"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."
To me that statement is saying that one should first establish power, then achieve prosperity, then one would have time for leisure. This is true on a national level as well as a family level.
Tough times mean brittle impoverished societies with weak armies that crumble easily. Easy times (prosperous, politically stable societies) are what creates strong armies.
War requires huge investments of resources, so only prosperous societies can have powerful armies. War also requires strong leadership that can't be corrupted or divided - only politically stable societies can ensure their war leaders will not turn cloak or start fighting among themselves.
Still, "strong men", the way I read it, means "adamantly striving for the increase of power" (not just military power) rather than "being powerful already".
When it comes down to such vague and ambiguous terms, the whole thing becomes as open to interpretation as a horoscope - basically unfalsifiable : )
The problem in that case is that I don't think it is true that these types of strong men tend to create easy times - if anything, they tend to create worse times for everyone around them, unless they are actually already extremely powerful. Warmongering leaders (whether we are discussing economic or open war), especially ones leading currently weak countries, tend to create even worse times for their people. Just look at Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, or, perhaps more arguably, Putin right now.
Yeah - if they fail (or are arguably failing, in Putin's case). Not really the case of, say, Charlemagne or Alexander The Great.
But if you only ever lost 1 or 2 wars, you're no longer on the world map.
Plus, after he died, civil wars broke up, which does not suggest happy people either.
Per the quote, the people Alexander conquered should themselves be considered weak men who will leave hard times for their children (being conquered/looted by Alexander, who they couldn't win against because of their weakness); but whose children, or grandchildren, will be stronger than them and create good times anew.
That is not inherent in that quote at all. Quote is very general and also is used generally to imply superiority of strong man. Putin and his army does qualify even from our perspective.
Also, if you say it is only from in-group perspective and create such quote, then we are looking at genocide approving philosophy. In that case, arguing by fundamental immorality of both quote and underlying filosophy becomes requirement. Because if it is used approvingly,it will make us more likely to commit genocide or other similarly bad act.
Also, whether he created good times should be judged by whether people in in-group had good times. Large conquered territory is not the same thing.
Synonyms include: powerful, muscular, sturdy, robust, tough, rugged, stalwart, hardy.
In ordinary English these terms can be applied to mental as well as physical fortitude.
The meaning here is not opaque.
I've never understood it as you do - strong men are just strong men, no need to read between the lines (of 1-liner). If you stick to the original meaning, this saying is as valid now as anytime in the past.
Strong men know what they want and need and are not afraid to go for it, and most often also obtain it. Being able to defend oneself is another meaning. In opposite to weak men, who are unsure of themselves, don't know what they want out of life, expecting things to be handled to them and life figured out.
I don't know in which part of society you do exist, but anytime in my past and present both of those groups are/were well represented, and successful life is definitely a domain of the strong folks.
Even so, regardless of other context, the general reality is that wealth and power beget wealth and power. Poor people (or societies) have a much much smaller chance of becoming wealthy than people who start wealthy have of maintaining their wealth.
I would agree that it those extraordinarily few people who manage to ascend the social latter are probably universally very strong people. But there are many times more people who could be considered weak that nevertheless preserve their wealth and status than there are strong people who improve their own. This applies both at an individual level as well as a group and societal level.
Rather, hard times (economic depression, warfare, disease, etc.) creating strong men meant creating toughness, resilience, patience and conservatism in society. The endurance of these events would eventually (somehow) allow the next generation to have its progress and luxuries; peace, economic prosperity, education. But easy times create comfort, arrogance, impatience, over-leverage; spoiled people don't know how good they have it, and so they think it'll last forever. It gets taken away from them, and they fight amongst each other about whose fault it is that everything is slipping away (blame immigrants, blame opposing parties, blame foreign powers, general polarization and divisiveness; them vs us).
Everything goes to shit, and the cycle is renewed.
Anecdotally, in my experience through athletics, I would describe groups of athletes from certain countries to be certainly tougher. They train harder, they endure more, they have less access to quality nutrition, medicine, equipment, etc. And yet they accomplish more despite having less. You can't phase or intimidate them because they've already endured far worse.
Ex: Dagestani wrestlers, Thai kick boxers.
So while this is a hyper-granular examination, the rewards are going to those "strong men" who endured "hard times". Of course there's a lot of selection bias going on here as well.
Still, even taking it the way you say, the quote is false. Poor and weakened societies tend to get lost in vicious cycles, and tend to create damaged people who struggle for the rest of their lives with the effects of the shock - ill, relying on vices, corrupt etc. It takes huge luck and hard work to transition back to a successful, prosperous and healthy society.
Conversely, societies that become wealthy and successful tend to continue that way for a very long time, and they create healthy and ethical people much more readily.
This can be easily seen in recent history by looking at post-USSR states vs Western Europe & the USA. By any measure, people living in Western Europe for example in 1989 were living much easier times than those behind the Iron Curtain. Still, even today, 33 years later, Western Europe is vastly more wealthy, culturally active, healthy, more powerful militarily and in every conceivable way than former Soviet bloc countries - especially the former USSR ones.
One of the most important wounds that hard times leave in a society is an extreme form of screw-you-got-mine individualism. This leads to people who are willing to do anything to succeed and grow above others - especially manifested as corruption and nepotism at every level. When you have lived through times you either take what you can or die of hunger, you can't afford to care for rules or others' well-being (except your own family).
Just think on longer timescales; with your example of the US and Western Europe, I would argue that they are in the process of weak men making hard times. The soviet countries are the opposite, strong men are now improving things. It's only been 30 years since the USSR collapsed. It took Rome centuries to fall from it's peak, why would the west be any different?
Another issue is that in modern times the richest people in poor countries tend to move to rich countries eventually. Immigrants are often the hardest workers and the most entrepreneurial.
Like Belarus, Russia and Chechenya are improving ... what exactly?
Edit: since this is downvoted - Russia had worst issues after fall of communism then countries currently in EU. So did Chechnya- they had two wars with Russia and lost. Belarus was not exactly paradise on word for quite a long time either. Thise countries are the ones starting the was and supporting it the most.
I think the case of Rome is exactly one of the ones where people get history extremely mixed up. The Roman empire was powerful and prosperous for hundreds of years - more than any other empire in Europe in history. The vast majority of people of those prosperous times created more prosperous times, again and again for those hundreds of years. Rome only fell because of an extraordinary amount of bad things happening at the same time, not because "easy times create weak men, and weak men create hard times".
Basically, by the model of the quote, we shouldn't expect any prosperous society to exist for anything more than 1-2 generations.
Even looking at the times after the fall of Rome, it took many more hundreds of years to get back to the prosperity of the earlier times - so the "hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times" part of the quote is also false.
Edit: As a complete aside, there is a particularly hilarious take on the history of Rome that made some splashes in right-wing circles, by a ridiculous self-proclaimed intellectual named Stephen Molyneux. Among many other historical inaccuracies, he was taking quotes from Cicero about the moral decay of Roman society to show how that "moral decay" led to the fall of the Roman empire - of course, Cicero didn't even live to actually see the Roman empire or its peak, nevermind its fall some 500 years later. If anything, Cicero's "moral decay" could be said to have led to the rise of the Roman empire.
I wouldn't expect Rome to bounce back in a generation.
The quote implies though that there is a deterministic process: good times can't help but create weak men, and weak men can't help but create hard times. This implies a rather limited time frame - if generation after generation of people living in good times keep creating good times, then it's hard to take the concept seriously. Similarly, if generation after generation living in hard times keep creating more hard times, the other part of the concept fails as well.
Even worse, while it seems to be true that every successful society eventually falls, it is demonstrably false that every failed society eventually rises. There are numerous peoples who have been utterly destroyed without ever rising up; and there are regions of the world that have never been prosperous, or at least not for hundreds of years now.
(Cue Peter Heather's argument that the fall of Rome was actually related to its inability to attract immigrants any more: for generations Rome survived and triumphed over other cultures because of its unparalleled ability to make new Romans- from other people's in Italy, from Gaul, from Egypt, from Germans, they could make everyone's sons into real, classically educated Romans, and that meant that their state and armies were sufficient. Then, for various reasons that he describes in his 2005 book _The Fall of the Roman Empire_, they lost that ability, and that was what doomed the Western Roman Empire.)
What I think is useful from this quote is that across generations, people forget the horror of war. They forget what it actually means to push through hard work & living with mass dysfunction. They feel entitled to much and unwilling to take on dirty, unglorified but necessary work.
Personally, I strongly suspect anybody that talks about mass entitlement. That's a phenomenon that I simply could not see on the real world. (Yet, many people keep saying it's there.)
Personal entitlement surely exist, but it never seems to extend over a population.
Notably, WWII was started by generation that went though WWI. Generation after WWI had more terrorist acts. Oh, and war in Ukraine was started by Russia - country that average person is far from living in luxury or economic prosperity.
I believe a counterpoint to this are armies such as the Viet Cong, and especially the Taliban.
The Viet Cong was a well supplied and well organized army, with significant logistical support from North Vietnam, and would likely had failed miserably if North Vietnam hadn't waited to consolidate its power and accrue supplies (and international support) after the revolution and previous civil war.
In the USSR invasion of Afghanistan, the taliban received ample support from the USA, including training, arms and logistics; again, they would have very likely failed in the absence of this support. In the NATO invasion of Afghanistan, the taliban quickly lost the military war, but ultimately retained their cultural advantage; the regime that the USA tried to install was simply unpopular, and instantly folded the moment it stopped being propped up. Either way, the last few decades of war have not led to some flourishing of Afghanistan as the theory predicts: it remains poor and by all likelihood will remain poor for the forseeable future, as all other war zones do.
Also, in both cases, the advantage of fighting in their own territory was a significant part of what ultimately defeated their opponents.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-03-02-0258
> Since my Arrival this time I have driven about Paris, more than I did before. The rural Scenes around this Town are charming. The public Walks, Gardens, &c. are extreamly beautifull. The Gardens of the Palais Royal, the Gardens of the Tuilleries, are very fine. The Place de Louis 15, the Place Vendome or Place de Louis 14, the Place victoire, the Place royal, are fine Squares, ornamented with very magnificent statues. I wish I had time to describe these objects to you in a manner, that I should have done, 25 Years ago, but my Head is too full of Schemes and my Heart of Anxiety to use Expressions borrowed from you know whom.
>To take a Walk in the Gardens of the Palace of the Tuilleries, and describe the Statues there, all in marble, in which the ancient Divinities and Heroes are represented with exquisite Art, would be a very pleasant Amusement, and instructive Entertainment, improving in History, Mythology, Poetry, as well as in Statuary. Another Walk in the Gardens of Versailles, would be usefull and agreable.—But to observe these Objects with Taste and describe them so as to be understood, would require more time and thought than I can possibly Spare. It is not indeed the fine Arts, which our Country requires. The Usefull, the mechanic Arts, are those which We have occasion for in a young Country, as yet simple and not far advanced in Luxury, altho perhaps much too far for her Age and Character.
>I could fill Volumes with Descriptions of Temples and Palaces, Paintings, Sculptures, Tapestry, Porcelaine, &c. &c. &c.—if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty.—The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts.—I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
I always have a problem with this quote. What are "strong men/women"?
(Really) tough times generally create broken people that dig themselves an early grave with alcohol, more than anything.
As the strong people make the world better we have good times and end up not paying attention to building (or valuing) strength which makes people weaker, things get crappy and then we need to build more strong people to pull us out.
Think of the early 20th century. In the lead-up to the depression, the 20s were all about partying and buying stuff of on credit and watching the market boom (at least at the broad scale narrative that we're taught, I'm sure there are nuances about it). Then we get the depression and WWII which required men to become strong and fight which lead to the post war boom. I'm sure there were many smaller cycles in history too, but I'm not really a scholar of history.
I look at today, we have an epidemic of weakness around us. Everyone needs a safe space, needs the government to take care of them and provide them with things, everyone gets offended by everyone else and has to go lie in bed because they "just can't even". At least that's what the grand narrative on social media is. And even from that, I see the cycle beginning. We're entering a tough time with famine and such, and people who decide to get strong and face the challenge are the ones who will do well and provide the next round of good times (The irony is that they probably won't be participating in the good times).
Long rant, sorry. But one of my mental models that I've been refining is that problems are caused by weakness and fear. If you are strong and confident, you are more likely fixing problems or taking care of people, not causing problems.
The grand narrative is not reality, though.
We're building more and better stuff than at any time in history.
Including the "strong stuff", if you're into that, think of military stuff.
Our problems are a lot more complex than in the past, and we're working on them.
It's just not glamorous or in the news daily.
World war 1 ended in 1918. The 20s were literally created by tough times. Notably, in Germany, they were tough too.
> Then we get the depression and WWII which required men to become strong and fight which lead to the post war boom.
WWII was started by men who fought in WWI. Nazi leadership, including Hitler, were former soldiers for whom WWI experience was formative. These men were followed by younger men raised to be strong - German nazi were big on masculinity and big on being strong. Collectively all those tough men committed genocide.
> We're entering a tough time with famine and such, and people who decide to get strong and face the challenge are the ones who will do well and provide the next round of good times
That famine is created by politicians who pride themselves and being stronger then weak west. That famine did not just randomly happened. It was created by men who grew up in USSR, worked for secret service and then seen whole their world crumble in 1990.
There are no safe spaces in Russia or Chechnya. Instead you get beaten for being gay (Russia) or tortured and killed (Chechnya).
We can perhaps use more descriptive or objective terms such as resilience and still find differences and subtleties. Are military veterans with several tours of duty that are going through PTSD "less resilient" than the civilian population? Are people that are bullied for their sexual orientation or their country of origin for decades resilient, as well? The way I see it we're all vulnerable somehow and find different means to try to protect ourselves mentally and physically, most of the time not very productive nor efficacious due to our own self deficiencies in the first place.
As such, to me the "weak" are those that cannot join coalitions of others readily and find ways to contribute in some manner or refuse. We are social animals and have survived for better or worse through making up for our own individual deficits with the strengths of others. As such the anti-social (doesn't matter what the political orientation is BTW) are the weak in society, and in that respect I think we can both agree that there is a trend toward weakness globally at least among economically developed societies.
This take has been in circulation by shallow-minded regressives for about 20+ years. It's getting moldy.
The quote is intended to apply at the national level, not at the personal level. Think WWII and the way the US came together in what is called the greatest generation, or the way England came together in what Churchill called it's finest hour. Then think of the arc in which the unified actions of those generations led to prosperity, and then to challenges, and to failures and division.
The UK after WWII, or in fact France and Western Germany, are better examples, though I think that the huge amounts of money that the USA decided to pour into them through the Marshall Plan were much more responsible for that then "strong men" forged in the war were.
* The USSR had just lost 20 million people - about 10% of its population. Germany, Poland, the UK, Austria and other European countries had been bombed into oblivion, as was Japan. Most of Africa was still recovering from European colonialism, as was India and most of SE Asia. China was still in the midst of its civil war, and had suffered some heavy losses because of Japan.
In ordinary English these terms can be applied to mental as well as physical fortitude. I'm a bit nonplussed by the confusion.
https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
I think of a lot of people who came up in the management consulting meat grinder and left. Even though they almost all hated the work style and cultures of the firms they left, they often cannot help but replicate the dysfunctional cultural tendencies and management styles that contributed to their burnout in every other place they go. There's a lot you have to unlearn before you can really pivot, but when you've been trained early on that certain inputs are your ticket to praise and promotion it's hard to think any other way.
I actually pay a lot for art every week. Most people do. It’s called music and movies. So the translation is, “everyone wants to make some random art but no one wants to pay for random unsolicited art.”
Which seems fine by me!
Food is an art, too. Good food is ... good
I understand that "if there's an act of buying, there's consumption" from your perspective, but I'd mostly disagree with that statement and actually, I think it's quite a narrow perspective.
For every act of buying, there's an act of selling. But in the reality I see, many artists sell to produce rather than they produce to sell. So the act of selling is quite flawed from, say, a company selling its products, and the same is true for the act of buying: many don't buy to own or consume, but to support or for a naively genuine sense of beauty.
You may very well boil it down to "money give, money take" but the symbolic here is far stronger than the capitalist perspective of art as a market.
Also, I'm not ignoring the attraction of the market for artists and buyers alike, it's just not the whole story.
If you take away visual and experimental arts you also lose good music and movies. And good graphic design. And good architecture. And more.
If you think this is exaggeration, consider that not a few household name musicians - Eno and a long list of others - went to art school, not music school.
Seems like an obscure reference more than a household name :-)
At least outside of DACH.
He's not a "household name musician", either.
Elvis, Beatles, Queen, Kanye West, Rihanna, Madonna, Beyoncé, Adele, etc are household name musicians.
Brian Eno is maybe a strong influence in the field, but few regular people outside of actual musicians have heard of him around the world, I'd venture.
I hadn't known about him before reading his Wikipedia page, just now. And I tend to read a lot :-)
How do we determine who is? Is Vangelis?
This is not rocket science.
Artsy musicians ain't it.
Vangelis îs a lot closer to that than Eno, amusingly :-)
That said, I completely agree that you can't expect any young people to know who he is.
I did list Elvis and Beatles and I can list more stuff from the 50s and 60s onwards. Brian Eno would not be on those lists.
How much of what you pay goes to the artists? If most of it goes to rentiers, then the artists themselves need other means of support so they can keep making art.
It sounds like research
Far far less to basic research.
Wikipedia's article on Bell Labs has a long list of stuff that came out of it. Some of it's stuff they made money off of, some is stuff other people made money off of. Some of it's stuff other people made money off of that ended up also creating a lot of traffic on Bell's networks.
Bell Labs is the best example, but Xerox PARC. Valve seems to have launched the VR revitalization.
Thing is… why wouldn’t we want product-relevant stuff? I mean… hating commerce is definitely a thing around here but the economy equates to the standard of living of humans. The ability to eat healthy foods, and enough to avoid malnutrition; to stay warm in winter and cool in summer (and thereby avoid death); to travel quickly and efficiently for economic, academic, leisure, or other reasons… these are all very important things that result from corporate research. People crap on it, but if any one of these things hadn’t happened half the humans alive today may well have died before age 10.
Adding that into art studies could do a lot for that economy and passion.
They're simply people who get paid for making music well. Often as part of a performance.
Promotion and marketing isn't generally what they do.
-- or they live with much less $ and financial security than they otherwise might.
So mere mortals have to focus their time and energy into having a backup plan.
Or theyre prioritizing rent, bills, medical care and retirement.