Ex Urbe

Ex Urbe's writing is generally pretty great. Do check out her series on Machiavelli, the inventor of Consequentalism: https://www.exurbe.com/?p=1429 .

This is by far the best explanation I've read of where Machiavelli is metaphysically coming from: http://www.exurbe.com/?p=1429 . He was a true patriot for his people.

Ada Palmer's "On Progress and Historical Change" https://www.exurbe.com/?p=4041 "So when I tell people about this election, and they ask me “Does it always have the same outcome?” the answer is yes and no. Because the Great Forces always push the same way. The strong factions are strong. Money is power. Blood is thicker than promises. Virtue is manipulable. In the end, a bad man will be pope. And he will do bad things. The war is coming, and the land — some land somewhere — will burn. But the details are always different. A Cardinal needs to gather fourteen votes to get the throne, but it’s never the same fourteen votes, so it’s never the same fourteen people who get papal favor, whose agendas are strengthened, whose homelands prosper while their enemies fall. And I have never once seen a pope elected in this simulation who did not owe his victory, not only to those who voted, but to one or more of the humble functionaries, who repeated just the right whisper at just the right moment, and genuinely handed the throne to Monster A instead of Monster B. And from that functionary flow the consequences."

The sentence after it explains. The core of "Reinventing the renaissance" is basically the renaissance-related blog entries from https://www.exurbe.com/ , developed further into a book.

Ada Palmer has a great blog post on why Stocism is so appealing to rich folks. Her writing is always excellent. https://www.exurbe.com/stoicisms-appeal-to-the-rich-and-powerful

One of my all-time favorite essays is by the same author: "The Shape of Rome" — https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/

Indeed, and there's a most excellent essay that goes into considerably more detail on this: https://www.exurbe.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/ , written partly in response to the Chengdu debacle, but also covering lots of Western examples, including Galileo vs the church, the comics code, and more.

I think the definition of slavery doesn't change when people do awful things. I don't think it's great for the economy either. I think people need to think more about their theory of justice, and about psychology and sociology, and I hope nobody is deciding their ideas about what a justice system should be based on an anecdote like that. The idea of justice as retributive punishment, a penalty you pay, is older than the bible. Have folks heard of Beccaria, Howard Zehr, and John Rawls? Here's a short blog post about Beccaria, whom Voltaire said everyone should read. https://www.exurbe.com/on-crimes-and-punishments-and-beccaria/ And Beccaria was writing centuries ago, Howard Zehr and John Rawls are both influential 20th century thinkers who had important ideas on what a more just society should look like.

For those not familiar with that blog, She previously wrote a long series on Machiavelli which was a great deep dive into his life If interested start here: https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/

Fun to see Ada Palmer posted here! One of my favorite essays by her is The Shape of Rome, which tells Rome’s history through its architecture. It is a fascinating history of course but her writing is what stood out to me: it felt fast, almost breezy, while still conveying the sense of just how much time had passed between events. I wish more history writing were like it, and if folks have recommendations I’d appreciate it. https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/

The end justifies the means? This is - of course - a very rough synopsis of Machiavelli's treatise - even if he never actually said that. But the other way of looking at his work was that he was the first person to develop a code of ethics that led to the idea of "doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people" I highly recommend the series from the blog of the this Renaicance scholar and specialist in Machiavelli which I discovered via HN the other day: https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/ He argues quite compellingly that Machiavelli's work led to classical utilitarianism ethics ("the greatest good to the greatest number of people") since he was the first to consider judging actions on their consequences rather than "what was in someone's heart".

Here's a great blog post about San Clemente https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/ (in which Freud battles his vertigo...)

Interesting article. I'd like to encourage people to read more stuff from her blog, it's absolutely excellent. I'm currently reading this piece[0] (teaser quote: "then, in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon invented progress."). Then there's the series ostensibly about Machiavelli[1], but that is actually a whirlwind tour of Italian renaissance history, philosophy, intrigue and eventually, yes, Machiavelli. [0] https://www.exurbe.com/on-progress-and-historical-change/ [1] https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/

Slightly off-topic, but on a related theme: http://www.exurbe.com/?p=2219

Fiction runs on idealizations of the world, and that jumps out when a bunch of them change -- how men and women are different, how people relate to authority, ... How thin those conventions and myths seemed to me made me less interested in today's fiction too, now. http://www.exurbe.com/?p=2176 gets into some of this in discussing a couple of TV series set in the Renaissance: one of them's pushed more into a modern story-shape that modern viewers expect. (Skip down to the two paragraphs on Episode 1.)

I found Ada Palmer's post on the Renaissance a couple months ago to be a good read, though it's a bit long for one sitting and there are a few tangents: https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-telling-the-m… A taste of what you might get out of it, from the preface: > This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death => Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust answer than, “No no no no no!” > This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them how the myth began. > This post is for you if you want to understand how an age whose relics make it look golden in retrospect can also be a terrible age to live in. > And this post is for you if want to ask what history can tell us about 2020 and come away with hope. Because comparing 2020 to the Renaissance does give me hope, but it’s not the hope of sitting back expecting the gears of history to grind on toward prosperity, and it’s not the hope for something like the Renaissance—it’s hope for something much, much better, but a thing we have to work for, all of us, and hard.

Thanks! And this is the article I remember https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/

Also very good is “The Scariest Library” https://www.exurbe.com/the-scariest-library/

Ada Palmer, who is a scholar of the history of philosophy, seems to more or less agree with hprotagonist here. https://dailystoic.com/the-transformation-of-stoicism-over-the-centuri… https://www.exurbe.com/stoicisms-appeal-to-the-rich-and-powerful/

Relevant: https://www.exurbe.com/tools-for-thinking-about-censorship/ (Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39088080)

The shape of Rome is a beautiful article on what you are describing with regards to, well, Rome: https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/

I think that's a mis-characterization of stoicism. That sounds more like Epicureanism (quit stressful things and live a simple life) or cynicism (quit everything and live like a stray dog so that you don't have to worry about losing anything). Stoicism because popular with Roman elites specifically because it didn't ask the adherents to quit anything, but simply to adapt themselves to whatever adversity they might face[1]. [1] https://www.exurbe.com/stoicisms-appeal-to-the-rich-and-powerful/

https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/ I think post has what you need.

A note, the pictures seem to have vanished in the Tor version of the article. It would probably be better to link to the original version on Ex Urbe: https://www.exurbe.com/the-borgias-vs-borgia-faith-and-fear/

And to go along with that, the Renaissance was actually an incredibly violent and turbulent time. https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-telling-the-m… is a good post about that, and the Dark Ages myth. There's a lot of propaganda from this time period that people still believe today because it was used to justify a lot of the European nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Just a reminder (I think it has been posted here) of this wonderful read about the many layers of Rome: https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/

This sequence on Ex Urbe is one of the more interesting exegeses of Machiavelli I have read. https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/

> Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration. I think that we should celebrate people who advanced the society _on_ _purpose_ and not accidentally. Intentionality matters. Such people were rarely in positions of power, and I'm not aware of any "good kings". Partly because effecting changes is never easy and partly because "good kings" could never grow when surrounded by rotten institutions. But there have always been a lot of good people! Yet most are unknown to the public. For example, Thomas Paine or John Locke in the US history. There were even more fascinating stories, like this one about Beccaria: https://www.exurbe.com/on-crimes-and-punishments-and-beccaria/ Edit: when talking dismissively about "good kings" I mean the ones that held absolute power. Not the modern European monarchs that are either figureheads or hold very little direct power.