culture

The Spartans, popular wisdom tells us, were history’s greatest warriors; in fact, they lost battles frequently and decisively. We are told they dominated Greece; they barely managed to scrape a victory in the Peloponnesian Wars with wagonloads of Persian gold, and then squandered their hegemony in a single year. We hear they murdered weak or deformed children, though one of their most famous kings had a club foot. They preferred death to surrender, as the legend of the Battle of Thermopylae is supposed to show—even though 120 of them surrendered to the Athenians at Sphacteria in 425 B.C.E. They purportedly eschewed decadent wealth and luxury, even though rampant inequality contributed to oliganthropia, the manpower shortage that eventually collapsed Spartan military might. They are assumed to have scorned personal glory and lived only for service to the city-state, despite the fact that famous Spartans commissioned poetry, statues, and even festivals in their own honor and deliberately built cults of personality. They all went through the brutal agōgē regimen of warrior training, starting from age seven—but the kings who led their armies almost never endured this trial. They are remembered for keeping Greece free from foreign influence, but in fact they allied with, and took money from, the very Persians they fought at Thermopylae.

Myke Cole on the Spartan myth.

Tl;dr the lionization of “Sparta” has nothing to do with the actual Spartans (who were kinda not very impressive) and everything to do with fascism and ethno-nationalism.

The article also taught me the terms “tacticool”, which describes the fetishisation of military (i.e. tactical) aesthetics by civilians, and “moron label”, a riff on molon labe (“come take it”).

But these tweets aren’t all fun and games. The fact that this type of language has entered the lexicon of friendship, one of the few human bonds that hasn’t been devastated by the transactional logic of neoliberalism—and has done so under the guise of being considerate or politically correct—is alarming. Transactional language strips love, kindness, and empathy from the social scripts of friendship, the exact sentiments people need when coming to you for help, regardless of whether or not you can provide that help at that specific time. Neurodivergent people too need that love, gentleness, and empathy, which is why they usually straight up ask for it in ways neurotypical people don’t. The implication that neurodivergent people should seek to use legalese when speaking with friends implies that we can’t distinguish between being open and explicit with our needs and being cold or patronizing. The appeal of the managerial language of these texts is that they seek to avoid the scariness of opening yourself to the emotions of others and their messy vulnerability. But it is precisely that messy vulnerability which makes friendships difficult (especially to people like me who can’t even handle their own emotions) but also worthwhile and wholesome.

Kate Wagner is at capacity.

This is in response to some viral tweets from a while back, that posited various scripts to use when you’re not in the right mental state to assist friends with their emotional problems. Wagner’s thesis is not that scripts themselves are bad, only that the language of these particular scripts was… and that people mocking the latter often ended up mocking the idea of the former, which is hurtful to neurodivergent people in particular.