You have this notion of "power" as the social good to be distribute. And you mean power in the restricted sense of the power to dominate (as opposed to the power to submit I guess) — apokrisis

No I don't mean this at all.

Power is not a dirty word. Power is important.

An Anarchist FAQ is a good resource for thinking about hierarchy in the sense I've said.

Anarchists care about power more than liberals -- though less than warlords, who want it all for themselves (in a hierarchy, one might say): anarchy is not opposed to power at all as much as wants it to be directed according to what human beings want, rather than a class of deciders.

Are you too disinterested to try to say what you mean in your own words? Or even cut and paste from your source?

I might as well point to the internet and say my answer lies there. You make zero effort.

I can wait until I have more if you'd like. I was trying to follow an old rule of mine wherein if I post to one person I'll post to everyone else by the end of the day.

I waited to respond to you last because I've been reading over your posts and thinking a lot, not out of disinterest.

To say that slaves are essential different from masters due to the kind of creature they are. One could justify saying "this person has a slavish soul" by saying "this person has bad habits that could change", which would be a psychological rather than a biological category. But Aristotle justifies it by tying it to their essence as creatures: their whole teleology is to be bound to a master who directs them in physical labor. — Moliere

Aristotle recognizes that the differences between the master and slave are generated by contingent factors. They are not somehow predetermined or immutable or necessary.

I'm guessing you're bound to a democratic/egalitarian argument where everyone is supposed to be equal, and any empirical inequalities must therefore be minor and superficial. But practically speaking this is a very difficult position to maintain, both because the empirical observations do not support it, and because when the democratic citizen votes they are required to discern good leaders from bad leaders. If there is no essential difference between one candidate and another, then why vote at all? And is it realistic to deny that there are at least two classes of adults: those who could make good leaders and those who could not?

I think what most trips up the modern democratic mind is that Aristotle holds that the natural slave prefers to be ruled by a natural master, in much the same way that the natural infantryman prefers to be ruled by a natural general. We have a notion that there are no natural slaves and that everyone is therefore fit to rule, and the consequences of this are nigh-comical. In that case, maybe the U.S. has received the presidential candidates it deserves.

For Aristotle the doctrine is eminently practical, and so to ignore the pragmatic reality on the ground while appealing to purely theoretical notions of "biological essences" is beside the point. What would a world with no natural slaves actually look like, and do we live in that world or not?

Well here again is your starter from your own source…

We have seen that anarchists abhor authoritarianism. But if one is an anti-authoritarian, one must oppose all hierarchical institutions, since they embody the principle of authority. For, as Emma Goldman argued, “it is not only government in the sense of the state which is destructive of every individual value and quality. It is the whole complex authority and institutional domination which strangles life. It is the superstition, myth, pretence, evasions, and subservience which support authority and institutional domination.” [Red Emma Speaks, p. 435] This means that “there is and will always be a need to discover and overcome structures of hierarchy, authority and domination and constraints on freedom: slavery, wage-slavery [i.e. capitalism], racism, sexism, authoritarian schools, etc.” [Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, p. 364]

Thus the consistent anarchist must oppose hierarchical relationships as well as the state. Whether economic, social or political, to be an anarchist means to oppose hierarchy. The argument for this (if anybody needs one) is as follows:

“All authoritarian institutions are organised as pyramids: the state, the private or public corporation, the army, the police, the church, the university, the hospital: they are all pyramidal structures with a small group of decision-makers at the top and a broad base of people whose decisions are made for them at the bottom. Anarchism does not demand the changing of labels on the layers, it doesn’t want different people on top, it wants us to clamber out from underneath.” [Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action, p. 22]
Hierarchies “share a common feature: they are organised systems of command and obedience” and so anarchists seek “to eliminate hierarchy per se, not simply replace one form of hierarchy with another.”

Etc, etc….

I will briefly note again why this is silly. Hierarchy theory in the systems science tradition is at pains to show how constraints are the reason there can even be freedoms.

Until you understand why this is, you just can’t understand what it means to be a self-organising natural system. You are stuck in some mechanical paradigm and not talking about nature as we find it in the real world.

Here is how I explained that in a similar thread using the reality of organising an actual army...

That's how hierarchy theory works. It is about the dialectical interaction between parts and wholes. And the two have to complement each other for the structure to persist.

So the whole - the global scale of the system - has to provide the constraints that shapes the right kind of parts. And the parts have to have the right kind of shape to meet the goals of the whole. The parts, in all their freedom, have to be acting in ways that re-construct that whole, in other words.

Think about an army. You need soldiers that act like soldiers and generals that act like generals.

That is the soldiers need to be good at acting on the ground in ways that produce a functional army. They must have the right habits to deal with the here and now of any combat situation.

Then the generals in their field headquarters need to be good at acting in ways that also produce a functional army. They must make the broad command decisions that shape the local combat situations as they will likely pop up during battle.

The hierarchical organisation works because it has a global view which gives shape to the local action. And the local action has enough of a view - enough of its own creative freedom - that on average it produces the kind of result which keeps the army rolling.

The notion of a hierarchy has gathered a lot of negative connotations. No one wants to get told what to do. No one wants to be on the bottom rung of anything.

But if you want a system that is intelligently adaptive, then it needs to have this kind of organisation. It needs to be able to apply its intelligence over multiple scales of being, multiple spatiotemporal horizons of action.

If the balance between the local and global scales are right, then the right outcomes will result. The local scale will continue to construct the whole, and the whole will continue to give coherent form its own parts. The system will survive and function, locked into a dynamic of mutual benefit.

And part of the dynamic is that there is internal mobility. Privates can get made generals. Generals can get busted to privates.

Or at least this is part of the democratic ideal we instinctively understand as being a smart way to operate.

Then further...

An army has to meet its purpose. So there is a Darwinian selection principle that produces the constraints which an army - as a human institution with regulations, history, a social memory - embodies.

The army exists as an idea in the minds of all its participants. So that makes it seem like an idealist fiction.

And yet every private quickly runs into the reality of the army way in a brute and direct fashion if they so much as twitch a nervous smile or leave a speck of dirt on their boots.

The mechanism that generates the constraints is the system as a whole in action over its long-run existence. Or what Salthe would call its cogent moment scale.

Constraint is the great weight of historical accident that builds in Darwinian fashion and acts on every local degree of freedom within a system. It represents the past in terms of what it intends to be its own future.

And then to evolve - being a natural system - it must also be slowly changed by its experiences. So even in armies, the system of constraint gets modified to make it better adapted to its current environmental challenges.

One day you might find women, as well as men, being trained to be unthinking killing machines.

So general evolutionary principles generate the constraints. And at the simplest level, the Darwinian competition is to just exist as a stably persisting process or functional structure.

And more generally...

A telltale fact from hierarchy theory is how wholes act to simplify their parts. Wholes refine their components so as to make themselves ... even more easy to construct.

Take a human level example of an army. For an army to make itself constructible, it must take large numbers of young men and simplify their natures accordingly. It must turn people with many degrees of freedom (any variety of personal social histories) into simpler and more uniform components.

So wholes are more than just the sum of their parts ... in that wholes shape those parts to serve their higher order purposes. Wholes aren't accidental in nature. They produce their own raw materials by simplifying the messy world to a collection of parts with no choice but to construct the whole in question.

Even the Cosmos had to impose simplification on its parts so as to exist. To expand and cool, it needed particles to radiate and absorb. It need a pattern of events that would let a thermal unwinding happen.

That is why you get order out of chaos. Reality needs to form dissipative structure that has the organisation to turn a sloppy directionless mess into an efficient entropic gradient.

Turn a full soda bottle of water upside down and it glugs inefficiently until a vortex forms and the bottle can suddenly drain fast and efficient.

Wholes make their parts by reducing degrees of freedom and creating components with little choice but to eternally re-construct that which is their causal master.

Not to mention...

The systems view is a triadic logic in which you have a dichotomy or symmetry-breaking, and then the hierarchy or triadic state of organisation that fixes a stable relation between those two complementary poles of being.

So very simplistically, a rabble of warriors make a fighting mob. Then the organised thing of an army can develop as the mob starts to divide into leaders and followers. You get the emergence of the dichotomy of infantry and general. Each complements the other in that the infantry acts in the immediacy of the now - the best choices in the heat of battle. The general then acts with the long term view.

This local~global hierarchical division brings stability and coherence. We can speak of the army as an organism, and even an organ system as it develops specialised branches like a reconnaissance force, logistics, artillery.

You even get a thermodynamic divide. The soldiers are the entropy - the grunt energy. The general is the information - the abstract information.

Or alternatively...

Constraints would have to arise immanently from the world they also limit. So the constraints are what get constructed.

The obvious analogy is that armies need to be composed of soldiers to really exist. So armies recruit young people (those with the most degrees of behavioural freedom or plasticity) and mould them to fit. As a set up, the army exists because it has narrowed human variety to produce some interchangeable set of near identical military parts.

And then all those soldiers, acting together in ways that manifest their highly specific military properties, reconstruct the very system that made them. Good soldiers become drill sergeants, captains and generals. Good soldiers take their soldierly habits even back into civilian life. So soldiering perpetuates soldiering.

Thus there is a synergy of the local and global in which a limitation of variety creates the components that are then able to self assemble into systems that keep churning out said components.

Strong reductionism of course just presume components exist already formed. Thus anything they collectively construct is an accident without purpose. However a holist or systems view says components - the kind of regularity that gives us the many similar parts that could have a collective behaviour - must be deliberately shaped.

Contingency has to be limited for there to be these parts. So already their existence is dependent on the reality of some global reason for being, and even an idea of the form of the part that would be necessary to the job in mind.

Continuing the theme....

A key part of the holist position is that the top down causality is something real because it shapes the parts.

So where does sand get its shape so that it might compose a beach? How does it get roundish, smoothed and graded by size? What higher constraints lead to the formation of every particle of sand.

Holism stresses the hierarchical fact that parts are made to fit the whole via development, an approach to a common limit. Parts become in fact parts as their initial irregularity or degrees of freedom are regulated so that they become as identical as matters in the construction of the whole.

An army needs to take raw recruits and turn them into soldiers. Young men with irregular natures must be regularised so they can function as parts of a fighting machine. And once a soldier, always a soldier.

It is this fact about holism - the parts themselves get developed by the whole - that make supervenience and determinism bunk in a systems logic context. Or rather, the parts can be deterministic only to the degree the whole has an interest or concern in making them that.

Grains of sand are still irregular rather than exact spheres. They only need to be roughly spherical and reasonably small to meet the Second Law's goal of maximising erosion. To produce perfectly round and perfectly matched grains would require self-defeating care.

Same with soldiers. They only need to approach an acceptable average.

So because the parts must be shaped to fit, perfect determinism is an ideal and in fact there always remains an irreducible uncertainty or indeterminism at the local scale on which any system is being composed.

This has turned out to be true even of fundamental physics of course. The indeterminism of the quantum is irreducible. And that means everything that wants to build itself up from that ground can't be clockwork determinism. It can only be clockwork on average.

And that means everything that wants to build itself up from that ground can't be clockwork determinism.

And there freedom lies.

But that was because economics lacked the larger constraint of a historical perspective on social order. — apokrisis

Ah, so pure form is not enough on its own, and that pesky unmathematical history turns out to be essential.

Economics too is being pulled into this new cross-disciplinary exercise of applying the lens of dissipative structure to an understanding of why our historical arc of development has been what it is. — apokrisis

What do historians say about the usefulness of that lens in understanding a historical arc?

Hierarchy theory in the systems science tradition is at pains to show how constraints are the reason there can even be freedoms. — apokrisis

Well, that's very kind of it. But it's not very meaningful in the context of water or electricity systems. Both do whatever they do. They are not constrained or free (except metaphorically).

It is about the dialectical interaction between parts and wholes. And the two have to complement each other for the structure to persist.

Yes, some philosophers are very keen on parts and wholes and dialectical relationships. But everything depends on what kind of part and what kind of whole. The relationships between the two are different in different contexts. For example, what are the parts of a rainbow? Of a number, say 3? Dialectical relationships in causal contexts are simply causal loops, but in Hegelian philosophy quasi-logical relatioships and in human beings conversations.

So wholes are more than just the sum of their parts ... in that wholes shape those parts to serve their higher order purposes. Wholes aren't accidental in nature. They produce their own raw materials by simplifying the messy world to a collection of parts with no choice but to construct the whole in question.

Well, it's perfectly true that if you lay out all the parts of a car on a work-bench, you don't have a car. If you have to add something, you didn't lay out all the parts. If you don't, what more do you add? Hint - what do you mean by "more" and what do you mean by "sum"?
I don't see many wholes about producing things or simplifying things? So where does all that activity take place? To put it another way, Before the whole is produced, it cannot create its parts (because it doesn't exist). So the whole cannot produce it's own parts.

So where does sand get its shape so that it might compose a beach? How does it get roundish, smoothed and graded by size? What higher constraints lead to the formation of every particle of sand.

Well, a beach is produced because the weather and the water erode rock into separate pieces, which then are eroded into small and smaller pieces (the action of wind and weather now includes causing them to physically erode each other) and are eventually collected together to form a beach, which is shaped mainly by the water in the adjacent lake or sea. What is "higher" about weather and water? There's no "higher" constraint. A school of sardines is formed in different ways, and a glacier in what that are different again. No "higher" constraint is involve. You are confusing the process by which human beings (and some animals) make things with the inanimate processes that make inanimate things. You seem determined to see hierarchies in everything, rather than considering whether each thing has a hierarchical structure or not.

An army has to meet its purpose. So there is a Darwinian selection principle that produces the constraints which an army - as a human institution with regulations, history, a social memory - embodies.

Yes. There are circumstances when it makes sense for us to form a hierarchical social structure. Closely co-ordinated action and fast decision-making are obvious factors. An army needs its hierarchy in order to fulfil its purposes. What are the purposes of societies in general? There are different societies that exist for different purposes, and they will adopt the structure that suits their purpose; that may or may not require a hierarchical structure. Let's say that the purpose of Society is to provide "life, liberty and the opportunity to purse happiness". The key point is that it exists for the benefit of its members - (if it does not, then it is tyrannical, unless the members have volunteered and can leave - neither of which is true of a state). So who is in charge? The top of the hierarchy? Or the bottom?

[ It is hard to reply given you say nothing about your expertise or interests here. But if you want an example of what a mathematical and systems approach to history looks like, Peter Turchin’s group is a good example. He was an ecologist turned historian.

This is the recent summary paper of their work - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn3517

Here, we have proposed a general approach for studying historical processes that combines the use of nonlinear dynamical systems, large-scale historical datasets, and a systematic statistical testing of alternative causal hypotheses. Our approach has allowed us to compare quantitatively all major theoretical approaches to the evolution of human social complexity within a single framework and to lay the ground for more nuanced and precise theories to be rigorously tested in the future.

Our analysis confirms that increasing agricultural productivity is necessary but not sufficient to explain the growth in social complexity. Furthermore, analysis indicates that this increase was not driven by factors associated with either functionalist or internal conflict theories. Instead, external (interpolity) conflict and key technical innovations associated with increasing warfare intensity appear to be the primary drivers of state growth, along with the growing population and resource base provided by increasing agricultural productivity.

Our analyses help clarify why a mechanistic model that privileges warfare and military revolutions (63) and agriculture (64) has offered compelling, if provisional, interpretations for what drove the rise, spread, and equilibrium levels of social complexity in Afro-Eurasia in the ancient and medieval periods, as well as worldwide during the early modern period.

Although factors such as infrastructure provision, market and monetary exchange, and ideological developments do not appear to play a significant causal role in propelling subsequent advances in social scale, hierarchical complexity, or governance sophistication, they likely are integral elements that support and maintain the results of that growth, which would account for the relationship observed between these factors in previous scholarship.

I would have thought you could work out my interests by observing what I take in interest in. Equally, I would have thought that you could work out my expertise by reading what I say. Actually, my main interest is philosophy, which involves being interested in everything and having limited expertise in anything. Like many philosophers, I don't like being categorized.

This is much more interesting that hierarchy theory. The results are not very surprising, which leads me to give them considerable credence. Three comments:-
1. Statistics are of great value in suggesting where to look for the causal narratives that explain the observed correlations. They do not explain the associations they identify. So we should not go overboard about their value.
2 The proposition that this is an evolutionary process is interesting. It neatly avoids the need to consider what the agents involved were thinking when they act - as when they adopt agriculture or iron weapons. But nonethelss they were thinking something when they adopted agriculture and iron weapons. It is easy to imagine that they recognized the advantages of these new inventions and that's why they adopted them. There is a back-handed recognition of this in the last paragraph:-

Although factors such as infrastructure provision, market and monetary exchange, and ideological developments do not appear to play a significant causal role in propelling subsequent advances in social scale, hierarchical complexity, or governance sophistication, they likely are integral elements that support and maintain the results of that growth, which would account for the relationship observed between these factors in previous scholarship.

3 (Added after posting) It's also worth pointing out that the data on which the project relies is not gathered in any of the ways familiar to us nowadays. It is deduced from the clues available to us. Very often this involves reconstructing the lives and habits of the people. So narrative history is still needed as a basis for the generalizations.


So thank you for drawing my attention to this. I did tell you that I am not in principle opposed to these approaches. This one is much better than the other one because it seems capable of dealing with the data without unduly distorting it.

Actually, my main interest is philosophy, which involves being interested in everything and having limited expertise in anything. — Ludwig V

Not sure that is how it works. Seems it ought to require being expert across all fields.

So thank you for drawing my attention to this. I did tell you that I am not in principle opposed to these approaches. This one is much better than the other one because it seems capable of dealing with the data without unduly distorting it. — Ludwig V

But they are not different approaches.

Not sure that is how it works. Seems it ought to require being expert across all fields. — apokrisis

The days when that was possible are long gone.

What are you an expert in?

But they are not different approaches. — apokrisis

Yes, they are. One respects the data and draws some worth-while conclusions. The other distorts the data by enforcing a single model on it.

Here is an excerpt from a Max Planck Institute article :

For example, the historian Ingeborg van Vugt has used this multi-layered approach to explore the different ways in which information circulated in the Republic of Letters, the long-distance intellectual community of the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and America. Such research allows us to better visualize how the Age of Enlightenment, driven forward by these intellectuals, developed. The next step could be to statistically model this network, and so be able to pursue her research question by integrating an even broader wealth of data.

A network model for studies in history of knowledge has to consider an unusually varied set of data. There is the data of a social nature concerned with people and organizations; that concerned with material aspects of history, such as the conservation life of a book; and the data that represent the actual knowledge, the content of the sources. These are three different levels of one and the same evolving network for which explanatory mathematical models have been rarely conceived and even less realized. From this perspective, history writing is even about to challenge applied statistics.

A dynamical systems approach is an enormous elaboration of the simple notion of composition of functions in which there is a mechanism of feedback that can help direct the process level to level. But even this germ of a system can be complicated. Add a huge reservoir of data and progress depends upon interpreting what it all means.

Add a huge reservoir of data and progress depends upon interpreting what it all means. — jgill

And that is no different at the level of fundamental physics. Maths gives us the topological simplicity of particle physics as a SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) structure. And yet then we have to have all this other stuff going on to effectively break this symmetry.

Like strong force confinement to preserve some remnant of SU(3) from complete self-annihilation – quarks bound up into protons and neutrons. And a Higgs field to break the SU(2) electroweak symmetry in a way that leaves three massive gauge bosons, plus a massless U(1) photon that could spend the rest of eternity radiating and redshifting the Universe towards its eventual heat death.

So we can have the pure forms from the mathematical arguments. But if the maths is just geometry and topology – a mesh of spatial relations – then it already explicitly leaves out its "other" in terms of the time/energy that breathes life into its equations. It is no surprise that something extra – a little condensed matter physics – has to be added to the brew.

Cosmology had its fundamental symmetry models straight from Sophus Lie. But it took a lot of effort to figure out exactly how those symmetries got broken in the real world by emergent topological effects such as the asymptotic freedom of the strong force, or the way the electroweak force was cracked by "eating" the Higgs field.

Time and energy – the statistical thermodynamics of a cooling~expanding Big Bang – needed to be added to the story so as to deal with "a huge reservoir of data and interpreting what it all meant".

What are you an expert in? — Ludwig V

Synthesising expertise.

Yes, they are. — Ludwig V

It seems you think you are the expert after all. And you have only just heard of Turchin's work. Probably not even read the paper yet. :up:

Add a huge reservoir of data and progress depends upon interpreting what it all means. — jgill

Observational studies are moderately useful for providing a working hypothesis but are absolutely unsuitable as a replacement for an experimental test report.

Merely staring at a phenomenon and then speculating about what's going on, does not yield knowledge.

That is why "data science" is not science.

What are you an expert in?
— Ludwig V

Synthesising expertise.

Yes, they are.
— Ludwig V

It seems you think you are the expert after all. And you have only just heard of Turchin's work. Probably not even read the paper yet. :up: — apokrisis

I'm sorry you have decided to give up on our discussion. I thought there was a reasonable chance that we might end up with an understanding, if not an agreement. Still, it has been of interest, so thank you for your time and effort.

Aristotle recognizes that the differences between the master and slave are generated by contingent factors. They are not somehow predetermined or immutable or necessary. — Leontiskos

I think that is a bit unspecific. From a point of view, it seems unproblematic; from another point of view, it would then be puzzling why Aristotle said that Greeks are suited to rule the world and thus the strong savages to the North as well as the effeminate intellectuals to the South to be ruled, as we can't change our race — immutable.

Synthesising expertise. — apokrisis

Circular innit?

I think that is a bit unspecific. — Lionino

Perhaps, but less unspecific than the original objection, which was my aim.

it would then be puzzling why Aristotle said that Greeks are suited to rule the world and thus the strong savages to the North as well as the effeminate intellectuals to the South to be ruled, as we can't change our race — immutable. — Lionino

Greeks are not immutably rulers. They need not have had the characteristics that made them good rulers, and they need not maintain those characteristics into the future. If there were something immutable or "biological" about Greeks being good rulers then none of this would be true.

I don't know, being that Aristotle was a zoologist (maybe first and foremost), I think he was talking about what later we would know as genetics, so Greeks would have immutably what makes them suited to ruling.

Circular innit? — Lionino

Dialectic. Broad as opposed to narrow. Synthetic as opposed to analytic. Meta-theoretic as opposed to applied.

I don't know, being that Aristotle was a zoologist (maybe first and foremost), I think he was talking about what later we would know as genetics, so Greeks would have immutably what makes them suited to ruling. — Lionino

Well genetics are not immutable, but here is the crux of the matter:

Aristotle says that Greeks are fit to rule because they have x, y, and z characteristics. He does not say that Greeks are fit to rule because they are Greek.

Now "anti-racists" have a difficult time even with saying that Greeks are fit to rule because they have x, y, and z characteristics, and this is because the "anti-racist" holds to a dogma which says that no race or people has any characteristic which makes it better, in any way, than any other race or people. I think that's the long and short of it: an anti-racist dogma comes up against an empirical argument. I would say that, in principle, the dogma loses every time, and that the best arguments against racism are not dogmatic, a priori arguments. We can go further and say that when anti-racism becomes dogmatic it carries itself over into irrationality, even though it is politically incorrect to say so. I don't oppose morality, but this is one of the many examples of a moralistic position falling into irrationality.

From a point of view, it seems unproblematic; from another point of view, it would then be puzzling why Aristotle said that Greeks are suited to rule the world — Lionino

Forgive my ignorance. I must have missed something. Did Aristotle say that Greeks are suited to rule the world? Reference?

a dogma which says that no race or people has any characteristic which makes it better, in any way, than any other race or people. — Leontiskos

Well, that is indeed a bit sweeping. It may well be that people with a black or brown skin are better suited to living in a tropical country. Evolution would see to that, just as it has, no doubt, seen to the colour of people living in temperate countries. Do we think that is particularly relevant to the practice of enslaving them? I hope not.
But I'm not sure that's what anti-racists are/were on about. I think that they were on about the idea that people with a black, brown or yellow skins were suited to being dominated by people with white or pink skin. They may have suspected that people with black, brown or yellow skins were not dominated by people with white skins because of some inherent characteristic but because of the more effective technologies of the white people. But I think they were more bothered by the idea that it was morally acceptable to maltreat any human beings simply because of the colours of their skins. Doing that seemed incompatible with the mission of civilizing and Christianizing non-European and non-Christian countries - as indeed, it was.

"anti-racists" have a difficult time even with saying that Greeks are fit to rule because they have x, y, and z characteristics, and this is because the "anti-racist" holds to a dogma which says that no race or people has any characteristic which makes it better, in any way, than any other race or people. — Leontiskos

I suppose you understand that sentence is itself an example of a tendency much criticized by anti-racists and other people opposed to prejudicial discrimination - stereotyping. Some racists may have a problem with the idea that Greeks, as such, are fit to rule and yet be completely at ease with the idea that people with x, y, and z characteristics are fit to rule. If all Greeks turn out to have x, y, and z characteristics, so be it. But they will not be willing to assume that they do on such fragile grounds as the fact that they all speak Greek or live in Greece. There is no rational connection between speaking Greek or living in Greece and being fit to rule.

If all Greeks turn out to have x, y, and z characteristics, so be it. But they will not be willing to assume that they do on such fragile grounds as the fact that they all speak Greek or live in Greece. There is no rational connection between speaking Greek or living in Greece and being fit to rule. — Ludwig V

Aristotle says that Greeks are fit to rule because they have x, y, and z characteristics. He does not say that Greeks are fit to rule because they are Greek. — Leontiskos

In a way, yes. Their culture was maintained and cultivated. The once divided city-States unified completely and because of that managed to fight off Eastern invaders for centuries, when it barely managed to do so before that, in the Persian war. Basically, Greece was given a Mediterranean empire for free when, the only time it managed to do something like that, the whole thing collapsed before a single generation passed. — Lionino

Whenever I think about whether some group of people is better off or not due to a social action I think to myself: would I be willing to be on the receiving end?

I can say that as an individual I don't have deep ties to whether the Eastern invaders are defeated. If anything, these seem to be the things that are wrong with our societies: the desire to dominate will lead to endless suffering that need not be.

Greece may have been given a Mediterranean empire for free, but if I were greek I'd have preferred to not be dominated.

Though, of course, the Greeks had already accepted this sort of conquer-or-be-conquered ethos; in some sense it's deserved because it was the same thing they'd do to others.

My suspicion is that ethos still has reflections today which, rationally speaking, need not be the case.

I think that's the long and short of it: an anti-racist dogma comes up against an empirical argument. — Leontiskos

I was recently recommended a podcast hosted by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. So last night I listened to my first episode, which focused on the notion of "racial equity." It was interesting without going beyond the realm of easy listening, but the tag clip at the beginning of the video highlights the beginning of McWhorter's argument in favor of equality, namely that blacks are not intellectually inferior (timestamp). What's interesting is that he intentionally avoids appealing to the dogma, and it cannot be overstated how odd this move is in the American landscape. McWhorter substantiates this, "We're going to get into trouble for even discussing [the empirical case for equality], but anyone who thinks we can't discuss it is being religious and not logical."

Aristotle gave an empirical case for inequality qua ruling, and I don't see how serious-minded individuals can oppose Aristotle's arguments without making their own empirical case for equality. Although he is not opposing Aristotle, there is a parallel sense in which McWhorter is one of those serious-minded individuals, and his arguments are perfectly reasonable.

Aristotle says that Greeks are fit to rule because they have x, y, and z characteristics. He does not say that Greeks are fit to rule because they are Greek. — Leontiskos

You did indeed say that. Not quite oops! but nearly. Could you give me the reference?

It's a complicated question. The issue that provoked it was:-

whenever a civilizer comes along somehow the civilized end up worse off and helping the civilizer live an easier life — Moliere

This was based on the standard narrative of the civilizing imperial missions of some of the European nations in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
But the question doesn't really apply to the conquest of Greece by Rome (between 146 and 31BCE).
During the Hellenistic period (between 323 BCE and 30 BCE) Greek cultural influence spread through the Mediterranean and beyond. There was a good deal of fighting during that time; I don't know how far that actually affected the Greeks. Yet it seems that prosperity and progress reigned. The Romans, therefore did not bring peace and prosperity - the Greeks were doing quite nicely on their own, thank you. In fact, there was a kind of reverse take-over. Greek culture dominated native Roman culture, to the point that there is very little left of what went before. How far that benefited the Greek in the street is hard to discern, but some Greeks did; Greek people were much in demand as tutors, doctors and administrators.

You did indeed say that. Not quite oops! but nearly. Could you give me the reference? — Ludwig V

See my post <here> and the reference Simpson gives to the Politics.

Whenever I think about whether some group of people is better off or not due to a social action I think to myself: would I be willing to be on the receiving end? — Moliere

That's a very good test. It's not perfect. Some people have very poor imaginations and worse memories. I remember, in the small town that I lived in a while ago, there was a recession and a number of people lost their jobs. They got very annoyed about the welfare system - not much money, ill-mannered and unhelpful staff. When they got jobs, they forgot all about it and reverted to moaning about high taxes and the idle poor.

anarchy is not opposed to power at all as much as wants it to be directed according to what human beings want, rather than a class of deciders. — Moliere

That seems reasonable. But I feel that they are rather weak on the role of co-operation in making life worth living.

the desire to dominate will lead to endless suffering that need not be. — Moliere

That's quite obvious. And yet people still try that way. They see themselves as the winners, but mostly end up as losers, because there's always a bigger dog round the corner. It's the same syndrome as the gamblers. They think about what they're going to win and never about what they're losing.

Greece may have been given a Mediterranean empire for free, but if I were greek I'd have preferred to not be dominated. — Moliere

I'm still trying to work out what that refers to. It doesn't reflect anything I know about and I can't find anything obvious in what the reference sites say.

Though, of course, the Greeks had already accepted this sort of conquer-or-be-conquered ethos; in some sense it's deserved because it was the same thing they'd do to others. — Moliere

Well, everybody accepted that. The point of war was to get rich quick.

My suspicion is that ethos still has reflections today which, rationally speaking, need not be the case. — Moliere

Of course. Nothing changes, except the way people dress up what they're doing. Hope is all there is.