Plague of Cyprian nearly ended the Roman Empire? No, really?

Apparently that's one of the claims of Kyle Harper in "The Fate of Rome," which I had never heard of before until going down some internet rabbit trails.

Did infectious diseases and even meso-level / meso-time climate change have more of an effect on the disintegration of the Roman Empire than older historians thought with fingering barbarian invasions, the rise of Christianity, etc? 

Certainly.

Were they decisive or nearly so?

Likely not.

So, the "No, really?" is rhetorical, in case that weren't already clear.

Was there a "Plague of Cyprian" and was it ebola or something similar, as Harper claims in the book and per that Wiki page? 

Almost certainly not. 

Per this Cambridge monograph by Sabine Huebner in response to him, Harper is almost certainly wrong on the dates of this plague and its origin, ergo wrong on its source. Independently of all that, the respondent says he's almost certainly wrong on this plague of non-Cyprian causing devastation in hinterlands Egypt. And derived from that, he's even more certainly wrong on claims that it nearly toppled the empire.

Roman historians know this period was the tail end of the famous crisis of the third century. Population loss from infectious diseases were a problem, but whatever this plague was and whenever its dates, it could not have nearly toppled the empire. Even at Harper's early date, this is 15 years after the end of the Severan dynasty and the instability that had already introduced.

And, it flat period could not have led to the Decian order for sacrifices and the Decian persecution, contra Harper. Per Huebner, the first mention of this plague did not occur until after Decius was dead.

With Huebner as co-author, here are parts one, two and three of a multi-academic response to Harper on various issues. (The first is 13 pages; the second and third are 10-pages, all easy reads.) Part two starts by noting his taking an extreme position on the Antonine plague and also flat-out ignoring a lot of modern research. The fact that no major invasions from the east happened in the first years after the Antonine plague and that, in the longer term, after the 192-93 coups, the Severan dynasty ruled 42 years, all undercut Harper. Beyond the Plague of Cyprian, part 1 is an overview critique of the whole book, much of it focused on problems with Harper's "maximalist" take on climate change. Part 3 looks to a fair degree at his take on the Justinian plauge.

And, with that, I'll take a pass on this book. And probably on Harper in general. (IIRC, I saw his "Plagues upon the Earth" at my library about a year ago and took a pass.) 

He's also writing a third book in this same general line, about problems with human overgrowth. It, too, may be interesting, but will likely run a narrow maximalist take on modern plagues.

Related to that? Per this person's thesis, Harper reportedly has professional problems related to his stridently pushing his thesis, and other personal issues as well. (Per other information, the intersection of professional and personal were student protests at Oklahoma University alleging that he didn't take seriously enough two cases of faculty reportedly using the N-word, and of blackface on campus, and that also questioned his dedication to diversity, equity and inclusion. This was when he was OU provost. When the OU student newspaper's header uses the "long-embattled" cliche, you've got problems.) The graduate also notes that Harper, and Amber Kearns, who has followed in his footsteps in some ways, also ignore the possible polemical value of writings from that general time about the plague's virulence, including overstating its death rate and its effect on the empire. And, on Harper's case, if conservative evangelical White Christianity accompanies the background to the student protests, I can see the background to him NOT discounting the polemical value of Christian letters overstating the death rate and calling it judgment on the empire. OTOH, lower-star reviews of his "Plagues upon the Earth" dinged him for beating evolution like a dead horse, as in people who are NOT fundagelicals were saying "we know evolution, you're beating a dead horse."

As for what this plague might have been? The Plague of Justinian has now been fairly well identified as the first incursion of the bubonic plague. Could this have been an earlier version? The "thesis" link suggests Lassa fever, which I also find unlikely, if nothing else as with Ebola on the grounds of where the plague originated, and tentatively suggests measles, which I could certainly accept.

Ode to a dead mouse

When I got home,

And opened the door, 

I heard the noise, 

And my first thought was, 

“I got you! 

The glue trap 

Worked.” 

 

Then, 

I went in the kitchen 

To open carefully 

A pantry door 

Carefully, was the plan, 

In case you were 

Agitated enough to bite. 

And then I saw you 

In the sink 

Trap-attached 

By your tail and a couple of feet. 

Powerful enough 

In your panic 

To push through 

A pantry door 

Trap and all. 

 

 I partially covered you 

With a large glass lid 

Until you quickly 

Went into panicked screeching. 

So, I pulled it off. 

 

 I went outside 

For my power walk 

Figuring you would be 

Closer to dead 

When I returned. 

 

Wrong! 

You were, rather, C

loser to escaped, 

Held only by part of your tail, 

Any feet previously trapped 

Now extricated. 

 

And so I acted. 

I first tried to trap you 

And the glue trap 

In a pot. 

But then saw 

That a 2-quart pot was too shallow 

To hold you in your frenzy. 

As you tried to scramble out. 

 

Tired of hearing you 

Scooting at night 

For days on end, 

I resolved. 

 

The pot I turned over 

And dropped you in the sink, 

Small bit of tail still trap-pinned 

And brought it down 

As best I could 

On your rodentine head 

Even as your black mouse eyes 

Stared back at me. 

 

A second shot 

Had more effect 

And a third 

Brought a trickle of blood 

From your mouth. 

Fuck you, Peter Singer. 

 

On the prose side, I reject Singer’s speciesism. I’ll kill wasps and hornets, and some bees. Flies are so-so. I’ll kill mosquitoes. Spiders stay alive, unless I know it’s a black widow or brown recluse. 

But a mouse inside the house? Or apartment in my case? Between it disturbing my sleep at times, and being a potential health hazard, it has to go. I thought I had caught it in a basket nearly a week ago. I took that outside and tossed all contents into the parking lot. It sure looked like a mouse running away. Maybe it was Might Mouse and returned. Maybe it had a partner, of the opposite sex; if it was a female left inside, it definitely needed to go. Maybe I was mistaken about what I dumped out late at night, but I don’t think so. 

I didn’t like the black mouse eyes staring at me, but it is what it is. I mulled through general animal tenderness, Singer’s speciesism and other things, after dumping dying mouse and glue trap in an apartment dumpster then walking to Walmart. 

On the way back, I thought of Keynes: 

“In the long run, we’re all dead.” 

Your long run just ended mouse-young. 

I’ll be there eventually. So will you, Peter Singer.

Leibniz: Man vs myth

The New Yorker has a full and fair look at German mathematician, philosopher, and well, polymath Gottfried Leibniz. Among other things, it argues that Voltaire took a number of liberties on his fictional portrait in Candide. The piece is a review of not just one but two new bios of him, by Audrey Borowski and Michael Kempe.

And, if either one at least half as good as the review, it's something I'll be looking out for.

In the article's telling, Leibniz comes off as a northern Leonardo da Vinci in many ways. Not an artist, but scientist, mathematician, philosopher, mix of actual and would-be inventor and more — and likc Leonardo, with an ADD-like lack of focus.

Goodreads: Borowski's "Leibniz in his World" and Kempe's "The Best of all Possible Worlds." 

Both are just over 300 pages. Interestingly, though both came out at the same time, November 2024, Borowski has yet to have a single review on either Goodreads or Yellow Satan, while Kempe has more than a dozen reviews and more than 100 ratings. (Most the reviews are in German; Kempe is German and runs the Leibniz Research Center in Hannover.) The subtitle of his book is "A Life in Seven Pivotal Days," which may add to, or detract from, its value. He is a professor of early modern history as well. Borowski has an Oxford PhD (in what, I don't know) and is a research fellow with the Desireable Digital project. More here and here, which indicates her background is in philosophy and the history of philosophy. Based on this, and what might be limitations with the "seven days" concept, if I had to pick just one of the two books, it would be hers.

A baptismal anniversary is more important than a birthday?

 I normally don't go "snark" here, but, this has seriousness behind the snark.

The idea above was a comment at a family member's Facebook post talking about their baptismal anniversary.

Bottom line is that, you can't have a baptismal anniversary without a birthday. And, for fundagelical types, you can't need a baptism without being born into a world with Christian original sin. (Mormons with pre-existing souls on Kolob need not apply. Modern Anabaptist types can caveat on baptism as needed.)

And, beyond that, it's arguable that fundagelical Christians should hasten the eschaton by going down the antinatalist road and getting rid of both births and baptisms.

If you're REALLY honest, you'd say that a good Christian's death anniversary is more important than either birthday or baptism anniversary because that has them, at least the soul part of them, "sleeping in Jesus' arms" or whatever, until that eschaton is finally here.

Good luck!

The humaste version of the 12 Divarim

"Humaste," as written about before here and here, is my secularist equivalent of "Namaste."

"Divarim"? The Hebrew word for "sayings," plural of "dabar." In the Tanakh/Hebrew Bible, or Christian Old Testament, both Exodus and Deuteronomy record a list of them. Related to USofA church-state issues, Catholics/Orthodox/Lutherans/Anglicans have one version of 10, Calvinists have a second version, and Jews have a third.

So, we're combining all three into 12, and putting the Jewish first one at the end, as this ex-Lutheran learned it in his confirmation class salad days as "the close of the commandments." (That one is "I Yahweh your god am a jealous god, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children, even unto the third and fourth generation, but showing mercy to the many who keep my injunctions" or similar translation.)

The 12 shall be edited as needed to fit the "humaste" and also to count a-theistic religions like those Buddhists.

1. You shall have no metaphysical principles before humanity. Per Martin Luther's Small Catechism explanations, this means that we should fear, love and trust humans to be human above all else.

2. You shall not make unto yourself any graven image. Obviously, no metaphysical principle should be elevated, but also no human being should be placed on a pedestal unduly. Neither should any material matter, especially one artificially elevated by an "influencer."

3. Do not invoke metaphysical principles in vain. This of course does not mean avoiding blasphemy, as it doesn't exist for secularists. This means not invoking for help, nor blaming for personal or larger failures, any metaphysical entity or principle. This obviously includes non-existent so-called deities, but also includes non-existent so-called karma, "luck" as anything metaphysical and so forth.

4. Remember a day of rest and keep it sacred. Sacred may not be the best word. Maybe tabu, in its original meaning, or herem, to go to the Hebrew — something separate. Americans in particular not only don't have good work-life balance, they don't have good work-life separation.

5. Remember your elders and other purveyors of wisdom; you will live better, and possibly live longer. This includes remembering that you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Epistemic humility is the flip side of good skepticism.

6. Do not murder. Do not participate in societal systems that perpetuate murder. This includes a country's military forces, as almost any "defensive" war really is not, and is usually premeditated. This includes a country's policing forces, which are a necessary evil, but in reality are usually corrupted with class bias and race bias. Also, beyond this, do not murder the human spirit. This includes perpetuation of the soullessness of much of modern capitalistic life.

7. Be faithful sexually, relationally and more. This starts with being faithful to your own sexual self and desires as long as nobody else is harmed. Relational fidelity includes more than romantic and sexual fidelity; per Damian and Pythias, it includes being faithful to friendships. It includes being faithful to contracts and agreements freely entered into.

8. Do not steal. This includes not aiding and abetting theft whenever possible. It includes going beyond that to protecting individuals' employment rights, non-thieving ownership rights and more. In other words, it proactively means supporting strikes and other collective bargaining, doing one's best to buy food and products from companies that have good labor relations and more. It also includes supporting equitable progressive taxation — with notes that here in the US, sales taxes, goods and services taxes, and Social Security taxes are all generally inequitable in a regressive way.

9. Do not lie, perpetuate disinformation and more. Lying is more than false witness, and disinformation goes beyond that. But, claims of disinformation should not be used to suppress honest discussion, as in the origins of COVID-19.

10. Rather than not coveting your neighbor's wife, believe that personal relationships, whether yours or somebody else's, between two adults, are relations of equals and that one partner does not control the other. Beyond romantic relationships, per No. 7, this includes noting that employers do not control employees, and government regulations that try to promote that must be fought against.

11. Going beyond not coveting employees, per the 10th Commandment or the latter two thirds of the 9th and 10th combined, this includes noting that personal servants have rights just as much as any other employees. Beyond "servants," it means fighting against slavery globally and getting rid of the prison labor loophole in the US and 13th Amendment.

12. Gods do not exist, but in the cases of things like child sexual abuse, family iniquities often do perpetuate themselves across multiple generations. Taking this seriously and fighting back against sexual, physical, emotional, religious, or other abuse of vulnerable children is a serious humaste charge.

The Buddhist deceptions of Stephen Batchelor

Now I know why so many westerners tell such bullshit about Buddhism. Stephen Batchelor, in addition to his other lies, claims the Buddha rejected karma and reincarnation, per this review of his main book.

And? Wikipedia agrees.

Now, exactly what gets reincarnated, and how and why, the Buddha himself may not have detailed. I accept that it stems from him — and have accepted that for many years — that Buddhism rejects the idea of an individual soul. In that sense, then, Buddhist belief in reincarnation is even more offensive than the Vedic/Indian epic religion belief of reincarnation of a personal soul.

I don't believe that Hinduism is the right word for the majority Indian religious belief at the time of Siddhartha Gautama, but I also reject Batchelor and others who claim Hinduism didn't start until the start of the British Raj. Some people even claim — and I think, but am not sure, that that includes Batchelor — that Hinduism was "invented" for the British. Rather, I think Hinduism begins with the Guptas, when Buddhism either faded out or was chased out of India. And, I think that it was probably some deliberate chasing out, at least to some degree, along with a conscious effort to organize beliefs and ideas of the Axial Age epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana into something coherent and cohesive. The ending of the compilation of the Ramayana in the 3rd century CE gives us a terminus ad quem for the dating of something like Hinduism. And, it dovetails, as that century is when the Gupta Empire started. And, Chandragupta II, circa 375-415, did much to elevate Hinduism.

I assume, but don't know, that Batchelor's "moves" here, and his motive, are ultimately to claim that Buddhism is not a religion, like Robert Wright. Well, Wright was wrong, and wrong. And thus, so is Batchelor. It believes in metaphysical principles and teaches people how to, individually and collectively, through both praxis and doctrine, to "better orient themselves" to these metaphysical principles, and thus fits my personal philosophy of religion-based definition of what a religion is.

I actually tackled this a bit a decade ago, and noted there, with a quote from someone else, that an Owen Flanagan was more intellectually honest than a Batchelor or Wright, in part by consciously admitting that they were creating a project to de-metaphysicalize the Buddha, rather than claiming to exegetically prove that he was an anti-metaphysician. And, here's that quote, again:

I don’t think it’s an accident that there are so many first generation Buddhists in America claiming it’s a philosophy and not a religion. Only if your parents aren’t Buddhists can you claim that Buddhism will do, unlike other religions, all that it promises. The first gen acolytes do all sorts of backbends to get around the obvious malarky of the dogma. Whether it’s the three card monty move of saying “there are many Buddhisms” so that any BS version of the doctrine you point out can be quickly pushed onto the wrong sect, or whether it’s the annoying “ineffable” dodge, or whether it’s the putting off until other lives the need for any sort of freaking evidence.

Owan Flannagan [sic] did his best to come up with a naturalized Buddhism, and I find it unsatisfactory. Nagarjuna is no more a logician than Democritus and Leucippus were Physicists, which, with Massimo’s blessing, they were not. Still I’m going to read the book for the history of logic.

There you are.

Here's Flanagan's primary book on that. And shock me, per one 1-star reviewer, that Sam Harris recommends the book. That's because he's done the Batchelor/Wright type BS peddling himself.

So, contra Flanagan's deliberate project and Batchelor's bullshit? Once again, as I said long ago on these pages?

Buddhism is still a religion.

And, karma is still as offensive as hell, whether it's a personal soul being reincarnated or not. Oh, and per claims that Buddhism teaches rebirth, not reincarnation? 

Per Spock: A difference that makes no difference IS no difference.

Dan Dennett and Q/qualia, the manifest image and more

Tim Bayne has a very good retrospective on some of Dan Dennett's thought at Aeon.

Two main things jumped out at me. One is his claim that Gilbert Ryle wasn't the only major philosophical influence on Dennett. 

He says we should also look at Wilfrid Sellars:

As the contemporary Oxford philosopher Anil Gomes observed in the London Review of Books in 2023, the key to understanding Dennett lies with another 20th-century American philosopher, Wilfrid Sellars – something of a philosopher’s philosopher. Sellars distinguished between two images of reality, the manifest image and the scientific image. The manifest image is the ordinary, everyday conception of reality – the conception of reality that human beings have prior to science. The scientific image, of course, is the conception of reality delivered by science.

Everybody knows a big part of Dennett's schtick was folk psychology, and Bayne says this was Dennett's version of the manifest image.

The biggie is — where is Dennett at in trying to incorporate some ideas from folk psychology into real psychology as a philosophy of mind? And, Bayne eventually looks at Dennett's idea of the self as a center of narrative gravity. He says this, essentially, stays in the manifest image and not the scientific image, and is based on stories. From this, he goes back to Wittgenstein as ordinary language philosopher. Here's his take on storytelling in general.

Indeed, if Dennett’s analysis of the self was driven by anything, it was driven not by science but by stories – and by stories about stories. At the heart of his paper ‘The Self as a Centre of Narrative Gravity’ (1992) is a story about a story-writing machine

From this, he says Dennett's idea is that, based on Ryle, "we" aren't looking for a causal explanation of behavior but rather sense-making. And, that's where Bayne discusses "the intentional stance."

That said, Bayne says Dennett himself was retreating from his view of intentionality by the end of his life.

Beyond that, aren't "we" as professional and amateur philosophers looking for a causal explanation of mind, beyond but including behavior?

Here qualia pop up.

The Philosophers’ Lexicon – first published by Dennett a decade before ‘Quining Qualia’– defines ‘to quine’ as to deny ‘resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant’. Dennett coined the term in homage to his undergraduate advisor W V O Quine, who had tried to construct a metaphysics with as few entities as possible. That’s ‘quining’; what about ‘qualia’? Dennett distinguished two senses of this term. In one sense, qualia (singular: quale) are simply the ways that things seem to us in perceptual experience. (To use Dennett’s example, consider how a glass of milk looks at sunset – that’s a quale.) To deny that there are ways the world appears to us in perceptual experience would indeed be in the running for ‘the silliest claim ever made’, but Dennett made no such claim. Instead, his eliminativism was directed towards a certain conception of perceptual experience – Qualia-with-a-capital-Q. To believe in Qualia is to think that the experiential character of consciousness (‘the ways things seem to us’) involves properties that are intrinsic, private, ineffable and directly available to introspection. It is Qualia – and not qualia – that Dennett quined.

As I told Massimo Pigliucci, assuming Bayne has a good interpretation of Dennett's thought, then Dennett comes off as essentially creating a fictive (sic) Platonic idea of Qualia capital Q, and then using that as a strawman to beat down opponents of his thoughts.

Dennett was good at other strawmanning, which leads me to endorse that Bayne IS at least in the right neighborhood. Further confirmation comes further down:

Note, in passing, the absence of science here. There is no mention of single-cell recordings; no appeal to computational models of brain activity; no measures of entropy. Instead, we’re asked to consider a purely fictional scenario. Dennett’s case against Qualia rests on a purely philosophical argument that would not have been out of place in the 1950s. (Indeed – as Dennett himself points out – it is a variation on a purely philosophical argument that was given in the 1950s: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘beetle in the box’ argument.) Although there is background concern here with scientific methods – in effect, Dennett is challenging the Qualia-phile to explain how Qualia might be studied – nothing in the way of ‘brain learning’ is assumed.

Dennett’s rejection of Qualia wasn’t a rejection of consciousness – it was a rejection of a certain conception of consciousness. But if Dennett didn’t reject consciousness, what explanation did he provide of it?

None, of course. Hence wags noting that the proper title for a mid-1990s book of his was "Dan Dennett's Ideas of Consciousness Explained."

There you are. That's our Danny boy!

And hence, while I noted his passing, and followed up on that, I wasn't philosophically crushed. Per that first link, I agreed with John Horgan that Dennett's rejection of at least capital-Q Qualia was a back door to Chalmers' p-zombies. Horgan's piece has a section on this. Second, I also agreed with John that Dennett was a practitioner of scientism, namely in his philosophy. His lack of actual science in his ideas on consciousness is one example. His claiming that evolution was algorithmic and a universal acid beyond biology is another.

In fact, Dennett deserves some Horgan pull quotes. I know Horgan actually deserves them:

Like many philosophers, Dennett clearly gets a kick out of defending positions that defy common sense. But his primary agenda is defending science against religion and other irrational belief systems. Dennett, an outspoken atheist, fears that creationism and other superstitious nonsense will persist as long as mysteries do. He thus insists that science can untangle even the knottiest conundrums, including the origin of life (which he asserts that recent “breakthroughs” are helping to solve) and consciousness.

Followed by:

Dennett accuses those who question science’s power of bad faith; these doubters don’t want their “beloved mysteries” explained. Dennett can’t accept that anyone might have legitimate, rational reasons for resisting his reductionist vision.

Some people surely have an unhealthy attachment to mysteries, but Dennett has an unhealthy aversion to them, which compels him to stake out unsound positions. His belief that consciousness is an illusion is nuttier than the belief that God is real. Science has real enemies—some in positions of great power--but Dennett doesn’t do science any favors by shilling for it so aggressively.

There you are.

That last paragraph may seem a bit harsh, but I would at least halfway accept it, including Horgan's "nuttier."

Too bad I wasn't famous enough to know Dennett while he was still alive and call him a Platonist, too.