You Ask Leading Questions

Studying history can help you become a better, more informed leader. Yet a lot of so-called advice from 'history' out there tends to oversimplify the historical record. History is big and complex; reducing this enormous field to a bunch of digestible soundbites makes it appear small and simple.

So  what would happen if we tried to follow historical leadership advice without picking and choosing examples or separating those select tidbits from their original contexts? Would that advice still make sense? In this episode we answer that very question. And we discover that the real lessons of history are deeper, richer, messier and stranger—and far more profound—than some folks would have you believe.

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

 YAAW Podcast | Episode 8 | Doug Sofer

You Ask Leading Questions

©2023 Doug Sofer

Cold Open

•   Welcome back to this mind-opening, mind-blowing, eye-opening and eye-blowing [distant blowing sound plus someone saying “Yow my eye!”] new podcast about how genuine, evidence-derived history helps you to better fathom the strangeness of now.

•   [pause]

•   So even if you get nothing else out of this podcast, I hope you retain the following important idea. Ready? Here it is:

•   [Echo effect] History is big!

•   [pause]

•   A lot happened in the past. And we’re still discovering—and rediscovering—the past when we analyze readings and other artefacts left behind from eras gone by.

•   And history isn’t only about happenings either.

•   It’s also about understanding what made past societies tick—their values, their institutions, their motivations, their priorities.

•   In a nutshell: Real history is about trying to make sense of the cultural contexts of past peoples—in all their bigness over space and time.

•   [pause]

•   Past peoples constitute an enormous group of folks from an enormous diversity of backgrounds—over pretty much the whole globe—over thousands of years.

•   And because they experienced, and thought, and valued different things than us, they’re often more different from us than folks generally expect them to be. 

•   [pause]

•   The academic discipline of history shows us that the human condition is far bigger, and more complicated, and messier, and weirder than it seems when you think only in the here and now.

•   [pause]

•   And that’s why I’m sometimes cheesed off when I hear folks try to talk about the past as if it’s small and/or simple.

•   [pause]

•   Take, for example, many different media that claim to bring you simple, digestible advice from the annals of history about leadership.

•   [pause]

•   There are abundant examples out there of so-called historical advice that remove certain leaders from their actual historical contexts.

•   [pause]

•   Go to your favorite search engine and type in the name of almost any historical king, emperor, president, prime minister, inventor, philosopher, coach, artist or writer you can think of—along with the words “[QE] leadership advice” and you’ll almost certainly see what I mean.

•   The sites that pop up make these leaders out to be folks who are just like you and me.

•   Except it’s like Joan of Arc and Aristotle and Genghis Khan are giving some kind of management seminar in the convention center at your nearby Hiltamadayatt Hotel where for the low low price of just $799 you can sit down on poorly padded stackable chairs and hear long-dead folks talk you through their Powerpoint presentations.

•   [pause]

•   For the most part, though, leaders of the past hailed from strikingly different worlds than ours.

•   [pause]

•   So today, let’s explore what kinds of advice the leaders from yesteryear really have to offer us.

•   [pause]

•   As you’ll soon see, some of their advice may seem so off-putting that it’ll make you want to get up from your poorly padded stackable chair, leave the convention hall entirely, and storm off to the hotel restaurant and drown your sorrows with a double nachos-deluxe platter.

•   But I promise it’s going to turn out all right: I’m a professional historian and I’ve been trained to guide you through un-conventional situations just like this one.

•   My name is Doug Sofer, and I’m a weirdo just like you.

Theme / call for sponsors

•   Please tell everyone you know about this podcast and make sure to check out findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors if you’d like to support this show!

•   Thanks!

Top Five List of Questionable Leadership Advice from History

•   Sure it’s possible to pick and choose tidbits of leadership advice from the past in order to make it seem coherent and relevant to the present.

•   More often than not, though, the wise counsel of past powerful people seems today as if it came from some other dimension.

•   Similarly, today’s guidance on governance would seem equally alien to yesterday’s elite. And you are a weirdo—

•   [divebomb]

•   —is literally the name of this podcast, so this is the correct place for us to consider these issues.

•   Today’s episode is called “You ask leading questions!”

•   [pause]

•   Quick caveat before we begin: Toward the end of this episode we discuss a few especially ugly truths about historical leadership strategies. If you’ve got young’uns around, you should know that this episode gets a bit uglier than usual with the final two parts: Those two parts are: “Lesson Two” and “Lesson One.”

•   [pause]

•   Why, you might ask, are we counting down numbered lessons today?

•   Because in typical leadership seminar fashion, we’re going to present our information in the format of an easily digestible list that we’ll call “Five Questionable Bits of Leadership Advice from History.”

•   Let’s get to it.

[Gong 5] Lesson #5: Dress for success—by preventing others from wearing nice things.

•   The advice often goes that you should “dress for the job you want.”

•   Sure, okay: but what if someone else wants your job?

•   When that happens, just do what the savvy leaders in 13th century Burgundy did: Place legal restrictions on the length of ordinary people’s shoes.

•   [pause]

•   Yes, that’s correct: In the Burgundy region of central France, the points on commoners’ shoes were only allowed to be a maximum of six inches long.

•   But the Burgundian prince could have 24-inch shoe points!

•   You just need to pass a similar law and you’ve solved your problem!

•   [pause]

•   And why stop there?

•   Now that you’ve got your mega-pointy shoes, why not also dress like a weasel?

•   [pause]

•   That’s right: You too could dazzle your friends and humble your enemies by wearing ermine fur.

•   An ermine is a kind of weasel, also called a stoat.

•   And in the winter, these guys’ fur turns white and becomes especially soft.

•   [pause]

•   The bad news for stoats was that nobles coveted those weasels’ winter coats and would therefore convert these animals into prestigious clothing—royal robes could be made almost entirely of ermine fur.

•   Other nobles and fancy people had fur trim on their clothing—like for the robes of English lords, and even for the academic regalia of scholars at Oxford and Cambridge in England.

•   It’s what the black-spotted white fur part is made of that goes around the Imperial State Crown, one of the crown jewels of the United Kingdom.

•   The good news for the ermines, though, was that for much of European history, stoat fur was not legally allowed to be used by common folk.

•   [pause]

•   So whether we’re talking shoe points or weasels, governments throughout much of the history of the world passed what are called Sumptuary Laws—laws that restrict which official categories of humans are permitted to purchase certain kinds of personal consumer goods.

•   Like food. Or jewelry. Or clothing.

•   [pause]

•   Which governments had sumptuary laws?

•   A whole bunch of them—all around the world.

•   In Europe, these kinds of sumptuary laws about ermine fur ranged all the way from Spain in the west to Turkey in the east—pretty much the whole length of Europe.

•   So for instance, there’s a series of laws from Valladolid in the Spanish kingdom of Castille—that dates back all the way to 1283. It begins with a statement that the king can wear whatever he wants. And then it continues:

•   “[QE] No grandee, knight, or any other man whomsoever may have more than four suits of clothing each year; and those may not bear ermine, drawnwork, silk, gold or silver thread, elaborate needlework, gold embroidery, pelts, trimmings, or any regal or elaborate material whatever except fur and cloth; one suit of clothing may not be covered with another; no one except the King may wear a scarlet rain cloak…”

•   This section keeps going for a while and eventually concludes:

•   “… no one may wear marten furs except the King, a noble, a grandee, or a bridegroom if he is the son of a grandee; no one may wear silver, crystal, buttons, long chains, ermine, or otter on their cloaks or robes except around the edges of their mantle….”

•   For the record, a marten is yet another kind of weasel!

•   [pause]

•   In 1727—four centuries later—on the other side of the continent in Turkey—then called the Ottoman Empire—that government created a similar sumptuary law. It also prohibited non-elite men and women from wearing ermine fur.

•   And from the many centuries between the middle ages through the 18th century and beyond, many different kingdoms all over Europe created similar weasel-based sumptuary laws.

•   [pause]

•   To sum up lesson #5, then:

•   Great European leaders dug stoat-fur and they were not weirdos. Un. Like. You.

•   Huh: Why does that sentence sound familiar?

•   [pause]

•   Anyway, if you want to know more, a book of essays about sumptuary laws in world history called “A Right To Dress” came out a couple of years ago. I’ll put a full citation up on Findyourselfinhistory.com if you’re interested.

•   For now, let’s move on our next bit of timeless leadership advice.

Lesson #4: Obey But Don’t Comply.

•   The Spanish empire ruled over much of the land and most of the people of the American hemisphere for approximately three centuries.

•   Starting in the decades after Columbus did his Ocean-Blue-Sailing-Thing in 1492—and all the way through the end of the 1820s, Spain controlled an enormous territory whose borders went further north than the Great Salt Lake in what is today the U.S. state of Utah—and as far south as Tierra Del Fuego—the southern tip of South America.

•   What’s more, this European kingdom exerted control over a territory that incredibly vast—from across the ocean!

•   And they pulled off this feat prior to the existence of any kind of instantaneous communication like the telegraph—which I talk about in episode 5.

•   [pause]

•   Surely, an empire as huge and long-lasting as that of colonial Spain must have some great lessons for managers and leaders today, right?

•   Let’s find out.

•   [pause]

•   There were many keys to Spain’s New World success, but one of those keys has to do with the way the kingdom organized its overseas colonial government.

•   At the top of the metaphorical pyramid of this kingdom was, perhaps not surprisingly, the monarch—for most of Spanish history that meant a king.

•   Next was an elite group of high-profile advisers called the Council of the Indies—a group that was supposed to know as much as anyone about the American hemisphere—and how to extract as much out of those colonies as possible.

•   [pause]

•   Both the monarch and the Council of the Indies were located in Spain.

•   Meanwhile, the top Spanish officials who were actually physically located across the Atlantic in the Americas were called viceroys—which pretty much means vice-king—the same way that the prefix “vice” works in “vice president.”

•   Spain’s kingdom was an absolute monarchy—somewhat like the French iteration of absolutism that we talked about in the previous episode.

•   Like in France, the Spanish king was the living embodiment of Spain, appointed by God to rule.

•   In other words, according to the working theory of government at the time, all authority in the Spanish empire came in theory began from God in heaven.

•   That authority then traveled to the monarch—who then relayed God’s power to the Council of the Indies, across the ocean to the viceroy, and eventually through the rest of the pyramid of government, one rank at a time.

•   In other words, there’s only one real rule of absolute monarchy: The monarch’s authority comes from God and therefore must be obeyed in all cases, under all circumstances.

•   [pause]

•   Except that sometimes the monarch didn’t really know what was happening in his American colonies—because they were across the ocean!

•   And the monarch’s advisers in the Council of the Indies—were also across the ocean!

•   [pause]

•   So if you’re the viceroy, what you do you do if you receive an order from the God-appointed king by way of the Council of the Indies—when the order doesn’t seem to make sense?

•   For instance, some orders may be out-of-date by the time they arrive—because the situation in the Americas has changed since the written orders were first dispatched—across the ocean!—in a sailing ship that could take many months to reach you?

•   [pause]

•   In those cases, the Spanish management system had a neat built-in legal trick they could pull:

•   Viceroys could reply to specific orders with the following, powerful sentence:

•   “[QE] Obedezco pero no cumplo”—

•   Which means “I obey, but I will not comply with this specific order.”

•   [pause]

•   This wasn’t just a saying: It was a specially worded legally justified objection that dated back to the middle ages. When invoked, it worked like this:

•   The viceroy takes orders from the king because he can’t possibly question orders that come from the Council of the indies, which was obeying the King, who was obeying God.

•   So not obeying was out of the question. But complying with orders did not always make sense either. So you could obey—that is, indicate your eternal adherence to the Spanish monarch as the embodiment of the Divine Will.

•   —but you could also not comply—because your specific orders didn’t make any sense.

•   Because they came from across the ocean!

•   [pause]

•   It might seem that obeying without complying was a kind of improvised response to an overly rigid system.

•   But it was more than that.

•   In fact, the Spanish system was deliberately held together through encouraging complete obedience to the religiously justified system on one hand, while recognizing that government officials—especially high-ranking ones—had to use their own judgment in order to evaluate their orders, on the other hand.

•   [pause]

•   In his 2004 book called The King’s Living Image, historian Alejandro Cañeque explains how Spanish theorists of government understood this seemingly paradoxical concept of leadership—and why it wasn’t contradictory at all in their eyes.

•   Cañeque explains:

•   [QE] [T]he Spanish monarchy never abandoned the notion that the main reason that justified the existence of kings was their obligation to administer justice. Spanish political thinkers continued to see the king as a judge, and, in particular, as a reflection of God’s justice.

•   In other words, as God’s appointed servant, a king’s job was literally to make judgment calls—to do justice on earth.

•   And that same responsibility—to make judgements and to administer justice to the best of one’s ability—fell to officials in the king’s government.

•   Citing an important early 17th century Spanish political theorist, Cañeque makes clear that officials of the monarch were never supposed to obey an order blindly if the official genuinely believed it would have harmful, unjust results.

•   For that reason “I obey but will not execute the order” makes perfect sense within this specific historical context.

•   [pause]

•   And it’s probably solid political advice all-around—for anyone working for an ocean-spanning empire when you’re obeying an absolute monarch who was appointed directly by God to rule.

•   [pause]

•   Which brings us to the next lesson:

Lesson #3: Share your bathwater.

•   This bit of leadership wisdom comes through examining another long-lasting dynasty.

•   In this case from late 19th century Indonesia, in the central region called Blora on the island of Java.

•   Java is the most populous island out of the 17,000 plus islands that make up the modern-day country of Indonesia.

•   Adrian Vickers, a professor of Southeast Asian studies, tells of one such ruler named Hamengkubuwono VII [-DS- Ham-En-Ku-BWO-no] whose moniker means:

•   [QE] “He Who Holds the World in His Lap”

•   Hamengkubuwono VII was the sultan of the mostly Muslim population in this Javanese region; a sultan is a kind of Islamic leader who holds both political and religious power.

•   He maintained an enormous library at his palace with an impressive section of Javanese history, among other topics.

•   Hamengkubuwono’s reputation for generosity toward his people was well known; he sponsored massive traditional Javanese operatic-slash-dance productions and parades. And he spent lavishly on the public arts especially as components of major holiday celebrations. 

•   During this era in the late 19th century, and well into the 20th, the Dutch controlled Indonesia. They did so through a policy of indirect rule, administering its government through existing noble leaders, like Hamengkubuwono VII.

•   Dutch colonial officials especially respected this leader and his family, admiring the tremendous size of his palace complex. They made sure that Hamengkubuwono and others in similar positions of nobility remained in positions of power so that, working with the Dutch, they could  retain the favor of the people.

•   [pause]

•   And the people of Blora evidently had a lot of reverence for their aristocratic elites—especially those who, like Hamengkubuwono, spent their wealth on the local populace.

•   [pause]

•   For example: Vickers describes some of Hamengkubuwono’s morning rituals. In so doing, the tremendous prestige of power that the sultan held among his people becomes abundantly clear:

•   [QE] “Every morning a troop of servants came to bathe him and then carried the water out to distribute to the populace as holy water that could cure illnesses and bring good fortune.”

•   [pause]

•   So how’s that for some practical leadership advice? Think about how efficient this practice would be for present-day bosses:

•   This precious resource was going to be wasted—literally going to go down the drain. [Bathtub draining noise]

•   But now you can just bottle it up and given out to your employees as holiday gifts—especially when you can’t afford to give them raises or bonuses this year.

•   Or just imagine how much illness-curing bathwater will save your organization in health insurance fees if you’re working in a place without a national healthcare system like the United States!

•   Everybody wins!

•   [pause]

•   On to the next lesson!

Lesson 2: Install a Eunuchs System

•  Anyone looking for leadership success stories in history must at some point turn to one of the most important periods in all of Chinese history: The Ming Dynasty, which lasted from 1368–1644.

•  The Ming was founded by the Hongwu Emperor, who lived from 1328–1398. His story is one of the greatest rags-to-riches stories in history.

•  Or more precisely, one of the greatest rags-to-founder-of-one-of-the-most-powerful-imperial-dynasties-on-Earth stories in history.

•  [pause]

•  Hongwu Emperor began as a peasant leader who rose up against the increasingly ineffective late Mongol Yuan dynasty—the government that had been established by Kublai Khan a century earlier.

•  From the get-go, Hongwu Emperor ran his government on two major principles: 

•  First, he was an ambitious man who wanted to compensate for his low-born status as a peasant by establishing a long-lasting royal family—an imperial dynasty.

•  Second, he feared conspiracies by other ambitious men who might try to plot against him and his government and create their own imperial dynasties.

•  What’s an emperor to do?

•  Part of the answer is that he used incredible violence to deal with anyone suspected of plotting against him or associating with conspirators—real or imagined.

•  The worst example came late in his reign when he started to anticipate a struggle for power after his death.

•  The short version goes like this:

•  Hongwu Emperor wanted his first-born son to succeed him. But that son got sick and died in his mid 30s.

•  So the emperor backed the first-born son of his first-born son—Hongwu’s grandson—to be the next emperor.

•  This grandson had a reputation of being a scholar and so commanded the loyalty of China’s famous scholar-bureaucrats—followers of the philosopher known in the West as Confucius who had lived nearly two thousand years earlier.

•  But since the grandson was more of an intellectual than a warrior, his grandfather the Hongwu Emperor believed he needed to clear the playing field of ambitious rivals for his chosen successor.

•  So Hongwu Emperor ordered the execution of 15,000 government officials & military commanders—who had been loyal to the emperor!—but who he thought might not back his grandson.

•  [pause]

•  Despite this bloody purge, the fourth-born son of the Hongwu Emperor named Zhu Di, still wanted the throne for himself.

•  [pause]

•  After the Hongwu Emperor’s death, Zhu Di raised an army to challenge his nephew.

•  But he needed assistance in the imperial government to aid him. And most of the Confucian bureaucrats had already chosen the side of the new, young emperor.

•  So Zhu Di turned to the other palace insiders who he considered most loyal: The imperial eunuchs—men who had been castrated.

•  [pause]

•  In many parts of the world, Eunuchs’ reputation for loyalty came out of the belief that they were supposed to be without ambition.

•  That reputation came, in turn, from the fact that they could not establish their own dynasty through their own biological children, because they were by definition sterile.

•  Creating an official class of government eunuchs may be hard to understand in the present day.

•  But it’s important to realize that eunuchs played important roles in many societies all around the world.

•  They were important in the Byzantine Empire—the state that sprung up from the eastern portion of the Roman Empire. And eunuchs were often utilized by Turkish rulers to guard women in royal harems.

•  In Western Europe, the Castrati were eunuch singers in Italy whose voices had tremendous harmonic range as a result of having been castrated before puberty.

•  [pause]

•  Back in China, during many periods in history, eunuchs had not been educated—or prohibited from being schooled.

•  They had served as guards and personal assistants but not as thinkers or bureaucrats.

•  In fact, both Hongwu emperor and his grandson tried to limit the personal influence of the eunuchs, they forbade their education and kept them from leaving the palace—the Forbidden City.

•  During Zhu Di’s rebellion, though, a number of influential palace Eunuchs escaped, though, and gave Zhu Di valuable intel about the defenses of the imperial capital.

•  Zhu Di conquered the city and became the new emperor, taking the title of Yongle Emperor.

•  During his reign, he lifted the prohibition on educating eunuchs and, no longer trusting Confucian bureaucrats, promoted loyal eunuchs into positions of authority in the government and the military.

•  [pause]

•  Probably the most famous of the Yongle Emperor’s eunuch confidantes was the admiral Zheng He who lived from 1371 through the early-mid 1430s.

•  Simply put, Zheng He was one of the world’s greatest explorers. He commanded what is called The Treasure Fleet from 1405–1433.

•  This was an enormous fleet, of enormous sailing ships; the lead ship was three-to-four times larger than Columbus’s Santa María.

•  Zheng He’s fleet traveled throughout the Indian Ocean, and into the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in East Africa, and the Swahili Coast South to Madagascar.

•  He and his fleet even spent time in and around the island of Java, close to five hundred years prior to the reign of Hamengkubuwono VII.

•  Zheng He is immortalized around the globe. In China, he’s almost like the patron saint of all things seafaring and exploratory. There’s a holiday in July that commemorates his first voyage; and there are naval vessels and spacecraft and amusement park rides named after him.

•  [pause]

•  But the promoting of eunuchs also weakened the later Ming period. It led to in-fighting between elite eunuch leaders and elite non-eunuchs who had been educated in the prior Confucian system of government.

•  Some historians claim that this ongoing conflict between government officials stifled the future development and expansion of the Ming Dynasty.

•  [pause]

•  Yet for centuries of history and in many parts of the globe, eunuchs played major roles as trusted servants and advisers. For that reason, their role in supporting leaders—and their roles as leaders in their own rights—is worth remembering.

•  [pause]

•  That said—in very unlikely case you were wondering: No, the phenomenon of an official category of eunuchs in a government definitely does not make sense outside of the original historic contexts in which the phenomenon emerged.

•  [pause]

•  And that brings us to our number one piece of leadership advice from the past:

Lesson#1: Magic statues!

•   What’s the best way to demonstrate your leadership skills?

•   Show your people that you have magical powers and/or the gods on your side.

•   [pause]

•   Both ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks constructed ‘talking statues’ of gods. A statue would have a tube in it that ended at the mouth. Priests would speak from behind a wall into the tube which would echo and amplify their voices—allowing them to speak in the booming voices of their undying deities.

•   For example, a historian of ancient technology named Adrienne Mayor, reports in a 2018 book that archaeologists in Egypt discovered that the statue of one Egyptian god:

•   “[QE] has a cavity in the back of the neck from which a narrow canal leads to an opening on the right jaw under the ear. The archaeologists speculate that a priest hiding behind the statue spoke into the cavity and tube, which modified his voice to make it seem that the god delivered oracles.”

•   Dishonest? Perhaps. But was it the cruelest thing a leader could do with a statue in order to justify their power?

•   Not even close.

•   Mayor also talks about many other, truly vicious uses of these same kinds of ancient technology.

•   She relates, for instance, an account of a dictator named Phalaris who ruled an ancient Greek city in the early 500s BCE/BC on the island of Sicily.

•   Phalaris allegedly was approached by an Athenian inventor who presented him with a large, life-sized, hollow, bronze bull. The inventor showed the dictator that a hatch could be opened and that he could then trap a prisoner inside the bull.

•   He could then light a fire under it and roast the enemy alive—and meanwhile a system of tubes would acoustically amplify the screams of the poor cooking victim, making a horrible and terrifying display for the dictator’s enemies, while smoke piped out of the bull’s nose.

•   [pause]

•   Nasty stuff.

•   [pause]

•   A final twist to this story comes at the end. Phalarus supposedly asks this sadistic inventor to demonstrate the sound mechanism—asking him to crawl inside the bull. Which he foolishly did.

•   Phalarus then supposedly locked the doomed inventor in, started up a fire, and made a screaming, smoking human pot roast out of this bloodthirsty bull artist.

•   [pause]

•   Thankfully much less cruel, but still certainly mean-spirited, was another animal-shaped statue—built two centuries later—for another tyrant in the Greek-speaking world.

•   This dictator ruled over Athens after it was conquered by the Macedonians.

•   He allegedly despised Athens and its traditions, and so reportedly had this giant snail built to humiliate the Athenians.

•   Many of the specific details about this moving-mocking-mega-mollusk have been lost.

•   But what evidence there is, indicates that it was probably run by one or two people inside it, possibly working some kind of conveyer belt and steering mechanism that moved it along.

•   It even included some way of dripping ooze after it, just like a real snail coasts along on a trail of mucus.

•   The giant snail was pulled out of storage—presumably out from some kind of giant snail garage—once a year as part of an Athenian parade. Mayor explains that the point of the snail was to make fun of 

•   “[QE] “‘the slowness and stupidity of the Athenians.’”

•   And she adds:

•   “[QE] The Great Snail itself was harmless, but it was a dramatic and public way for the tyrant to humiliate the Athenians, whose democracy was being crushed by Macedonians and their collaborators.”

•   [pause]

•   So what advice can we pick up from the story of the Colossal Snail of Shame?

•   Let’s make like a snail and glide on over the conclusion and think about what we’ve learned here today.

•   [Separator music]

Conclusion

•   So what does history teach us about leadership? Let’s summarize:

•   First: [pause]

•   Cover yourself in weasels! And get shoes that are quadruply as pointy as the pointy kicks of the ordinary folk. And, most important, prohibit anyone else from dressing the same as you.

•   Next, make sure that you obey—but do not always comply with any orders that you happen to receive from anyone whose power is directly or indirectly derived from God.

•   So sure, you’re required to use your critical judgment in following orders, but never, ever, ever question the source of that judgment.

•   [pause]

•   And hey, don’t forget to drain your bathtub into some kind of reservoir so that you can bottle it for the benefit of all the little people around you.

•   Apparently, the saying about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater is only half right: Looks like you shouldn’t throw out either.

•   And don’t forget to surround yourself with loyal eunuchs.

•   And never underestimate the power summed up in the acronym A.B.M.M.S.: Always Be Making Magical Statues.

•   Yes, display your power, inspire awe, and mesmerize your employees with the voices of the gods!

•   Or maybe demoralize your rivals with a giant oozing snail!

•   [long pause]

•   Or maybe if someone tells you that the past is full of easy lessons for today’s world, you might want to take their advice with a grain of salt.

•   [pause]

•   For the most part, real historical researchers don’t go digging for selective stories to turn into slogans or motivational posters or feel-good parables.

•   [pause]

•   Yes, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from the past, but the past is so much bigger than that.

•   Past peoples were like us in many fundamental ways, but they were also extraordinarily different—sometimes radically so.

•   They had different values, made different kinds of decisions based on different underlying assumptions about how the world works. 

•   Only through immersing yourself in the careful, open-minded study of the past—trying to understand the way that past people thought and felt and dreamt—in all its messiness—can we start to learn about how rich and complicated—and maddeningly confusing—our predecessor were.

•   [pause]

•   In that sense, history is a lot like immersing oneself in a foreign culture. It offers different perspectives on life that you might not have even known you needed.

•   For a simple example, it’s hard to realize how strange it might seem to eat noodles with a fork, until you live in a place where the locals use chopsticks.

•   History offers the same kind of insights: You never really understand how odd it may be for you to be allowed to wear more or less whatever you want—until you learn that in many past societies, sumptuary laws significantly restricted those choices.

•   Or you never understand how an occupying government might justify its rule, until you consider the impact of a giant mechanical snail that was designed to intimidate the Athenian population.

•   Or maybe you never realize how your own government is structured, until you discover one where eunuch officials maintain order.

•   [pause]

•   History, once again, is big.

•   It’s bigger than any simple list of lessons make it out to be.

•   It provides us with perspectives from people all over the world, over many thousands of years.

•   In the process, it reveals rich, complex, nuanced possibilities about the human experience that you might not have otherwise imagined.

Outro, teaser, credits

•   For next time: What do electric guitars, mass street protests, and 20th century authoritarian dictatorships have in common?

•   The answer is Historical technologies for amplifying sound.

•   YOU’RE TOO LOUD!

•   [whisper] Stay tuned.

•   You may find the references to the historical sources and other information used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

•   I’d love to hear your thoughts about this and/ort other episodes and/or about this podcast and/or about podcasting and/or history in general. Drop me an email at doug@findyourselfinhistory.com .

•   In case you were wondering where in the world I do my professing, I work at Maryville College—Incredibly close to the Great Smoky Mountains. Everyday Unexpected. Learn more at maryvillecollege.edu 

•   [Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this podcast are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect Maryville College, its administrators, faculty, staff, students, board of directors, or any fur-bearing weasels associated with this institution of higher education.

•   This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2023 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. You can find out more about Matt at trimboli.com .

•   Thanks for listening.