I am proposing that aggression is a widely practiced belief that we are calling the Anti-System. Let’s lay a foundation with a survey of the action on the ground in Medieval European events.
Half of this site is about ancient history, and the remnants of the ancient mind-sets that still linger in our collective behavior. Now with more aggression in the European arena (the Western heritage), this mind-set is surfacing for all to see. Yeah, it sure is still here.
The other half of this site (library4conciliation) is about the Passionary Theory of Ethnogenisis. There are quite a few books about it already uploaded, and there will be some excellent works to come, already prepared.
How does anything in the world get done? It has to be with excess energy, doesn't it? Excess energy, over that used for gathering food. Excess energy is defined as "DOER-Ship", the will to do. And with some belief systems it is not even a will, it is a necessity, (or I will burst). These are the "crazies." Excess energy is not for the good (or for the bad). Anything can happen, only it must be something.
I don't believe Europe was at any limit in supporting populations. It was all subsistence farming, with little or no supply chains to reach a limit. That was the problem. "Down on the farm" it was intensely boring. Let's go out an be a mercenary.
As an ethic civilization grows, matures and declines there are definite stages of collective energy along that path, and Gumilev defines this as passionarity. As he sees it, it is in a parallel development in dozens of civilizations, including our own. Europe was bursting at the seams with people killing each other, when the Crusades became an outlet for these adventurers. It is not only the generals that looted. Soldiers were given a week to loot and rape anyone they could catch. I think 80% of these people were killed and thus never came back. This allowed Europe to begin building their culture.
Later; the same thing happened with the colonies, which allowed the European "Enlightenment Period" to happen. First by eliminating these over-passionate people, and then through the free resources amassed, there was the money to build a culture.
You have expressed a lot of considerations worthy of follow-up. I can tell you that I have read very much of the theory of passionarity. So I admit an in-bred bias. The theory is a proposal that can be looked into.
I can't remember what brought me to these ideas? I remember well that the first books I translated were from the Moscow State University course material on the history of the Soviet Union. I wanted to know why it collapsed. Really there were ongoing problems, so I had to survey the whole 70 years to form an understanding. (I haven't uploaded any of this material, maybe half a million words.)
That's when I found the first book on Gumilev, the Yevtushenko book. I found it fascinating, and the part about the passionary-theory was still aiming me at understanding the collapse, (collapse of dozens of societies that he studies). Yevtushenko had studied all of Gumilev's works and he synthesized it. A good shorthand. Then I thought that I should read some of Gumilev's major works, and began translating the big theoretical one, and then switched to the big historical one.
Both were long and complicated. I quit after barely starting and left it for several years. So there is a long incubation period of this Substack. I started up again because I find the historical writing very appealing. I like his active style. The theory is also interesting, but it is a theory to be measured with current events, and he supports it with all the historical data. I don' think it is something to be believed in. Just look, and see if it can explain what you see.
All that, to say I have a bias, but not a belief.
Of course as a geographical/historian Gumilev considers all material conditions and the various environmental differences of geography. But you are absolutely RIGHT that Gumilev's passionarity doesn't seem to address those conditions, (it is before the conditions and doesn't hold them as causative), except it's a general principle derived from an observed correlation. YES, it is correlated in many societies, that's the repetitive part. We can wonder, does our speeded-up society, Internet and all, change this calculus?? Here's where I have my doubts.
After 100 - 200 AD there where ethnic groups that lived only by raiding, take the Vikings. There were many others. They saw no need to be a farmer, when you could steal whatever you need. If there weren't many riches, by then there was an active network of slave traders, and you could just steal the children and sell them. They always did. You didn't have to bring them all the way to Northern Africa, just pass them through the trader network. The point is, raiders didn't raid because of famine, they did is as a profession, that of a pirate.
Who cleared all this land? It wasn't a communal project like in China with giant river containment, giant irrigation, or the great wall, and lack of manpower. It was just individual peasant families, perhaps that had migrated into the area, since their homeland was ravaged by war, and also by the above mentioned raiders. The fall of the Roman empire was marked by the "Great Migration".
The leaders of the crusades were knights. To be a knight you had to be rich, buy horses and armor, weapons and spend your time training for war. You had no problem with famine. Knights must have financed a peasant army. Put a spear in his hands, (pikemen) and let him walk to the holy land.
In scanning the Wiki articles, it is said that with the big Italian cities almost 20 % of the population was urban, which leave 80% on the land. Did droughts and bad weather destroy 100% of your crops. I'd say with failure of grain crops, you still had some cabbages, carrots and potatoes in the root cellar. Living on the land, you could survive, but the cities would be cut off from bread. I picked up on the population growth, but I didn't get the decline figures of the great famine. (3 years, whereas the Crusades were on and off over 300 years). There were lots of localized famines, 1304, 1305, 1310, 1315–1317 (the Great Famine), 1330–1334, 1349–1351, 1358–1360, 1371, 1374–1375, and 1390. It did say that life expectancy went from 35 years to 30 years during the great famine, in France I think. These are averages of course and depend a lot on infant mortality and sickly babies. (It would be an extremely difficult statistic to synthesize for 1316?)
About looting: A really unanswerable question (so far for me), is why was it so easy to raise these small, medium and huge armies for over 1,000 years? I don't even believe many of these histories, because nobody cares to look at the tremendous logistics needed to keep an army fighting for years???
Why did soldiers want to be soldiers, from Rome onward? Maybe killing people was satisfying, and you only lived to be 35 anyway. (Again, I think 35 is all about infant mortality. Even Roman emperors had sickly children of which many died in childhood.)
That's the million dollar question. The Keivan Rus city-states all raised armies and slaughtered each other continuously. All successful empires had mercenary armies, plus maybe citizen soldiers. You could say that there were "REASONS"? Really? Any reason will due, if your burning desire is to go out and reap your fortune. (Or stay home and tend the goats.)
What is the drive to ascribe the reasons of material conditions. They were forced to behave in this way, to survive, right? Really good people, and our heritage from them is upright.
First of all, you're not a winning army if you're half starved.
Second, people from far away were objectified as barbarians, or lower than a dog.
Third of all, Abrahamic scriptures were written to justify genocide, and even gang-rape. Yahweh told us to do it, he ordered us. Was Yahweh a pervert, or was it just the "prophets" that wrote about it the perverts? Of course back then it was the order of the day.
LOTS OF QUESTIONS.
(I'd like to talk on whynotthink. What are you determining?)
Good writing!
Half of this site is about ancient history, and the remnants of the ancient mind-sets that still linger in our collective behavior. Now with more aggression in the European arena (the Western heritage), this mind-set is surfacing for all to see. Yeah, it sure is still here.
The other half of this site (library4conciliation) is about the Passionary Theory of Ethnogenisis. There are quite a few books about it already uploaded, and there will be some excellent works to come, already prepared.
How does anything in the world get done? It has to be with excess energy, doesn't it? Excess energy, over that used for gathering food. Excess energy is defined as "DOER-Ship", the will to do. And with some belief systems it is not even a will, it is a necessity, (or I will burst). These are the "crazies." Excess energy is not for the good (or for the bad). Anything can happen, only it must be something.
I don't believe Europe was at any limit in supporting populations. It was all subsistence farming, with little or no supply chains to reach a limit. That was the problem. "Down on the farm" it was intensely boring. Let's go out an be a mercenary.
As an ethic civilization grows, matures and declines there are definite stages of collective energy along that path, and Gumilev defines this as passionarity. As he sees it, it is in a parallel development in dozens of civilizations, including our own. Europe was bursting at the seams with people killing each other, when the Crusades became an outlet for these adventurers. It is not only the generals that looted. Soldiers were given a week to loot and rape anyone they could catch. I think 80% of these people were killed and thus never came back. This allowed Europe to begin building their culture.
Later; the same thing happened with the colonies, which allowed the European "Enlightenment Period" to happen. First by eliminating these over-passionate people, and then through the free resources amassed, there was the money to build a culture.
.
You have expressed a lot of considerations worthy of follow-up. I can tell you that I have read very much of the theory of passionarity. So I admit an in-bred bias. The theory is a proposal that can be looked into.
I can't remember what brought me to these ideas? I remember well that the first books I translated were from the Moscow State University course material on the history of the Soviet Union. I wanted to know why it collapsed. Really there were ongoing problems, so I had to survey the whole 70 years to form an understanding. (I haven't uploaded any of this material, maybe half a million words.)
That's when I found the first book on Gumilev, the Yevtushenko book. I found it fascinating, and the part about the passionary-theory was still aiming me at understanding the collapse, (collapse of dozens of societies that he studies). Yevtushenko had studied all of Gumilev's works and he synthesized it. A good shorthand. Then I thought that I should read some of Gumilev's major works, and began translating the big theoretical one, and then switched to the big historical one.
Both were long and complicated. I quit after barely starting and left it for several years. So there is a long incubation period of this Substack. I started up again because I find the historical writing very appealing. I like his active style. The theory is also interesting, but it is a theory to be measured with current events, and he supports it with all the historical data. I don' think it is something to be believed in. Just look, and see if it can explain what you see.
All that, to say I have a bias, but not a belief.
Of course as a geographical/historian Gumilev considers all material conditions and the various environmental differences of geography. But you are absolutely RIGHT that Gumilev's passionarity doesn't seem to address those conditions, (it is before the conditions and doesn't hold them as causative), except it's a general principle derived from an observed correlation. YES, it is correlated in many societies, that's the repetitive part. We can wonder, does our speeded-up society, Internet and all, change this calculus?? Here's where I have my doubts.
After 100 - 200 AD there where ethnic groups that lived only by raiding, take the Vikings. There were many others. They saw no need to be a farmer, when you could steal whatever you need. If there weren't many riches, by then there was an active network of slave traders, and you could just steal the children and sell them. They always did. You didn't have to bring them all the way to Northern Africa, just pass them through the trader network. The point is, raiders didn't raid because of famine, they did is as a profession, that of a pirate.
Who cleared all this land? It wasn't a communal project like in China with giant river containment, giant irrigation, or the great wall, and lack of manpower. It was just individual peasant families, perhaps that had migrated into the area, since their homeland was ravaged by war, and also by the above mentioned raiders. The fall of the Roman empire was marked by the "Great Migration".
The leaders of the crusades were knights. To be a knight you had to be rich, buy horses and armor, weapons and spend your time training for war. You had no problem with famine. Knights must have financed a peasant army. Put a spear in his hands, (pikemen) and let him walk to the holy land.
In scanning the Wiki articles, it is said that with the big Italian cities almost 20 % of the population was urban, which leave 80% on the land. Did droughts and bad weather destroy 100% of your crops. I'd say with failure of grain crops, you still had some cabbages, carrots and potatoes in the root cellar. Living on the land, you could survive, but the cities would be cut off from bread. I picked up on the population growth, but I didn't get the decline figures of the great famine. (3 years, whereas the Crusades were on and off over 300 years). There were lots of localized famines, 1304, 1305, 1310, 1315–1317 (the Great Famine), 1330–1334, 1349–1351, 1358–1360, 1371, 1374–1375, and 1390. It did say that life expectancy went from 35 years to 30 years during the great famine, in France I think. These are averages of course and depend a lot on infant mortality and sickly babies. (It would be an extremely difficult statistic to synthesize for 1316?)
About looting: A really unanswerable question (so far for me), is why was it so easy to raise these small, medium and huge armies for over 1,000 years? I don't even believe many of these histories, because nobody cares to look at the tremendous logistics needed to keep an army fighting for years???
Why did soldiers want to be soldiers, from Rome onward? Maybe killing people was satisfying, and you only lived to be 35 anyway. (Again, I think 35 is all about infant mortality. Even Roman emperors had sickly children of which many died in childhood.)
That's the million dollar question. The Keivan Rus city-states all raised armies and slaughtered each other continuously. All successful empires had mercenary armies, plus maybe citizen soldiers. You could say that there were "REASONS"? Really? Any reason will due, if your burning desire is to go out and reap your fortune. (Or stay home and tend the goats.)
What is the drive to ascribe the reasons of material conditions. They were forced to behave in this way, to survive, right? Really good people, and our heritage from them is upright.
First of all, you're not a winning army if you're half starved.
Second, people from far away were objectified as barbarians, or lower than a dog.
Third of all, Abrahamic scriptures were written to justify genocide, and even gang-rape. Yahweh told us to do it, he ordered us. Was Yahweh a pervert, or was it just the "prophets" that wrote about it the perverts? Of course back then it was the order of the day.
LOTS OF QUESTIONS.
(I'd like to talk on whynotthink. What are you determining?)
.