[HN Gopher] Feelings at the Fall of the Republic, Ancient and Me...
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Feelings at the Fall of the Republic, Ancient and Medieval Living
Standards
Author : parsecs
Score : 131 points
Date : 2021-08-06 04:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| gumby wrote:
| > a magistrate would convene the senate and pose a question
|
| This is a good reminder of the democracy of the Republic. I had
| forgotten that Magistrates had powers such as these. Popular
| press and film concentrate on the Senators, (and Emperors for
| post republic stories) but the magistrates, like the tribunes,
| were elected by the plebs (populace) into a government with some
| separation of powers. In fact it might be better to consider the
| roman Senate more like the UN Security Council: all countries are
| equal but de facto some countries are more equal than others, so
| there is some structure for focusing and constraining them.
|
| And do not forget that those with political ambitions (like
| Gaius, who came from and old but minor patrician family, the
| Julii, through a cadet Caesar branch) started out by being
| elected a Tribune by the plebs, even if the objective was
| Senatorial rank and a generalship.
|
| Since the Reagan era at least the US has seemed in the thrall of
| the same disease that afflicted the patricians of the roman
| republic. It's no surprise major biographies of Cicero appeared
| in the late 90s and early 20th century. The philosophy (as
| described in the article "tendency of Roman elites to think in
| terms of the virtue of individuals rather than the tendency of
| systems" afflicts the analysis today. I value my individualism
| and don't want government telling me what to do, but I also
| recognize the value and function of community (whether taxes,
| volunteering, speed limits, or vaccination). Rome (in all of
| royal, republican, and imperial times) was far more atomized and
| organized around families than most people realize today and that
| was ultimately its weakness. Though there was a doctrine of
| "civis romanus sum", the reality was that too much power remained
| in the patrician houses, enough to permit essentially continuous
| civil war once the republic was de facto gone.
| brodo wrote:
| Good article. When it comes to living standards, it is worth
| mentioning that there was a more equal wealth distribution after
| the fall of Rome which made it impossible for medieval nobles to
| finance large armies. This meant that wars in medieval times
| where shorter and less bloody then before and after. Also slavery
| disappeared from Europe, except for Spain. For an everyday normal
| person in western Europe living around the year 800-1300 was
| probably better then during antiquity. Early modernity was pretty
| bad compared to that period too. (witch trials, 30 year war...)
| true_religion wrote:
| Yes, somehow when it comes to slave states, people tend to
| focus on the lifestyle of the slave masters rather than the
| great heap of humanity living in squalor to support them.
|
| In context though, I wonder if serfs really had it better. They
| still had no freedom to move, and in the early Middle Ages
| there was no appeal granted to serfs under a tyrannical lord.
| weare138 wrote:
| Serfs were essentially slaves but because Christianity
| technically forbade slavery the church side-stepped the issue
| by narrowly defining slavery as only when someone is bought
| or sold. Serfs were bound to the land and lord they 'served'
| under and had no rights. Lords couldn't buy and sell serfs
| but they could lease them to other lords. So it wasn't
| slavery as long as you gave the serf back to the lord you got
| them from at some point.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| Where is your source that Christianity technically forbade
| slavery and that this was related to the concept of
| serfdom? I wasn't aware of this and find it surprising
| compared to what I had originally thought about the time
| period on question.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| There is a dead sibling comment to my comment that seems
| inflammatory but is correct historically.
|
| Many societies continued to have slaves after the
| introduction of Christianity, including Britain before the
| Norman conquest.
|
| There was a religious reform movement around the time of
| the conquest that if I understand correctly gradually
| eliminated slavery over a few generations to a few
| centuries.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Someone can correct me but I think the difference is the
| Church wasn't down with taking a Christian as a slave.
| That would have resulted in the number of slaves
| dwindling.
|
| I think the in the US slavery is associated with the
| virulent Slavery in the United States where slaves were
| literal property every bit as much as a horse and a wagon
| were property.
|
| Might be that Romans would have considered the difference
| between their slaves and medieval surfs as a distinction
| without a difference. And possibly be horrified by the US
| variant. Your slave doesn't have the right to marry and
| own property? WTF?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I think the in the US slavery is associated with the
| virulent Slavery in the United States where slaves were
| literal property every bit as much as a horse and a wagon
| were property.
|
| There was nothing especially virulent about slavery in
| the US compared to slavery in other places.
|
| > Your slave doesn't have the right to marry and own
| property? WTF?
|
| It's actually true that American slaves were generally
| legally forbidden from marrying. This didn't matter,
| though; marriage was not just not suppressed but actively
| encouraged by slaveholders.
|
| It's not true that American slaves didn't have the right
| to own property. They did.
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| The main distinction here is that Christianity was much
| more open to the slavery of non Christians than the
| slavery of Christians.
|
| The Catholic Church was very particular about this in
| making sure to only ban the enslavement of Christians
| while explicitly condoning the slavery of non Christians.
|
| It's a classic example of ingroup vs outgroup bias.
| bobthechef wrote:
| > I wonder if serfs really had it better. They still had no
| freedom to move, and in the early Middle Ages there was no
| appeal granted to serfs under a tyrannical lord.
|
| In Poland, peasants actually were freer in the Middle Ages
| then they were in later centuries. Serfdom became more of a
| thing with the rise of the wealthy landed magnates whose
| greed increasingly bound the peasants to production. Poland
| was, among other things, the breadbasket of Europe, and in
| the preindustrial era, agriculture was a major source of
| wealth, and so among its exports to Western Europe, grain was
| a major source of revenue. The nobility in Poland was quite
| large (around 10%, as opposed to the ~2% in a country like
| France), but over time, a part of that nobility managed to
| become fabulously wealthy and maintained private armies that
| I believe could rival the army of the Polish Crown in size,
| and owned hundreds of villages, towns, and even cities.
| Eventually, Poland's last king, Stanislaus II Augustus,
| placed the peasants under the protection of the State.
| brodo wrote:
| Yes although there where also some free farmers. As I
| understand it, the serfs had more power in the high middle
| ages than before and after, because the lords also lacked the
| resources for strong police forces. There was not a lot of
| metal around, so most soldiers did not have shields or armor.
| You and your serf buddies could realistically resist the
| local lord with some forks and knives. Plus the catholic
| church was also protecting serf's rights to an extend.
| lumost wrote:
| I hadn't heard of a metal shortage during the middle ages (
| only seen examples of heavy metal armor worn by nights ).
| Do you have a link to a resource to learn more about this?
| robotomir wrote:
| I think shortage of metal was a problem during the bronze
| age. Because bronze is easily recyclable, my theory is
| that the Late Bronze Age collapse happened when everyone
| had a sword. In the Iron age, it's not a question of
| availability, but of technology, how quickly can you
| provision a sword and a chainmail for everyone?
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Swords have always been a fairly rare weapon. Spears and
| pole-arms offer longer range at much lower cost,
| particularly in the context of massed infantry battles.
| robotomir wrote:
| What about armor?
| watersb wrote:
| Armor is hard. It slows you down, and you can't hear or
| see as well as the guy coming up behind you.
|
| If you are trained well enough to be effective with metal
| armor, you're probably trained well enough to be
| effective without it in close quarters.
|
| Heavy plate requires mounted cavalry, but largely negates
| the maneuverability of horse, and can be brought down
| with foot trained with pikes or heavy spears.
|
| Maybe the metal was best used elsewhere.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Medieval warriors who could afford it wore plate armour,
| because it was (despite some drawbacks) incredibly
| effective protection. Many modern tropes (they had to be
| be winched on to horses, they couldn't get up if they
| fell over etc) are just plain wrong. The medieval
| warriors were less educated than us, but they weren't
| stupid.
| brodo wrote:
| Here is a good German source: https://www2.ufg.uni-
| freiburg.de/d/publ/zimm1.html
|
| And here a different one in English: https://web.archive.
| org/web/20180401081044/http://mygeologyp...
| jeltz wrote:
| What does metal have to do with shields? Metal shields were
| never popular in medieval Europe. And I also really doubt
| your assertion that shields were rare.
| zrail wrote:
| Also keep in mind that during that period the Black Plague
| killed 30-60% of the population. Serfs had more power
| because there were dramatically fewer of them.
| varjag wrote:
| On the other hand if it took a plague to improve the
| standards of living it is fair to agree the baseline was
| quite abysmal.
| zrail wrote:
| Oh no doubt!
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| I don't think that argument makes sense. What's the
| country with the highest standard of living today? This
| says it's Canada: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-
| countries/quality-of-life-r.... If a plague wiped out 50%
| of the population of Canada, and wages went up
| afterwards, would that mean that the current standard of
| living in Canada is quite abysmal?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| If a plague wiped out 50% of the population of the First
| World countries, wages wouldn't go up, they'd disappear
| entirely.
|
| The just-in-time supply chains that keep the lights on
| and food and other goods in the stores would fall apart
| within a couple of weeks.
|
| Medieval starvation was local. Areas were largely self-
| sufficient in the bare essentials - except in bad years,
| which happened regularly enough to keep a lid on
| population growth, but not so regularly they caused
| widespread depopulation.
|
| Trade was mostly for useful extras.
|
| That's very much not true today. Everything is
| specialised and interdependent, and not even farming
| areas are truly self-sufficient.
|
| This was - and possibly still is - the biggest risk from
| a pandemic. It's hard to calculate the exact tipping
| point, but when you have a certain percentage of the
| population unable to work for a couple of weeks or so,
| essential systems start breaking down.
| dragonelite wrote:
| We have seen the shock to the supply chain that happened
| during the early months of this pandemic.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Yes, this is the real problem with the modern world, and
| I'm afraid it's only getting worse. We're becoming hyper-
| efficient and scaling things up enormously at the cost of
| being extremely fragile.
|
| Eventually, some black swan event will happen and we'll
| have a systems collapse it will be very hard to recover
| from - because so little of the population will have
| baseline skills. Thankfully this pandemic wasn't it, but
| it doesn't seem to have woke up TPTB to the problem.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| The "essential" system that broke down during the Black
| Plague was serfdom.
|
| If 50% of Canadians died next week, you think what,
| Canada would cease to exist?
| whoaisme wrote:
| Maybe it would? I mean if yyou're smart tell us how 50
| percent of Canucks getting wiped out would play out. You
| act as if plenty of political entities didn't cease to
| exist because of the plague.
| pbourke wrote:
| > If 50% of Canadians died next week, you think what,
| Canada would cease to exist?
|
| It's possible. Canada's nearly broken up* in recent
| memory over regional differences. 50% of a population
| dying is a massively destabilizing event that could undo
| even a comparatively wealthy nation.
|
| * or at least its second largest province narrowly
| decided to stay in Confederation.
| brodo wrote:
| The black plague started 1350. 1310 was the big famine.
| Late middle ages where no joke.
| thrownblown wrote:
| Lol. Slavery certainly did not disappear to everywhere but
| Spain.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_slave_trade
| mwaitjmp wrote:
| > Also slavery disappeared from Europe, except for Spain
|
| Slavery was unfortunately very much a thing in Anglo Saxon
| England.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#2
|
| Pre the migration of the Saxons into England (not long after
| the Romans left leaving the inhabitants unprotected) they would
| raid coastal areas and carry off slaves back across the sea.
| Later, Viking raiders would do the same...
| felipemnoa wrote:
| >>This meant that wars in medieval times where shorter and less
| bloody then(sic) before and after.
|
| My brain short circuited a bit when reading this sentence. Just
| to clarify, you are saying that "wars in medieval times where
| shorter and less bloody then(sic) before and after" medieval
| times?
| williamdclt wrote:
| Probably meant "wars in medieval times were* shorter and less
| bloody than* before and after"
| dmos62 wrote:
| Are you saying that the phrasing is incorrect? Medieval times
| is some period and there's periods before and after that. I
| don't see what you're saying.
| vijayr02 wrote:
| Not OP, I think it's a pedantic point being made. WW1 and
| WW2 were both after medieval times.
| bnralt wrote:
| There were plenty of long and bloody wars during the High
| Middle Ages (such as the Albigensian Crusade and the Anarchy,
| just to name a couple).
|
| I think a large part of the author's point that this is a long
| period of time (even if we restrict it to 800-1300, that's
| about the same length of time as between Columbus' voyage and
| today), covering a large area (even if we restrict it to
| Western Europe), and it's difficult to come up with a single
| criteria of comparison.
| tonmoy wrote:
| Do you have any sources for either of these claims? This goes
| against my general intuition (which could itself be wrong)
| tarsinge wrote:
| I don't have a source for this whole question but regarding
| that intuition:
|
| > English peasants likely didn't work more than 120-150 days
| a year. That's about 215-245 days off a year.
|
| From https://www.fodors.com/news/news/you-wont-believe-who-
| got-mo...
| watwut wrote:
| That assumes there is no work out of season. So, no making
| of bed sheets, no matter king of cloth, candles, fixing
| tools, no animal care out of season and no work related to
| small children. No storage maintenance, no baking/cooking.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Peasants everywhere work full time, all through the year.
| For people who are just managing to survive, there is
| always something that needs doing.
|
| Growing or foraging and preparing food (especially
| manually milling grain); making (starting from raw
| plant/animal fibers), patching, and cleaning clothing;
| building hedges, fences, walls, and thatched roofs;
| making pottery; making and maintaining tools; taking care
| of animals; .... are extremely labor intensive.
|
| To get some idea what life was like for Stuart-period
| English farmers (and life was much the same in preceding
| centuries), see the BBC show _Tales from the Green
| Valley_
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series
| zeteo wrote:
| > wars in medieval times where shorter and less bloody then
| before and after
|
| Each individual war was shorter and less bloody but there were
| many more of them as the barons were feuding constantly in the
| absence of central authority. Also roving bands would
| periodically loot and burn while passing by. If you look at the
| time and effort invested into castles and city walls in the
| period it tells you all you need to know about how safe people
| felt at the time.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| > Overall the various Romans who contemplated reform were in a
| way hindered by the tendency of Roman elites to think in terms of
| the virtue of individuals rather than the tendency of systems.
|
| I'm not convinced the two are separable. One important virtue in
| a republic is self-restraint, the ability to see an opportunity
| to enrich or empower yourself at the cost of the republic, and
| refrain from exploiting it. A self-indulgent people will find it
| hard to preserve the systems that comprise the republic.
| davedx wrote:
| Compare with the US: a system of laws, checks and balances can
| prevent the most determined tyrants from seizing power. So far.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Compare with the US: a system of laws, checks and balances
| can prevent the most determined tyrants from seizing power.
|
| The laws, etc., help a lot, but they are built by people and
| can be dismantled by people. The founders could have built an
| authoritarian government; IIRC Washington was offered much
| more power than he took, and his resignation after two terms
| was his choice to put democracy first.
| sologoub wrote:
| A lot is changing in the US society and some not for the
| better - if you compare to even 80s/90s, the strength of the
| institutions has eroded and the trust is all but gone. The
| "so far" may not last much longer.
| NationalPark wrote:
| Just to put some data behind it, Monmouth found in June
| that 63% of Republican-identifiers and Republican-leaners
| believe Joe Biden only won the 2020 election because of
| voter fraud. Seems bad, but how does it stack up to faith
| in institutions historically?
| dTal wrote:
| My first thought was that the US in particular suffers from
| the same disease. It's a highly individual-focused culture
| that tends to credit people with their successes and blame
| them for their failures. Criminal justice reform, or harm
| reduction for drug users, is fiercely opposed on the grounds
| that it's _their fault_ they got into that situation. A
| persistent fiction is that if only the right individual
| becomes President, everything will be fixed. Systems level
| thinking is unpopular.
|
| As for tyrant-resistance, I would go so far as to say that
| the US just had a tyranny stress test, and the results were
| deeply concerning.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I think the American people have forgotten some important
| small-r republican principles. They have forgotten
| tolerance, accepting that others may have differing values
| and opinions, but that we need not force them to agree with
| us. They have forgotten that every power you let "your guy"
| exercise is going to be turned on you by "the other guy".
| They have forgotten that loyalty should be to principles,
| not parties or individuals, because a true principle never
| turns hypocrite. And they have forgotten that the
| responsibility for preserving liberty rests with them, not
| politicians, not Supreme Court justices. There are
| structural problems, yes, but I believe the root cause is
| the people's lack of education in these points.
|
| The system is made out of people.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| > Systems level thinking is unpopular.
|
| It is. Moreover, the most pressing problems we face are in
| fact systems level problems. At the root of this exists a
| fallacy of composition where the argument is that if each
| individual is virtuous, then the whole[system] is virtuous.
| Are there other sources than the Roman republic for more
| optimistic instances where this dynamic played out?
| traject_ wrote:
| > Systems level thinking is unpopular.
|
| I think it is the opposite really. Materialistic thinking
| is the baseline in modern society and in many ways the
| tendency to dismiss the unquantifiable as non-existent is
| one of the greatest weaknesses of modernity. It is
| certainly far easier to quantify the average temperature
| in a region using Antarctic or Greenland ice core data
| and use that to determine how that may affect
| agricultural production in a historic time period or
| analyze average skeleton height sizes to assess quality
| of life metrics than to analyze how cultural changes
| affected problems.
|
| >At the root of this exists a fallacy of composition
| where the argument is that if each individual is
| virtuous, then the whole[system] is virtuous
|
| The Romans may not have worded it correctly but it should
| not be surprising if we replace the word 'virtue' with
| 'social norms' and re-analyze how changes in social norms
| can affect social trust, how institutions are structured
| and even how families are structured(e.g. a change in
| norms from the religious change from paganism to
| Christianity meant a change from the city focused
| philanthropy of euergetism to the poor/sick focused
| ecclesiastical charity).
|
| Social trust, for example, is very important as it
| greatly reduces transaction costs yet and its core much
| of it relies upon the concept of common shared knowledge
| (in the form of traditions, values and principles) that
| is difficult to quantify. Yet at its core, the change in
| social norms would be deeply related to changes in
| 'virtues' as virtues, in practice, are ideals that
| society pressures individuals to follow. So, the Romans
| may not have the scholarly data on material changes in
| the environment to be sure but they also have a better
| intuitive understanding of the importance of virtues than
| their modern successors.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| A well-designed republic will not rely on the self-restraint of
| those in power. Indeed, it will assume those who seek power
| have little self-restraint, and it will have systems of checks
| and balances intended to prevent would-be tyrants from seizing
| the entire state.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I don't think it's realistic to expect a structure imposed by
| law to withstand the abuse of people who make, interpret, and
| enforce those laws, unless a superior force (the entire
| people) is opposed to it.
| zz865 wrote:
| When talking about living standards, it must always be pretty
| nice living on the Mediterranean, drinking your wine with fresh
| fish, rustic bread and olive oil etc. Got to be great compared to
| the guys freezing their butts off in Northern Europe eating
| pickled turnips in the snow.
| jeltz wrote:
| Pickled turnips are delicious, you should try them if you like
| pickles. But I mostly associate them with kebab and falafel
| places.
| andrepd wrote:
| >it must always be pretty nice living on the Mediterranean,
| drinking your wine with fresh fish, rustic bread and olive oil
|
| Well I'm not gonna lie, it is x)
| CRConrad wrote:
| We don't eat pickled turnips. It's the herring, not the turnips
| we pickle. So we eat _frozen_ turnips with pickled herring.
| sologoub wrote:
| We to the north-east of you do :)
| CRConrad wrote:
| Murmansk? Or just Jyvaskyla?
| sologoub wrote:
| A parent was born by a military base by Nikel, just on
| the other side of the border from Svanvik and Bjornsund.
| Slightly north west of Murmansk.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| compare freezing your butts off to thirty percent loss of
| population via plague, mentioned above?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| In a six hundred year period, like 590 of them would be
| better in the Mediterranean. One generation may have had it
| slightly better, but I'm pretty sure the Justinian plague
| still hit northern Europe.
| dash2 wrote:
| Super interesting. One point about living standards: at this
| point the world is in the Malthusian equilibrium, so living
| standards are rather decoupled from technology. (Whenever
| technology raises your living standards, you have more children,
| and average GDP per head returns to subsistence level.)
|
| Malthus has had a big comeback in the theory of economic growth
| over the past couple of decades.
| gelert wrote:
| However, people in many countries around the globe are having
| fewer children and not due to reaching "subsistence level".
| Some of the biggest impacts in birth rates are education,
| particularly for women, and birth control, both things are the
| product of technology raising living standards. Birth rates are
| not declining today because of Malthusian cycles.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > Whenever technology raises your living standards, you have
| more children, and average GDP per head returns to subsistence
| level.
|
| I thought it was 1. people have lots of kids because lots of
| them die, 2. progress in terms of stopping babies and children
| dying means more adults than expected survive to adulthood, 3.
| Those adults then adjust to the new reality and start having
| less kids.
| dash2 wrote:
| That's the post-Malthusian world where there's effective
| birth control. Now, how exactly you get from Malthus to post-
| Malthus is a very tricky question.
| merpnderp wrote:
| Have several plagues and an economic crash, while retaining
| your technology levels?
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