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KulakRevolt  1yr ago (anarchonomicon.substack.com)   3412 thread views

Crowned Masterpieces of Eloquence: We used to be a Civilization

anarchonomicon.substack.com

A piece I wrote on one of the most fascinating and incredible thriftstore finds I've ever stumbled upon.

The Edwardians and Victorians were not like us, they believed in a nobility of their political class that's almost impossible to understand or relate to, and that believe, that attribution of nobility is tied up with something even more mysterious: their belief in the fundamental nobility of rhetoric.

Still not sure entirely how I feel about this, or how sure I am of my conclusions but this has had me spellbound in fascination and so I wrote about it.

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ADDENDUM:

Follow on piece on Justice Brewer's Other Massive catalogue of great short works:

CROWNED MASTERPIECES OF LITURATURE

I'm not sure this is actually bad. Oratory is an attempt to convince someone of your ideas for reasons other than the quality of your arguments. The heirs of that process are every Madison Avenue advertising executive, every clickbait article writer, every Twitter mob. It isn't good and we only think it is because things in old books once had high status, and advertising is low status, and because of the halo effect where the fact that many orators used oratory for good goals rubs off on oratory itself.

Still are, but we used to be one, too.

The Friday Fun Thread included a discussion of Heinlein, which lead me in turn to one of his most famous quotes.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Specialization is for insects.

Not sure I get this. If anything surely specialisation is the root of civilisation, and so if there is anything that separates from the animals it is that.

This is more a paean to the general problem-solving ability we call “intelligence.” An insect dedicates its whole life to one of these tasks. A human, says Heinlein, can achieve specialist-level competency in a generalist’s number of skills. Animals lack civilization—but insects don’t even have self-reliance.

Heinlein is coming at this from a very American flavor of rugged individualism. But it’s a sentiment following from Kipling. They are praising the pushing of boundaries.

One of his worse quotes. Majority of people can't do most of these, either due to temperament or lack of intellect, and even the smarter ones with fortunate personalities who could learn to do everything here adequately simply don't have time to get enough experience.

Specialisations is what enables efficient economies to function. Sure - people take it too far sometimes - e.g. I've nothing but contempt for people who won't learn to cook, however..

Even if you take the quote as a 100% literal instruction it's still doable and not even unreasonably hard

Appropriate nickname, but I don't believe anyone who hasn't spent a lot of time waging war or at least doing similar military exercises could 'plan an invasion' without it going very haywire.

E.g. I played multiplayer games where the logistics were a milliont times easier, and you had to only coordinate 20 people, you usually didn't have any supply routes to secure because you could just teleport with them into your base from elsewhere.. and yet still, the guys who were invading every evening were vastly better at it than the ones who did it rarely because they had practice.

There aren't many generals out there that do the invading every evening. Consequently, in the real world, invasions frequently go haywire - such is the state of things.

Remember that Heinlein was born in 1907. An average person had much more exposure to the military theory and practice during that era, compared to us. A smart and capable person, even more so.

There aren't many generals out there that do the invading every evening.

We could be doing the invading every month at least, but we don't.

IMO it's an excellent quote. It's well-crafted. It sounds good. It describes something intuitively admirable. It also provides a good overview of many of the key abilities required to maintain a civilization.

Yes it's a blatant exaggeration and cannot be taken literally, but I'd say it's still a chunky piece of good writing.

It's easy to say that such a quote is good if you may take it sufficiently non-literally.

I would agree that saying things like "I've never planned an invasion, obviously this is wrong" takes the quote too literally. On the other hand, "don't take it literally" can be a fully general excuse against any possible objection.

The quote is really parochial to a combination of 1930s living and the military. Lazarus Long doesn't even include "repair an air leak in a spaceship" or anything that's parochial to his era but not to Heinlein's. Half of the list are specific skills that are only a pretense at being general skills. And I think this is a fundamental problem: Heinlein's specializing while claiming otherwise because humans have to specialize in order to function.

I literally linked the Archive scans and Epubs of all ten volumes, which are 100% FREE and don't even require an email

Your reading comprehension is the one that's failed. Did i say Churchill was "unknown" no I said he was minor: On par with Buttigieg or Crenshaw.

I'm well aware of his early life and adventures in South Africa, that doesn't change the fact he was a minor politician in 1909, not a major party figure nor household name. Likewise I said Hilter was self educated from classical text explicitly stating he lacked a university education.

As for the matter of Conspiracy vs. decay. Mediocrity is a choice. Anyone who ascends the heights of power only to be mediocre deserves to be hated as if it was a conscious choice. If they are incapable of doing their positions and prominence justice, they can resign and let better men take their place... However they don't and instead prop each other up in their mediocrity. That's conspiracy.

If a judge would charge the inherent organization of the institution as conspiracy if the result were a crime, I will likewise charge it as conspiracy when the result is mediocrity and decay.

You would ask if there was sufficient malice to will the negative result from the onset... I ask if there was ever sufficient good will for a positive result. The fact that vastly more effort is always expended in covering up the failure than avoiding the failure I think tells us all we need to know. Dereliction of duty is a crime, the attempt to cover it up and reconstitute it as the standard is conspiracy.

And the failure is so total, the will to fail so entirely instituted that it comes down to a "twitter whore" shilling a blog to share these works, when I've taken actual university level courses in Rhetoric that only circled the same 4-5 civil rights leaders inevitably praised as "Articulate"

If I've hit a nerve I'm glad. The mediocrity of our age demands such oceans of burning rage...

Banned for this comment and for this one. Vigorous rebuttals are appreciated. Crafting as many condescending sneers into your rebuttal as possible is not.

Somewhat valid, but unnecessarily rude. Kulak may not be influential or an exceptional writer or very rigorous or a paragon of any virtue sans self-interest and beyond reproach, but at least he's out there trying to produce something. Often what he writes, messy as it may be, at the very least points out interesting notions. I'm happy he does what he does.

  1. Doesn't Google books do a lot of that anyway?

  2. There have been cases where Google books has processed their books automatically and there have been problems because the software isn't 100% perfect.

In other words, it sounds like a scam site, especially since they don't prominently say "we process free scans from other places" and clearly lay out what value they add to those scans.

Also, linguists will beat you up and take your lunch money.

Hitler was perhaps the greatest case study in the power of a classical education and self-directed study, as well as its weaknesses (should have studied logistics and naval warfare (every other battle would have been decided if he’d won the battle of the Atlantic))

And to this day post war education is built around preventing anyone from learning the lessons he learnt (which now extends to 2+2=4 in some classrooms).

Of course no American, English, or German school boys learns anything resembling classical military history any more, no one studies classical languages, even geography is notably lacking —though there in the American case, its seems geography isn’t taught so that Americans might be compliant with their wars instead of concluding, as every generation of Americans did pre-1945… that Eurasia is entirely irrelevant to them.

The western world responded to the Nazis by burning down all the cultural institutions of western civilization, since some aspect of western civilization must have been to blame… somehow

Aside from other things I disagree with, I think this is a complete misdiagnosis of the causes of the decline of classical education. At least in Britain, the main driver in that regard was surely economic, not just in the sense that giving people such an education is expensive but more pertinently that in the post-war political environment education fundamentally became about preparing students for the modern economy, hence the tripartite system; a basic comprehensive education for unskilled workers, a technical education for those doing skilled manual labour, and grammar schools for managers and administrators (indeed, grammar school students often did, and to some extent still do where they still exist, get a fair amount of 'classical' education).

Moreover, plenty of the current British political class did have a firmly classical education. Boris was Eton educated and an Oxford classicist, but his speeches, while occasionally having some of the bizarre Trumpish quality are generally pretty rubbish, while for my money the best political speaker in 21st century Britain, Gordon Brown, was comprehensive educated. While I do think there has probably been a decline in the quality of political speech-making (though not nearly to the extent you suggest, and certainly not across the whole post-war era; see for instance just wrt Britain, in various decades, Heath's speech against the death penalty, White Heat of the Technological Revolution, Weapons for Squalid and Trivial Ends, Brown's famous conference speech and his speech on Scottish independence, Howe's resignation speech, Winds of Change and, outside of politics, Tim Collins' eve of battle speech), I don't think the decline in classical education is really the cause.

I think it’s more an Industrial Revolution thing. In order to turn a human into a meat machine, it’s best that he never learn to use his brain to full capacity. Compliance is much more difficult if the human in question doesn’t think too deeply.

This seem far too conspiratorial. Comprehensive educations in the 50s weren't basic because they were afraid people might be less compliant, it was simply felt that that was all they needed if they were going to go and work in a mine or steel mill, and resources are always scarce.

Your posts often have an effect where they play fast and loose with facts in service to some vibe or message. The message is often good, but there's a sense of being intentionally averse to things like 'analysis of opposing viewpoints' or 'ways in which I might be wrong' because that's not with the vibe. That, generally, weakens your position, because the vibe you're trying to give off may be wrong, or confused, in meaningful ways, and contradictory facts illuminate those.

It's arguable that oratory has declined not due to a loss of "vital spirits", but due to ... modern media. The speech connects the politician's visceral voice and, often, appearance to his constituents, which is very appealing when the alternative is the telephone game or pamphlets. But when one can produce videos splicing your words with weak moments of your opponents, animations, videos of real-world events, the medium of a clearly-delineated 'oration' will declin simply because it has competition.

Politicians today still give speeches - some people even cried at ... Adam Kinzinger's ... moving words. Obama's "well spoken" and, i guess, reasonably competent speeches were often praised as moving, compelling, causing goosebumps or tears! obama speeches.

There's also the obvious - you're comparing the best of the past to the mediocrity of the present. You note how most politicians are unsurprising, and stick to common themes, ... while Hitler and Napoleon broke new ground? Did Hitler and Napoleon's thousands of political contemporaries, a few decades past and future, all do the same? Is mathematics in decline because professors at community colleges aren't as accomplished as Einstein or Erdos?

It makes sense the American education system, state and media have set about trying to destroy oratory

And here's the usual equivocation between 'complex dynamics and confusions lead to bad things, in ways entangled with existing power structures and media' and 'the all-powerful enemy is intentionally destroying truth, beauty, and love because they hate you'.

I think there's something significant to the decline of oration - both the text, and vocal intonation. I'm not sure your post really gets at what, or why, it did though.

Obama's "well spoken" and, i guess, reasonably competent speeches were often praised as moving, compelling, causing goosebumps or tears!

I am not sure it's a good example, as Obama is practically a religious figure to many, they'd be in tears if he read the yellow pages. The question is, in a hundred years, which of Obama speeches would they study in high school as an example of rhetoric brilliance? I'd go for "none of them".

Your posts often have an effect where they play fast and loose with facts in service to some vibe or message. The message is often good, but there's a sense of being intentionally averse to things like 'analysis of opposing viewpoints' or 'ways in which I might be wrong' because that's not with the vibe.

That's Kulak in a nutshell, really.

There's an oft-repeated line about how institutions are run counter to how society is. For example, corporations don't constantly rely on contracts for every little thing, but run as a command economy of sorts. I think of Kulak in the same way, and if this was an ideologically diverse space with a more relaxed environment, I wouldn't mind because he provides a similar thing - a strong idea which can be walked back from in the discussion around it.

But given the space we have, it's just annoying to see more of the same ideas without discussion of their flaws.

Yeah, my criticism of this piece goes something like this:

I agree that something has declined WRT oratory, but is it that things genuinely declined post-WWII, or is it more that the message has new channels through which it can be spread?

Certainly, a liberal might counter with FDR, JFK, or MLK, people who are literally popularly-quoted, whose most famous speech quotes formed the backbone of the 90's version of American Civics. Nowadays, memes are the most evocative vehicles for the transmission of ideas.

Certainly, a liberal might counter with FDR, JFK, or MLK

That would be a terrible counter. The youngest of those (MLK) was 12 when WWII started, and had shown significant oratory prowess before the end of WWII (winning an oratory contest in 1944). It would be hard for the intentional de-prioritization of oratory in the aftermath of WWII to impact any of them.

Nice post. I’d argue that the distancing from oratory also had a lot to do with the lack of belief in God and losing the rituals of the church after the world wars.

The problem of evil looms large over Christianity when the evil is so palpable and undeniable.

Post-modernism happened. The death of the author was also the death of rhetoric as it had been historically understood.

Great piece.

I've found I prefer older translations of the classics to newer translations. I've read both Garth's Ovid and Mandelbaum's, the latter in class the former for pleasure. I got so much more out of the former, even though the latter is (according to the academics I know who could actually read it in the original) far more accurate to the original meaning. This piece from the Paris Review actually asks a lot of the same questions comparing different verse translations to a different modern prose translation

Modern Prose:

Some tried to escape by climbing to the hilltops, others, sitting in their curved boats, plied the oars where lately they had been ploughing; some sailed over cornlands, over the submerged roofs of their homes, while some found fish in the topmost branches of the elms. At times it happened that they dropped anchor in green meadows, sometimes the curved keels grazed vineyards that lay beneath them. Where lately sinewy goats cropped the grass, now ugly seals disported themselves. The Nereids wondered to see groves and towns and houses under the water; dolphins took possession of the woods, and dashed against high branches, shaking the oak trees as they knocked against them. Wolves swam among the flocks, and the waves supported tawny lions, and tigers too. The lightning stroke of his strong tusk was of no use, then, to the wild boar, nor his swift legs to the stag—both alike were swept away. Wandering birds searched long for some land where they might rest, till their wings grew weary and they fell into the sea.

Old Verse, by Dryden:

One climbs a cliff; one in his boat is borne,

and ploughs above, where late he sowed his corn.

Others o’er chimney tops and turrets row,

and drop their anchors on the meads below:

or downward driv’n, they bruise the tender vine,

or tossed aloft, are knocked against a pine.

And where of late the kids had cropped the grass,

t>he monsters of the deep now take their place.

Insulting Nereids on the cities ride,

and wond’ring dolphins o’er the palace glide.

On leaves and masts of mighty oaks they browse,

and their broad fins entangle in the boughs.

The frighted wolf now swims among the sheep;

the yellow lion wanders in the deep.

His rapid force no longer helps the boar;

the stag swims faster than he ran before.

The fowls, long beating on their wings in vain,

despair of land and drop into the main.

Ditto the Iliad. Pope's verse translation:

Then thus the hero of Anchises’ strain:

“To meet Pelides you persuade in vain:

Already have I met, nor void of fear

Observed the fury of his flying spear;

From Ida’s woods he chased us to the field,

Our force he scattered, and our herds he kill’d;

Lyrnessus, Pedasus in ashes lay;

But (Jove assisting) I survived the day:

Else had I sunk oppress’d in fatal fight

By fierce Achilles and Minerva’s might.

Where’er he moved, the goddess shone before,

And bathed his brazen lance in hostile gore.

What mortal man Achilles can sustain?

The immortals guard him through the dreadful plain,

And suffer not his dart to fall in vain.

Were God my aid, this arm should check his power,

Though strong in battle as a brazen tower.”

And a more modern prose translation by Kline:

‘Lycaon,’ Aeneas replied, ‘why urge me to fight the brave son of Peleus, when I reject any such idea? It would not be the first time I confronted swift-footed Achilles. He chased me from Ida with his spear, when he raided our herds and sacked Lyrnessus and Pedasus. Zeus saved me then, giving me strength and speed, or I would surely have fallen to Achilles and Athene. She went before him, a saving light, rousing him to kill the Leleges and Trojans with his spear. No warrior can face Achilles in combat: some immortal always goes by his side to ward off danger. His spear is true and never falls to earth without piercing human flesh. Yet if the gods allowed fair play, he would not beat me easily, even though he thinks himself a man of bronze.’

I understand the value of accuracy in modern academic translations*, that they better capture the word-for-word meaning of the original text. But so much of the spirit is lost when the translator clearly does not believe in the text in the way the original writer did. The modern translator of Homer does not believe in the glory of battle, the modern translator of Ovid does not understand the playfulness of the gods to be a thing of beauty. The modern translations are drab, or they view the events of the stories as horrors. Homer and Ovid did not view their stories that way, and that meaning is more important than the syntax.

The spirit of the work is an unbroken chain of interpretation from Homer and Ovid to Pope and Dryden, but it is lost in a modern Classics department. I was lucky enough that my professors in undergrad at least had a hint of that, at least understood enough of it from their professors to be able to give a taste of it before returning to questions of "Queering the authorship" or whatever the fuck. The next generation of Classics students may not even get that. They may be taught by Postmodernists who were taught by Postmodernists, they will know no other way to look at the Iliad than through a queer Feminist of Color lens, and something will be lost. I recently completed this lecture course on the Early Middle Ages, at one point when discussing the discursive concept of The Dark Ages, professor Freedman suggests that we are reentering a new dark ages if we define a dark age by knowledge of Homer. The Greeks and Romans knew Homer, the dark ages lost that knowledge, the Renaissance and Enlightenment regained it, we are losing it once again.

*A second, equally facile, argument is made that the archaisms of the old translations hold them back, make it difficult for ordinary readers to enjoy them. This is often used as a reason why the Bible must be endlessly retranslated and updated. It's enough to make one wish to return to the Latin Mass, perhaps I should finally learn it in full. It is precisely classic literature that grounds a language, whether it is the Greeks and Homer, or the English and Shakespeare. We should reach back for these works while we can still read them with only a minimum of effort, and preserve them so that our heritage as modern English speakers can stretch from the Elizabethan to today. If we let our ability to read the Classics slip away, if we need translations of Shakespeare and Milton and Pope, we will lose that unbroken heritage, our children will be unable to regain it.

It's hard for me to take rhyming couplets seriously. They are so sing-songy and monotonous that they almost seem inherently comic to me. I much prefer Fagles's Iliad over the small amount of Pope's Iliad that I read. Pope's Iliad is probably my least favorite Iliad translation that I have seen. To me it just seems like it is a lot of Pope and not much Iliad. To be fair, I do not know any variety of Greek so I can only judge English-language Iliads on their own merits.

If you could recommend one chapter of one translation of one classic (the Odyssey or any other) that conveys the spirit of the original text, what would you choose?

Book X of the Metamorphoses, in the Garth translation I recommended above. It covers Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion, Venus and Adonis, Atalanta; along with a pile of others. Orpheus and Adonis are key myths to understanding the classical world, they tend to get skipped over or shortchanged in favor of the Sword and Sandals stuff like Hercules and Achilles in popular adaptations but they were hugely important religious stories. It also gives a really good feel for Ovid's method, in that it mixes with stories like Atalanta that are playful, Pygmailion that are meaningful but small time, and stories that are profoundly meaningful and religiously significant like Orpheus. It's light and beautiful and gorgeous and fun and important.

if we need translations of Shakespeare and Milton and Pope, we will lose that unbroken heritage, our children will be unable to regain it.

Words just don't mean what they used to in Shakespeare's time. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just how language changes. Example:

“Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment,” which seems to mean that you should let other people criticize you but refrain from judging them—strange advice. But by “take censure” Shakespeare meant “evaluate,” so that Polonius is really saying “assess” other men but don’t jump to conclusions about them.

Why stop at Shakespeare? He wasn't the first to write in English, after all. Perhaps we should ground our language in the classic work of the Gawain poet.

Perle, plesaunte to prynces paye

To clanly clos in golde so clere,

Oute of Oryent, I hardyly saye,

Ne proved I never her precios pere.

Sure, you need to learn a few words, but it's already just about comprehensible.

Because Shakespeare has long been widely considered the greatest author not just in English but in any language. We anglophone peoples are blessed to speak the same modern English he wrote in, why would we wish to destroy that heritage when we could pass it to our children?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rJpQmhAUJlc

Except it's not the same language, because when he says "take each man's censure" it means something totally different. I'd have a better chance at understanding "Oute of Oryent, I hardyly saye/Ne proved I never her precios pere.".

The heritage you want to pass on, of reading original Shakespeare and understanding everything he wrote, has been gone for hundreds of years.

the greatest author not just in English but in any language.

I don't think this is a widely held view, except perhaps among those who only speak English.

The heritage you want to pass on, of reading original Shakespeare and understanding everything he wrote, has been gone for hundreds of years.

It seems to have been alive and well in American culture until quite recently.

As far as Shakespeare being the greatest author of all time, I think he certainly makes everyone's shortlist regardless of where they're from. I would certainly rank him above the top writers in the other major European languages (Cervantes for Spanish, Goethe for German, etc.), but I can't speak to the best of the other major literary traditions except that Du Fu probably gives him a run for his money.

Soundbites and references to Shakespeare have been alive and well and in fact continue to be alive and well.

Garber also discusses the role Shakespearean rhetoric has played in American political culture since the founding. Quotes from Shakespeare have always been ubiquitous in American politics. They were used in the earliest days of the American republic. They are used with equal frequency today.

As for actually understanding everything that he wrote beyond the soundbites that remain comprehensible in The Year of Our Lord 2023, you cannot do that today without studying English as Shakespeare spoke it.

There's certainly a place for historical linguistics in our understanding of literature, but if you mean that the educated, literate reader of English needs to take a full course on Early Modern English to understand Shakespeare in the original, rather than simply referring to the footnotes that accompany any modern edition of his plays at moments of confusion, then I disagree. I will however allow that by my standards very few American English-speakers post-1960 count as being educated.

Moreover, it is entirely possible for individual works in archaic language to be understood even when anything else written in that stage of the language would not, so long as those works are continually read and reread, commented on, and taught by succeeding generations. I don't think it's fair to say that modern Christians reading the King James Bible don't understand its meaning if they don't know how to conjugate for thou or that Chinese people don't understand Tang Dynasty poetry because they are reading the characters using modern pronunciation where they no longer rhyme. The most extreme example of this is Hebrew, which was able to be revived as a spoken language solely because of an unbroken chain of literary transmission in the form of preserved religious texts.

If you're reading Shakespeare with footnotes, then the conversation is totally moot - I could read Chinese if you supply the proper footnotes.

I don't think it's fair to say that modern Christians reading the King James Bible don't understand its meaning

I guarantee you that there are parts of the KJV that people do not understand correctly (see the "censure" example above). "Thou" (which is not a verb and doesn't conjugate) has nothing to do with it. Words simply do not mean what they used to.

The most extreme example of this is Hebrew, which was able to be revived as a spoken language solely because of an unbroken chain of literary transmission in the form of preserved religious texts.

That's because people would literally learn Hebrew as a foreign language to understand the Torah. Yiddish speakers didn't just read every other word and fill in the gaps with the footnotes. There are no footnotes. This is exactly the opposite of the approach you are talking about with Shakespeare.

While Shakespeare didn't include footnotes, he also was writing plays, not novels -- moderns will have no problem understand what is going on most of the time watching a competent performance, despite the original language.

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I didn't read all that, but if your claim is that it doesn't matter what the actual meaning is and just vibes are enough, good news - there is no ability to understand Shakespeare that we can lose, because we don't actually care about understanding him.

Did you deliberately do the exact thing you are bemoaning for the irony? Your post doesn't read as irony, but it feels too rich to be accidental, it's a 200 word post.

I'm not bemoaning anything. Doesn't really matter to me if people actually understand Shakespeare or just read him for the vibes (and this guy is no Shakespeare).

The post I responded to was deliberately overwrought purple prose and was certainly not speaking clearly.

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