My favourite thing in this chapter is an etymological nugget that I suspect is too good to be true, but which I desperately want to believe. The word “alchemy” comes from the Arabic al-kīmiyāʾ (الكيمياء), which in turn comes from the Greek khēmeia (χημεία), but that’s where our knowledge of this word stops. χημεία has no known Indo-European origin, and no obvious cognates that would suggest a borrowing. There are some hand-wavy theories that it might derive from khēmet, the word for Egypt in ancient Egyptian, but it’s a stretch to put it mildly. Needham proposes the Chinese 金 meaning “gold” as the ultimate source. In modern Mandarin, this word is pronounced like jin, but the Classical Chinese pronunciation is better preserved by the Southern dialects, which variously render it as gum, gim, or, in Hakka and Southern Min, as kim. The list of English words with Chinese origins is short,1 and it would be nice to add this one.
But the Chinese alchemists by and large weren’t after gold, their goal was eternal life instead. In fact aurifaction originated as an instrumental “warm-up” exercise for the main event. Everybody knew that the reason gold was the most perfect metal was because it was a harmonious and balanced combination of the elements. So if the same harmoniousness and lack of internal contradiction could be achieved within a living organism, then the consequences would obviously be physical immortality and superhuman abilities. Elemental harmony, biological harmony, social harmony — in the light of Chinese metaphysics these goals were all reflections and intimations of one another. And the first two at least could be brought about by the same methods: the application of various potions and elixirs designed to increase or reduce the influence of a particular element. The same principle forms the cornerstone of Chinese medicine today.2
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-14.
- My favourite of these, since it seems so unlikely, is “ketchup” deriving from 茄汁 (“tomato sauce” in Cantonese), perhaps via the Malay kicap.
- Needham’s third lecture is about the most recognizable and well-traveled example of Chinese medicine — acupuncture — and contains the intriguing assertion that naloxone administration totally cancels acupuncture’s efficacy for pain relief. This suggests that acupuncture’s mechanism of action may have to do with stimulating the body’s production of naturally-occurring opioids. There’s some evidence the placebo effect could be related (fascinatingly, naloxone also appears to eliminate the placebo effect).
June 20, 2026
QotD: The word “alchemy”
June 19, 2026
US history is unique, it does not map onto the histories of other nations
I’ve noticed this pattern myself, but I hadn’t considered that a lot of Americans don’t just use the patterns of their national history when looking at other western nations:
“Political Map of the Indian Empire, 1893” from Constable’s Hand Atlas of India, London: Archibald Constable and Sons, 1893. (via Wikimedia Commons)
Not every place in the world can be examined through the historical template of the United States.
One of the reasons conversations about India are so difficult for folks in the West to untangle is that many of the frameworks Americans use to understand power, intergroup dynamics, identity, and historical injustice do not map onto India. Not at all.
For Americans who have adopted a critical lens, the template derived from American history is fixed. A dominant demographic majority group seeks to preserve power while marginalized demographic minorities fight for recognition and inclusion. Because this template is so fixed in the imagination, there is a tendency to view and interpret dynamics and events in other countries in exactly the same way. I have seen it myself. “We’ve all seen how this works”, someone will say, and proceed to apply the American template to a different place.
And the history of the Americas (both North and South) is dominated by European (white) Christian colonization. As a result, Americans are familiar with the legacies of European empire and Christian missionary expansion. By contrast, the history of Islamic conquest and rule, which shaped large parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe for centuries, occupies far less space in the American imagination. So too does the contemporary influence of petrodollar-funded religious institutions, transnational Islamist movements, and the global circulation of Islamist narratives.
This does not mean these forces explain everything. It does mean that many Americans have little historical or conceptual framework for understanding how they might shape politics, memory, education, or intergroup relations in places like India.
India’s history is not the same as that of the Americas.
For centuries, India experienced successive waves of colonization. The first came through a series of Muslim invasions and dynasties, culminating in the Mughal Empire. The second came through British colonial rule, predated by British mercantile and missionary efforts. Yet unlike many colonized societies, the civilizational majority was never fully displaced, converted, or absorbed. Hindu traditions, practices, languages, stories, temples, and collective memories survived.
This is perhaps the single hardest aspect of India for many Americans to grasp because it has no real analogue in American history: the Hindu demographic majority is also the historically colonized population.
For many Western observers, this creates immediate suspicion because it violates the assumptions embedded within our familiar frameworks. The expectation is that majorities defend power while minorities challenge it.
As a result, contemporary debates about textbooks, public memory, historical figures, temples, and national identity are often seen and interpreted by folks in the West through frameworks that retrofit Indian history into contemporary American critical analysis through the reductive binaries of majority/minority, right/left, which are memeable and digestible, but obscure much more than they reveal about power, history, equity, policy, foreign influence, etc.
When Hindus argue that violent and painful aspects of Mughal conquest have been whitewashed in public education, they are frequently accused of attempting to rewrite history to justify the alleged “Hindu right wing” suppression of a minority group today. (Please do read my analysis of religious-based violence in India. It’s not what you think it is. Link.)
Yet Americans themselves are familiar with the process of revisiting historical narratives to advance truth and reconciliation. We have debated how slavery is taught, how Indigenous history is taught, how immigration is taught, and how women and minority groups have been represented in textbooks and in classrooms. We generally accept that historical narratives evolve as new evidence emerges and as previously marginalized perspectives are taken seriously.
What makes India different is that the group seeking rigorous reconsideration of historical narratives is often the majority population. For many Western observers, this creates immediate suspicion. The assumption is that majorities seek dominance while minorities seek justice.
But history does not always work that way.
The result is that efforts by Hindus to recover historical memory are often denounced as nationalism (which is falsely equated with white or Christian nationalism in the United States) before they are examined on their own terms. Questions about historical representation become questions about political motives. Efforts to revisit narratives become “evidence of extremism” or, even more bizarre, “anti-intellectualism”. And figures who have occupied a central place in Hindu memory for centuries are presented as newly invented symbols of contemporary political power.
The result is that the Indian voices most readily amplified in Western media are often those whose analyses are already legible within familiar Western frameworks. Their arguments are immediately understandable, which lends them “credibility”. Perspectives that do not fit those frameworks are frequently dismissed as “Hindu nationalist” before they are seriously considered.
One need not agree with every argument made in these debates to recognize that they are, in fact, debates. The question is not whether history should be examined. The question is whether everyone is permitted to participate in that examination without having their motives presumed in advance.
Sparta vs Athens – 2(a): Two Greek Worlds (Citizens, Helots, Power)
seangabb
Published 8 Feb 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
In this lecture segment I set out the fundamental contrast between Sparta and Athens as social and political systems. Sparta was a permanent military state built on coerced labour and internal discipline. Athens was a quarrelsome democracy that relied on participation, persuasion, and a wider civic culture of debate.
We begin with the basic structures: who counted, who did the work, and how each society organised its citizen body. This is not moral theatre. It is institutional reality. By the end, the students should see why Sparta could produce cohesion and battlefield reliability, while Athens produced instability, argument, and a public life that made intellectual achievement possible.
QotD: The Prince is a … satire?
Let me back up. The occasion where I first heard the “it’s a satire” thesis was an “advanced placement” History class back in high school. They probably don’t have those anymore as part of the regular curriculum — dat be rayciss — so in case you’ve never endured one, it’s a bunch of mega-nerds who only care about pleasing Teacher trying to do History. For our unit on “The Renaissance”, we had to read both The Prince and More’s Utopia, and do our term paper on one or the other.
Naturally I picked The Prince, and since you all know the kind of kids who were in that kind of class, naturally everyone else picked Utopia. I might’ve been the only kid who ever did his paper on Machiavelli; certainly the teacher acted like she’d never seen one before. We didn’t have the phrase “trigger warning” back then, but that’s what it amounted to — Teacher hastened to inform everyone in the class that The Prince was really a satire, and so of course I was just kidding too, ha ha, because otherwise we were in the presence of very, very, very bad thought …
“Yes, kidding, ha ha ha,” I muttered, because while I obviously wasn’t the quickest on the uptake back then — I should’ve just done the stupid paper on goddamn Utopia like the rest of the sheep — even I could figure out that I was gonna get sent to the school counselor if I didn’t get with the program …
… and that’s when I learned the aforementioned lesson. Kidding? You think Machiavelli’s kidding? Didn’t we just do this whole unit on the Renaissance? Your main man Thomas More was burning people at the stake, for fuck’s sake! And as for the Italians, they were straight whacking people out in church, with the active connivance of the fucking Pope himself. Satire, fuhgetaboudit, that’s Godfather shit, Machiavelli’s as serious as cancer. You just don’t want to believe that people are actually the way they so obviously are, so you’ll tell yourselves he’s kidding … and Teacher will back you up on it, because she doesn’t want to believe it either.
(Meanwhile, I’ll get an A for my excellent “satire”, in exchange for which I will never ever bring it up again or I’ll fail the rest of the semester).
Severian, “End States and Inverted Incentives”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-22.
June 18, 2026
Ross 1912 Cadet: Straight Pull .22 Rimfire Training Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Jan 2026The Ross model 1912 Cadet rifle was introduced in 1912 as a diminutive rimfire companion to the 1905 and 1910 military Ross rifles. It was a single-shot straight pull rifle, with a somewhat unusual locking bolt system. Somewhere between 13,000 and 17,000 appear to have been made, for civilian commercial sale, Cadet Corps, and Militia use. Production ended in March 1917, when the Ross company collapsed. Today these are quite rare rifles.
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QotD: James K. Polk – a dark horse?
The truth is that Polk’s political opponents knew very well who James K. Polk was — and why they should fear him. Yet almost two centuries later, despite solid standing in modern presidential polls and a portrait that currently graces the Oval Office, Polk’s legacy is entwined in mischaracterizations.
The Myth of the Dark Horse
Many will tell you that Polk was a dark horse. No, he was not.
Born in North Carolina in 1795, Polk aspired to the presidency at least from his first election to the Tennessee House of Representatives at the age of twenty-eight. He always had what every budding politician craves: the unqualified support of the era’s greatest hero. Although some vilified Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory was a political force that could not be denied. With Jackson’s encouragement, Polk entered politics and then married Sarah Childress, whom Andrew and Rachel Jackson treated as a daughter.
Prior to his nomination, Polk had served seven terms in Congress, including two as Speaker of the House; he had been governor of Tennessee; and he had tried to unseat the sitting vice president to become President Martin Van Buren’s running mate in 1840. To be sure, there were defeats along the way. Polk lost his first try for the Speakership and two gubernatorial campaigns in Tennessee, a state as bitterly divided as any between Jackson’s Democrats and emerging Whig forces.
But Polk never lost sight of the prize. Even in defeat, he continued to correspond with Democratic leaders across the country. His presidential nomination in 1844 at a convention divided over the annexation of Texas may well have been — as one of his most ardent supporters advised — four years ahead of schedule. After all, former president Van Buren, who had lost his reelection campaign in 1840, again sought the nomination in 1844. But Polk was not a dark horse suddenly surging from the back of the field. He was in the arena and one of the most astute and well-connected politicians of his day.
Walter R. Borneman, “James K. Polk and the 5,106 Votes That Changed America”, Coolidge Review, 2026-02-20.
June 17, 2026
The Korean War Week 104 – Order Restored at Koje-do – June 16, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 16 Jun 2026The saga of Koje-Do POW camp comes to its end this week after Bull Boatner’s troops crack down hard and finally take full control there. Operation Counter continues with fighting for Hill Eerie, and South Korean President Syngman Rhee is stirring up so much trouble that the US is considering intervening in South Korean politics to stop him.
00:00 Intro
00:40 Recap
01:11 Operation Counter
03:31 The Chinese Account
05:22 Koje-Do
10:46 Rhee Again
12:50 US Presidential Election
15:58 Summary
16:25 Conclusion
18:13 Call to Action
Canada’s new civic religion, with the “land acknowledgement” as the daily rite
L. Wayne Mathison shows how cultural boundaries changed radically over relatively short periods of time in what is now Manitoba, rather discrediting the fairy tale we tell our children about pre-contact First Nations living in peace and harmony:
Canada’s institutional obsession with land acknowledgements and historical guilt has officially jumped the shark.
Every university lecture, corporate meeting, school event, and government memo now seems to begin with the same rehearsed confession about whose land we are supposedly standing on. It has become a civic ritual, complete with liturgy, original sin, and mandatory public piety.
Strip away the administrative sermonizing and the whole thing rests on a very shaky version of history.
We are expected to pretend pre-contact North America was a peaceful, static, eco-friendly paradise where distinct peoples lived in permanent harmony until Europeans arrived and ruined everything.
That is not history. That is mythology.
Worse, it is patronizing. It strips Indigenous peoples of their full humanity by pretending they were somehow immune to the normal forces that shaped every other society on earth: ambition, conflict, trade, migration, alliance, conquest, revenge, and expansion.
The actual history of this continent was not a postcard. It was dynamic, complex, and often brutal.
The Haudenosaunee expansion during the Beaver Wars reshaped huge parts of what is now Southern Ontario. The Huron-Wendat, Neutral, and Erie peoples were devastated, displaced, or absorbed through war and political domination.
On the plains, the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Iron Confederacy, and others fought long struggles over territory, trade, horses, resources, and survival. Peoples moved. Borders shifted. Alliances formed and collapsed. Some groups conquered. Some retreated. Some disappeared into larger political orders.
History did not begin when Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence.
This land was already a theatre of power, movement, conflict, diplomacy, and displacement long before Europeans arrived.
The modern Canadian narrative treats European colonisation as a unique cosmic crime, as if conquest and territorial displacement were invented in 1492. They were not. Europeans arrived as a technologically dominant global power and did what powerful groups had done across human history, including on this continent.
That does not make the suffering harmless. It does not erase broken treaties, residential schools, forced relocations, or government abuse. Those things happened, and they matter.
But a serious country cannot build its future on a childish version of the past.
Every habitable part of the world has been taken, lost, fought over, inherited, traded, defended, and taken again. The people Europeans encountered were not frozen in moral perfection. They were human beings living inside history, not outside it.
The guilt industry does not repair the past. It often paralyzes the present.
Canada cannot move forward by treating itself as a permanent crime scene or by dividing citizens into inherited moral categories of “settler” and “Indigenous”.
We can tell the truth about cruelty, conquest, broken promises, and injustice without pretending history had a correct stopping point right before European ships appeared.
A mature country does not need ritual guilt.
It needs honesty, equal citizenship, legal clarity, and the courage to build a future instead of endlessly prosecuting the past.
Brewing 3,000 Year-Old Ancient Mesopotamian Beer
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 23 Dec 2025Cloudy pomegranate beer made with honey and dates
City/Region: Assyria
Time Period: 9th Century BCEAshurnasirpal II was an Assyrian king who built an empire in a rather ruthless manner. While he’s remembered for razing cities and killing and/or maiming their inhabitants, he’s also remembered for throwing one heck of a party. When he unveiled his new palace, he invited nearly 70,000 guests to a 10 day feast, and they even wrote down the menu. He provided 10,000 jars of beer for the feast, and while some were basic beer, there were also specialty brews like this much fancier version made with pomegranates, dates, and honey.
While flat, this cloudy beer is surprisingly tasty. The flavor of the honey and pomegranate come through, but with none of the sweetness, and they combine for an oddly modern taste.
Because there are no hops to preserve the beer, it’ll only keep for up to 1 week. As with any vague ancient recipe, feel free to change the amounts of the ingredients to suit your taste.
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June 16, 2026
Why Argentina Lost the Falklands War
Real Time History
Published 6 Feb 2026On March 28, 1982 almost the entire Argentinian navy, carrying 900 troops, invaded the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas). The ruling junta was confident Britain wouldn’t oppose the Argentinian fait accompli. But Britain’s political will and military ability to carry out a successful campaign at the end of an 12,500 km supply line surprise many.
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QotD: Nitpicking the field fortifications in Gladiator (2000)
What we are shown is pretty clearly a prepared defense on a hillside, with a series of raised terraces, with a mix of abatis (sharpened wood obstacles, often crudely cut wood stakes set in an X pattern) and mantlets, with gaps in those defenses to allow units to move and a whole bunch of catapults positioned up on the hill. The terraces make for a layered, multi-stage fighting position at each level. On the one hand, the Romans were hardly averse to field fortifications and one wonders again if this set was a product of someone with an active imagination looking at the Column of Trajan [Wiki], which features a lot of scenes of Roman soldiers cutting trees and building bridges, roads and forts.
The problem isn’t that there are field fortifications, it is everything else about them: the style of field fortification, their position, layout and use. As we’ve noted before, Roman armies on campaign built fortified marching camps nightly, so we would expect Maximus’ army to have such a camp, but as we’ve discussed even more so, one of the classic, famous features of Roman armies is that they build the same layout of camp wherever they go, the famous Roman “playing card” forts, generally built on flat, open ground (rather than hillsides). That defense would not look like this, instead consisting of a ditch (the fossa) behind which would have been a earthwork rampart (the agger) topped with a wooden palisade (the vallum); thus rather than successive layers, you’d have a single clear fighting position (the vallum) on a mount with the ditch directly in front of it. And that would be a continuous line, with just four gates (at the center of each side), rather than this kind of checkerboard pattern of fortifications, because of course the purpose of this defense was to prohibit entry. Moreover, the line of field fortifications we see are not part of, nor connected to, a marching camp: it is simply a line of fortifications on the side of the hill with nothing on the flanks, rather than the distinctive “playing card shape”. We don’t see the camp sitting behind it either.
But the really immediate problem is that Maximus’ army has formed up within his troops strung through the field fortifications, with legionary soldiers mostly in front of them (but some are behind them) and the archers in between the stakes and mantlets. This may seem like a sensible way to form up a defense, but it is not the Roman way. Maximus is very intentionally “offering battle”, – inviting his opponent into an open field engagement. The way a Roman army did this was invariably forming up on the flat, open, unfortified ground in front of the camp, toward the enemy, signalling that they would fight in the open, outside of their walls (as Maximus does indeed intend to do).
So what we ought to see is Maximus’ army formed up outside in the open field, with the camp likely visible some distance behind them. That camp would be protected by very different fortifications: you’d be able to make out its “playing-card” shape, with watch-towers on the corners and the raised vallum running the exterior and the relatively neat grid of tents in the interior.
Finally, before we get to the battle plan, I want to note one more oddity here, which is the battlefield itself. The battlefield is a muddy field, which it looks to have been recently clear-cut, otherwise surrounded by dense forest. Of course part of the reason is that this is Bourne Wood, a coniferous tree plantation (and frequent filming location) in Surrey, England (which is why the trees are all the same species, so neatly spaced out) rather than the edge of an old-growth forest somewhere in southern Germany.
But the thing is, the Marcomanni, Quadi and other Germanic-language speaking peoples were an agrarian society, same as the Romans: their villages were surrounded by farm and pastureland. Of course a lot of the forest – old-growth forest, rather than tree-farms as here – remained, but if a Roman army wanted a flat, open space to offer battle in, they needn’t have cleared it themselves (and indeed probably couldn’t, at least not in the time frame they’d have to prepare for a pitched battle), but could simply march to the nearest village with its patches of farmland. Getting a Roman army to fight in dense, old-growth forest, after all, famously required clever ambushes, as a Teutoberg Forest (modern Kalkriese) in 9 AD. And if the enemy didn’t want to fight in the open, Roman armies were perfectly happy to burn villages and pillage crops as the standard way of attempting to force an enemy to accept an offer to battle or else vacate the area.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nitpicking Gladiator’s Iconic Opening Battle, Part I”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-06-06.
June 14, 2026
How to Make Dissent Disappear – Death of Democracy 19 – Q3 1937
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 13 Jun 2026In 1937, Nazi Germany moved from controlling politics to controlling thought itself. Churches, artists, workers, and dissenters all came under attack.
Berlin, September 1937. From the outside, Germany can seem strangely quiet while the rest of the world slides deeper into war, civil conflict, and authoritarianism. But inside the Reich, the Nazi state is tightening its grip on the last spaces where dissent can still exist.
This quarter, the Gestapo arrests Pastor Martin Niemöller and intensifies the attack on the Confessing Church. The regime opens the House of German Art in Munich, then stages the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition to mock, vilify, and destroy modernist culture. The SS establishes Buchenwald near Weimar, forcing prisoners to build their own prison. Meanwhile, Göring’s new state industrial empire and the Nuremberg “Rally of Work” reveal a society being reorganized for war.
This is Step 19 in the death of democracy: when the authoritarian state stops merely silencing opposition and begins fighting the inner freedom to believe, imagine, worship, create, and think.
Mauser M80SA: Actually a High Power and Actually Hungarian
Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Jan 2026In the 1980s, the Mauser company was completely adrift, without any real plans or goals or good leadership. They had been trying to get by on relaunched old designs, and not been very successful. By the late 80s they move on to just buying guns from other companies (like Renato Gamba) and relabelling them as Mauser. One of these partnerships was with FEG in Hungary.
In 1990, Mauser contracted with FEG to buy Browning High Power copies. FEG had actually licensed the high Power design from FN back in the 1970s, and was already tooled up for production, so they just added a Mauser roll mark and called the gun the M80. It was a straight copy of the High Power, except for the omission of the magazine safety. Production ran from 1990 until 1995, with only 3,200 made. The gun did not sell well, which should [not] be very surprising — this was a very outdated design by the 1990s and the Mauser name just wasn’t worth much as a value-add.
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QotD: Some of H.G. Wells’ more awkward views
This was, of course, before the genocidal policies of the Nazis were implemented, and while many of these grand men and women of the left had died before the camps were liberated and the horrors known, others certainly lived on. Some were contrite, others not. Either way, it hardly forgives them their ideology and influence – naiveté and ignorance simply isn’t a viable defence in such circumstances.
Michael Coren, “Eugenics and the intellectual left”, The Critic, 2020-09-16.
Update, 15 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
June 13, 2026
The intellectual dangers of “nostalgia economics”
Mani Basharzad explains that although resurgent socialist beliefs are a bad sign, there’s actually a worse danger to modern economies that isn’t a coherent ideology but all the more potent because of it:
Custom image by FEE
If someone asked me what the most dangerous economic ideology is, many would expect an Austrian to give a typical answer: Marxism, socialism, or Modern Monetary Theory. Yet I believe there is another way of thinking that is even more pervasive. It is not a coherent body of ideas like those ideologies. Rather, it is a sentiment so widespread and socially accepted that it threatens not merely economic freedom, but our very understanding of progress itself. I call it “nostalgia economics”.
Recently, the singer Sting suggested that the rise of toxic masculinity is partly the result of the “loss of manual jobs”, claiming that because many men no longer use their hands and physical strength in their daily work, unhealthy masculine traits are on the rise. Like many commentators on the political left, he also blamed Margaret Thatcher for Britain’s economic transformation. “Britain’s wealth was created in the coalfields and the steel towns and the mill towns and the shipyards”, Sting said. “All of those skill sets were thrown on the scrapheap … for Thatcher’s dream of a service economy.”
This is nostalgia economics in action. A global celebrity whose music can be streamed instantly on another continent, who earns income through digital platforms, and whose career depends on modern communications and services, criticizes the very service economy that makes his success possible.
A person in thrall to nostalgia economics will take the blessings of progress for granted while romanticizing a past that never truly existed. Imagine living in the world of Charles Dickens: you would not have had access to a typewriter for much of your life, if at all, since it was only commercialized in the late 19th century. More importantly, you would not have had access to electricity. The conveniences we now consider basic would have been unimaginable luxuries.
The economic historian Norman Stone illustrated the extraordinary pace of modern progress through the experience of the novelist Henry James:
In 1895 the novelist Henry James acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter; in 1898 he saw a cinematograph. Within very few years, he could have had a Freudian analysis, travelled in an aircraft, understood the principles of the jet-engine or even of space-travel.
Had Sting been alive in 1890, a world tour would have looked very different. A journey from London to New York would have taken more than a week rather than a few hours. International audiences, instant communication, and global entertainment markets would have been beyond imagination.
The glorification of manual labor is one of the most overrated ideas in modern political discourse. This tendency is not confined to the left. Ambitions to revive manufacturing employment through government policy often draw on the same nostalgic impulse. But what exactly are we trying to return to?
Perhaps literature offers a more honest answer than politics. Oscar Wilde observed that “all unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour” involved unpleasant conditions. He went even further, commenting that “there is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading”.
The reality of industrial labor was far harsher than many modern observers imagine. In Britain, workplace fatalities have fallen dramatically over the last century: fatal injuries to employees dropped from around 4,400 a year early in the 20th century to around 200 a year by the end of the century. Coal mining, one of the occupations most frequently romanticized today and the first industry Sting evoked, exposed workers to constant danger and disease. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (“black lung”) claimed well over a thousand lives annually. What would a laborer enduring dangerous conditions, long hours, and chronic health risks have given for an air-conditioned office job?
One thing Sting did identify is that men generally do need more physical activity in their lives both for general physical health but also for mental health.
