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Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

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Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

#31

"I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield." Interesting to see Conway's law show up here. Companies tend to ship their org structure in a product.

I think Conway's law is more interesting. It seems natural that networks of human relationships would mirror each other when the same groups of humans translate themselves into a new context.

Whereas the structure of technological products is a "different thing" than the human relationships that created it, it's less obvious that it would translate across that boundary.

Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

#32
post #30
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Can you explain?

The exact quote "python is for brahmins" brings up top links on incels.is and 4chan, so perhaps OC's character is something worth dismissing.

This is a bizarre reply? IIRC there was a law suit involved

Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

#33
post #26
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the whole "Python is for Brahmins" stuff at Microsoft India office.

What? Can you explain?

I think it’s about software engineers, who are supposed to be impervious about effects of caste structures and hierarchy, judging programming languages from the caste lens.

That is my interpretation, please don’t hold me against it

Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

#34

"I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield." Interesting to see Conway's law show up here. Companies tend to ship their org structure in a product.

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Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

#35
post #9

"I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield." Interesting to see Conway's law show up here. Companies tend to ship their org structure in a product.

Reminds me of the whole "Python is for Brahmins" stuff at Microsoft India office.

Looks like it was a satire? I couldn’t find any authoritative sources on it.

https://www.m9.news/social-media-viral/viral-microsoft-caste...

Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

#36

One of my favorite dynamics: Warrior class that really kicks butt, takes control over the state and then slowly becomes obsolete but is so embedded in the social structure that it just sticks around sucking up vast resources for hundreds of years. I've read the Ottoman Empire had this happen with the Janissaries, but there are lots of other instances of the military becoming a colossal useless but dangerous parasite,…

Sparta, their entire civilization basically atrophied because of it.

Sparta and Rome suffered from the same problem, actually. They approached it differently. Rome survived. Sparta didn't.

The problem was that citizenship or social class was based on inheritance and it was essentially a closed system. At a time when infant mortality was so high and being in the military was risky, this meant that the ruling class diminished over time.

The author of this piece touches on how most soldiers had to bring their own gear. That's fair because they're talking about why people fight not how but it's important. So in Rome, you were cavalry if you could bring your own horse. Only the wealthier people could do this. This was a later reform. The very early Roman cavalry were a closed class. We don't know a lot about this other than legends because records were lost, most notably when Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390 BCE.

Anyway, so "equites" were a higher social class but were a mix. Some of them were patricians (probably descended from the original heavy cavalry that protected the pre-Republic King, allegedly). Also, some patricians weren't equites.

In the early Republic there were 40-45 Patrician families. They held all the political power and offices. By Caesar's time it had dwindled to ~12, so much so that some plebeian families got elevated.

Sparta was what we'd now call an ethno-state requiring a full bloodline for citizenship. AFAIK Sparta never evolved away from that and all such closed societies die, just like the original Roman patrician families.

Rome took a different approach that bears some similarity to "whiteness" in the modern world. Race is an invented social construct (and, in the case of whiteness, was invented to justify slavery). But what has made whiteness resilient is that definition of who is white keeps evolving as necessary to maintain the in-groups.

For example, Ben Franklin didn't consider Germans "white" (famously describing them as "swarthy" [1]). Through different waves, different European ethnic groups became "white". The Irish didn't become "white" in the US until 100-150 years ago. Arabs became "white" in 1915 [2].

I just want to stress how made up this all is. Anyway, back to Rome.

Rome was famous for taking over an ethnic group (usually quite violently) but then making them Roman. Many people on the periphery of the empire aspired to become Roman. We have a term for it: Romanization

[1]: https://medium.com/@cailiansavage1/why-benjamin-franklin-did... (or Latinization). There's historical record of this everywhere from Eastern Europe to Northern Africa ro Britannia. Britannia was a funny one because there are Latin inscriptions describing a very Roman life from people who unsuccessfully rebelled against Rome in the early occupation a century earlier.

So I guess I'm saying is that yes, Sparta atrophied as all purity-based ethnicities always do whereas Rome survived much longer with an expanding concept of "Roman-ness", which isn't too dissimilar from what we recognize as "whiteness" today.

[2]: https://teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu/s/oer/item/1999

Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

#37

I'm sorry, this is just sententious bloviation. The sources are so thin, there's no reason to go around imputing all these fantastical ideas that somehow benefit your own beliefs. It's just boring and insipid to watch people fall into this trap over and over.

Agreed, the article contained a lot of speculation and not many historical examples. It was more about what the author thought “made sense” than what reality was. It was also quite long winded. Probably could have been summarized to maybe 3 reasons. Oddly enough I don’t see “money” mentioned, at least not simply, and that should probably be reason #1

> Oddly enough I don’t see “money” mentioned, at least not simply

"the entitlement principle (service as the flip-side of the coin for some set of rights or status)" and

the employment principle (separate from the vocational principle). We may sum it up with, “recruits show up purely as an economic transaction: service for money” – it’s a job.

Close enough.

> and that should probably be reason #1

Article goes on to explain that:

it is fairly rare for pre-modern armies to function purely ‘as a job.’

Which makes sense: humanity's history of picking fights with fellow humans goes back much further than the history of money itself. And even where they overlap, there's other reasons for recruits to enter an army.

Much of pre-modern societies were organised around master-servant, slavery, nobility, family clans & related concepts. Free market economies with individuals striving to maximize the amount of gold nuggets in their pouch, is a relatively recent concept.

Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

#38

I'm sorry, this is just sententious bloviation. The sources are so thin, there's no reason to go around imputing all these fantastical ideas that somehow benefit your own beliefs. It's just boring and insipid to watch people fall into this trap over and over.

Agreed, the article contained a lot of speculation and not many historical examples. It was more about what the author thought “made sense” than what reality was. It was also quite long winded. Probably could have been summarized to maybe 3 reasons. Oddly enough I don’t see “money” mentioned, at least not simply, and that should probably be reason #1

I do think it's worth looking at a few of his other posts (I'm a fan) to lend some credence to this one speficially. The more history-focused (so not aimed at worldbuilders) pieces are consistently well-sourced in a way that most blogs aren't, and he has a pretty long history of this same level of care.

Does that make him infallible? Of course not. But it does mean I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here.

Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

#39

"I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield." Interesting to see Conway's law show up here. Companies tend to ship their org structure in a product.

I think Conway's law is more interesting. It seems natural that networks of human relationships would mirror each other when the same groups of humans translate themselves into a new context. Whereas the structure of technological products is a "different thing" than the human relationships that created it, it's less obvious that it would translate across that boundary.

> “structure of technological products”

Unless the technology is glued together with ad-hoc systems using email, slack, Dropbox, and the like. At least that’s my experience in small businesses.

Re: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sparta, their entire civilization basically atrophied because of it.

Its also because they built it entirely on slaves and refused citizenship to most. 300 was an entertaining movie but it left out the slavery that was central to Sparta.

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