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Steven Pressfield is the acclaimed author of Gates of Fire and Killing Rommel: A Novel and other works of historical fiction, who recently began blogging at It’s the Tribes, Stupid! . Steve graciously agreed to contribute a guest post here at Zenpundit and I’m very pleased to present the following: 

                                                                     THE SPARTAN SENSE OF HUMOR

                                                                      by Steven Pressfield

[Fair warning: this is NOT a political column.]

In ancient Sparta, there was a law prohibiting all citizens from hewing the roofbeams of their houses with any tool finer than an axe.  The Spartans wanted their homes to be–spartan.  Result: roofbeamsin Sparta were just tree trunks with the limbs lopped off.

Once a Spartan was visiting at Athens, staying in an elegant home with frescoes, marble statuary–and impeccably-squared ceiling beams.  Admiring these, the Spartan asked his host if trees grew square at Athens.  The gentleman laughed.  “Of course not; they grow round, as trees grow everywhere.” 

“And if they grew square,” asked the Spartan, “would you make them round?”

Probably the two most celebrated Spartan sayings come from the battle of Thermopylae.  First is King Leonidas’ admonishment to his comrades onthe final morning, when the defenders knew they were all going to die.”Now eat a good breakfast, men, for we’ll all be sharing dinner in hell.”

The second is from the warriorDienekes, on the afternoon before Xerxes’ million-man army first appeared.  The Spartans had taken possession of the pass but had not yet seen the enemy.  As they were going about their preparations, a local Greek came running in, wild-eyed, having just gotten a glimpse of the Persian multitudes approaching.  The invaders’ archers were so numerous, the man breathlessly told the Spartans, that when they fired their volleys, the mass of arrows blocked out the sun.  “Good,” replied Dienekes, “then we’ll have our battle in the shade.”

Spartans liked their quips terse and lean.  They trained their young men for this.  Youths in the agoge (“the Upbringing”), the notorious eleven-year training regimen that turned Spartan boys into warriors, would from time to time be called out before their elders and grilled with rapid-fire questions.  The boys were judged on the wit and economy of their answers.

The reason for this was fear.  The Spartans developed their style of humor from combat and from the apprehension that precedes combat.  Hoplite warfare was surely among the most terror-inducing for the individual fighter, not only because he knew that all the killing would be done hand-to-hand, but because he often had hours preceding a battle to stare at the enemy phalanx across the field, while his own imagination ran riot.The Spartans prized the type of wit that cut such tension, the kind of humor that could release fear with a laugh and pull each individual out of his own head and his own isolation.

Think about Dienekes’ quip for a moment.  If we imagine ourselves there at the “Hot Gates,” it’s not hard to picture our imaginations working overtime as we wait for the enemy host to make its appearance.  What would these alien invaders be like? We knew they were fierce horsemen and warriors, drawn from the bravest nations of the East.  And we knew they’d outnumber us 100 to one.  What weapons would they carry?  What tactics would they employ?  Could we stand up to them?  Now suddenly a local farmer comes racing into camp, bug-eyed and out of breath, and starts regaling us with tales of the scale and magnitude of the enemy army.  Were we scared?  Hell, yes!  You can bet the young warriors clustered around this messenger, each of them thinking, “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”  Then Dienekes, a commander of proven valor about forty years old, offered his icy, unperturbed quip.  What happened?  You can bet that after the defendershad their laugh, they noticed that their palms weren’t as clammy as they had been thirty seconds earlier.  The warriors looked at each other–darkly no doubt, and grimly–and went back to their tasks of preparation for battle.

Several qualities are worth noting, I think, about both Dienekes’ and Leonidas’ one-liners.  First, they’re not jokes.  They’re not meant just to raise a laugh.  Yet they’re funny, they’re on-point.  Second, they don’t solve the problem.  Neither remarkoffers hope or promises a happy ending.  They’re not inspirational.  They don’t point to glory or triumph–or seek to allay their comrades’ anxiety by holding out the prospect of some rosy future outcome.  They face reality. They say, “Some heavy shit is coming down, brothers, and we’re going to go through it.”

And they’re inclusive.  They’re about “us.”  The grim prospect they acknowledge is one that all of us will undergo together.  They draw each individual out of his private terror and yoke him to the group.

That’s it.  That’s enough.

The reason contemporary Marines relate so instinctively to the Spartan mind-set, I suspect, is that their own attitude is so similar.  Marine training, as anyone who has gone through it knows, doesn’t build supermen.  Marines don’t have any special tricks to kill you with a butter knife.  But what Marines know how to do better than anybody isto be miserable.  That’s what Marine training teaches.  Marines take a perverse pride in having the crappiest equipment, coldest chow and highest casualty rates of any American armed force.  What’s the dirtiest, crummiest, most dangerous assignment?  That’s the one Marines want.  They’re pissed off if they don’t get it.  Nothing infuriates Marines more than to learn that the army has gotten a crappier assignment than they have.

I recommend this attitude, by the way, for all artists, entrepreneurs and anyone (including bloggers) who has to motivate himself and validate himself all on his own.  For facing the blank page, nothing beats it.  It also engenders a wholesome species of dark, gallows pride.

Another Spartan was visiting Athens.  (The river at Athens, we should note, is the Cephisus; at Sparta the river is theEurotas.  The Spartans were famous, as well, for never letting any invader get anywhere near their city.)  The Athenian was bragging about prior wars between the two rivals.  “We have buried many Spartans,” he declared, “beside the Cephisus.” 

“Yes,” replied the Spartan, “but we have buried no Athenians beside the Eurotas.”

This will be the first of several related posts. 

The other day, I happened to be talking to my friend Dr. Von, a physicist and educator, and he brought up a post by The Eide Neurolearning Blog, on educating children in terms of “big picture thinking”:

What is ‘big picture’ thinking? Business consultant Andrew Sobel described it as:

1. Having a simple framework
2. Using analogies and metaphors
3. Developing multiple perspectives
4. Looking for patterns and commonalities….

Instead of training for compliance, careful rule-following, and exact memorization or a paragon of crystallized intelligence, we need to make more room for ‘big picture’ thinkers – while still recognizing the need for basic skills and knowledge.….Pint-sized big picture thinkers really do exist and they seem to be over-represented among gifted children who underperform or cause behavioral disruptions in their early elementary school years. Many of these kids are ‘high conceptual’ thinkers, those who like discovering novel subjects, themes, and things that don’t make sense(“The thing that doesn’t fit is the interesting thing” – Richard Feynman), but the reason for this is often not random – inductive learners (learners who derive rules from examples) use novelties to generate new hypotheses or new rules.If you really want to teach and interest big picture thinkers, you would expose them to rich multisensory and chronologically-advanced experiences. Look for subjects, phenomena and ideas that could be compared and contrasted. Complexity should be embraced and not shunned. For big picture thinkers – complex is simple and simple is complex. Complexity often brings more meaning because there are enough examples that one can make a pattern.….Many of them are seeking the overarching framework inside which they can put their new bit of knowledge. Often these are ‘why’ kids – who need to know why something is true, not just that something is true.

The Eides have given an excellent explanation of the big picture thinker as a cognitive type and had some implied suggestions in that description on how a teacher or professor could approach students to get them thinking – models, metaphors, analogies, exposure to patterns and multiple perspectives. Note: all students willl derive some benefit from these techniques and become better at seeing the larger context. Many people can, with sufficient practice, can become significantly better, but the natural big picture thinkers are the ones who will react with insightful leaps of reasoning, imagination and questions with little or no prompting.

Unfortunately, such experiences in public schools and even our universities have become increasingly rare. Dr. Von explains why:

When I talk with students (juniors and seniors in high school) about how different subjects and classes are taught, invariably it comes down to great amounts of memorization. Most students, when you engage them in real conversations about the education they receive, will open up freely and get right to the point…because of the continued emphasis on grades and GPAs by colleges, students feel the need to focus first on memorization and get the grade on the test, and then move on to the next topic without much concern with what was just studied. When this is the case in school, has true learning just occurred? Likely not, if students are unable to recall and actually apply concepts that were covered in the past.

….To make matters worse, as students rely so heavily on memorization and short-term success on tests (and this is driven home even more in the ‘high stakes testing’ environment we find ourselves in in the era of No Child Left Behind, as resently implemented), those students, many of whom are gifted, as the Eides point out, who prefer complexity in their learning, are not benefitting from the way many (most) classrooms are run. By complexity, I mean those students who want to ‘see the big picture.’ Those students who want to know why something works, and how it is related to the material that was studied last semester as well as to the material that was covered in another class. For example, I love when students in my physics classes come to me asking about how to interpret and apply a particular integral result which was just studied in calculus class, or how Einstein’s theories changed political and military history, as studied in a history course. Those moments happen every so often, as a result of student curiosity and their wanting to truly learn about the material rather than memorize something for the test, and good teachers recognize such moments when they happen…

It falls to me to discuss why it matters: As a nation we are crippling the next generation of visionaries by retarding their intellectual growth with bad educational policy as surely as we might if we were adding lead to their drinking water.

Scientists and inventors, philosophers and artists, entrepreneurs and statesmen, individuals who conceive of and accomplish great things do not emerge from schools and colleges that emphasize low-level thinking and a curriculum without intellectual depth or rigor. They emerge in spite of them.

To force a systemic improvement in public education, the Bush administration pushed through “No Child Left Behind” with rigid timetables, mandated high stakes testing and punitive consequences for schools and districts not making standards. That is to say, the Bush administration addressed the lack of rigor in educational process with a sledgehammer – but ignored the lack of rigor in educational substance ( at least directly – under NCLB some schools had to toughen their curriculum to teach to the state test, but other schools or schools in different states dumbed down for the same reason – curricular alignment).

That NCLB forced public schools to ensure that our weakest students verifiably succeed at understanding the fundamentals is laudable. That this emphasis increasingly comes at the cost of schools only educating all their students at the level of the fundamentals is inexcusable. Perhaps criminal. NCLB is the overarching legal framework that was superimposed on a system whose content was (and often still is) frequently less than demanding and taught by instructors who themselves have not majored in the subject they are teaching. 

At the postsecondary level, long before the measure and punish model of NCLB arrived at k-12 schools, colleges and universities abandoned any semblance of a core curriculum or traditional canon and undergraduate degree requirements were larded with plenty of au courant esoterica as course options. Esoterica formerly left for footnotes in dissertations or as the subject of longwinded, diatribes at the dreary meetings of extremist splinter parties. Ivy League, big state schools, small third tier colleges – it does not matter; with only a few exceptions, the “cafeteria a la carte” model of undergraduate education prevails.

While a few students absorb and become true believers of fashionable cant, most students graduate high school and college unaffected by the large amounts of rubbish and trivia they have been exposed to because it was presented without any kind of sensible context and being committed to short term memory, quickly forgotten. The real damage to students comes from the cumulative effect of the absence of substance – the waste of time where meaningful content and the pressure to think through hard problems should have been.

The costs of educational myopia are here and they will grow worse with time. We already see sharply declining public support for science (because more people are now ignorant of basic scientific literacy),  lower rates of innovation and other negative economic effects. In the area of governance, across the board, regardless of party label or ideology, we have national leaders in their 40’s, 50’s and early 60’s who see the world primarily in short-term, tactical terms and who confuse career or class interest with governing in the national interest. Oligarchy is inherently a non-strategic worldview because it eschews making choices because choices require sacrifice in the near term in order to acquire systemic advantages in the long term. 

“Oligarchy” seems like a a harsh word because we think of “oligarchs” as being selfish, exceedingly greedy, political sociopaths. While such figures do exist outside of TV and the movies (Burmese junta, Iranian hardliners, Soviet politburo etc.) most people are neither particularly malicious nor eager to consciously and openly do things society acknowledges to be wrong or counterproductive. Even less so are they eager to be seen by the public as incompetent. The problem is that, frequently, people are prisoners of their own limited frame of reference and, when their conscience might be tweaked, they excel at rationalization and denial.

This is not a question of smart or dumb or of expecting politicians to be moral paragons. There’s plenty of IQ wattage inside and outside of Washington, DC and petty larceny in politics goes back to the stone age. Rather, on average, the difficulty is that our nation’s intellectual potential has not been effectively maximized. Is it reasonable to educate people in a way where all subjects are disconnected from one another, prioritizing narrow specialization, emphasizing accumulating facts over understanding principles, rewarding the “right answer” instead of the “best question”, demanding conformity instead of curiosity and then expect our leaders to be visionaries and adaptively creative statesmen who think in strategic terms?

Why would our societal orientation in complex, dynamic, fast moving situations be good when our educational system trains people only to think through simplified, linear, sequential problems? Strategic thinkers need to be able to see “the big picture” and handle uncertainty, or they cannot be said to be strategic thinkers.

The ship of state has been steered, over the last forty or so years, into an epistemological cul-de-sac and we are headed for the rocks. America needs a grand strategy for a competent citizenry in order to reach the point where it can again have a grand strategy to deal with an unruly world.

LINKING TO THIS POST:

Red Herrings

Project White Horse

Fabius Maximus

The Committee of Public Safety ( provides an extensive analysis of the subject)

RELATED TOPIC:

Liberty/Security – Rethinking liberal arts

Steven Pressfield responds at It’s the Tribes, Stupid to Fabius Maximus, Michael Yon and….me!

What I Would Say Differently If I Were Saying It Again

“Good” Tribalism and “Bad” Tribalism

I would define “bad” tribalism as that practiced by the Taliban and al-Qaeda. I know, I know . . . critics will say that both those groups are pan-Islamic, ideology-driven, supra-national, propelled more by Salafism and Deobandism than pure tribalism. I would not argue with that.

But if we probe beneath the surface, we recognize virulent tribalism at the heart of the belief systems of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. I would cite the following “bad” tribal characteristics: hostility to all outsiders; perpetual warfare; codes of silence; duplicity and bad faith in all negotiations with non-insiders; suppression of women; intolerance of dissent; a fierce, patriarchal code of warrior honor; a ready and even eager willingness to give up one’s life for the group; super-conservatism, politically and culturally; reverence for the past and, in fact, a desire to return to the past.

Defined in relation to its opposites, “bad” tribalism takes its stand against everything open, inclusive, modern, progressive, secular, individualistic, Western, female-empowering.

What about “good” tribalism? “Good” tribalism is the ancient, proud, communal system of family- and clan-based local governance that has been practiced in Afghanistan and many parts of Central Asia for millennia. Tribal jirgas resolve disputes and give a voice to all members; tribal militias protect the land and the people. “Good” tribalism wants to be left alone to live its own life. In a way it’s democracy in its purest and most natural “town hall” form. It has worked for thousands of years and it’s working today….

Read the rest here.

Jamais Cascio of Open the Future has a piece on possible extrinsic, pharmaceutical and evolutionary modifications to human intelligence in The Atlantic Monthly ( I read it on my Kindle):

Get Smarter

….Our present century may not be quite as perilous for the human race as an ice age in the aftermath of a super-volcano eruption, but the next few decades will pose enormous hurdles that go beyond the climate crisis. The end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nano­technologies-each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation. And as good as our brains have become at planning ahead, we’re still biased toward looking for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage.

But here’s an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.

….Yet in one sense, the age of the cyborg and the super-genius has already arrived. It just involves external information and communication devices instead of implants and genetic modification. The bioethicist James Hughes of Trinity College refers to all of this as “exo­cortical technology,” but you can just think of it as “stuff you already own.” Increasingly, we buttress our cognitive functions with our computing systems, no matter that the connections are mediated by simple typing and pointing. These tools enable our brains to do things that would once have been almost unimaginable:

• powerful simulations and massive data sets allow physicists to visualize, understand, and debate models of an 11?dimension universe;
• real-time data from satellites, global environmental databases, and high-resolution models allow geophysicists to recognize the subtle signs of long-term changes to the planet;
• cross-connected scheduling systems allow anyone to assemble, with a few clicks, a complex, multimodal travel itinerary that would have taken a human travel agent days to create.

If that last example sounds prosaic, it simply reflects how embedded these kinds of augmentation have become. Not much more than a decade ago, such a tool was outrageously impressive-and it destroyed the travel-agent industry.

That industry won’t be the last one to go. Any occupation requiring pattern-matching and the ability to find obscure connections will quickly morph from the domain of experts to that of ordinary people whose intelligence has been augmented by cheap digital tools. Humans won’t be taken out of the loop-in fact, many, many more humans will have the capacity to do something that was once limited to a hermetic priesthood. Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.

My bibliomaniacal co-blogger at Chicago Boyz, Lexington Green, just created a new internet meme, with a post entitled Ten Books I Want To Read Again:

I have too little time to read, let alone re-read. But there are certain books that had an impact on me, that I think about from time to time, and that I have an urge to re-read. I suppose that re-reading, or at least wanting to re-read is a sign that a book is part of a person’s quantum library. I have more, but I will pick ten:

• Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine
• Eric Rucker Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros
• Robert A Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• Homer, The Iliad
• George Orwell, 1984
• Quentin Reynolds, They Fought for the Sky: The Dramatic Story of the First War in the Air
• Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions
• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
• Evelyn Waugh, The Sword of Honor Trilogy

• H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

A few years ago I re-read Starship Troopers, which had a huge impact on me when I was 11 years old. It was just about as good as I remembered it. I also re-read 1984 about five years ago. I first read 1984 when I was ten years old. I read it a couple of times afterwards. It is absolutely foundational to my thinking. In the ensuing years, I have read almost everything else by Orwell. I found that 1984 was much better than I remembered it being – So much so that I will certainly to go back to it one more time.

A Quantum Library are those books that you read repreatedly because each time you find insights that you had missed or misunderstood previously. While many classics fall into that category, it can be any book with enough pull that you spent the time to read it again. Highbrow literature is not required.

Here are my ten, no particular order:

1. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.

Gibbon, along with Clausewitz and Ranke contributed mightily to the development of the historical profession, with Gibbon as a great inspirationfor many others and a daunting intellectual in his time ( Benjamin Franklin unsuccessfully sought a dinner invitation with Gibbon, while a lobbyist for colonial interests in London). I last read The Decline and Fall as an undergraduate.

2. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright.

Tom Barnett brought up Wright recently, which reminded me how much I liked Wright’s influential explanation of cultural evolution as a force in the Darwinian ratchet in Nonzero.

3. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

Probably the most vilified yet least read by critics book of the last thirty years.

The authors staked out an extreme hereditarian position in regard to the “g” factor of IQ, which they took great delight in juxtaposing in one chapter and one appendix section with aggregate mean demographic statistics in such a way as to rub academic PC sensibilities raw. This politically calculated gesture let them ride to the bestseller’s lists on a wave of outrage, a good part of which was self-discreditingly ignorant of psychometric testing, genetics, economics and social science methodology, which drowned out the more perceptive critics. now that the furor is long past, it would be interesting to re-read The Bell Curve in light of subsequent scientific discoveries about neurolearning and intelligence.

4. The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom.

Read it when it first came out and was carrying it into a philo gen ed class which caused my professor, a pompous ass who disliked me for some conservative opinion I once had the temerity to voice, to pause and announce “Well…at least you are reading a serious critic”. He was reading it as well.

5. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Bulgakov was the anti-Soviet novelist who happened to also be Stalin’s favorite playwright ( Bulgakov was the author of The White Turbans, which Stalin delighted in repeatedly watching – a quirk of fate which saved Bulgakov’s life and freedom). An unhappy man of great imaginative powers, Bulgakov’s great novel had something like a quarter of a million or half a million words excised by Soviet censors. I’m curious if more accurate editions have been issued.

6. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson.

One of the best single volume histories of the Civil War. A “gateway” book to other Civil War histories.

7. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

For anyone who was ever Holden Caulfield – or who had to teach him.

8. The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest.

This is a hybrid pick because I read The Great Terror and also Conquest’s Reassessment. Conquest is always worth reading, an old school man of letters of whom we will see no more of his like.

9. The Best and the Brightest by David Haberstam.

The seminal, anti-Vietnam War book by a lionized Establishment figure ( lionized now, not during the war), the title of which became a term of cultural literacy. Appropriate because the current administration seems to be too cocksure that they too are best and brghtest.

10. The Possessed (The Devils) by Fyodor Dostoyevskii.

Dostoyevskii’s psychological portrait of faddish radicalism, earnest nihilism, and incipient terrorism in a provincicial backwater in Tsarist Russia, is another classic that fits the spirit of our times. The Possessed is less ponderous and more satirical than Crime and Punishment and more cohesive than The Idiot.

What are your ten ?