Links for March, 2025

Rome, Sorcery, Academic Dissent, Bread Riot Musical, Theodicy

Welcome, dear reader, to my monthly collection of links to interesting items that don’t merit their own separate posts. And as always, consider becoming a free subscriber to keep up with my latest posts or a paid subscriber for full access to the archives and my eternal gratitude for the support.

Romulus’s Cesspit

Pondering the fate of the American republic led me to Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic. The book covers the conflict between the late republic’s two main political forces: the optimates and the populares. One is an aristocratic oligarchy too obsessed with playing status games to solve pressing problems, the other is a series of populist demagogues harnessing nonelite grievances to fuel their own crazy ambitions. Duncan’s narrative starts with the crusading tribune Tiberius Gracchus and ends with the bloody purges of the dictator Sulla. The title of the book refers to the fact that this great storm is backstory to a more famous one — the civil war involving Julius Caesar.

Some of the political dynamics seem horrifyingly familiar, with factions increasingly breaking norms and precedents in ratchet toward greater and greater extremism, each side using the other’s excesses as justification for its own.

But one difference I’m struck by is how personally violent ancient elites were: It was the senators led by a top religious official who lynched Tiberius Gracchus, clubbing him and his friends to death with broken bench legs. Whatever troubles our current leaders might unleash, it’s hard to picture them getting their hands dirty in this way.

I continued the Roman kick by revisiting Bryan Ward-Perkin’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, which I first read six or seven years ago. The book is meant to be a corrective to overly revisionist views that the end of the Western empire wasn’t any kind of “fall” but just a continuous social transformation.

True, depending on where and when we’re talking about, living under a Gothic king might not have been much worse a deal than living under the Empire. But for much of the Roman world there was indeed a decline in material prosperity and physical security. Accounts of besieged towns, raped nuns, and plundered caravans remind us that the Germanic invasions were quite often experienced as such, and not merely as migration and assimilation. And archaeological evidence illustrates how the collapse of extensive trade networks and the economies of scale they allowed led to widespread decline in material standards of living.

On local variation in the experience, see Patrick Wyman’s excellent Fall of Rome Podcast.

Cicero denounces Cataline before the Senate.

Back to Caesar’s day: In his series “Death Throes of the Republic,” Dan Carlin notes that one fascinating thing about the period is that there are enough surviving sources that the major players come across as three-dimensional personalities, despite being over two millennia removed from us. That’s especially so with the orator Cicero, for whom we have not only many speeches but even personal correspondences. Anthony Everitt’s Cicero: His Life and Times is my current drive-time audiobook and gives a detailed window into the nature and world of a man long gone.

Sidenotes:

I tend to picture the figures of the time based on surviving statues of them, but I can’t help but picture Cicero as actor David Bamber from the HBO series Rome.

I was somewhat shocked at how much Everitt’s description of Cicero’s contemporary, Cato the Younger, reminded me of sociologist Donald Black. Now I can’t help but picture the Roman Senate as a faculty meeting writ large. This analogy might be useful for understanding both.

The Roman elite were cosmopolitans who seem very modern in some ways, but ancient in others. I’ve already mentioned their propensity for violence. Another thing that stands out is their superstition, with constant fretting over signs and portents. And Everitt notes that while they looked down on human sacrifice among their less civilized neighbors, they weren’t necessarily above doing it themselves when things got rough. Which is a good segue to:

Sorcery and Witchcraft

My sociology of violence course at WVU has a short section on ritualistic violence, where I cover things like hazing, rites of passage, and human sacrifice. While the last of these seems like a relic of the ancient world, it is very much alive and well in modern times. This news clip discusses the practice of child sacrifice in Uganda, and includes a secretly filmed meeting with a sorcerer who promises to procure and kill a child to help with the undercover reporter’s supposed business venture. And here’s a longer documentary filmed a few years later.

The problem is ongoing: For instance, a self-proclaimed healer in the Ugandan capital Kampala is now being charged with human sacrifice after 24 human skulls were discovered in his home. The article notes that the month before, another cache of 17 skulls was discovered at a shrine.

In another part of the country, four people were recently arrested for the killing of a four-year-old girl, allegedly for a ritual sacrifice.

An article in the International Criminal Justice Review gives an overview of ritual child homicide in Uganda and other African countries, noting that killers are after the blood, genitals, or other parts of their victims, and believe that they have more supernatural potency if taken while the victim is still alive.

Though it has a ritual aspect, I would classify these killings as primarily predatory, with the violence being a matter of economic gain through supernatural means. The witchdoctors themselves are running a business that requires human resources so they can bestow supernatural blessings on their clients, who usually want financial success as well.

Just as sorcery is alive and well in many parts of Africa, so too are witchcraft accusations. As Donald Black discusses in his book Moral Time, there are two major patterns of witchcraft accusation.

One pattern happens when accusations flow downwardly and outwardly toward socially marginal members of the community, such as widows, spinsters, and orphans. They’re often provoked by some downward mobility on the part of more integrated individuals, with illnesses or crop failures being blamed on the witch.

The other pattern involves accusations directed upwardly, at someone guilty of conspicuous success. It tends to be provoked by someone rapidly rising above his fellows, with his newfound prosperity being blamed on him using witchcraft to get ahead at their expense.

A new article in Aporia discusses the commonality of witchcraft beliefs in contemporary Africa, and argues that they are powerful enough to retard economic development. The pattern of accusing those who do too well disincentivizes economic success, while the pattern of accusing the socially marginal erodes social trust and cooperation. And both, the argument goes, can facilitate corruption and authoritarianism.

Dissent in Academia

Academia is reeling from overspending, shrinking youth cohorts, and declining trust from those who see many academic disciplines as politicized beyond repair. Regarding the latter: The problems of political homogeneity, groupthink, and intolerance are the subject of this piece by Arnoldo Cantu in the Journal of Teaching and Social Work: “A Case for Intellectual Humility, Tolerance, and Humanism: Perspectives from an Ethnically ‘Minoritized’ Graduate Student.” Excerpt:

Some additional examples of disturbing and disheartening experiences: I can recall sitting in on a curriculum meeting observing an ardent discussion between faculty about how certain core classes should, instead, be taught in-house (as opposed to students taking them in other departments across the university) because other disciplines would not be able to “de-center whiteness” as effectively. I am not sure what came of that discussion, but I felt a pause for concern of what seemed like wanting to keep social work students within the ideological echo chamber to, arguably, indoctrinate them on certain flavors of truth and social justice.

….I also remember someone (I can’t recall if this was from a student or the professor) making a comment out loud of “Ew, white people” in a social work class. I do remember, however, that the comment was not addressed – the professor having gleefully gone along with it with a grin.

Over at the Utterly Moderate Podcast, Laurence Eppard, Bradley Campbell, Jukka Savolainen, and Jacob Mackey discuss options for “Improving American Sociology.” The conversation revolves around the field’s low and declining reputation as a scientific endeavor rather than a branch of left-wing activism, and whether those of us who take sociology seriously as a discipline can reverse this.

Campbell emphasizes that doing so is a matter of self-preservation in an era where Republican administrations at the state and national level are coming to view the academy in general and sociology in particular as taxpayer funded political opposition. And it’s hard to argue the field isn’t a branch of the political opposition when our professional organizations make utopian politics and “liberatory praxis” the themes of their annual meetings or put anti-Republican political cartoons in their meeting programs. At the department level you have faculty who will explicitly argue that having a “critical” perspective is necessary for a hire, but being a “conservative” (including in their eyes mainstream liberals and centrists) is a professional disqualification.

You’d think the self-preservation argument would have an impact even on those who don’t care about science as vocation, but I suspect the sense of entitlement among many of them is past the point of delusion.

FYI, I’m currently writing up the results of a survey sponsored by Heterodox Academy on how political conflict and bias shapes the experiences of graduate students even in the hard sciences.

Enjoy the Gumbo

I can’t always group these things into a theme, so the rest is a miscellany:

Here’s a piece in Sociological Inquiry from Marian Borg and Eaven Holder on “Hate Crime as Social Control: Integrating Black's Theories of Conflict Management and Social Time.”

At The Intrinsic Perspective, Erik Hoel says “Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse.” The idea is that easy creation of art and literature by AI will drain the meaning out of the human models they’re trained on:

While ChatGPT can’t pull off a perfect Miyazaki copy, it doesn’t really matter. The semantic apocalypse doesn’t require AI art to be exactly as good as the best human art. You just need to flood people with close-enough creations such that the originals feel less meaningful.

Shoutout to subscriber Drea and her call for research:

“Erik’s theory produces falsifiable hypotheses. Could some People Doing Science craft a longitudinal study of the impact of Ghibli slop on people's experience of real Ghibli?”

I’m more interested in business now that my wife runs one of her own, and my future in academia seems much less certain than before. Thus I took special notice of Will Storr’s “The 4 Secrets of Storytelling for Business.”

One of my honor’s students last year made a sock-puppet musical on the Richmond Bread Riot of 1863: “We want bread or blood!” Now that’s edutainment.

Here’s a short film, in the style of an old documentary using found footage, on Godzilla and related kaiju.

I’m in love with this medieval “bardcore” version of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

At Manifold, Stephen Hsu discusses the myths and realities of modern China and its rise on the world stage. I think a lot of Americans suffer from a culture lag regarding their perceptions of the relative military, technological, and industrial power of the US and China. It reminds me of when older friends and colleagues assume that Koreans must closely follow the movies and television of America, rather than being more oriented toward their own massive and high-quality entertainment industry.

Colleague: “Oh, you must be so excited that Parasite won an academy award!”

My Korean Wife: “It did? I don’t really know anything about those.”

Growing up Pentacostal/Baptist, I knew something of the Biblical story of Job, but never really understood it. My sense then was it was another test of a man, like God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son. Only later did I realize it was primarily about theodicy, intentionally presenting a hard case where God appears to be cruel for reasons that make little sense to us and less to Job. This video discussion by Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowiz [link corrected 3/29] helps make sense of it, with a nice parable or two thrown in.

Thank you for reading!