#Brett Devereaux specifically

[st-just]

Pop histories of WW2 really shouldn't be allowed to refer to 'the liberal powers of Europe' without including an asterisk the size of Africa every time.

[random-thought-depository]

Yeah, like you and Perdvivly I'm not sold on absence of evidence indicating absence here.

I think one issue is Brett Devereaux is talking about something much more specific than the general phenomenon of being traumatized:

"Here are the diagnostic guidelines. Note how a diagnosis requires one intrusion symptom (involuntary and instrusive memories, dreams, flashbacks, marked physiological reactions) and persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and two negative alterations in cognition and mood associated with the trauma and two marked alterations in arousal and reactivity associated with the trauma. A lot of the examples being cited in the comments do not come anywhere near meeting that criteria. As I read and understand that, an individual who is voluntarily recounting the trauma – much less re-exposing themselves to it by going out to fight again – without significant reactions (read the guidelines – these are really very significant reactions) doesn’t fit the criteria."

I think lots of very traumatized people wouldn't have PTSD by this definition. And the ability to express some of these symptoms seems variable depending on incentive systems; if you will be shamed and punished for refusing to fight again you'll likely find some way to stay functional while being re-traumatized. I think if Brett Devereaux is right about this my main take-away would be that either the diagnostic criteria for PTSD is too narrow or we should stop colloquially using "has PTSD" as more-or-less a synonym for "is severely traumatized." Even if Brett Devereaux is completely correct about this the preindustrial past quite likely had lots of war veterans with severe war trauma. This discourse is kind of like talking about autism in history while using a definition of autism that excludes anyone who doesn't have severe speech deficits and doesn't do head-banging stims.

One thing that inclines me away from the idea that war PTSD was rare for most of history is that e.g. battered wives and abused children can get PTSD, which suggests it's a pretty common human reaction to sufficiently aversive experiences.

One obvious potentially relevant technological and institutional change is that our society produces vastly more written text than, say, the Roman Empire or Medieval Europe; I think it's plausible that we produce more written text in a day than the Roman Empire produced in a century. And since we have a lot more non-ephemeral bandwidth, we use it differently from past people for whom non-ephemeral communication bandwidth was precious; see e.g. Sam Kriss's comments on the Book of Dede Korkut. An obvious parsimonious potential explanation is that PTSD is common and obvious enough to be prominently mentioned in the written records of a society that produces a constant voluminous firehose of written text but is rare and subtle enough to not be obviously mentioned much in the written records of a society that produces much less written text.

I think there might be a non-linear tipping point effect with that. Once Uncle Bob's family are introduced to the concept of PTSD from television and magazines and so on, they are going to take a look at Uncle Bob who was never quite the same after he came back from the war and start seeing PTSD instead of just that vague "was never quite the same after he came home from the war" and are likely to start advocating for Uncle Bob as a PTSD sufferer instead of as a member of some other social category like "war veteran." Once you've got political pressure groups dedicated to advocating for the interests of PTSD sufferers, you've got people incentivized to find PTSD sufferers and encourage them to identify as PTSD sufferers, spread awareness of PTSD as a social problem, encourage empathy toward PTSD sufferers, and so on. I suspect processes similar to this are a big part of the Stephen Pinker decline of violence thing, i.e. a big part of why society started treating women, children, disabled people, and LGBT/queer people a lot better; the printing press and later physical and social technologies of mass communication made it easier for people to form political pressure groups around alleviating forms of pain they'd previously suffered in an atomized individual way.

I also suspect @perdvivly is right that the development of psychology as a discipline is a big part of why we started talking about war trauma differently. Brett Devereaux makes sure to point out that he's just saying diagnosable PTSD isn't visible in the historical record, he's not suggesting that pre-modern warriors didn't suffer fear, grief, moral injury, etc., but if you didn't come from a society with a discipline of psychology would you see PTSD symptoms as something distinct from those "normal" emotions? You have vivid intrusive memories of your traumatic experience? Well, yeah, if you experience something painful and scary you're probably going to have vivid unpleasant memories of it. You have nightmares? Well, yeah, that's a thing that sometimes happens after a painful and scary experience.

I agree with Centrally-Unplanned that if war PTSD became more common after 1800-1900 or so (and I think that's plausible, I'm just not sold on the theory that it was rare before that) it's probably because of technological changes that made the experience of battle more traumatizing for soldiers (e.g. introduction of artillery, longer battle duration, more of a sense of helplessness because a lot of the time when modern soldiers get bombed they can't personally directly strike back at the people bombing them, etc.).

@not-terezi-pyrope, I am not so sure PTSD from ancestral environment violence would have been selected against. Lots of traumatized people have kids. Really disabling PTSD would probably have been selected against, yeah, but a person can be pretty miserable without it effecting their reproductive success much.

For a bit of a left-field materialist moment, people have been mentioning recently (due to an ACX post) the fact that people in the ancient world did not have PTSD from war. I think this result is quite robust; war was a nigh-universal part of life for many people, writings about war and its aftermath were the most popular topic of writing around, and we have robust documentary evidence about every other negative impact of war that people did experience. Certainly someone in the ancient world had some equivalent, but if it was at all as common as it is now it would have been discussed, and probably even named and addressed as part of martial culture. Instead its a complete ghost.

I do feel like reaching towards "martial culture" as the explanation is a bit weird though? It plays a role, for sure, I do agree that a society that raises someone to know that killing and fighting is Good, Actually, is going to be better mental prep for said activities. But a lot of societies today, and way more within "modern war" memory, had martial cultures! Virtually all societies fighting in WW1, where PTSD was first widely observed, had very similar values to the Romans; fighting is noble & good, and it is right to kill for your country. Those values just broke down in the conflict itself. And I think this too is giving the past too much monoculture; wars like the Second Punic War or the Thirty Years War had intense levels of population mobilization, which meant they were tapping manpower from every sector of society, and a lot of those individuals or communities had their own values that were less martial (think Jewish communities in Europe, for an example). And those wars don't show much new evidence. That evidence could be lost, its the kind of evidence that would be lost ofc, but it still points in that direction.

And its weird to point to culture when technology seems like the way bigger cause? Its why we called it shell-shocked after all! War in the older days was very concrete and typically concentrated. You marched at more-or-less peace for months, saw an enemy, arrayed for battle, and fought right up against a guy in front of you. If you won it was on your own strength against dudes in eyesight swinging metal; if you lost you ran away or were dead and so don't get PTSD. I can see how this isn't a recipe for flashback triggers, it wasn't that different an environment from your day to day 99.9% of the time. Meanwhile modern war is massively loud explosions, people randomly dying next to you, and in contexts like trench warfare or counterinsurgency its constant levels of awareness for the idea of metal cracking your skull in every direction. And we do get reports of PTSD-style symptoms from earlier WW1-style conflicts like the Russo-Japanese War. I think war-based PTSD is in some part a literal noise issue, and modern war is much louder.

Both probably play a role, but I think technology is the main one. War is now a factory for breaking one's sense of place in the world, almost by design (that works better for killing the enemy), so it really isn't even that surprising.

[random-thought-depository]

Another interesting series of essays with lots of useful information for speculative fiction writers from Brett Devereaux! Copying and pasting from some comments I left about that essay over there (disclaimer that I haven’t watched GoT or read ASoIaF, I’m just going by that essay):

Really, the impression I get from this essay is Dothraki culture as written would make more sense if you crossed out every reference to horses and replaced it with some sort of fantasy animal. It would have to be something fast-breeding and fast-growing that can turn grass into animal tissue very efficiently but produces little or no secondary products (no eggs and little or no milk); maybe it’s not a mammal.

Alternately, maybe the Dothraki are primarily hunters like the North American Great Plains cultures and their staple food is some sort of fantasy super-bison with similar traits (fast-breeding, fast-growing, very efficient at turning grass into animal tissue), hence the Dothraki can have much bigger populations than IRL horse nomad bison-hunting cultures? Rationalization: this hypothetical super-bison unfortunately tastes like crap, somebody like Danaerys basically never eats it because the immediate household of a powerful leader would be high-status enough to get the good stuff for every meal, and in Dothraki cuisine the good stuff is mostly horse and horse products supplemented with the occasional tastier wild game. The horse meat heavy diet is generally easier to rationalize if you assume Danaerys’s perspective is biased by mostly interacting with rich people who have more meat in their diet than the average Dothraki.

Of course, this is all being bending over backwards to be charitable to the source material, trying to come up with interpretations that might salvage it.

Oh, another thought I had…

I’m thinking of James C. Scott here, specifically their points about how “barbarians” are often not primordial cultures that progress passed by but actually descendants of “civilized” people who fled from the taxation, oppression, etc. of states…

Maybe the Dothraki would make more sense if they’re actually recent adopters of the steppe nomad lifestyle and were sedentary farmers a few generations ago, maybe a couple of centuries ago tops? Their culture isn’t masterfully adapted to the steppe, their adaptation to their new lifestyle is still very much a work in progress. That might explain things like their dwellings being not very good. Perhaps some of the “Fremen mirage” features of their culture could then make sense in a kind of meta way; their culture isn’t so much “barbarian nomad” culture as a “civilized” person’s attempt at “barbarian nomad” culture; in a sense they’re less like Mongols and more like ISIL. Stuff like the sheep-killing might fit with that; it’s people who still don’t quite grok what being a pastoral nomad means doing something stupid because they think it will make them look badass. Aren’t the Iron Islanders supposed to be kind of like that, not so much Vikings as reactionaries violently LARPing at being Vikings? So I guess it would kind of fit.

[lifeattomsdiner]

22 in 22

tagged by @st-just

Rules! Choose 22 books you want to read or goals you want to achieve in  2022. That’s it! It can be a mix of books and goals, or 22 books, or 22 goals…. it’s up to you. Then tag some friends to play along I will not be doing that part on account of not wanting to.

General goals:

1. Get some of my writing published (okay, not entirely in my control, but i’m actively working on it and i’ve got 11 more months to keep bombarding publishers with submissions)

2. Build a short story portfolio... whatever that means, exactly.  Arguably already completed given that i’ve got about seven short stories sitting around in states between “fully drafted” and “actively submitted for publication” but i could always write more, you know?

3. Make an author’s website--currently kinda on hold pending Goal 1 given that it feels weird to make one without any publication credits to list

4. Get some work done--ambitiously, as much as a full draft--for one of my novella/novel-length projects

5. Maintain my pace from last year of reading at least one book a month (...it’s going to have to be more than that given my reading list below, isn’t it)

6. Read more nonfiction books than I did last year (should be easy, as Storygraph says that number was, uh, zero)

Specific books (aided by my extremely generous TBR list):

7. The War That Ended Peace (currently reading!), part of my nonfiction kick for which I blame @st-just

8. Seeing Like A State, the other major part of my nonfiction kick which i think came from Brett Devereaux over at ACOUP

9. Anti-Story: An Anthology of Experimental Fiction, thanks to Jeff Vandermeer’s creative writing book Wonderbook (specifically the chapter in which he identifies the elements that almost all stories have, and then identifies this anthology as a source of examples for stories that don’t)

10. The Dispossessed, because i love me some Le Guin and also i lowkey want to pilfer parts of the Hainish Cycle for a hypothetical future Lancer campaign

11. Lord of Light, s/o to certain individuals from the Locked Tomb discord for convincing me that this books is very much My Shit

12. Nona the Ninth, bc you’d better believe i’m nabbing a copy on day one

13. A Desolation Called Peace, one week until it comes out in paperback, yes i’m counting

14-16. The Southern Reach Trilogy, because reading Vandermeer’s aforementioned creative writing book has gotten me interested in, well, his creative writing (and i was lucky enough to happen across the whole trilogy at a used bookstore)

17. Children of Time, again you can blame @st-just for this one, also i hear there’s a sequel out nowadays

18. The Light Brigade, which i actually started reading in 2021, and while it was very engaging i had just come off of Baru Cormorant and needed a break from the heavy stuff

19. One Last Stop, because in addition to nonfiction i’m trying to vary my fiction diet at least a little (which, hey, i read The City & The City last year so that’s a start)

20. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Collected Stories; i’ve never read anything of the guy’s before but he was referenced in Kentucky Route Zero so i really want to see what his deal is

21. Stories of Your Life (and others), because Arrival was really good so i wanna check out the original story and Ted Chiang’s other stuff

22. Monstress, which okay i swear i don’t get all of my recs from @st-just, they’re just the person on here who talks about what they’re reading the most.  anyway i’ve read two volumes out of... six? so far, maybe finish that out by the end of the year

So yeah like i said i’m not gonna go and pick out people to tag, consider yourself invited to participate if you want to

[laurelnose]

@briannysey: So, I did leave out some context here — my impression of Andor is that it is, like, Star Wars but the good take on how imperialism works, but we were not actually talking about What If Star Wars But Good, or even specifically about accountant protagonists, we were talking economic SFF. SFF which is concerned with the material infrastructure that keeps the whole thing rolling. Interlude: The Llosydanes. Sixteen Ways To Defend A Walled City. Brett Devereaux. Fuck, even Ancillary Sword. this does not seem to be what Andor is about at all! though maybe I am wrong, Andor is a very minimal part of my fandom osmosis bubble.

I was not aware Dickinson had done anything SW-related besides including Kylo in the extremely good and funny Ask Baru column they wrote, though, I will go look for that!

Coworker: Does the Empire provide any economic benefit to anyone ever? Like, what does the Empire export?

Boss: They should do, like, Baru Cormorant but for Star Wars.

Me: What? You want—idk, Palpatine’s treasonous gay accountant?

Him: Yes!

Me: I—no, yeah, I would probably read that.

[squareallworthy]

Brett Devereaux arguing that enrollment in undergraduate humanities courses is increasing

Did he argue that? In a recent blog post, he said

the academic job market in nearly every field in the humanities is so full of qualified candidates for whom there are too few jobs that the job search has become almost entirely random (this mostly has to do with a collapse of hiring, not a surge in the production of PhDs; note that hiring has collapsed even as enrollments have risen.

and the context makes is seem like he's talking about humanities enrollment specifically, but his link goes to this chart

which is for overall enrollment, not just the humanities. And it shows that enrollment rose a little in 2019, but is still far below the peak in 2010. Everything from 2020 onward is projected, and since a projection from 2019 wouldn't include the effects of COVID-19, we shouldn't place any faith in it.

Going from this data, "hiring has collapsed even as enrollments have risen" is a strange way to describe the situation. "Hiring has collapsed while enrollment shrank by more than 6% in the teens" would be more accurate.

Unless maybe he's talking about the 2008 to 2010 period in particular, in which case saying "enrollments have risen" insead of "enrollments rose ten years ago" is a bit strange.

Brett Devereaux arguing that enrollment in undergraduate humanities courses is increasing, and teaching humanities is often cheaper than teaching STEM courses (much less equipment required!), and so by rights the demand for academic jobs in the humanities should be increasing–except for policies by universities (in the case of public ones, often directed by governments) toward deliberately reducing resources for humanities departments and directing more resources to student amenities over other things.

It’s gonna be real embarassing if in fifty years we functionally have no one qualified to teach the humanities, especially ancient history and medieval literature and anything else that requires mastery of dead languages, because we have no one left who is actually trained in the subject. Much like building a Saturn V, that’s not expertise society passively retains without effort. If you stop going to the moon, you have to re-engineer the technology to do so; if you stop studying history, you are going to forget it.

This thought was kind of the primary inspiration for Reordberend, though in the end I don’t think I succeeded in communicating it very well. There are large fields of knowledge that, especially to those of us with a forward-looking frame of mind, who are excited or worried about the Future and all its myriad possibilities, that do not seem obviously or immediately useful. Like a high-school student made to study algebra, we wonder when we could ever possibly use it (as if the only utility a thing has is that which is immediately obvious; as if there is any such thing as knowledge which is useless!). But we neglect such fields of knowledge at our peril: the person who really knows nothing of science or astronomy, who doesn’t know where rain comes from or that the Earth orbits the Sun, or what causes magnetism or the tides, has no idea how narrow their understanding of the world is. How could they? It’s complete enough for them. Likewise it seems to me the society that lets the humanities atrophy will not feel like it has lost much–”some pampered academics have had to get real jobs,” it might say to itself–but only because it has lost that knowledge so completely.

[bayesic-bitch]

I’d have to dig up the reference, but in The Logic of Political Survival, the author points out that sometimes autocrats will pay their key supporters less than they could and raise the tax rate past the revenue-maximizing value, specifically to prevent the emergence of rivals that would be in a position to challenge them. If antebellum slave-driving methods were not profit maximizing, it could be for a similar reason -- slave owners being willing to take a reduction in profit to discourage enslaved people from organizing and rebelling, similar to what Brett Devereaux argues happened in Sparta. You could see chattel slavery as basically being one part older historical slavery and one part police state, with the existence of the police state part being necessary to compensate for the additional risk of rebellion that comes from applying much greater pressure to produce than other forms of slavery

thought too hard about chattel slavery for a sec. the thing that gets me is like....how LONG it lasted. i feel like im used to thinking about atrocities, but its easy to think of them as a sort of temporary aberration. like, the holocaust was horrific but it lasted less than 10 years, and it was driven by a particular guy, you can sort of mentally quarantine it as a temporary madness. but chattel slavery was hundreds of years of people being far crueler than even benefited them because of, idk, the power of ideology

[tanadrin]

Specifically, this post was originally a follow-on to Brett Devereaux's series on the depiction of the Dothraki in Martin's work, based on a claim he specifically made about the historical basis of their depiction: that they were explicitly based on the Shoshone and Mongols, and whether that claim held up at all w/r/t how those cultures historically operated in their respective environments; as Devereaux showed pretty exhaustively, the depiction of the Dothraki has basically nothing to do with the reality; that in fact it is perilously close to (if not outright) a racist stereotype; and that Martin, whatever his other talents, actually evinces a very poor understanding of history, something that Tolkien--for all that he shows less interest in matters like tax policy--does not, especially when you look at Tolkien's excellent grasp of details that in the grand scheme of things might prove incidental to the themes he's writing on, but which are important to the depiction of, e.g., the war between Saruman and Rohan in the Two Towers.

Martin only gets dragged for ahistoricity (at least, in my book) when he claims a degree of authority about history, or that certain aspects of history inform his work. The Dothraki would be unremarkable as a fantasy culture within the broader context of fantasy except that Martin claims they're based on named real-world examples--and the different approach he and Tolkien take to their sources of inspiration would be irrelevant if he didn't seem to feel the need to drag Tolkien (or ignore the fact that Tolkien actually does address all of the things alluded to in that quote).

it is very easy to avoid getting dragged over and over again by history bloggers for the quality of your fantasy novels: don’t repeatedly emphasize how ~aCcuRaTe~ they are! Accuracy means nothing in fantasy, it’s a totally useless term, and people will forgive almost any believability-stretching worldbreaking sin if you write well and tell an engaging story–unless you try to stake your reputation as a fantasy writer on gritty realism and being a more historically attentive worldbuilder than that Tolkien guy, who only *checks notes* had a PhD in medieval literature and spent his entire life thinking, writing, and teaching about medieval language and culture.

[empre55-alexandra]

There are Histiry docs and Historians that call some of the powers in Europe "liberal"? That's hilarious, and also ridiculous lol.

Thankfully, I only watch Indy Neidell's and Timeghost's WW2 series on YouTube.

Pop histories of WW2 really shouldn't be allowed to refer to 'the liberal powers of Europe' without including an asterisk the size of Africa every time.