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Comment by cobbzilla | Hacker News Reader

This article totally glosses over the Helots, the Spartans permanent slave underclass. Any “defense” of Sparta should have some explanation for this horrible situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots

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My God really? Slavery was the uniform norm for almost all of human history [0]. If nothing good can come of a society that enslaved others, then the logical corollary is an incredibly short sighted and unnecessarily nihilistic view of the journey of humanity. Can we give history a break?

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Sl...

Edit: before somebody says blah blah race, there isn't a race on Earth that wasn't subjected to slavery in history.

Yes, it’s different. Of the many flavors of slavery, the Spartan version was particularly brutal.

A very great deal of good can come of exploiting others; a whole lot of good - for me. As for them, fuck 'em. They're only <insert rationalisation here>.

Owning a slave pre-industrial revolution doubles your manpower. Owning ten multiplies it by 10.

And BTW slavery still exists, either literally or functionally. Plenty of sweatshops in the world, and I hear chocolate isn't always grown in happy edens.

"Functional" slavery as your implication describes is so catastrophically different from actual owning of persons that it's incomprehensibly dishonest and devalues the very real reality of slavery in past and present in the developing world. First world perspective, when you think having a job is the same as being owned.

Slavery was the norm. Slave societies, where slaves made up the vast majority of the population, were definitely not the norm.

Social practices where an underclass of people are locked into agrarian or manual labor largely on the basis of hereditary differences is something that spans most agrarian societies. Serfdom, caste systems, slavery, etc. all essentially lock large demographics into limited labor opportunities. Certainly each of these things have significant difference, and there's substantial differences even within them (e.g. Feudal Japan's caste system of farmers, warriors, artisans, and merchants is different from South Asian caste systems. Classical slavery is not identical to transatlantic slavery). But people in power using social institutions to ensure that significant portions of the population are unable to acquire wealth or power beyond subsistence is fairly universal across agrarian civilizations, and didn't really change until the industrial revolution.

It's a weird argument though. Infanticide was also the norm for almost all history, but you wouldn't defend any relation between it and whatever progress the society made, or things it produced.

It's just unrelated in my opinion.

Yes it did: "Spartan citizens, who were greatly outnumbered by the enslaved helots..."

A passing mention in one sentence, without any further exposition: this is not what I consider an adequate defense.

It might have to do with the fact that the parts of Sparta that this piece is 'defending' minimally interacts with that aspect of Spartan culture or society (if at all?). How does the fact that the Spartans had a brutal class of slaves undermine or interact with the article's thrust/claim that Spartans demonstrate that "that people crave more than individual liberty, full stop. People want actively to participate in the life of a community, too, and our politics ought to answer to that"?

Because it absolutely interacted. That community and collective effort was built to suppress Helot rebellions by overwhelming military force. Their extreme of social mobilization was only possible or desirable because of common threat, in this case of their own making. You cannot separate the social structure of a ruling minority from a ruled majority, the former is always shaped by the interaction with the latter.

See also the reports of drops in suicide rates and better social cohesion in war zones. That doesn't mean we should advocate a brutal civil war as a mental health measure.

The article hardly attempts to say structuring our societies to maximize its ability to crush rebellions is a good thing. It does say that solely maximizing individual spheres of rights and opportunity of commercial profit may actually not be a great idea.

I think this is hardly a controversial opinion.

Like I agree that more context about helots would have shored up this article nicely, but I also think that all the chatter about its absence misses the point of the article.

Come on... look at this section:

characteristics of Spartan society that many of them would object to, including relative economic equality, cultural egalitarianism, and military restraint.

The Spartans are a strange case: They rejected anything resembling liberal democracy, abandoned commerce, industry, and trade, and by doing so, rose to preeminence in the Greek world and maintained their independence for seven centuries—far longer than any modern republic.

So the saving features are keeping a terrible tyranny for seven centuries, "cultural egalitarianism" (nice euphemism) and "relative economic equality" (except between the 90% slaves and the 10% citizens).

To create this paradise they just had to reject democracy, commerce, industry and trade. Nice deal!!!

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