In Defense of Sparta | Hacker News Reader

In Defense of Sparta

newrepublic.com

38 pointshoffmannesque30 comments

"Sparta preserved its regional dominance more by restraint than by hunger for conquest. Thucydides’s history portrays the Spartans as reluctant to go to war and often more merciful than their more liberal-minded opponents."

As Donald Kagan writes in his book about the Peloponnesian War, this was very likely self interested restraint - the entire basis of their economy was the exploitation of the Helots, and there was a fear that battles of conquest would have resulted in a revolt back in Athens. There was also the fact that every time the Spartans attempted even modest naval excursions, it completely failed, making a larger empire in an area with a lot of water impractical.

I totally agree with emulating the best in other cultures as the other says at the bottom in summary, but in some cases, there are trade-offs that are hard to decouple. In the case of Sparta, the freedom to ignore the accumulation of wealth was a luxury earned by an elite on the forced labor of others.

"a revolt back in Athens" - I meant "a revolt back in Sparta."

This article totally glosses over the Helots, the Spartans permanent slave underclass. Any “defense” of Sparta should have some explanation for this horrible situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots

My God really? Slavery was the uniform norm for almost all of human history [0]. If nothing good can come of a society that enslaved others, then the logical corollary is an incredibly short sighted and unnecessarily nihilistic view of the journey of humanity. Can we give history a break?

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Sl...

Edit: before somebody says blah blah race, there isn't a race on Earth that wasn't subjected to slavery in history.

Yes, it’s different. Of the many flavors of slavery, the Spartan version was particularly brutal.

A very great deal of good can come of exploiting others; a whole lot of good - for me. As for them, fuck 'em. They're only <insert rationalisation here>.

Owning a slave pre-industrial revolution doubles your manpower. Owning ten multiplies it by 10.

And BTW slavery still exists, either literally or functionally. Plenty of sweatshops in the world, and I hear chocolate isn't always grown in happy edens.

"Functional" slavery as your implication describes is so catastrophically different from actual owning of persons that it's incomprehensibly dishonest and devalues the very real reality of slavery in past and present in the developing world. First world perspective, when you think having a job is the same as being owned.

Slavery was the norm. Slave societies, where slaves made up the vast majority of the population, were definitely not the norm.

Social practices where an underclass of people are locked into agrarian or manual labor largely on the basis of hereditary differences is something that spans most agrarian societies. Serfdom, caste systems, slavery, etc. all essentially lock large demographics into limited labor opportunities. Certainly each of these things have significant difference, and there's substantial differences even within them (e.g. Feudal Japan's caste system of farmers, warriors, artisans, and merchants is different from South Asian caste systems. Classical slavery is not identical to transatlantic slavery). But people in power using social institutions to ensure that significant portions of the population are unable to acquire wealth or power beyond subsistence is fairly universal across agrarian civilizations, and didn't really change until the industrial revolution.

It's a weird argument though. Infanticide was also the norm for almost all history, but you wouldn't defend any relation between it and whatever progress the society made, or things it produced.

It's just unrelated in my opinion.

Yes it did: "Spartan citizens, who were greatly outnumbered by the enslaved helots..."

A passing mention in one sentence, without any further exposition: this is not what I consider an adequate defense.

It might have to do with the fact that the parts of Sparta that this piece is 'defending' minimally interacts with that aspect of Spartan culture or society (if at all?). How does the fact that the Spartans had a brutal class of slaves undermine or interact with the article's thrust/claim that Spartans demonstrate that "that people crave more than individual liberty, full stop. People want actively to participate in the life of a community, too, and our politics ought to answer to that"?

Because it absolutely interacted. That community and collective effort was built to suppress Helot rebellions by overwhelming military force. Their extreme of social mobilization was only possible or desirable because of common threat, in this case of their own making. You cannot separate the social structure of a ruling minority from a ruled majority, the former is always shaped by the interaction with the latter.

See also the reports of drops in suicide rates and better social cohesion in war zones. That doesn't mean we should advocate a brutal civil war as a mental health measure.

The article hardly attempts to say structuring our societies to maximize its ability to crush rebellions is a good thing. It does say that solely maximizing individual spheres of rights and opportunity of commercial profit may actually not be a great idea.

I think this is hardly a controversial opinion.

Like I agree that more context about helots would have shored up this article nicely, but I also think that all the chatter about its absence misses the point of the article.

Come on... look at this section:

characteristics of Spartan society that many of them would object to, including relative economic equality, cultural egalitarianism, and military restraint.

The Spartans are a strange case: They rejected anything resembling liberal democracy, abandoned commerce, industry, and trade, and by doing so, rose to preeminence in the Greek world and maintained their independence for seven centuries—far longer than any modern republic.

So the saving features are keeping a terrible tyranny for seven centuries, "cultural egalitarianism" (nice euphemism) and "relative economic equality" (except between the 90% slaves and the 10% citizens).

To create this paradise they just had to reject democracy, commerce, industry and trade. Nice deal!!!

Halfway down I was presented with a link to another Newrepublic article: "The Sparta Fetish Is a Cultural Cancer The myth of the mighty warrior-state has enchanted societies for thousands of years. Now it fuels a global fascist movement."

This is an explicit response to that piece, and even quotes it in the third graph.

As an amateur historian, I never understood the fascination for Sparta. They were quite powerful in militia, but not for so long and they got instantly owned once republican values were on the rise. They were famous in a period of time, but not more than that. It was a totalitarian system, with little freedom value to my eyes in comparison to Athens or Rome, for example.

>As an amateur historian, I never understood the fascination for Sparta.

Well, for one thing, Plato was an adherent of the 30 tyrants, who were allied and admirers of the Spartans. Since he kind of invented Western Civilization, Laconophilia has a rather long and storied tradition.

By 369 BC (~20 years before Plato's death), the Thebans defetead the Spartans with the messenians (the helots). That was the end of Sparta as a major military power. After this, the Spartan men had to work on farms to feed themselves and their children, and they couldn’t train all the time. So they weren’t the best army anymore, and Sparta became just another small town, without much power.

The fact that Spartan treatment of the Helots was considered abominable by other slave-owning states of the time should reveal how bankrupt the Spartan system was.

Indeed. They were also a reduced population in comparison with other city-states. They weren't that richer also, because their fascists system of the state is everything. To me they did some quite nice battles, but aside from that, there are few little things to admire from spartans.

Blame 300 the movie

This article seems well meaning until the end where it hints that forced participation in the community might be something to admire about Sparta. Talk about illiberal and fascist.

> Talk about illiberal and fascist.

Or communist, as the article itself mentions.

Also posted herein: "The Sparta Fetish is a Cultural Cancer[0,1]"

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20639828

[1]https://newrepublic.com/article/154563/sparta-myth-rise-fasc...

Something I recently learned was the importance of the Spartans claim to have been descendants of Heracles (Hercules), and that they had a much more interesting power structure than is often assumed, but in general almost all of their stranger idiosyncrasies and rituals stemmed from that claim and the supposed instruction commanded to them by Hercules.

Sparta's modern day equivalent is Israel with Palestinians as Helots.

Universal military service (aka Helot suppression) for all citizens, just like Sparta.

There's one big difference - Israel has an economy independent of the Palestinians that is sufficient to sustain its society. This makes isolation and separation a more viable strategy, and makes the dynamic closer to that of late European imperialism. (There are particularly close parallels with the French in Algeria.)

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