Words, words, words.

What do you read, my lord?

[richmond-rex]

Taken as a whole, Richard III’s Parliament was unexceptional: it was a workmanlike and pragmatic affair. There were no important legislative initiatives comparable to those seen in, for example, the Parliaments of Henry VI in 1429 or Henry VII in 1495. In 1484, Parliament transacted the business the King wished to see transacted, and just enough business of concern to the Lords and Commons to keep them pliant. There is no suggestion of open hostility to the King on the part of Parliament, but nor is there a sense that they were being cowed into submission by an overbearing monarch. The balance of business benefitting King, Lords and Commons respectively was comparatively even, and suggests negotiation, rather than confrontation.

— Hannes Kleineke, Richard III and the Parliament of 1484

[dwgill-quotes]

The influence of these ascetics broke all Roman social rules: few were aristocratic, few were educated, but people sought their advice persistently. We have replies of two elderly hermits living just outside Gaza in the early sixth century, Barsanouphios and John, to some 850 questions of all kinds put to them by laity, clerics and monks, which can pass for the sixth-century equivalent of Dear Abby. If I want to give grain and wine to the poor, should I give them the best quality? (no, you needn’t). Since we must not kill, should I lie to allow a murderer to escape the death penalty? (maybe, as long as you tend to lie under other circumstances). Can I buy in the market from pagans? (yes). Can I eat with a pagan? (no). What about when he is important? (still no, and here is a polite excuse). Do I really have to give my cloak to every beggar, and go naked? (no). And, perhaps the feeblest of all: I can’t make up my mind, what should I do? (a perhaps exasperated reply: pray to God, or else ask us again). It is clear in all of this that ascetics were trusted to know; educated or not, they had access to spiritual truth.

Chris Wickham, chapter 3 of The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400 - 1000.

This is in the context of the ascetic and monastic movements of Christianity.

[dwgill-quotes]

Pagan religion did not depend on a very elaborate institutional structure, and the cults of each city were all organized locally; rabbinic Judaism, too, was very decentralized (Jews did have a single patriarch until around 425, but it is unclear how wide his powers were). Christianity, however, had a complex hierarchy, partly matching that of the state. By 400 there were four patriarchs, at Rome, Constantinople (since 381), Antioch and Alexandria (a fifth, Jerusalem, was added in 451), who oversaw the bishops of each city... Bishops were soon arrayed in two levels, with metropolitan bishops (called in later centuries archbishops) at an intermediate level, overseeing and consecrating the bishops of each secular province. Inside the dioceses of each bishop, which normally covered the secular territory of their city, bishops had authority over the clerics of other public churches... The church in the fourth and fifth centuries became an elaborate structure, with perhaps a hundred thousand clerics of different types, more than the civil administration, and steadily increasing in wealth as a result of pious gifts. It was not part of the state, but its wealth and empire-wide institutional cohesion made it an inevitable partner for emperors and prefects, and a strong and influential informal authority in cities; the cathedral church by 500 was often the largest local landowner (and therefore patron), and, unlike in the case of private family wealth, its stability could be guaranteed – bishops were not allowed to alienate church property... Even in a church context, bishops generally identified themselves with their diocese first, with wider ecclesiastical institutions only secondarily. But they were linked to the wider church hierarchy all the same: they could be called to order and dismissed by metropolitans and by the councils of bishops that steadily became more frequent, whether empire-wide (the ‘ecumenical’ councils) or at the regional level, in Spain or Gaul or Africa. The fact that this institutional structure did not depend on the empire, and was above all separately funded, meant that it could survive the political fragmentation of the fifth century, and the church was indeed the Roman institution that continued with least change into the early Middle Ages; the links between regions became weaker, but the rest remained intact.

Chris Wickham, chapter 3 of The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000.

[dwgill-quotes]

Intermittently, at least, Swift was a kind of anarchist, and Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels is a picture of an anarchistic Society, not governed by law in the ordinary sense, but by the dictates of “Reason,” which are voluntarily accepted by everyone. The General Assembly of the Houyhnhnms “exhorts” Gulliver’s master to get rid of him, and his neighbours put pressure on him to make him comply. Two reasons are given. One is that the presence of this unusual Yahoo may unsettle the rest of the tribe, and the other is that a friendly relationship between a Houyhnhnm and a Yahoo is “not agreeable to Reason or Nature, or a Thing ever heard of before among them.” Gulliver’s master is somewhat unwilling to obey, but the “exhortation” (a Houyhnhnm, we are told, is never compelled to do anything, he is merely “exhorted” or “advised”) cannot be disregarded. This illustrates very well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the anarchist or pacifist vision of Society. In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by “thou shalt not,” the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by “love” or “reason,” he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

George Orwell, "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels", featured in All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays.

[dwgill-quotes]

It may surprise you to hear that in the deeply religious medieval age it was possible for kings to stand up to a pope like this, and come out as victors into the bargain. We are apt to think of the separation of Church and State as a distinctively modern idea. But the medievals would need no lessons from us on this score. At the turn of the fourteenth century the Church and the medieval states were not just separate: they were at each others’ throats. We know from our earlier discussion... that this struggle was a constant of medieval culture... and really an inevitable one, given the substantial involvement of clerics in the temporal sphere, with vast landholdings and military forces at their command. Besides, the whole point of being a king or an emperor is that you don’t answer to anyone. A monarch is the supreme authority in his sphere of action... When a pope said to these rulers that they answered to him, that their otherwise supreme power was exercised at his behest and at his discretion, they were hardly going to respond with meek acquiescence.

For the secular theorists in the debate the problem was saying where royal power and authority did come from, if not from the Pope. Their answer was that such authority is granted directly by God. This is the kind of historical irony I really cherish. The idea that kings have a “divine right” to rule seems an obvious example of the way that religion and politics were intertwined in earlier times. Yet the idea was, to no small degree, put forward in order to resist the rival claims of the Church.

Peter Adamson, chapter 55 of Medieval Philosophy: A history of philosophy without any gaps, Volume 4.

[dwgill-quotes]

My reading was now mainly rubbish... I read twaddling school stories in The Captain. The pleasure here was, in the proper sense, mere wish-fulfilment and fantasy; one enjoyed vicariously the triumphs of the hero. When the boy passes from nursery literature to school-stories he is going down, not up. Peter Rabbit pleases a disinterested imagination, for the child does not want to be a rabbit, though he may like pretending to be a rabbit as he may later like acting Hamlet; but the story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Eleven exists precisely to feed his real ambitions.

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy.

[dwgill-quotes]

Every man, however brave, who begins by worshipping violence, must end in mere timidity. Every man, however wise, who begins by worshipping success, must end in mere mediocrity. This strange and paradoxical fate is involved, not in the individual, but in the philosophy, in the point of view. It is not the folly of the man which brings about this necessary fall; it is his wisdom. The worship of success is the only one out of all possible worships of which this is true, that its followers are foredoomed to become slaves and cowards. A man may be a hero for the sake of Mrs. Gallup's ciphers or for the sake of human sacrifice, but not for the sake of success. For obviously a man may choose to fail because he loves Mrs. Gallup or human sacrifice; but he cannot choose to fail because he loves success. When the test of triumph is men's test of everything, they never endure long enough to triumph at all. As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.

G.K. Chesterton, "The Mildness of the Yellow Press," featured in Heretics.

[dwgill-quotes]

Although we have no clear idea about the opinions of the illiterate majority, the Roman elite was generally dismissive of the myths... It was almost universally agreed that the gods existed—even Epicureans admitted that—but it was almost as universally thought that the myths misrepresented the gods. By the second century CE, most Greek and Roman intellectuals either rejected the myths outright (the Epicurean approach), allegorized them into philosophical respectability (the Stoic approach), or claimed that the traditional gods were not gods at all, but mischievous daimones—spirits of the air—sent by the actual gods (the Platonic approach). This last interpretation became increasingly popular in Late Antiquity, when Neoplatonism emerged as the dominant philosophical tradition. By the time Constantine became Christian, very few educated Romans took their myths literally. Christianity merely added another layer of allegory to the traditional pagan approaches to myth. Christian scholars resurrected the ancient allegorizing approach we call euhemerism (which claimed that the traditional gods were ancient human kings and heroes), and enthusiastically endorsed the idea that at least some myths were based on the deeds of demons masquerading as gods. The myths also offered conveniently low-hanging fruit for sermonizing; in the City of God, for example, Augustine describes Romulus' murder of Remus as characteristic of the sinful earthly city.

Garret Ryan (/u/toldinstone) in answer to the question "The Roman founding myth seems to be directly related to their pagan religion ( Romulus/Remus + Aeneas/Dido etc.). Once the Empire was predominantly Christian, how did they come to terms with their pagan origins? Did they change their founding myth?" on /r/AskHistorians.

[dwgill-quotes]

Whatever programmers think about themselves and these towering logic-engines we’ve erected, we’re a lot more superstitious than we realize. We tell and retell this collection of unsourced, inaccurate stories about the nature of the world without ever doing the research ourselves, and there’s no other word for that but "mythology". Worse, by obscuring the technical and social conditions that led humans to make these technical and social decisions, by talking about the nature of computing as we find it today as though it’s an inevitable consequence of an immutable set of physical laws, we’re effectively denying any responsibility for how we got here. And worse than that, by refusing to dig into our history and understand the social and technical motivations for those choices, by steadfastly refusing to investigate the difference between a motive and a justification, we’re disavowing any agency we might have over the shape of the future. We just keep mouthing platitudes and pretending the way things are is nobody’s fault, and the more history you learn and the more you look at the sad state of modern computing the the more pathetic and irresponsible that sounds.

Mike Hoye, "Citation Needed."

[dwgill-quotes]

One must qualify that much of what is today called "artificial intelligence" is little more than traditional regression analysis, the basic technique taught in introductory statistics courses, but on an unprecedented scale and presence in daily life. None of this technology approaches the conscious, adaptive, reflective capacities often associated with the term, the kind we would find in 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000 or Star Trek's Mr. Data. The labeling of these techniques as "artificial intelligence" arises in part from the ideological aspirations of Silicon Valley and in part from its overhyped marketing, and so ought to be resisted.

Jon Askonas, "How Tech Utopia Fostered Tyranny."

[dwgill-quotes]

The applicability of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to government sponsorship of residential segregation will make sense to most readers. Clearly, denying African Americans access to housing subsidies that were extended to whites constitutes unfair treatment and, if consistent, rises to the level of a serious constitutional violation. But it may be surprising that residential segregation also violates the Thirteenth Amendment. We typically think of the Thirteenth as only abolishing slavery. Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment does so, and Section 2 empowers Congress to enforce Section 1. In 1866, Congress enforced the abolition of slavery by passing a Civil Rights Act, prohibiting actions that it deemed perpetuated the characteristics of slavery. Actions that made African Americans second-class citizens, such as racial discrimination in housing, were included in the ban. In 1883, though, the Supreme Court rejected this congressional interpretation of its powers to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment. The Court agreed that Section 2 authorized Congress to “to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States,” but it did not agree that exclusions from housing markets could be a “badge or incident” of slavery. In consequence, these Civil Rights Act protections were ignored for the next century.

Richard Rothstein, preface to The Color of Law.

[dwgill-quotes]

I reject the widespread view that an action is not unconstitutional until the Supreme Court says so. Few Americans think that racial segregation in schools was constitutional before 1954, when the Supreme Court prohibited it. Rather, segregation was always unconstitutional, although a misguided Supreme Court majority mistakenly failed to recognize this.

Richard Rothstein, preface to The Color of Law.

[dwgill-quotes]

In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is no possibility, in me at least, of saying, "I'll do it if I feel like it." One never feels like awaking day after day. In fact, given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all. The rest is nonsense. Perhaps there are people who can work that way, but I cannot. I must get my words down every day whether they are any good or not.

John Steinbeck, journal entry, featured in Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath.

[dwgill-quotes]

A man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and one old friend.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.

[dwgill-quotes]

Why did men fight? The old man had always been a dutiful thinker, never an inspired one. Now his exhausted brain slipped into its accustomed circles: the withered paths, like those of the donkey in the treadmill, round which he had plodded many thousand times in vain. Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hearts?

T.H. White, chapter 14 of "The Candle in the Wind", part 4 of The Once and Future King.

[dwgill-quotes]

"You must remember I am the King of England. When you are a king you can’t go executing people as the fancy takes you. A king is the head of his people, and he must stand as an example to them, and do as they wish." He forgave the startled expression in Lancelot’s face, and took his hand once more. "You will find," he explained, "that when the kings are bullies who believe in force, the people are bullies too. If I don’t stand for law, I won’t have law among my people. And naturally I want my people to have the new law, because then they are more prosperous, and I am more prosperous in consequence." They watched him, wondering what he meant to convey. He held the look, trying to speak with their eyes. "You see, Lance, I have to be absolutely just. I can’t afford to have any more things like those babies on my conscience. The only way I can keep clear of force is by justice. Far from being willing to execute his enemies, a real king must be willing to execute his friends."

T.H. White, chapter 4 of "The Candle in the Wind", part 4 of The Once and Future King

[dwgill-quotes]

A few weeks ago, Kenyatta and I had dinner with another couple. They are old friends of ours, and like us, children of black consciousness. Kenyatta and the couple were talking about the beauty and wonder of Paris (I’ve never been.) They were contrasting that with all of the race critiques we came up on, some of which we still hold. And some point one of us said something to effect of, "You know you really gotta give it up. These white folks got done did something." When you are a young intellectual black kid, you often find yourself in this desperate search for some sort of anti-Western tradition. That Saul Bellow quote—"Who is the Tolstoy of the Zululs"—really captures a lot of the dilemma for those of us looking for a "native" tradition. That search ends all kinds of ways for different people. But for us, I think it ended in the rejection of the premise, in the great Ralph Wiley riposte that “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.” That line was sorcery for me. It found me a black pathologist, and set me free by revealing that my own search for something “native” was an implicit acceptance of the very racism that I sought to counter. The way out was not to find my own, but to reject the notion of anyone’s "own." If you reject the very premise of racism—the idea skin color directly contributes to genius or sloth—then all of humanity becomes "native" to you. And so empowered, I could—out of my own individual identity—create my own intellectual and artistic pedigree, and I was free to have it extend from Biggie to to Wharton to Melville to Hayden.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, "The Federalist Papers"