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KulakRevolt  1yr ago (anarchonomicon.substack.com)   3382 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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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.

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