Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"One could almost say, to give an idea of the impact Rome had on European intellectual life that had begun with Socratic philosophy, that for the first time history, historical knowledge, became, by its grasp of truth, the equal of philosophy." -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 182

"Rome is exemplary -- new and exemplary --in that it shows the limits of individual virtues. According to Scipio's report, Cato explained that there was never a genius so vast that he could miss nothing, nor could all the geniuses brought together in one place at one time foresee all the contingencies without the practical experience afforded by the passage of time. "Thus one must ascribe to Cato the Elder one of the first formulations of the theory of spontaneous order and of Hayek's idea that the functioning of the social order rests on an immense amount of information that could not be mastered by any individual or group of individuals, however zealous and capable one might imagine them to be." -- Pierre Manent, The Metamorphoses of the City , p. 190 I must admit, finding Hayek popping up 190 pages into this book was as surprising as it would be to discover, say, that my landlord in Brooklyn was married to my high school prom date.

"One can see that the most delicate questions of morality, and even the most difficult questions of ontology (such as the status of individuality) are linked to the question of political form. The human as pure moral agent and the human as pure particularity, pure individuality, two phenomena that appear to us to be given, that is, as determined in themselves or by themselves, are shown to be in fact derivative phenomena, if we judge by the Roman experience." -- Pierre Manent, The Metamorphoses of the City , p. 142

For language arts, we had Miss Communication. Mathematics was taught by Miss Calculation. In art we had a modernist, Miss Representation. Miss Placed taught us about the great rivers of each continent, such as the Nile, draining Antartica. Our lab work was carefully supervised by Miss Estimate. But my favorite of all was dance, where Miss Step taught us classics like the fox shuffle and the electric swing.

"Rome is not so much a city to be compared to Athens or Sparta as the dynamic process of human consociation, a process that unceasingly pushes and in the end abolishes the limits of the city form." -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 137 This quote comes after Manent discusses the legends of Rome's founding as a city composed of refugees and outcasts. What other polity was formed by refugees and outcasts and took on a universalizing mission?

There is an amusing scene in the movie where Brian tells the crowd that they're all individuals. In unison, they repeat after him "We are all individuals." The sheeple are so stupid! They parrot as a group the idea that they are each individuals! But, of course, the movie itself, with its trite observations about religion and individualism, while funny, is an instance of utterly commonplace groupthink: probably 80% of the Pythons' fellow students at Oxford and Cambridge would have held essentially the same views.

But at least I am relieved they are doing swell.