Debunking Archives - Page 8 of 19 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Sparta Was Not a Paradise for Women

It is extremely common for people who write about ancient history on the internet to claim that ancient Sparta was, by ancient Greek standards, a paradise for women. I’m frankly sick and tired of this narrative because it is, in many ways, deeply misinformed. It is, of course, dangerous to overgeneralize, but I would argue that a randomly selected woman of unspecified social status in Athens would actually be far more likely to be happy than a similarly selected woman in Sparta.

It’s true that Spartiate women (i.e., women who belonged to the Spartan citizen class) generally had more freedom and privileges than women of the citizen class in most other Greek poleis (i.e., city-states). Nonetheless, life for Spartiate women wasn’t nearly as good as it is often made to sound. Their rights were still severely limited and the rights that Spartiate women had that women in other Greek poleis lacked were actually fairly normal for women in other ancient civilizations, such as Egypt and Rome.

Furthermore, the popular discourse around Sparta almost always completely omits mention of the fact that the overwhelming majority of all women in Sparta were enslaved helots, for whom life was almost certainly an absolute living Hell. While all Greek poleis had enslaved people, in Sparta, they made up a vastly larger share of the overall population than in any other polis and they were notoriously ill-treated, even by ancient Greek standards. Helot women were forced to do an overwhelming amount of manual labor, they lived in constant fear of being whipped or murdered by the krypteia, they were kept perpetually starving and malnourished, people they loved were constantly dying, and many of them were regularly being raped.

Yes, Young Women in the Nineteenth Century Knew What Sex Was

It seems that, when people think about sex in the historical past, they have a tendency to think in terms of extremes. For instance, the popular perception of the ancient Romans seems to be that they were all having wild sex orgies all the time. (This perception is usually coupled with the idea that this sexual “degeneracy” somehow led the Roman Empire to collapse, which, as I address in this article from July 2020, is complete nonsense.)

By sharp contrast, the popular perception of nineteenth-century British people is that they were so prudish and sexually repressed that young women had no idea that sex even existed. This idea that nineteenth-century women had no idea how a woman becomes pregnant is notably a major part of the Netflix historical drama series Bridgerton, which is set in London in the year 1813.

In reality, however, nineteenth-century mothers generally saw it as their responsibility to tell their daughters what sex was so that they could know to avoid having it before marriage. Moreover, a parent of any social rank in any society in any time period would have to go to truly extraordinary lengths to shelter their daughter in order to prevent her from finding out what sex is until she reached young adulthood. Trying to shelter a daughter to this degree in the nineteenth century would have been at least as difficult as trying to do such a thing today.

Yes, There Were Black People in Britain in the Nineteenth Century

It seems that, with my characteristically late timing, I have only just gotten around to watching the show that everyone was talking about six months ago. On 25 December 2020, Netflix released the period drama series Bridgerton, which is set in London in the year 1813 during the Regency Era. The show has triggered enormous controversy over the fact that it portrays a large number of British aristocrats who are not white, including one of the main characters, Simon Bassett, Duke of Hastings, portrayed by the Black British actor Regé-Jean Page. Many people on the internet are predictably outraged over this, insisting that the show is not historically accurate and that it is “blackwashing” history.

The show, however, for its own part, makes very little pretense at historical accuracy in the first place. After all, most of the music is modern pop music played in a “traditional,” orchestral style. Furthermore, the show is not quite as historically inaccurate as some people might think. It is true that there were no Black people who held titles of nobility in Britain during the period when Bridgerton is set, but there were certainly free Black people living in Britain at the time who were both prominent and prosperous.

Peter Singer’s Extraordinarily Bad Take on Apuleius

On 30 May 2021, the online open classics journal Antigone published a piece written by the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer about the ancient Roman novel The Golden Ass, which was originally written in Latin in the late second century CE by the North African writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE). Antigone promoted the article on their Twitter account. Their announcement begins with the words: “Today we are delighted to share an article by Peter Singer, renowned philosopher and animal rights advocate…”

Antigone’s publication and promotion of Singer’s article immediately sparked backlash over the fact that Singer has spent the past three and a half decades publicly advocating that infants who have observable physical disabilities at birth should be killed. He even co-authored and published an entire book in 1985 titled Should the Baby Live?: The Problem of Handicapped Infants, in which he advocated this.

Many classicists, myself included, feel that Antigone should not have published Singer’s article about Apuleius because, even though the article itself did not discuss infanticide, he is not the sort of person that they should be platforming. Even beyond this, though, Singer’s take on The Golden Ass is so extraordinarily bad that, even if he didn’t have a long history of advocating infanticide, no classics journal should have published it.

Is Yoga Really Ancient?

Yoga has become quite an international cultural phenomenon in the past few decades. It is now estimated that somewhere around three hundred million people practice yoga worldwide, which is nearly the same number of people who live in the entire United States. Yoga is consistently advertised—both by the yoga industry and by the current government of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi—as an extremely ancient Indian spiritual and physical practice that dates back thousands of years in more-or-less its present form.

This narrative, however, is not entirely accurate. It is true that there was an ancient Āstika philosophical school called yoga and that modern yoga has been influenced by traditions that ultimately grew out of this school. Nonetheless, nothing closely resembling modern āsana-centered yoga-as-exercise ever actually existed in the Indian subcontinent in ancient times. Haṭhayoga, the immediate precursor to modern postural yoga, only first started to emerge around a thousand years ago during the medieval period and did not start to develop into modern yoga until the nineteenth century, under the heavy influence of European “physical culture” exercise regimes.

Tucker Carlson Is Using Controversy about Literature Classes to Promote Fascism

There is something of a culture war going on right now over which books students should be assigned to read in literature classes. I’ve been meaning to write an article on this subject for over six months now, but, until now, I haven’t had time. Sadly, I’ve been so insanely busy with the many other things going on in my life that I haven’t had much time for researching and writing articles lately. Now, however, recent events have compelled me to write an article about a different aspect of the controversy than I originally planned.

Many of my readers are probably already aware of Tucker Carlson. He is a far-right political commentator who has a long and well-documented history of promoting white supremacist, fascist, misogynist, and xenophobic ideas. He has his own show on Fox News called Tucker Carlson Tonight and, on 14 May 2021, he did an entire segment about the literature class controversy titled “Classic literature out. Sexual propaganda in.”

In this segment, Carlson first protests the removal of works that he considers “classic literature” from English syllabi and then pretends to be absolutely scandalized by the reading of explicit passages in young adult novels that have been approved for students to read in one public school in Loudoun County, Virginia. Carlson frames the controversy using a standard fascist narrative that misrepresents the issues and ignores many demonstrable facts, including the fact that many works of so-called “classic literature,” including many works that are often read in schools, are just as sexually explicit as the works he protests against—or, in some cases, even more explicit.

“Rewriting History” Is Not Inherently a Bad Thing

There seems to be something of a trend going on right now in politics where people have developed a habit of accusing their opponents of wanting to “rewrite history.” I’ve mostly seen conservatives accusing progressives of this, but I’ve also seen a few cases of progressives accusing conservatives of it without further clarification. In all cases, people who accuse other people of wanting to “rewrite history” portray this as something unambiguously bad.

The problem is that “rewriting history” is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, “rewriting history” is literally a historian’s job description. It is inevitable that each generation will rewrite history and there is really nothing anyone can do to stop it. It is, however, extremely important that the people who rewrite history do so honestly, using correct evidence and correct methods of interpretation. When we talk about “rewriting history,” what matters is not whether people are doing it, but how they are doing it.

Jordan Peterson Does Not Understand Mythology

In case you’ve had the extraordinary good fortune of having never heard of him, Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He largely rose to fame in 2016 over his vocal opposition to an act passed by the Parliament of Canada to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity and expression.” Since then, Peterson has developed an enormous cult following as a self-help author and YouTube personality. His followers generally tend to be young, heterosexual, cisgender men who come from middle-class backgrounds and have conservative political leanings.

Peterson calls himself a “classical British liberal” and a “traditionalist”—both terms that are commonly used as euphemistic self-descriptors by members of the far right. As we shall see shortly, he has publicly promoted various misogynistic, transphobic, and white supremacist claims. Much of what Peterson has written and said has already been thoroughly analyzed and debunked. In this article, however, I want to especially focus on an aspect of Peterson’s work and activism that I don’t think has been adequately addressed: his interpretation of mythology.

Peterson has made the psychoanalytic interpretation of myths into a major backbone of his work. Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, which was first published in 1999, talks about mythology extensively, and he routinely uses mythical examples in his lecture videos and in his 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. This is all in spite of the fact that he clearly does not understand mythology and much of what he says on the subject is incorrect.

No, Ancient Greek Is Not Albanian

One of the most bizarre yet persistent linguistic claims I have encountered so far on Quora is the claim that Ancient Greek is somehow actually Albanian. This claim seems utterly bizarre to me, because I have been studying Ancient Greek on my own since high school, I have taken four semesters of it so far at the college level, and I can read texts written in it fairly well. I do not speak Albanian, but I have listened to recordings of people speaking it and tried to read passages written in it and I can say for a fact that it is not Ancient Greek.

Indeed, I have no idea how anyone who knows Albanian or Ancient Greek could possibly think that they are the same language. Nonetheless, again and again, I have encountered Albanian nationalists claiming that they are. I therefore think it is time for me to address this hypothesis (if we can even call it that) once and for all.

Transgender People Exist—And That’s Ok

If you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to the news over the past few years, you have almost certainly heard about how a lot of conservatives are really mad that transgender people exist. They routinely insist that acknowledging the existence of trans people is “gender ideology” and that it goes against both science and the Bible. They insist that there are only two genders—male and female—and that a person’s gender is determined by their chromosomes and can never, under any circumstances, truly be changed.

In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that these arguments are, in fact, incorrect and that the existence of more than two genders is totally compatible with both science and the Bible. This essay has taken me nearly a month to research and write, so it will be quite long and will incorporate evidence from a wide range of different fields, including biology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and religious studies.