No, despite having taught about it

@digory at which education level were you teaching?

@TheAllMemeingEye highschool, informally

It was destroyed by the woke Christian bullshit

@skibidist What kind of "woke bullshit" do you have in mind?

Bret Devereaux seems to believe essentially the opposite (at least to whatever extent it's meaningful to apply the term "woke" to ancient history): https://acoup.blog/2021/07/30/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-v-saving-and-losing-an-empire/

"Indeed, diversity was the root of Roman success. What made the Roman Empire possible, both to create and to hold, was the willingness of the Romans to opportunistically include conquered peoples in the Roman project... Diversity did not destroy the Roman Empire, but intolerance of diversity contributed greatly to its fall."

@TimothyJohnson5c16 I don't buy Deveraux's claim; the barbarian kingdoms were run genuinely differently from the Roman Empire (though they were better run where they had more to work with, like Tunisia and Italy). Alaric's army wasn't run along the lines of, say, Magnentius.

My suspicion is that skibidist is trolling, but he is welcome to make his case.

@TimothyJohnson5c16 @EnopoletusHarding I am always trolling to some degree. I read Gibbon's Decline... when I was very young and again later, and it has influenced me to a significant degree. I also tend to believe that one can hardly find a culture after Christianity that celebrated life like Romans used to. But I don't think Christianity was a significant causal factor for the fall. On that, I side with complex systems people's perspective. Something about institutional complexity becoming such that nothing could be done and vying for power becoming a negative sum game. Like the EU today.

How good is "good"? I can give a layman amateur history enthusiast explanation based on wikipedia, youtube mini documentaries, and LLM convos, which I suspect might be better than what 90% of the global population would give, but obviously nowhere near the level that a historian would

@TheAllMemeingEye I don't know what you know; you would have to decide for yourself.

@EnopoletusHarding So it's about whether we ourselves consider it good rather than a fixed standard, even though we might be delusional and dunning-krugered?

@TheAllMemeingEye I hope you aren't, but I don't know how to set up a standard so that I know you aren't.

@EnopoletusHarding I'll vote on the side of epistemic humility to correct for my potential unknown biases 👍