but it's not an even battlefield. For instance;

Hence personal truths, authenticity, lived experience--all Nazi buzzwords.

The CIA explicitly pushed this to weaken the ability of journalism to threaten systemic power and reduce things to personal issues. Also here.But I don't have enough coffee in me to get into Operation Mockingbird.

I'd basically just come down on; Two people are debating in a town square, but only one has access to the megaphone. Sometimes because it's too expensive, and other times because if the second person ever gets their hands on it the cops take it away.

Which, again, I think is a point worth emphasizing here, because it means that when fascism can be polite about things it's mostly just incredibly pro-business rhetoric that aligns extremely neatly with the Allied system of government. And I think that's likely to be the much bigger, immediate term threat - Mussolini took power in Italy with the March on Rome not from overwhelming force, but from the promise to the liberal elite that force could be used to break unions and prevent labor organizing. Hitler, too, never held a majority vote, was maneuvered into place by the political elite.

Visiting Athenian nobles propagandizing Sparta shouldn't be lost on anyone here. I think that's the historical parallel most worth following up on. Why did those contemporary accounts see a culture that produced no art, no great public works, and a brutal system of oppression, and then seek to valorize and romanticize it? Because I think that's the real threat as to how contemporary liberalism is going to lose, if it's going to lose to anything.

[TheJediMasterEd]

5715841

In a way, the fascists won World War 2. The Allies got to impose their form of government. The fascists got to impose their form of philosophy.

The shark from Happy Days called. He said you beat Fonzie's jump by a good ten feet.

[Bad Horse]

5715853
Why do you disagree?

Do you deny that the Nazis chased all empiricist philosophers out of Germany and France, and installed only phenomenologists?

Can you name an empiricist philosopher who was kicked out of continental Europe, then returned to it after World War 2? Can you name a philosopher who taught under the Nazis, then was permanently fired by the Allies? Even Heidegger only had to cool his heels for 4 years before he started teaching at Freiburg again.

Can you name a prominent continental philosopher that wasn't influenced primarily by fascist philosophers, or by philosophers who had studied primarily fascist philosophers? Camus is the only one I can think of, but that's only because he had no university training in philosophy.

I'd like to know if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that I'm right.

[TheJediMasterEd]

5715865

No, but how did the West, or even the more limited case of Europe, become more fascistic after WWII?

If the West's philosophy became more fascistic after WWII, we should see some evidence of that in the West's culture. If we just restrict ourselves to Europe, same thing.

(Either that, or philosophers are completely unimportant to the West. In which case we might as well be discussing, I dunno, magical talking horses, or something equally fantastical.)

Look, my larger point is this: you're going nuts here. I know it makes you feel good to take increasingly extreme positions and successfully defend them, even if they become divorced from reality. The problem is if you do that enough, you become divorced from reality.

That happens to a lot of creative people. It happened to Scott Adams. I don't want it to happen to you, if for no other reason than that you're a better writer than Scott Adams.

[Bad Horse]

5715892
The fascists outlawed the Vienna Circle and the Ernst Mach society, expelled or killed good philosophers, left the bad ones in place, and installed or promoted philosophers with explicitly pro-fascist beliefs (like Heidegger) and/or epistemologies compatible with fascism (meaning ones that teach that feelings and personal beliefs are more important than facts).

After the war, the Allies made little effort to correct this, and the philosophers who had left Germany didn't want to go back (probably because Germany was a bombed-out wasteland). No French empiricists went back because there weren't any French empiricists before the war AFAIK.

Various philosophical movements explicitly rejected Nazism, like existentialism and post-modernism. But they were all made by phenomenologists, and mostly by people who were strongly influenced by Heidegger (like Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Derrida). So they could never come up with reasons why Nazism was bad. This only made things worse; they had to either admit that the Nazis were as good as them, or else denigrate or replace reason (which is what they sort-of did; not Beauvoir, but in general continental philosophy does not respect empirical facts).

The main exception was Marxist philosophers like Adorno, but they're still conflict theorists, still not on good terms with empirical science, and still convinced that they alone hold the key to the future.

Today, continental philosophy has reportedly moved on to something other than post-modernism, which I am not familiar with and see no reason to become more familiar with. But American universities became infested with continental philosophy in the 1960s, thru a combination of existentialism, nihilism, post-modernism, Marxist activism, and sociology departments (which imported social constructivism from, guess who, German phenomenologists).

This trickled down to artists, who were already adherents of continental dialectics and epistemology due to the ascendency of modern art. Post-modernism worked its way into literature mostly through Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Marcuse, and eventually Foucault (via academicians using them to write identity-politics tracts which were then incorporated into literary theory under the umbrella of critical theory). I don't know how it spread in Hollywood , but today it preaches post-modernist metaphysics (e.g., The Matrix) and a Marxist eschatology in which "late capitalism" will lead us all to disaster. Rock-and-roll has been taken over by death-oriented bands who sing about the futility of life and the coming violence.

Foucault, who taught that all conflict is motivated by power-seeking (just the latest update on Nietzsche), civilizations are nothing but oppressive power structures, and rational discussion is always bullshit, was by far the strongest European influence on American politics, yanking us back from mistake theory to conflict theory, which is the main reason America is imploding today. The 1960s movements in Europe and America loved him bcoz he gave them an excuse to burn society down without bothering to understand it.

This all came back with a vengeance in the 1990s, when the student radicals of the 1960s got tenure. This is where the Social Justice movement came from, more than from American progressives of the 1890s, or even of the civil rights movement. American progressives didn't produce much formal philosophy. Identity politics academics in the 1980s and 1990s drew more-heavily on French post-modernists and social constructivism to "deconstruct" American society. Today, and this only really became clear after about 2015, this has become the driving force in American education, from kindergarten to college; and in the Democratic party, even though it's a minority opinion in the Democratic party.

[archonix]

5715585
Judges appear to be a great example of the peter principle in action. They're more often than not drawn from the legal profession, rising to judgeship by whatever means is employed locally. Here in the UK, they're usually barristers who stood still long enough to be fitted for a red dress and a wig, rather than because they're particularly intelligent or hard-working.

A lawyer friend of mine told me a joke once: what do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 80? "Your honour."

5715852
We never had a British newspaper called the Herald Sun. We had the Daily Herald, which was a failing newspaper (relatively speaking) that was relaunched as The Sun in the mid 60s and saw a moderate burst of interest, before sinking back to its previous circulation numbers for a while. It was losing money when it was bought out, but it didn't go out of business. The Sun was always a joke of a paper, well before Murdoch bought it, with the joke being that if you wanted to read tomorrow's Sun, you could read today's Daily Mirror. They plagiarised everything for years. I don't know where Chomsky got his story from, but it's completely wrong in every respect.

[TheJediMasterEd]

Titanium Dragon was not so very long ago simply for citing statistics

Now you just fuckin wit me, right bro?

[Murcushio]

5715684

Classical historian Brett Devereaux has a series of essays here that backs up a lot of the data and analysis. He also gives some explanations for why contemporary historians talk Sparta up so much that I think you'd find interesting - it was propaganda, basically, visiting accounts are written from the perspective of noble guests. It also follows up a lot more of the points you start looking into here. .

Of particular interest is how Sparta eventually strangled itself to death; there was literally no way to become a Spartiate and plenty of ways to STOP being one, so eventually the ruling class got too small to continue to impose its will on the vast bulk of the rest of Sparta (especially once they lost control of their breadbasket Messenia) and the veto points of that system prevented the few people who saw "hey, this is a problem" from being able to actually DO anything about it. There were a couple scheme as Sparta wound down to attempt the replenish the Spartiates, the crustiest of the crusty, incredibly wealthy, already-established parts of Spartiate culture went "fuck no," and then the Romans rolled over them and turned them into a theme park.

It's interesting to contrast Bad Horse's amateur attempts at history with Deveraux's professional attempts at history. They both get to largely the same places but in different ways and the styles of writing are much different than them just being different writers. In particular they both get to the conclusion of "wait a fucking minute... all these people who are lionizing Sparta are authoritarian tourists with axes to grind!" from much different routes.

[Murcushio]

BTW, the Spartans were moderately democratic. They had an assembly of citizens that could vote on various things, but they had, IIRC, no way for the citizens to propose legislature or actions.

I am... not sure this is a useful definition of "democratic." Sure, the Spartiates very specifically were moderately democratic among THEMSELVES. That's narrowly true but by that definition plenty of ruling juntas have been "democratic."

[Bad Horse]

5715986
If such a country said today that they were democratic, we'd say, "No, you're not." But they had a concept of democracy, and a mechanism to implement it: a constitution specifying who got to vote and how votes were counted (actually in a pretty weird way). In that way similar to the Roman Republic, but without the civil wars. Not just a junta, which I think we use for groups that aren't bound to any rules. I mentioned this because I myself tend to present the "democratic Athens vs. oligarchic Sparta" narrative, and it is an over-simplification, and I figured some Spartaphile would call me on it without a disclaimer.

[Bad Horse]

EDIT: I retract this statement as misleading due to incompleteness, because of MrNumbers' conflicting story, below, of what happened.

5715964
Nope. He was going to be a speaker at a pony con, but was uninvited when someone complained that he'd once quoted crime statistics from the FBI online that showed, IIRC, that the ratio of blacks shot to blacks arrested for violent crimes was the same as the ratio of whites shot to whites arrested for violent crimes. You can ask him for the details.

[Bad Horse]

5715960
Chomsky is not a reliable source. Check out The Anti-Chomsky Reader for a long list of times Chomsky made stuff up and trusted his readers not to check on him.

I'm not entirely reliable myself, but I'm posting comments on a pony fan-fiction site in my spare time, not an MIT prof selling millions of books which are read by millions of people and quoted by the media.

[Bad Horse]

5715892

Look, my larger point is this: you're going nuts here. I know it makes you feel good to take increasingly extreme positions and successfully defend them, even if they become divorced from reality. The problem is if you do that enough, you become divorced from reality.

I think the problem is that you feel you can legitimately say a position is divorced from reality even while admitting it's been successfully defended. People feel that way today because our society has become permeated with Nazi metaphysics, although you can call it post-modernism if you like. "Reality" is no longer bound to facts, but to the accepted narrative--which is not the common narrative, but the narrative of the elites.

If the West's philosophy became more fascistic after WWII, we should see some evidence of that in the West's culture.

I think we see lots of evidence, primarily in how we've suddenly gone from a society based on merit, equal opportunity, reasoned debate, and law; to one based on racism, hatred, lies, and executive orders, in which most people are afraid to say what they think, and the news media pretend that no-one believes the things most people believe and everyone believes the things they believe.

Just last year, I saw a video taken at my alma mater, SUNY Buffalo. Lt. Col. Allen West, a black Congressman, had been invited to give a talk on racism in America, and he said that America isn't as racist as it was when he grew up. The crowd tried to attack him, but police quickly rescued him and took him away. So a mob of hundreds of students went after the woman who'd invited him there, and chased her across campus. I saw that video of hundreds of students spilling out of the auditorium, racing after her, screaming "No peace!" I think they would have killed her if they'd caught her.

Only Fox News reported this. The school newspaper printed an angry editorial denouncing the speaker. No students were disciplined, even though they were caught on film trying to assault someone in order to take away his freedom of speech.

This might have happened in the 1960s, but it would have been reported on nationwide. It would never have happened in the 1980s. America HAS changed.

[AugieDog]

5716060

Actually:

It was retired Lt. Col. Allen West, a former GOP congressman from Florida, whose talk sparked this, not Cornel West...

Mike

[Bad Horse]

5716069
Thanks for the correction. I just looked it up online to see who it was, and I guess I was in too much of a hurry and copied the wrong name. That was dumb; I know who Cornell West is, & he wouldn't have said that. But my brain just said "oh, yeah, I associate him with issues of race" and moved on.

[MrNumbers]

5716048

Hello, sorry, but this is a misrepresentation. By this point Titanium Dragon had also gone on the record as saying that IQ is a genetically heritable quality, and black people were significantly of lower IQ - a case he argued publicly in the Writeoff Discord server, bare minimum, which is actually what was shared with organizers. The FBI crime statistics shorthand is used as a meme for dog whistling - the joke is the kind of person who has those statistics memorized, because it's a common dog whistle, but using that explanation as the whole reason is a joke. Titanium Dragon's white supremacy is well established and easily verifiable, and I believe has ended with him being removed as a moderator for several large subreddits.

[MrNumbers]

5715960

Absolutely correct, my apologies for misremembering a book from years ago. Here's the paragraph I was botching;

As James Curran points out, with 4.7 million readers in its last year, “the Daily Herald actually had almost double the readership of The Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian combined.” What is more, surveys showed that its readers “thought more highly of their paper than the regular readers of any other popular newspaper,” and “they also read more in their paper than the readers of other popular papers despite being overwhelmingly working class . . .”

Later Chomsky cites they had 8.1% market share of daily circulation, but only 3% of total advertising revenue.

[Bad Horse]

5716094
Huh. I didn't hear that part about IQ. (EDIT: Or maybe I did? I have the feeling maybe you told me that before.)

But I don't believe TD is a white supremacist, just an Aspy who insists that quoting statistics from reputable sources and conclusions from refereed journals is always okay. To call him a white supremacist for the things you described implicitly claims that one's human rights should depend on one's IQ, which I think is a dangerous idea to let slide. I don't think we should pin our hopes for a just society on having factual questions that we don't yet know the answer to turning out the way we want them to.

[MrNumbers]

5716099

Titanium Dragon:

Criminals tend to be poor people, because all the things that predict criminality also predict poverty – poor impulse control, low IQ, low empathy, ect. The “poor people are criminals” stereotype comes from the actual reverse – it isn’t that poor people are criminals (as seen in the Great Recession, and Great Depression, when crime didn’t go up) but that criminals tend to be poor. > Casuality is reversed there.

Count Numbers:

How so?
Honestly, I’m just trying to explain why black people aren’t poor because they’re all criminals [sic]

Titanium Dragon:

That’s not what I said.
Income correlates with higher test scores because the US (and other developed countries) are meritocracies
IQ, for instance, correlates with income to about .4 to .5.
And IQ has a heritability in the US of .75 to .85
People with higher income parents
Are MUCH more likely to have high IQ parents
I voted for Hillary Clinton
You lose.

Here's a charming snippet. Look, you can twiddle around the margins of this one, but it's skimming the end of a two hour public conversation - more context makes this worse, and that more context exists.

I also used to have screenshots of him telling u/Prince_Kropotkin that Bernie Sanders supporters would all be executed for treason, back when he still had a moderator role in r/politics - the original hosting server of the screenshot's dead, but I might be able to find it in Discord. And the Wikipedia entry on GamerGate notes him as the first editor to lose permissions for aggressive editing of Anita Sarkeesian's page, after reprimanding.

Listen, I get it, you're friends with the guy, and I legitimately came here trying not to pick fights over this stuff, I promise. I was trying not to go hard on this here. But there is just, a catastrophic mountain of things like this. And when you're wilfully ignorant of it, it makes it really difficult not to emphasize listening to Jedi Master Ed here.

[Bad Horse]

5716094
There's something odd in this issue that I can't quite put my finger on.

Suppose somebody said that blacks had worse health, on average, than whites. Lots of people who call themselves progressive do in fact say this.

Health and IQ are qualitatively similar. Both are determined by both genetics and environment. Both have strong effects on socioeconomic status. So why is saying blacks have worse health on average than whites progressive, while saying blacks have lower IQ on average is white supremacist?

I suspect that the instinct to say those things is due to some Christian notion of one's IQ as part of one's soul, and therefore of one's merit; while one's health is part of one's body, and thus a thing one isn't held responsible for.

[RoMS]

5715865

Do you deny that the Nazis chased all empiricist philosophers out of Germany and France, and installed only phenomenologists?

Though a day late to this, I need to add my grain of salt. This statement is wrong on several levels.

"Empiricism" as a general movement in philosophy had long splintered into many different schools of thought that can hardly be called empiricist in a pure sense of the term. Refocusing the point to the Vienna circle like you did later on is more amenable. The Logical Empiricists. But if those, for the most part, left the continent before or during the war, it is important to note that they did not come back because most had obtained tenure beforehand and in the meantime. It is also important to note that variants of empiricism did not die with them in the continent. Among philosophers one could called empiricist variants, you will still find continental ones post-war. For instance: Popper (who, despite his tenure in the UK, was involved on the continent with the Mont Pelerin society) or Gilles Deleuze (by his own words and work).

This aside, saying the nazis chased empiricists out of Europe and installed phenomenologues in Germany and France is blatantly wrong. First because that'd be a reduction of the wealth of ideas that came around Europe at the time (e.g. Christian reaction to phenomenology in the 1930s) and after. Second because Heidegger's phenomenology predates the rise to power of nazism (it'd have been more interesting to point at his review of the pre-socratics with his 1943 lectures on Heraclitus for instance) and will survive him with Levinas for instance. Third because the French academia did that to themselves with the influence of none other than Jean Paul Sartre. He was instrumental in rehabilitating Heidegger after the war (he actually was banned from teaching for a few years -- 1951! -- following denazification).

[MrNumbers]

5716102

So first of all, I was literally a special needs educator during the time the above interaction took place. Not that that proves anything, but just, I cannot stress enough how much that dog won't hunt, personally.

Second of all: Are you seriously asking? Because I've got the real answer. I'm going to be pulling from “The Paradox of Intelligence: Heritability and Malleability Coexist in Hidden Gene-Environment Interplay” by Bruno Sauce and Louis D. Matzel, and heavily from "Whole Brain Size and General Mental Ability: A Review" by Philippe Rushton and C. Davison Ankney, as well as from The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen J Gould.

The difference between the median incomes of BIPOC and whites in the US would account for 50g of brain mass gained between the ages of 4 and 24 - observable differences in areas like cortical wrinkling and other physical manifestations we associate with intelligence - autopsies performed in WW2 comparing black and white officers bear this out, even when obviously accounting for individuals who ended up achieving similar professional outcomes.

The observable differences in intelligence in racial groups disappears almost entirely when we account for this socioeconomic difference.

"Almost entirely" - well, because the effects of poverty on intelligence are more racialized in the US as well. Even higher-income black populations are more likely to have toxic lead in their water. For one such example. The US, where I'm pulling most of this data, is also a unique case where BIPOCs earning doctorates see their lifetime wealth levels drop on average, due to how often that wealth gets redistributed to supporting families, whereas whites earning doctorates typically come from already-wealthy families, and so that income effect is multiplied.

If you go through all the data presented, you reach two conclusions;

One: There is horrible discrimination in the United States, right now, against black communities.
Two: If the United States were completely race-blind these are still similar to the outcomes you would expect.

However, the US is not race blind, and people base racist conclusions on these outcomes - on these statistics, and they use this to shape political reality. For instance, the drug war. Quoting a senior Nixon official:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

From 538:

Black Americans were especially likely to be killed in poorer neighborhoods. Of the 136 African-Americans killed by police who are in the Guardian’s database, 56 — more than 40 percent — died in tracts in the poorest 20 percent nationally. But that may say more about overall racial inequality than about policing per se: African-Americans were killed in low-income areas at roughly the same rate that they live in them.

But this isn't IQ, so why does it matter?

Because waffling on the genetic factor means entertaining notions that the problem might not be fixed with more social welfare projects or wealth redistribution. Time and time again these differences disappear when normalized for economic inequality in the data, but there is no real world normalization occurring that justifies this. From the last year of reliable data I can find, the average black male still earns only 2/3s of what the average white male earns. The income gap hasn’t changed since 1996.

Which is how you end up with Titanium Dragon saying more black people are poor because they're stupider, and become criminals. This is what he is saying "Causality is reversed" on.

It serves no other purpose, no other point. You want better data than this, more fair? Fine. De-racialize wealth inequality - and this doesn't just mean income inequality, it means fixing the hereditary wealth gap from being locked out of the housing market for decades longer, from redlining and other polices like it - and then we'll have a better way to see where the genetic factors play.

But the science has been done. It's right here, in these papers. Anyone who wants to sell you a racial theory of intelligence - or says the facts aren't studied because they'll be uncomfortable - is someone who only loves the aesthetics of data and rationalism. It's intelligence only as an affectation.

EDIT: Post-script - Learning that differences in household wealth create such a measurable effect on the weight of the brain, in the course of this research, was one of the most viscerally radicalizing things I've ever experienced. That the effects of wealth can be measured so concretely, on a kitchen scale - that children are robbed of a functional part of their anatomy by the circumstances of their parents for the rest of their lives, no matter what other choices they make as adults - haunts and disgusts me every day.

[Heartshine]

5716102
Clinical therapist chiming in who was trained on intelligence testing - the WAIS IV - the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, 4th edition for those that don't exist in a space where 98% of their language has become acronymns - was based on the earlier models of intelligence testing, but is still running off of norms established by the WAIS II. Also, this inventory, along with many others, does two things well: 1. it identifies cognitive deficits in individuals that can be explained by neurodevelopmental problems, injury, stroke, or in one subscale, education level and 2. identifies giftedness in individuals that would indicate that you need to use another inventory to assess intelligence and deficits because one individual is particularly clever.

What it doesn't do well is tell you how 'intelligent' an average person is because, realistically, we're not using it on 'average' people. WAIS-IV and other inventories explicitly exist to detect problems. The other issue, and this is one that was addressed but not solved during the update, was that there was a general homogeneity to the samples use to create those norms. IE, the test subjects that they used to create the normative scales were 2200 individuals from the US and about 600 or so from Canada. Now, if you ask Pearson, the publisher that holds the patent for the inventory, this was based on US census results. However, if you look into the information in the test itself (like I got to do when I was trained to give the test), they will inform you that their samples came from two colleges in the US, a college in Montreal, Canada, and the Tel Aviv University in Israel. The rest of their norms were based on earlier editions. Earlier editions which showed that there were severe language problems within the test parameters that made the test show people as underperforming in: rural areas, extreme low income urban areas, and on American Indian reservations. As a consequence, their 'fix' for it is to adjust the scores for people in these subgroups so that they can be normed to 100 as the 'standard' IQ.

It took until WAIS-IV for this to happen, however IQ enthusists (read: morons who are basically modern phrenologists) will continue to point out that blacks 'underperform' on IQ tests. Yes, so do poor whites, American Indians, Hispanic populations, and hilariously, middle income whites in rural areas. In fact, people who perform 'best' on IQ tests are Middle and Upper Class individuals who identify of being Asian descent, who will actually outperform wealthy whites. Which isn't something you ever hear brought up by people who are very interested in IQ. Which I tend to find kinda funny.

Because the issue with testing, as tends to be with a lot of psychology tests, not just IQ in specific, is it gets normed to speak the language of upper middle class white people. Which is great if you fall into that ethnic group (or identify as Asian apparently), but if you don't, a lot of the ways that the questions are asked can really screw up your readings on testing. We gave WISCs, the Child Version of the IQ test, to volunteers when I was in grad school, and I found one of the biggest issues was that my participants scored way lower on average than my class. BECAUSE I WAS A YANKEE AND THEY COULDN'T UNDERSTAND MY ACCENT. Intelligence testing to prove 'who is superior' is a dumb, dogshit idea that should have died with Hitler in a bunker (Or maybe, more ideally, strung up next to Mussolini), but people continue to abuse this ideology for... honestly reasons I can't fathom.

Because IQ testing is really good to have when you are wondering why a client is functioning really well in some areas and suffers in others, or to see what was broken after they had a stroke. Or if they qualify for MENSA. Like... that's it. End of story.

No proving what race has more brain wrinkles. (this is determined by a number of factors mostly related to diet and Socioeconomic status)

Just... hey are you gifted? Or what is broken in you that we need to give you extra assistance with.

[Bad Horse]

5716110
This is all good to know about the IQ test, but doesn't dissolve the problem. You can shift to SAT scores, ASVAB scores, and so on, some of which were designed to measure something like "intelligence".

I think it's more profitable to ask questions like: Why do we care what the average score is by skin color? What tasks do we need that information for? Do those tasks maybe have something more-specific than IQ that they could measure instead? Can we factor and expand "intelligence" into different dimensions, each for a different purpose?

Ultimately, though, some people are "smarter" than others. Here's a thought exercise: Suppose there is no black, no white, no race. Everybody is gray. But some gray people are smarter than others. Can your society work like you want it to for this gray raceless people? If not, the problem isn't race.

I mean, I feel like we're delegating a problem to race that is not at root a racial problem, but the problem that different people are different, and we don't know what the just way is of dealing with differences. By pretending that race is the problem, we pretend that the problem is much easier to solve than it really is, and guarantee that we'll find "solutions" that just re-distribute inequity in some other way that we're not measuring.

[Heartshine]

5716118
You ended up tripping my Special Interest and Job Trap Card so you kinda got a novel. XD

That said, yeah, people are different. And that's a good thing. The issue is humans by default tend to do the me/likeme and notme/notlikeme thing and it has been a problem ever since we evolved into the social predators that we are.

I think it's more profitable to ask questions like: Why do we care what the average score is by skin color? What tasks do we need that information for? Do those tasks maybe have something more-specific than IQ that they could measure instead? Can we factor and expand "intelligence" into different dimensions, each for a different purpose?

The answer to most of these questions is 'no, we shouldn't care about average by skin colour cause there are so many factors that fuck that up.' That said, again, the tasks that information is good for are the ones I laid out: what cognitive deficits are causing a problem for someone.

Also, another thing that I didn't mention but noticed a few other commentors did was that a lot of this is based on income level. Turns out, if you have more resources to devote to your kids, you tend to have smarter kids. The less resources (and usually as a consequence, time), your kids are going to struggle. Part of the reason why SNAP and WIC exist in the US was because the US government in the 1960s went 'wow, people who are low income have kids who really struggle in school. We wanna be the smartest nation on the planet (o, how the mighty have fallen -_-), and we find that a lot of brain development happens between birth and age 2. We should implement programs that help with making sure that kids get fed! Which, given that the new deal was still popular, that got squeaked through until... well, more financially conservative governments pared it back.

Individual differences are always going to be a thing. My roommate is an artist. She can draw the most amazing, adorable things. I struggle to make stick figures that look like humans. But I also specialized my life into learning how to communicate with people. I think part of my issue as well with 'how do we categorize people' is, at its core, stuck in this idea that you need to bring your own value and capital to society. Which, I'm not going to get into here because I have the distinct impression that we have differing opinions on the inherent value of the individual, which is fine, but detracts from the conversation. A lot of things are good to categorize people, but only insofar as having a general sense of what an individual can do is helpful. With... I would argue someone who is as close to 'nominal' functioning as possible? I'm not so sure we need a test that says that they score 1,983,293,291st in Math in the world.

Can your society work like you want it to for this gray raceless people? If not, the problem isn't race.

A quick glance at the US, which is ... extremely racially charged but tries to tell itself it is a homogeneous culture, yeah no, it still doesn't function. Because like I mentioned earlier, a huge problem with any form of intelligence is that it is also based on socioeconomic status. Poverty does several things to your development that really fucks you over in the long term. Poor diet leads to poor brain development. Poverty often requires parents to work long hours to make ends meet, which means children are not getting the recommended hour+ of quality time with a parent per day that is good for emotional development. It also makes you change your priorities, because you watch your parents struggle in your job, and so you learn that if you have a higher education, you have a more stressful job, as opposed to someone who isn't in poverty learning that well if you get a good education, your job prospects may improve. I say may, given that this is... slowly becoming not a thing in today's end-stage capitalist hellscape, because I am seeing more and more middle-income families showing up in crisis with the same issues as folks I see in poverty so... shrug.

By pretending that race is the problem, we pretend that the problem is much easier to solve than it really is, and guarantee that we'll find "solutions" that just re-distribute inequity in some other way that we're not measuring.

Gestures vaguly at her earlier comments about late stage capitalist hellscape possibly being the problem. I feel like you are so close to understanding the point you're making, but missing the point entirely, and I'm trying to figure out what sort of cognitive dissonance it takes to do this.