4 ms·

Classicism pro tip, if someone says Mary Beard is wrong about Rome, they should be a very accomplished classicist. Taleb in particular would need a lot of stud

by yk 8y ago

Classicism pro tip, if someone says Mary Beard is wrong about Rome, they should be a very accomplished classicist. Taleb in particular would need a lot of study of history to understand in which way he is wrong. Beard's argument is, that the question of Caesars's race is as perfectly useless as the question if he was a Republican or a Democrat. Sure, we can try to construct something we claim is essential about Democrats and Republicans and then project that back to build something that resembles an argument, it is just that the entire building takes place in the present and therefore does not tell us anything about the past. (The big difference between Republican/Democrat and race is just, that the entire west spent the last 200 years insisting very loudly that race is really, really present in nature.)

ng12 8y ago
> Beard's argument is, that the question of Caesars's race is as perfectly useless as the question if he was a Republican or a Democrat That's why so many people disagree with her. Yes, she knows a lot about Rome but that doesn't stop her from politicizing her knowledge. The two sides are talking past eachother: on one hand we can't talk about Caesar's race from a modern standpoint. He wouldn't have framed whiteness (or Italian-ness) in the same way we do. That does not mean we can't talk at all about Roman ethnicity: he was biologically light-skinned.
- yk 8y ago
  The trouble is, there are things that are easy and things that are hard. That people lived in the past in what is essentially a different Kuhnian paradigm is one of the really hard things to understand, it takes quite a bit of reading primary sources to develop an intuition about that. It's quite funny actually that Talib tries to defend himself by quoting Tom Holland, the thing is, Holland is a pop-history writer, that is he specifically works hard to write in a way that these issues are not important to his books.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > That does not mean we can't talk at all about Roman ethnicity: True, but... > he was biologically light-skinned. Ethnicity is shared cultural identity. Biological traits may be important to some ethnic identities, but that is one of the things that changes with cultural context. If we are going to talk about ethnicity of late Republican Romans, we need to first talk about the nature of ethnic identity in late Republican Time, but once we do that, we'll realize that the whole discussion is probably irrelevant to any current political/ethnic/etc. discussion except by way of providing analogies about human behavior wherein the actual identities involved are largely irrelevant other than for background color.
kgwgk 8y ago
Maybe accomplished classicists use "accurate" and "typical" differently than other people, but I find surprising that her first comment on the BBC's depiction of this "typical family" (their words) in Roman Britain https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/08/Screen_Shot_2017_08_02_at_4.54.34_PM/lead_960_540.png?1522774757 https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/08/Scre... was that "this is indeed pretty accurate". Apparently she meant just that it was possible, but then how was it "pretty accurate" to describe it as "typical"?

by yk 8y ago

ng12 8y ago

> Beard's argument is, that the question of Caesars's race is as perfectly useless as the question if he was a Republican or a Democrat That's why so many people disagree with her. Yes, she knows a lot about Rome but that doesn't stop her from politicizing her knowledge. The two sides are talking past eachother: on one hand we can't talk about Caesar's race from a modern standpoint. He wouldn't have framed whiteness (or Italian-ness) in the same way we do. That does not mean we can't talk at all about Roman ethnicity: he was biologically light-skinned.

yk 8y ago
The trouble is, there are things that are easy and things that are hard. That people lived in the past in what is essentially a different Kuhnian paradigm is one of the really hard things to understand, it takes quite a bit of reading primary sources to develop an intuition about that. It's quite funny actually that Talib tries to defend himself by quoting Tom Holland, the thing is, Holland is a pop-history writer, that is he specifically works hard to write in a way that these issues are not important to his books.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> That does not mean we can't talk at all about Roman ethnicity: True, but... > he was biologically light-skinned. Ethnicity is shared cultural identity. Biological traits may be important to some ethnic identities, but that is one of the things that changes with cultural context. If we are going to talk about ethnicity of late Republican Romans, we need to first talk about the nature of ethnic identity in late Republican Time, but once we do that, we'll realize that the whole discussion is probably irrelevant to any current political/ethnic/etc. discussion except by way of providing analogies about human behavior wherein the actual identities involved are largely irrelevant other than for background color.

kgwgk 8y ago

Maybe accomplished classicists use "accurate" and "typical" differently than other people, but I find surprising that her first comment on the BBC's depiction of this "typical family" (their words) in Roman Britain https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/08/Screen_Shot_2017_08_02_at_4.54.34_PM/lead_960_540.png?1522774757 https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2017/08/Scre... was that "this is indeed pretty accurate". Apparently she meant just that it was possible, but then how was it "pretty accurate" to describe it as "typical"?