Bret Devereaux

This time it looks like we're sailing out of the Spartan-hagiography-by-way-of-gullible-readings-of-Plutarch and into Pressfield's actual theory tying this all together, with 'Episode Seven: What is an Archetype." So here we go.

"Since we're calling this series the warrior archetype, we might as well define our terms" Yes, good. But usually term definition comes first, not (at this point) almost an hour into a discussion?

"The sense that I'm using 'archetype' comes from Carl Jung; the Jungian Sense" Oh dear. I am not a psychologist, but it is my general impression that the field of psychology has largely left Jung behind?

So here is a pet-peeve of mind: outdated and largely abandoned psychology being used to frame historical analysis. Now, sure, if you want to use Freud or Jung as a tool of literary analysis - esp. literature *after* Freud or Jung wrote which might be influenced by them, go ahead

But the only way that Jung or Freud are in any way remotely useful in understanding human cultures is if they actually managed to describe something fundamentally true about the human psyche. In my view, historians ought to defer to specialists (read: psychologists) on that.

And my impression is that psychology, as practiced and studied today, has tended to regard Jung's theories as fundamentally unscientific and untestable and thus of little value in either research or clinical practice. I follow their expertise on that point.

I think this is important because there is a temptation to simply take whatever historical theory of the thing that fits an argument. I see this a lot w/ the use of economics in the ancient economy; whatever badly outdated economic theory fits a given argument gets used.

As a historian, I take the expertise of other fields as I find it. I can't be an expert in everything, so I have to trust other experts! The option to cherry-pick theories isn't left to me; the historian ought to rely on the communis opinio in fields outside of their expertise.

Ok, let's let the video march on. But evidently Jung's 'warrior archetype' is going to be the fulcrum around this argument turns.

'Archetypes...come encoded with all of the information we need.' So, 1) Azar Gat just has the better version of this argument when he argues for evidence that human beings are evolved for war. But he focuses on basic behaviors and social patterns instead of archetypes.

Pretty clearly, humans - like any social animal - have evolved some social behaviors! If that were all Jung said, it'd be fine. But the archetypes imply a lot more, with their link to the collective unconscious and - as Pressfield puts it - the implication of 'stored wisdom.'

But 2) this kind of archetypal thinking tends to collapse things that are contingent from culture to culture. I'm sure this is a point we'll come back to, but what a 'warrior' looks like is not the same from one place or one people to the next.

Even if they are embedded, somewhere, in the same evolved needs and root behaviors. That critique has been made of Jung - that his psychology was rooted in imperial ideologies which sought to collapse colonized peoples into a single, uniform mass of 'undeveloped' humanity.

Long analogy comparing archetypes to software which comes 'already encoded with all kinds of information.' Which is nonsense. 'Child' 'God' 'Warrior' 'Maiden' 'Mother' are all roles which are learned and which express and present differently in different cultures.

I taught a comparative myth course for a few years and while the course was designed to bring out common motifs between world mythologies, one thing that was so striking, for instance, is how different 'gods' are from one place to the next.

Are gods immortal? Are they good? What are the scope and scale of their powers? Can they be beseeched and if so how? Are they human in form? We looked, for instance, at Loki and Anansi together - but is Anansi even a god?

Clearly there is a human tendency to imagine non-physical (=spiritual) forces in the world and to sometimes personalize those forces (but sometimes not), but beyond that? Loads of cultural contingency. Lots of similarity, but also lots of difference. Not one bland archetype.

So the idea that there is some functionally complete 'chip' that just fills in all of the details the same way every time is silly. I suspect we'll come back to this because it goes to the idea that there is a 'universal' warrior or war experience. There is no one 'war' chip.

'Archetypes...according to Jung, they are universal..if we could go to a hunter gather tribe and access their warrior archetype it would be identical to that of a cadet at west point' Sure, Jung says this, but as a statement of fact about the world...um [citation needed]!

Also, obviously not? Gat and L. Keeley (War in Human Civilization and War Before Civilization respectively) point in the direction of what war behaviors in the pre-historical past might have been like - I am largely convinced by them.

But it is a style of warfare so substantially different from 'conventional' war as waged by industrialized countries that our militaries respond with bafflement when they encounter it and call it 'unconventional' or 'asymmetric' war.

And whether it was highly trained West Point graduates or conscripted Everymen, those 'western' militaries have had to struggle to learn and adapt to that different style of warfare. There was no 'chip' they could plug in to just 'get it'

Even though, to be clear, it is *conventional* warfare that is the aberration, and 'unconventional' or 'asymmetrical' warfare which is the historic norm (I think @MilHist_Lee has a project making this point)

Also, by the by, expectations about child development and behaviors also vary quite a lot, culture to culture. Even the terms and meanings to describe different age brackets - especially when connected to social/emotional change rather than physical - are flexible.

To take Latin, a 'puer' is a boy (clear enough) but there's no word for 'teenager.' iuvenis or adulescens - sometimes translated that way - are really from about 17 to about 30 (yes, THIRTY) representing 'early adulthood' the long period of physical but not full social maturity.

The categories for Roman girls and women were even less age-linked and almost entirely about marital/sexual status. A female Roman was called a puella (girl) from actual childhood until marriage, when she became a 'mulier' (=woman) or 'matrona' (after giving birth).

As you may well imagine, the behavioral and developmental expectations that went along with that frame of thought could be very different from ours! A Roman female might be - and be expected to behave as - a 'matrona' (a full adult) in her late teens.

Those differences can't be compressed down into a single archetype. That said, it is no surprise that Jung thought they could - 19th and early 20th century scholarship is full of scholars blithely assuming that the standards of their culture were universally applicable.

The tendency to uncritically retroject modern-period European values in particular is a real enduring weakness of that older 19th and early 20th century scholarship.