The destruction of rome was a good thing for most of Europe, minus the southern Mediterranean. The trajectory of the Byzantine empire suggests nothing compelling if the decadence was allowed to endlessly go on.
I imagine the right has a preference for a Chinese elite because Chinese immigrants are less anti white than Jews or Brahmins when unassimilated. Unassimilated Han are a weird contradiction of very pro MAGA and pro CCP.
Destroying Rome in the time of Caesar would have been very bad, and that's what the dissident right is cheering on...
There is a distinction between Rome in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd century. "Byzantium" is not a thing until the 4th and 5th century. Conflating these together results in people jumping the gun and declaring that we are in the 5th century, when we are in fact in the 1st century. America could have hundreds of more years before falling into the kind of Byzantine decadence you describe.
The right-wing is Cicero, claiming that Caesar will destroy everything. I say, "let him cook." It is also very important, looking beyond America, that Byzantium was able to preserve (in conjunction with the Arabs) much of Greek and Latin philosophy. So it may have not been progressive, but it was preservative, which was necessary for the Renaissance. Byzantine preservation is important.
People like the sound of total destruction when it seems like Caesar will not come, or his defeat seems all but certain. Trump is either very lucky or divinely ordained to have survived the recent attempt on his life. What would people hope for if he had perished? No other American Caesars seem forthcoming. But people should hope for him to repair things while he can.
The bourgeois right sees the renaissance as the height of European culture, but there is also a very much belated realization that the renaissance also entailed the erosion and then destruction of Europes warrior aristocracy. The bourgeois right has had their time to try and make a compelling mythos for hierarchy without lordship - by most accounts they have utterly failed at this. So perhaps future historians will be far less kind to the renaissance and preservation of Roman law.
"No other American Caesars seem forthcoming" to whom? Over what timescale?
Lincoln or FDR were analogous to the consuls of Republican Rome who took emergency powers during wars. Caesarism is not a response to a military or economic threat, but to the internal dissolution of authority.
The fear of Caesarism began during George Bush's Evangelical coalition. "American Theocracy" (2006) by Kevin Phillips is an example of early Rockefeller-Clintonite fear of an American Caesarism.
"Trump or bust" ignores the fact that Trump was always too old to ever fulfill the Caesar archetype. Give it 20 years.
In twenty years, the right fears there will be little of America left to rescue. America in twenty years is statistically Brazilian. Anecdotally, it’s composed of completely mentally deranged and incapable youth, with the generation before them not being much better. That audience has no want for a Caesar. They either want a never ending continuation of the status quo, or a Zimbabwe inspired DEI Stalin to finish what his predecessors started. Caesar has small hopes of winning an election in 2020, and there is no Roman equivalent of generalship to climb the ladder through war
According to "statistics" there is little difference between America and Brazil in 2024. Brazil is 43% white, Gen Z is 49% white. But there are qualitative differences between whites... between rural and urban whites, there is a 10 point IQ difference, similar to the white-Hispanic IQ gap, or the Finnish-Balkan gap. America is being flooded by Asians -- Brazil is not. You can't divide the world into "white and non-white" and come up with accurate predictions. According to that logic, Singapore belongs in the third world.
I don't agree with your assertions. "Gen Z sucks, and because Gen Z sucks, Caesarism is impossible." Why are you arguing that Caesar needs to win elections? Do you understand that Caesar didn't win an election?
The real Caesar didn’t win an election because he came to power through compelling generalship. The last figure America had like this was MacArthur. The route for independents free of the bureaucracy to rise through service is closed now, and won’t be reopened except for dire circumstances, like losing badly to China in the pacific. So now there are either elections, or being part of the blob directly. Guys like yarvin say that a blue blob Caesar could be a good thing, but so far we’ve seen it produce a lot of guys like Trudeau and macron, who are happy to use executive power solely to crush right wingers and make them miserable before going back to business as usual.
A lot of the immigrants flooding America are actual Brazilians or other Latin Americans, no? Singapore itself would be third world without a confident right wing dictatorship keeping the Malaysians in check.
Byzantine civilization -- efficient, scholarly, and technological -- is remarkable for being built on brainpower and for brainpower from the beginning. It thrived for centuries despite having the deck severely stacked against it by using strategy. Constantinople, known as Miklagard to the Norsemen, or the Great City, was once a city open to talent, a tabula rasa, initially lacking a traditional caste of established families. They had a lot of cool stuff -- aqueducts, fortifications, roads, bridges, gold. mosaics, silks, churches (Hagia Sophia), palaces, water clocks, astronomical devices, water-powered automata, philosophy, fountains, organs, etc., etc., but for me, the most compelling aspect of their civilization was the flamethrowers, a state secret for seven centuries, which they would use to whup-ass on the Umayyads, the Rus, and anyone else who attacked them.
The byzantines, with their lovey brainpower and sleek inventions, spent the lifespan of their civilization losing territory to primitive foreign invaders and never being able to permanently reclaim what was lost. Most of the states effort was spent on managing mercenaries because it never was able to effectively levy citizen armies like rome once did.
The Byzantine Empire's poor reputation comes from the Enlightenment. Because Throne and Altar couldn't be attacked directly, writers of the period often used surrogate targets or made their case in roundabout ways. If you wrote a book attacking Christ directly, you would get hanged, while if you made "an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects" like Hume, well, things are more ambiguous, even though the point is the same. Voltaire plays the same game in the play "Mahomet." So you may see a Montesquieu or a Gibbon portraying the Byzantine Empire as a group of losers -- a dumb, superstitious, despotic government led by effeminate, cowardly men and corrupt eunuchs obsessed with empty rituals, navigating an endless, incomprehensible bureaucracy. While some of that stuff is true, there is an ideological context behind the choice of subject matter; what is left out of the story is also self-serving. This is apparent when considering religious motivations for believing in a dark age. Protestants like to think nothing compelling happened between 500-1500 AD, while the interval shrinks between 500-1000 AD with Catholics.
I didn’t mention iconoclasm at all. The byzantines failed over and over again at expelling the Arabs and Turks where the Spanish and hapsburgs succeeded. I believe the long lasting failure of rome to cultivate a functioning warrior aristocracy played a role.
Using DeepLeft's 15 socio-cultural categories, how do you categorize Byzantium?
I would put it in the "ascetic" category, i.e., intellectual-ethical. Sure, it was basically a military dictatorship, but it was a dictatorship in the administrative sense, like Starfleet in the Star Trek universe. It ran on the Holy Wisdom, or Neoplatonism, from top to bottom; its strengths and weaknesses should be seen in this light.
For example, if it were purely a warrior aristocracy, an army of 15,000 would not be able to fight off, let alone annihilate, an Umayyad force of 120,000 soldiers and 1,800 ships. Live by the sword, die by the sword. But using the power of The Science, they achieved absolute victory, like Bruce Campbell building the Deathcoaster to take on the Army of Darkness. (A Jewish chemist from Lebanon was the MVP here.)
The disadvantages were not that their military sucked, but that an intellectual-ethical polity lacks the flexibility for imperial governance. Down in Alexandria, Christians tended to be Monophysites. This label covers a dozen different things but generally refers to a flavor of Christianity that beefs up God's place in the Trinity relative to Christ -- up the divinity, lower the humanity. They felt stiffed by the rigid theological decisions coming out of Constantinople, and when Islam arrived, it was a smaller adjustment since, theologically, they were already more than halfway there. If Byzantium had a stronger warrior and/or a mercantile aspect to their leadership, they would have been more adaptable. But they wouldn't have been Byzantium.
They also deserve credit for seeding Russian civilization and supercharging the West. We owe much to refugees like Georgios Gemistos Plethon (one of the greatest LARPers of all time) and Ioannis Argyropoulos, who found work in Italy. This injection of Platonism influences everyone from Lorenzo de'Medici to Leonardo da Vinci. Mathematize all the things! Marsilio Ficino, seeking an Orphic system of natural magic, was chosen to lead a Neoplatonic academy in Florence. A generation or two later we have the mathematized physics of Galileo, ancient ideas infused into a Faustian sense of dynamism, scale, and limitlessness.
Speaking of LARPers, Richard Spencer, who has a Norman surname, once made cringe remarks about retaking Constantinople -- maybe he was thinking whites became decadent and were overrun by non-whites. But it wasn't Arabs or Turks who delivered the critical blow, but a fighting force in 1204 composed of fellow Christians -- Venetians, Franks, Flemish, and, yes, Normans -- consumed with insatiable greed and ambition. Byzantium never recovered from the Latin occupation.
We use forks today, not fingers, because Byzantine aristocrat Maria Argyropoulaina used one in Venice in 1004. Constantinople was the New York of the world for a thousand years. A dark age that isn't compelling? Don't be so sure! That's all I'm saying.
I’m not familiar with the 15 categories. Byzantium is most similar to the Hellenistic empires that followed Alexander’s conquest. Despotism over the corpse of republicanism. Mercantile oligarchs kept in line by a king. A better system than letting the oligarchs themselves rule, but not as robust as what the Franks produced.
Worshipping The Science means you can get neat victories here and there, but you are helpless when your population gets converted or replaced by hordes of Turks.
My priorities when it comes to environmentalism are purely selfish: I like cold weather.
The destruction of rome was a good thing for most of Europe, minus the southern Mediterranean. The trajectory of the Byzantine empire suggests nothing compelling if the decadence was allowed to endlessly go on.
I imagine the right has a preference for a Chinese elite because Chinese immigrants are less anti white than Jews or Brahmins when unassimilated. Unassimilated Han are a weird contradiction of very pro MAGA and pro CCP.
Destroying Rome in the time of Caesar would have been very bad, and that's what the dissident right is cheering on...
There is a distinction between Rome in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd century. "Byzantium" is not a thing until the 4th and 5th century. Conflating these together results in people jumping the gun and declaring that we are in the 5th century, when we are in fact in the 1st century. America could have hundreds of more years before falling into the kind of Byzantine decadence you describe.
The right-wing is Cicero, claiming that Caesar will destroy everything. I say, "let him cook." It is also very important, looking beyond America, that Byzantium was able to preserve (in conjunction with the Arabs) much of Greek and Latin philosophy. So it may have not been progressive, but it was preservative, which was necessary for the Renaissance. Byzantine preservation is important.
People like the sound of total destruction when it seems like Caesar will not come, or his defeat seems all but certain. Trump is either very lucky or divinely ordained to have survived the recent attempt on his life. What would people hope for if he had perished? No other American Caesars seem forthcoming. But people should hope for him to repair things while he can.
The bourgeois right sees the renaissance as the height of European culture, but there is also a very much belated realization that the renaissance also entailed the erosion and then destruction of Europes warrior aristocracy. The bourgeois right has had their time to try and make a compelling mythos for hierarchy without lordship - by most accounts they have utterly failed at this. So perhaps future historians will be far less kind to the renaissance and preservation of Roman law.
"No other American Caesars seem forthcoming" to whom? Over what timescale?
Lincoln or FDR were analogous to the consuls of Republican Rome who took emergency powers during wars. Caesarism is not a response to a military or economic threat, but to the internal dissolution of authority.
The fear of Caesarism began during George Bush's Evangelical coalition. "American Theocracy" (2006) by Kevin Phillips is an example of early Rockefeller-Clintonite fear of an American Caesarism.
"Trump or bust" ignores the fact that Trump was always too old to ever fulfill the Caesar archetype. Give it 20 years.
In twenty years, the right fears there will be little of America left to rescue. America in twenty years is statistically Brazilian. Anecdotally, it’s composed of completely mentally deranged and incapable youth, with the generation before them not being much better. That audience has no want for a Caesar. They either want a never ending continuation of the status quo, or a Zimbabwe inspired DEI Stalin to finish what his predecessors started. Caesar has small hopes of winning an election in 2020, and there is no Roman equivalent of generalship to climb the ladder through war
According to "statistics" there is little difference between America and Brazil in 2024. Brazil is 43% white, Gen Z is 49% white. But there are qualitative differences between whites... between rural and urban whites, there is a 10 point IQ difference, similar to the white-Hispanic IQ gap, or the Finnish-Balkan gap. America is being flooded by Asians -- Brazil is not. You can't divide the world into "white and non-white" and come up with accurate predictions. According to that logic, Singapore belongs in the third world.
I don't agree with your assertions. "Gen Z sucks, and because Gen Z sucks, Caesarism is impossible." Why are you arguing that Caesar needs to win elections? Do you understand that Caesar didn't win an election?
The real Caesar didn’t win an election because he came to power through compelling generalship. The last figure America had like this was MacArthur. The route for independents free of the bureaucracy to rise through service is closed now, and won’t be reopened except for dire circumstances, like losing badly to China in the pacific. So now there are either elections, or being part of the blob directly. Guys like yarvin say that a blue blob Caesar could be a good thing, but so far we’ve seen it produce a lot of guys like Trudeau and macron, who are happy to use executive power solely to crush right wingers and make them miserable before going back to business as usual.
A lot of the immigrants flooding America are actual Brazilians or other Latin Americans, no? Singapore itself would be third world without a confident right wing dictatorship keeping the Malaysians in check.
Byzantine civilization -- efficient, scholarly, and technological -- is remarkable for being built on brainpower and for brainpower from the beginning. It thrived for centuries despite having the deck severely stacked against it by using strategy. Constantinople, known as Miklagard to the Norsemen, or the Great City, was once a city open to talent, a tabula rasa, initially lacking a traditional caste of established families. They had a lot of cool stuff -- aqueducts, fortifications, roads, bridges, gold. mosaics, silks, churches (Hagia Sophia), palaces, water clocks, astronomical devices, water-powered automata, philosophy, fountains, organs, etc., etc., but for me, the most compelling aspect of their civilization was the flamethrowers, a state secret for seven centuries, which they would use to whup-ass on the Umayyads, the Rus, and anyone else who attacked them.
The byzantines, with their lovey brainpower and sleek inventions, spent the lifespan of their civilization losing territory to primitive foreign invaders and never being able to permanently reclaim what was lost. Most of the states effort was spent on managing mercenaries because it never was able to effectively levy citizen armies like rome once did.
The Byzantine Empire's poor reputation comes from the Enlightenment. Because Throne and Altar couldn't be attacked directly, writers of the period often used surrogate targets or made their case in roundabout ways. If you wrote a book attacking Christ directly, you would get hanged, while if you made "an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects" like Hume, well, things are more ambiguous, even though the point is the same. Voltaire plays the same game in the play "Mahomet." So you may see a Montesquieu or a Gibbon portraying the Byzantine Empire as a group of losers -- a dumb, superstitious, despotic government led by effeminate, cowardly men and corrupt eunuchs obsessed with empty rituals, navigating an endless, incomprehensible bureaucracy. While some of that stuff is true, there is an ideological context behind the choice of subject matter; what is left out of the story is also self-serving. This is apparent when considering religious motivations for believing in a dark age. Protestants like to think nothing compelling happened between 500-1500 AD, while the interval shrinks between 500-1000 AD with Catholics.
I didn’t mention iconoclasm at all. The byzantines failed over and over again at expelling the Arabs and Turks where the Spanish and hapsburgs succeeded. I believe the long lasting failure of rome to cultivate a functioning warrior aristocracy played a role.
Using DeepLeft's 15 socio-cultural categories, how do you categorize Byzantium?
I would put it in the "ascetic" category, i.e., intellectual-ethical. Sure, it was basically a military dictatorship, but it was a dictatorship in the administrative sense, like Starfleet in the Star Trek universe. It ran on the Holy Wisdom, or Neoplatonism, from top to bottom; its strengths and weaknesses should be seen in this light.
For example, if it were purely a warrior aristocracy, an army of 15,000 would not be able to fight off, let alone annihilate, an Umayyad force of 120,000 soldiers and 1,800 ships. Live by the sword, die by the sword. But using the power of The Science, they achieved absolute victory, like Bruce Campbell building the Deathcoaster to take on the Army of Darkness. (A Jewish chemist from Lebanon was the MVP here.)
The disadvantages were not that their military sucked, but that an intellectual-ethical polity lacks the flexibility for imperial governance. Down in Alexandria, Christians tended to be Monophysites. This label covers a dozen different things but generally refers to a flavor of Christianity that beefs up God's place in the Trinity relative to Christ -- up the divinity, lower the humanity. They felt stiffed by the rigid theological decisions coming out of Constantinople, and when Islam arrived, it was a smaller adjustment since, theologically, they were already more than halfway there. If Byzantium had a stronger warrior and/or a mercantile aspect to their leadership, they would have been more adaptable. But they wouldn't have been Byzantium.
They also deserve credit for seeding Russian civilization and supercharging the West. We owe much to refugees like Georgios Gemistos Plethon (one of the greatest LARPers of all time) and Ioannis Argyropoulos, who found work in Italy. This injection of Platonism influences everyone from Lorenzo de'Medici to Leonardo da Vinci. Mathematize all the things! Marsilio Ficino, seeking an Orphic system of natural magic, was chosen to lead a Neoplatonic academy in Florence. A generation or two later we have the mathematized physics of Galileo, ancient ideas infused into a Faustian sense of dynamism, scale, and limitlessness.
Speaking of LARPers, Richard Spencer, who has a Norman surname, once made cringe remarks about retaking Constantinople -- maybe he was thinking whites became decadent and were overrun by non-whites. But it wasn't Arabs or Turks who delivered the critical blow, but a fighting force in 1204 composed of fellow Christians -- Venetians, Franks, Flemish, and, yes, Normans -- consumed with insatiable greed and ambition. Byzantium never recovered from the Latin occupation.
We use forks today, not fingers, because Byzantine aristocrat Maria Argyropoulaina used one in Venice in 1004. Constantinople was the New York of the world for a thousand years. A dark age that isn't compelling? Don't be so sure! That's all I'm saying.
I’m not familiar with the 15 categories. Byzantium is most similar to the Hellenistic empires that followed Alexander’s conquest. Despotism over the corpse of republicanism. Mercantile oligarchs kept in line by a king. A better system than letting the oligarchs themselves rule, but not as robust as what the Franks produced.
Worshipping The Science means you can get neat victories here and there, but you are helpless when your population gets converted or replaced by hordes of Turks.