Then over time, according to the traditional narrative, the Spartans became “luxury-loving and corruptible,” as Starr wrote, and this eroded their toughness and military superiority, eventually leading to their downfall on the battlefield. The Spartans of 380 BCE might not have beaten their very formidable grandfathers of 480 BCE, but the Spartans of 280 BCE would definitely not have beaten their grandfathers.[13] The hated Persians are sometimes credited with deliberately contributing to this. The “Great Kings” of Persia, who could not defeat the Spartans on the battlefield, found that gold was a more effective way to neutralize them. Over time, the premodern sources portray Spartans, especially some Spartan kings, as a good deal more materialistic and money loving than the more “spartan” Spartans of old. It’s as if these “soft” Persians, as the ancient Greeks often portrayed them, spreading their softness like a virus, equalized the toughness between the two sides.[14]
There are other ways to explain Sparta’s rise and fall than “toughness”—better training and conditioning, for example—but it seems strange to assign no value to it at all.
WAR AND POVERTY are not constants. They may create a heightened resilience on the part of the humans affected by them, but not all people are. Some people get lucky and avoid combat and economic privation. But everyone gets sick.
It may seem strange to suggest that high levels of illness might make human beings tougher, but the effect on a society of relatively regular and lethal epidemics and the mortality they cause certainly might have created a level of resilience that most of us today probably don’t possess. A husband and wife who have lost several of their young children to disease and have stoically pushed forward with their lives would probably seem tough and resilient to us. People around the world still do this, and we consider it one of the great tragedies of life to lose even a single offspring. But it has been only relatively recently in human history that this experience has become less than commonplace. Before the modern era, the number of people who lost multiple children to illness was astonishing. One wonders what effects this might have had on individuals and their society as a whole. The historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was one of seven children. All six of his siblings died in infancy. That was a pretty high rate even in the early eighteenth century, but the terrible regularity of losing children before they reached adulthood was common. However, focusing on what disease might do to children is to ignore the wider effects that high levels of illness can have on a society. A really bad epidemic might kill everyone.
When it comes to disease, the world is a vastly different place in the modern era than it was at any previous time in history.[15] Yes, there are parts of the developing world that have been virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages and are still disease ridden, but by and large the technologically advanced societies of the modern world have scant concept of the way human existence was affected by disease from the beginning of humankind until just a generation ago. It’s startling to think of the many pandemics that have erased large percentages of the global population over the ages. Reading the contemporary accounts is like reading very dark science fiction. If we lost a quarter of the human population to a modern plague, it would seem obscene to suggest there was the positive side effect of making us more resilient.
In some ways, illness makes us tougher, because immunities often develop in those who have been sick. That’s hard science. But do people who suffer the regular loss of loved ones to disease become tougher or more resilient individuals? Do societies with large numbers of such people living in them become tougher societies? These questions fall into that gray area of things that we intrinsically feel might be important, but that can’t really be measured or proved. Clearly, there were times in our history when only the strong survived, so a person had better be tough. But a case might be made that toughness isn’t as important a qualification for survival as it used to be.
Connecting this to the wooden shoes–silk slippers ladder, one might suggest that timing is important. If tough times call for tough people, what if the times are less tough? In addition, the silk slippers stage can come with some potentially offsetting benefits.
The early-twentieth-century German military historian Hans Delbrück[16] had a theory that everything that characterizes the modern military—the organization, tactics, drill, logistics, and leadership—is designed to help offset the natural advantage of the toughness that people at a lower level of civilization possess. “Compared to civilized people,” he wrote about the ancient Germans who kept getting beaten by the more refined Romans, “barbarians had the advantage of having at their disposal the warlike power of the unbridled animal instincts, of basic toughness. Civilization refines the human being, makes him more sensitive, and in doing so, it decreases his military worth, not only his bodily strength, but also his physical courage. These natural shortcomings must be offset in some artificial way … The main service of the standing army consists of making civilized people through discipline capable of holding their own against the less civilized.”[17]
By Delbrück’s way of thinking, the whole reason that city-states first started organizing their farmers—who generally tended to be more peaceable than the barbarians right outside their borders—was to create a superior military, which requires training and discipline, so that they could hold their own against people whose harsher environment made them fiercer or more warlike.[18] “If a given group of Romans normally living as citizens or peasants had been put up against a group of barbarians of the same number,” Delbrück wrote, “the former would undoubtedly have been defeated; in fact, they would probably have taken flight without fighting. It was only the formation of the close-knit tactical body of the cohorts that equalized the situation.”
The seemingly softer society’s use of technology, superior organizational capabilities, and money against a potentially tougher and hardier society is a dynamic that’s visible in many historical eras. The modern Afghans may be one of the toughest people on the planet right now, but their individual and societal resilience is offset by Western military forces that might as well be playing the part of the Romans in this story. However, if the Western militaries were forced to fight using the same weapons as the Afghans—AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and IEDs—and they, in turn, used our drones, fighter planes, and cruise missiles, then the question of our toughness versus theirs might be crucial. Remember, the Afghans have been a people at war for forty years, against a multitude of opponents. In some ways, they might be more like our grandparents when it comes to toughness than we are.
The weapons and technology are so advanced now that we can have a modern warrior engaging his foe in Afghanistan from an air-conditioned room in Kansas—a virtual pilot whose skills were likely honed growing up on video games the same way that a Japanese youth two centuries ago practiced for a future of sword fighting in kendo class. Instead of combat weapons drill, today’s trained killers, many of whom may never see a dead enemy up close, fly drones that shoot tough-as-nails tribal soldiers in the harsh, mountainous terrain.[19] Modern militaries have, like Delbrück’s Romans, found ways to work around the toughness deficit.[20] Yet toughness may still make a difference in who wins or loses the war. It may be the key factor that decides who has the willingness to continue the ongoing body count and financial costs