This is an interesting review of a more interesting project to create a digital geospatial model of the Rome of recent antiquity.
It is mysterious why it has been published on an extremist website. It's like reading a article about the life and times of Goethe in Al Quaeda Monthly.
extremist? Really? And especially to the level of comparing it with a literal terrorist organization. The hard right has its genuinely extremist, white supremacist and nationalist elements but to claim that a conservative affinity makes a site like this into an extremist page is absurdly self-righteous and hypocritical even. Might as well say the same about Huffpo or NPR. No? I never understood how leftist and heavily "progressive" ideas automatically get a free pass as being fundamentally correct even when they have a long history of friendliness towards very violent extremes of their own spectrum but even moderate conservatism is right on the creaking edge of being declared extreme no matter what.
I didn't see the original comment, which has been flagged and apparently deleted by a moderator. I just want to say that the liberal equivalent of The American Conservative is probably something like Jacobin Magazine, not HuffPost or NPR. Basically, a source of opinion and ideas with a political agenda.
If you turn on "showdead" you'll be able to see the original comment. I don't think there was anything worth flagging about it; the commenter just gave away his political bias using the the word 'extremist' rather than a more neutral term.
"Basically, a source of opinion and ideas with a political agenda."
Groups can so easily attack and label other groups as extreme when they hold similar views toward the other end of the spectrum.
Accuse others of being non-accepting of their ideas while at the same time not being accepting of the other groups ideas and beliefs. And willing to destroy the other sides careers and businesses over it.
People should always be able to have their own beliefs and speak out and question things without fear of persecution.
Being accepting and open to ideas and discussion is the way we should debate and express our ideas/opinions.
If you are having to spread and enforce your ideas through fear you are probably on the wrong side.
> "I never understood how leftist and heavily "progressive" ideas automatically get a free pass as being fundamentally correct..."
that's pretty easy to explain: liberalism is grounded in inclusivity, and conservatism in exclusivity, which is a tension that lives in each of us. and from a young age, we are educated that sharing and caring for others is good, and being selfish is bad. we tend to equate things that are good with being correct.
note that progressivism doesn't lay on this spectrum at all, as it only advocates progress over stagnation (a different facet of conservatism).
the philosophical positions of these ideologies are different from their political implementations, of course.
I didn't compare it to AQ, I said it was bizarre. AC has a lot of anti-LGBT hate articles which alone is enough to be considered extremeist. But I'm sorry if you take that as an insult.
Isn't conservatism basically forcing people to not progress? Some might see that as a nearly violent act against their freedom. But really, what else is there to conservatism than "do not change"?
>Isn't progressivism basically forcing people to change? Some might see that as a nearly violent act against their freedom. But really, what else is there to progressivism than "you must change"?
Does the above re-wording make the problem with your characterization more obvious? I hope that it is obvious that both "progressive" and "conservative" philosophies are qualified by necessary and persuasive reasons to do one thing or the other. You should not change the status quo unless there is a good reason to do so, changing things carries the risk of making the current situation worse. Obviously the reverse is also true, you should always critically assess the current status quo because it may not be working as intended or has outsized negative impact on certain groups/institutions and we should change it.
I think your sentence is needlessly inflammatory, you're essentially straw manning the idea of conservative when we should always do our best to assume good faith in hackernews commenters until proven otherwise.
The thing is, I am not a progressive in your understanding and by English sense of the word and I fully agree with your rewordization. In my country, progressives are comparable to US libertarians.
What you list as positive traits seem to be just rational politics. That's how it's known in my country, not as something conservative or else. So is that conservatism, being rational and pragmatic instead of... Irrational as progressives? Or is the key message of conservatism something else? The word conservative suggest a stop of change. I thought the message of conservatism would be more related to that.
"Or is the key message of conservatism something else?"
It depends on the conservative. It's a broad camp. Some people who call themselves 'conservative' are really just super reactionary people who hate any kind of change while others are reasonable people who want to be careful. US politics is highly partisan right now so there is a lot of conflict that has more to do with team or tribal affiliation (republican or democrat) than with actual ideological or philosophical differences.
Traditionally, though, conservatism as a school of thought originates with the writings of Edmund Burke on the French Revolution, where he pointed out, not that social and political change were bad in themselves, but that the Revolution in his opinion, was going too far too fast, breaking with too many traditions, and was thereby sowing the seeds of its own destruction. He argued that because the French Revolutionaries were attempting to replace widely held (in France at the time) principles of political legitimacy with novel principles of the political legitimacy, that politics in France would break down into practical power politics and would result in a military dictatorship. His prediction turned out correct, though people still debate his reasoning.
So, in this sense, conservatism is the idea that traditional political institutions have value because they are traditional political institutions. Change is not inherently bad, but must be undertaken carefully because if you overtly discredit the current institutions you court instability and the new system might not be better.
It is very difficult to talk about both words given the amount of meaning that has been layered on top of both over the years. Generally conservative just means you are cautious around change, whereas progressives are much less cautious and more willing to experiment with new changes.
I wasn't commenting on your English. I just thought it was strange to describe conservatives this way. In the US, true conservatives believe in smaller governments and less laws (more individual freedom). So I'm not sure how conservatism can stop individuals making progress.
Totalitarian fascism and communism were both aggressively branded as progressive waves of the future in the first part of the 20th century. Change is often bad, and it is good to have level-headed conservatives resisting it.
We are quick to see the negative, but conservatism also maintains keeping traditions and culture. I live in the Acadian region and we continue our traditions as they preserve our culture.
"Isn't conservatism basically forcing people to not progress? Some might see that as a nearly violent act against their freedom. But really, what else is there to conservatism than "do not change"?"
To some degree I suppose. Given the natural tendency in politics to produce two opposing groups the monikers always become overloaded. In eras where 'conservatives' represented the mercantile class, change went hand-in-hand with building the huge trading companies, the industrial revolution, modernization and 'rightsizing' of farming practices, etc. so it depends.
If, 20 years ago or before, you had told me that the West was practically going to civil war over the question of the value vs harm of mass third world immigration, I'd have laughed at you. The rest of the disagreements are window dressing at this point I think.
People are getting very precious over hyperbole. It is incongruous that this articule appeared in this forum. I keep wondering if it is an aspect of the 'Western Civilisation is best, and traces its roots back to the Roman Empire' school of thought. The far-right funding group, the Ramsay Centre, has been pushing for a Western Civilisation degree recently. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-26/anu-reveals-why-it-wa...
And no I wouldn't call many of the articles on the AC website conservative, they seems not just brazenly political but extremist. In the American Fox news bubble they may seem middle of the road, but outside it they seem really wacky.
I don't know whether I'm reading into this with a bias given that it's published in The American Conservative, but the conclusion of the article definitely reads as an homage to when "Western Civilization" was nice and homogeneous, and everyone could trace its lineage back to Rome.
> The importance of classical Rome to the conscious and unconscious customs of later Western urbanism cannot be overstated. Today, as cultures cross-pollinate, and as technologies topple timeless ways of living, it is an open question whether the familiarity of Rome’s ancient forms will be felt much by those who live in the future, beyond the next horizon. [ ... ] Perhaps this time—our time—is really the end of the ancient world.
I read this as "all of the 'other' people who come into the West won't share this unifying history of the city that was the pinnacle of civilization."
Highly ironic that the article in the carousel directly above this one was "Why Identity Politics Kills Democracy."
My suspicion is that they had to find some ideological justification for writing about this cool project in a conservative magazine, so they probably just shoehorned those lines in there.
I don't think this is a bad thing. The more conservatives are exposed to ideas and cultures that are radically at odds with contemporary conservative mores, the more likely these conservatives are to open their minds.
And make no mistake, ancient Rome as a pagan civilization is absolutely at odds with contemporary American conservatism. They can twist and shoehorn in their preferred takes as much as they'd like, but once the seed is planted the smarter conservatives start looking beyond the provincial ideas they're inclined to inherit from their immediate cultural background.
Perhaps more exposure to the intellectual tradition of conservatism would likewise help free you from, to borrow a phrase, "the provincial ideas" about your political opponents that you seem to have been "inclined to inherit from [your] immediate cultural background. "
Lol. Trust me, I've been down that path. I was not only conservative when I was younger, but fairly right-wing, including some beliefs close to NRx decades before that was a thing.
I've read most of the books, been to the conferences (including multiple CPACs), raised money for right-wing causes, and worked for right-wing organizations including some personalities that most politically savvy people would recognize.
Heck, my righ-wing connections were one of the reasons I was an early user of paypal (since one of my boddies was friends with Thiel and the Stanford Review crowd).
So, thanks, but I've already done what you've said and have found it wanting and severely lacking.
Why does one need to be a conservative to find value in Ancient Greco-Roman civilization? It's certainly possible for someone to be critical of modernity yet not be some kind of right-wing zealot, or even right-wing at all. Personally I don't identify with any modern political ideology and think that there is a lot of value to be found in the ancients.
This black-and-white view of dividing everything into "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists" is extremely destructive and it's one of the main reasons that Western Civilization is in its current identity crisis. And that applies to all sides of the political spectrum.
You are reading it with the bias you mention, and, as a consequence, you are attaching overbroad significance to a sentence that weighs in at about 3% of a text dedicated to the discussion of an archaelogical atlas of Ancient Rome.
I will point out that a dislike of "Identity Politics" can easily be defined as "divisions within some set that a person wishes to be uniform". For example, a Christian may be perfectly happy with Christianity's differences with other religions but very unhappy with divisions within Christianity itself. I don't think it is necessarily hypocritical to hold that view.
To put it in terms more familiar, intersectionality is intended to unify a diverse body against a larger uniform society. In a sense, the most conservative Americans and the most radical are one in the same. Radicals seek unity against enemies within and conservatives seeks unity against enemies without. The only thing separating some radical ideas from some conservative ideas is the scoping.
---
As a sidebar, I'm really digging this train of thought. Its kind of interesting to think that the only difference between Martin Luther and Pope Urban II was their scope of the world's problems. Which makes sense. After all we're only human. We don't think that differently from one another.
The book is a bit expensive, although I'd like to have a copy.
Given the turn that modern politics has taken, I guess all that matters was this sentence:
"Today, as cultures cross-pollinate, and as technologies topple timeless ways of living, it is an open question whether the familiarity of Rome’s ancient forms will be felt much by those who live in the future, beyond the next horizon."
It's not a bad question really, with 'Rome' as a stand-in for all the well-worn bits of culture. Are 500 year old nursery rhymes still in practice and will they be? You can certainly see the change in the teaching of literature in schools. Latin or Greek are scarcely taught anymore. No doubt there are 100's of examples. 'Rome' of course is an imaginary construct that is really a later Anglo-American version of historical matters.
I doubt I'll live long enough to see the results of states that knock out the underpinnings of common culture. Perhaps they'll build their own fresh ones, perhaps it never mattered.
> I doubt I'll live long enough to see the results of states that knock out the underpinnings of common culture. Perhaps they'll build their own fresh ones, perhaps it never mattered.
I think the elites of the world are steadily converging toward a common culture, which is exactly what gave the Roman empire its identity.
Off-topic but somewhat relevant: When I was in college (ca. 2009) I worked on a project whose aim was mapping ancient Rome in 3-D so that students could explore the city as if they were living in it. We were a team of three including our supervisor who was the expert in ancient Rome and we managed to recreate about 9000 buildings including temples in points of interest. Most recently I have discovered [0] that one version of assassins Creed that was based on ancient Greece is free to download, You can't play the game but you can explore the city with its really high quality renderings/interactivity and learn through quizzes
I bought the book for my wife, who has a phd in Roman history. Its an absolutely gorgeous book containing a wealth of information. Its also incredibly dense material. Its really made for specialists, but for them its completely worth the price. Im glad people are creating works like this.
>In fact, the editor describes the Atlas as a virtual museum of the city (which has no brick-and-mortar institution devoted to its ancient topography).
Since the model was realized between 1933 and 1955 it may be somehow less accurate or missing some later discoveries/whatever, still it remains impressive, here is a short video that doesn't actually provide a sense of its size and detail:
I personally really enjoyed http://orbis.stanford.edu/ which maps between cities, even telling you how many dinarii it would have cost via various methods. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a layer with modern city names, so you have to know that, e.g., Budapest was Aquincum in Roman times.
42 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 92.9 ms ] threadIt is mysterious why it has been published on an extremist website. It's like reading a article about the life and times of Goethe in Al Quaeda Monthly.
"Basically, a source of opinion and ideas with a political agenda."
This is exactly right, I think.
y, I find extremely troubling that:
Groups can so easily attack and label other groups as extreme when they hold similar views toward the other end of the spectrum.
Accuse others of being non-accepting of their ideas while at the same time not being accepting of the other groups ideas and beliefs. And willing to destroy the other sides careers and businesses over it.
People should always be able to have their own beliefs and speak out and question things without fear of persecution.
Being accepting and open to ideas and discussion is the way we should debate and express our ideas/opinions.
If you are having to spread and enforce your ideas through fear you are probably on the wrong side.
that's pretty easy to explain: liberalism is grounded in inclusivity, and conservatism in exclusivity, which is a tension that lives in each of us. and from a young age, we are educated that sharing and caring for others is good, and being selfish is bad. we tend to equate things that are good with being correct.
note that progressivism doesn't lay on this spectrum at all, as it only advocates progress over stagnation (a different facet of conservatism).
the philosophical positions of these ideologies are different from their political implementations, of course.
Does the above re-wording make the problem with your characterization more obvious? I hope that it is obvious that both "progressive" and "conservative" philosophies are qualified by necessary and persuasive reasons to do one thing or the other. You should not change the status quo unless there is a good reason to do so, changing things carries the risk of making the current situation worse. Obviously the reverse is also true, you should always critically assess the current status quo because it may not be working as intended or has outsized negative impact on certain groups/institutions and we should change it.
I think your sentence is needlessly inflammatory, you're essentially straw manning the idea of conservative when we should always do our best to assume good faith in hackernews commenters until proven otherwise.
What you list as positive traits seem to be just rational politics. That's how it's known in my country, not as something conservative or else. So is that conservatism, being rational and pragmatic instead of... Irrational as progressives? Or is the key message of conservatism something else? The word conservative suggest a stop of change. I thought the message of conservatism would be more related to that.
It depends on the conservative. It's a broad camp. Some people who call themselves 'conservative' are really just super reactionary people who hate any kind of change while others are reasonable people who want to be careful. US politics is highly partisan right now so there is a lot of conflict that has more to do with team or tribal affiliation (republican or democrat) than with actual ideological or philosophical differences.
Traditionally, though, conservatism as a school of thought originates with the writings of Edmund Burke on the French Revolution, where he pointed out, not that social and political change were bad in themselves, but that the Revolution in his opinion, was going too far too fast, breaking with too many traditions, and was thereby sowing the seeds of its own destruction. He argued that because the French Revolutionaries were attempting to replace widely held (in France at the time) principles of political legitimacy with novel principles of the political legitimacy, that politics in France would break down into practical power politics and would result in a military dictatorship. His prediction turned out correct, though people still debate his reasoning.
So, in this sense, conservatism is the idea that traditional political institutions have value because they are traditional political institutions. Change is not inherently bad, but must be undertaken carefully because if you overtly discredit the current institutions you court instability and the new system might not be better.
What?
To some degree I suppose. Given the natural tendency in politics to produce two opposing groups the monikers always become overloaded. In eras where 'conservatives' represented the mercantile class, change went hand-in-hand with building the huge trading companies, the industrial revolution, modernization and 'rightsizing' of farming practices, etc. so it depends.
If, 20 years ago or before, you had told me that the West was practically going to civil war over the question of the value vs harm of mass third world immigration, I'd have laughed at you. The rest of the disagreements are window dressing at this point I think.
No doubt it's all very confusing to the Chinese.
And no I wouldn't call many of the articles on the AC website conservative, they seems not just brazenly political but extremist. In the American Fox news bubble they may seem middle of the road, but outside it they seem really wacky.
> The importance of classical Rome to the conscious and unconscious customs of later Western urbanism cannot be overstated. Today, as cultures cross-pollinate, and as technologies topple timeless ways of living, it is an open question whether the familiarity of Rome’s ancient forms will be felt much by those who live in the future, beyond the next horizon. [ ... ] Perhaps this time—our time—is really the end of the ancient world.
I read this as "all of the 'other' people who come into the West won't share this unifying history of the city that was the pinnacle of civilization."
Highly ironic that the article in the carousel directly above this one was "Why Identity Politics Kills Democracy."
I don't think this is a bad thing. The more conservatives are exposed to ideas and cultures that are radically at odds with contemporary conservative mores, the more likely these conservatives are to open their minds.
And make no mistake, ancient Rome as a pagan civilization is absolutely at odds with contemporary American conservatism. They can twist and shoehorn in their preferred takes as much as they'd like, but once the seed is planted the smarter conservatives start looking beyond the provincial ideas they're inclined to inherit from their immediate cultural background.
I've read most of the books, been to the conferences (including multiple CPACs), raised money for right-wing causes, and worked for right-wing organizations including some personalities that most politically savvy people would recognize.
Heck, my righ-wing connections were one of the reasons I was an early user of paypal (since one of my boddies was friends with Thiel and the Stanford Review crowd).
So, thanks, but I've already done what you've said and have found it wanting and severely lacking.
This black-and-white view of dividing everything into "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists" is extremely destructive and it's one of the main reasons that Western Civilization is in its current identity crisis. And that applies to all sides of the political spectrum.
To put it in terms more familiar, intersectionality is intended to unify a diverse body against a larger uniform society. In a sense, the most conservative Americans and the most radical are one in the same. Radicals seek unity against enemies within and conservatives seeks unity against enemies without. The only thing separating some radical ideas from some conservative ideas is the scoping.
---
As a sidebar, I'm really digging this train of thought. Its kind of interesting to think that the only difference between Martin Luther and Pope Urban II was their scope of the world's problems. Which makes sense. After all we're only human. We don't think that differently from one another.
Given the turn that modern politics has taken, I guess all that matters was this sentence:
"Today, as cultures cross-pollinate, and as technologies topple timeless ways of living, it is an open question whether the familiarity of Rome’s ancient forms will be felt much by those who live in the future, beyond the next horizon."
It's not a bad question really, with 'Rome' as a stand-in for all the well-worn bits of culture. Are 500 year old nursery rhymes still in practice and will they be? You can certainly see the change in the teaching of literature in schools. Latin or Greek are scarcely taught anymore. No doubt there are 100's of examples. 'Rome' of course is an imaginary construct that is really a later Anglo-American version of historical matters.
I doubt I'll live long enough to see the results of states that knock out the underpinnings of common culture. Perhaps they'll build their own fresh ones, perhaps it never mattered.
I think the elites of the world are steadily converging toward a common culture, which is exactly what gave the Roman empire its identity.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/10/assassins-creed-odyssey-ge...
Just in case: https://www.romereborn.org/
The actual brick and mortar museum (and model) does exist however: http://www.museociviltaromana.it/
http://www.museociviltaromana.it/it/collezioni/percorsi_per_...
Since the model was realized between 1933 and 1955 it may be somehow less accurate or missing some later discoveries/whatever, still it remains impressive, here is a short video that doesn't actually provide a sense of its size and detail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jMEN3zOQ5E
I personally really enjoyed http://orbis.stanford.edu/ which maps between cities, even telling you how many dinarii it would have cost via various methods. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a layer with modern city names, so you have to know that, e.g., Budapest was Aquincum in Roman times.
Not as clean and romantic.