The rumor went around that trains were throwing steel ball bearings from their wheels. Genuine steelies! Somebody said they saw one that a kid from Detroit brought up. So big that you couldn’t close your fist around it. Nobody else saw it, though.
Nevertheless, we scoured the tracks for endless hours, turning over every likely pebble that caught the sun. No steelies. I did amass a small collection of spikes that had worked their way loose from the ties. Never did figure a use for them. But they were cool.
The game was marbles. Way we played it in upper Michigan was to draw a chalk circle on the cement or scratch one on the sand with a stick, sometimes we even used a length of string. The battleground was set. The players approached cautiously if their stock was low or boldly if their marble bag brimmed.
One boy against one boy. Man against man. A test of skill and mental grit. Incidentally, only boys played against boys, girls against girls: this was back in the day when adults didn’t burst a spleen for kids noticing the obvious differences in the sexes. Besides, boys were daring and cavalier. They were out for conquest. Girls would sometimes — this still baffles me — agree to play to a draw! Even if one girl would outright win she wouldn’t claim her prize. Bizarre creatures.
First boy, if he was a pro, placed his middle finger against his thumb and then snapped it at his marble, aiming to smack it into his opponent’s. If he hit it, he got to keep it. No time outs, no I-wasn’t-readies, no whimpering. Newcomers and cowards could be identified by the anemic way they smacked their marble, say by giving it no more than a half-hearted push with their forefinger.
Strategy was obvious. If you were the better shooter, you attacked attacked attacked. Go right after the other guy. Intimidate him. Like Nelson, ignore all subtleties and blaze away. Cagier boys took advantage of the braggarts and only pretended to be cautious. They let their opponents open with a bold shot or two, answering with a shot away as if in retreat, then when the other boy’s shot would miss and stop close by, the jig was up.
And that was the problem. Too bold and your shots would come close, too close. Countless times the marbles would stop an inch away. It was a goner. This is why it made sense to shoot hard; over-shooting was hardly a risk. Unless you in a sudden-death match where shooting outside the lines meant an automatic loss.
Most of us neither lost too many nor gained too many. But a few kids were easy pickings. Every day they’d come with a new small bag (these were sold in grocery and “dime” stores) and lose them. Rich kids.
Unless by prior agreement, only even matches were allowed. Cat’s eye against cats eye were the lowest, entry-level bouts. Cats’ eyes, for those monumentally ignorant of Americana, are the clear marble with the squiggly, colorful aberration running through the center. These were the general stock, like ten-year-old used cars; useful, but unloved. Why, you could find spare cat’s eye rolling around behind the home room teacher’s desk. What counted was quantity.
Perries, probably a corruption of puries, solid colored beauties. These were always just a shade smaller than the cat’s eyes. Perries, though coveted, had a tendency to chip, sometimes even crack open when hit hard. Clears were solid glass, no color. Steelies were polished ball bearings. I only ever saw two of them. Not the railroad kind, but small ones from who-knows-where. They were said to be unbeatable, which is why we latched onto any rumor of a source.
Then came the boulders, the double-sized version of the normal marble. One of these was worth five to ten of the regular kind, depending on availability. Boulder-on-boulder matches were always closely attended. They were rare, too, especially when they featured perries. (I have since learned boulders are called “shooters” in other areas. But all our marbles were shooters.)
We used to empty our marble bags and compare, holding our treasures up to the light for the kind of close scrutiny used by gemologists sizing up wedding rings. Oddities such as pea-sized perries occasionally showed up. These were said to be from China, then still a mysterious land.
I don’t guess kids play marbles anymore. Unless there’s a marble “app” for their cell phones. But it now makes sense that my favorite adult game is petanque.
William M. Briggs, “Marbles!”, Science Is Not The Answer, 2026-06-23.
September 26, 2026
QotD: The game of Marbles
September 25, 2026
QotD: The whole point of imposing tariffs is to raise prices
Think on it. So, those dastardly foreigners are better, or cheaper, or subsidised, or just plain swarthy johnnies who are selling to us and thereby stealing the crust from the mouths of the more expensive (or less good etc) proper British producers. So, we now impose a tax at the border. This makes those products from swarthy johnnies more expensive. So, people will buy fewer swarthy and more good and honest British.
This also enables the good British to raise their prices and so make a profit.
So, what actually happens is that the British consumer gets screwed for the benefit of British capitalists. Not quite what I’d recommend as a policy but that’s the point and the intention. Tariffs raise the domestic price of the thing, that’s the reason why.
Tim Worstall, “But Increasing Prices Is The Very Point Of Tariffs”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2026-06-18.
September 24, 2026
QotD: The perpetual progressive underdogs
To the autist, each car must be inspected in detail, with full attention … and while the autistic’s attention is laser-focused on one particular parked car – “1998 Ford Taurus, midnight blue, left front tire is a little low, right taillight out, bumper sticker near muffler”, etc. — he fails to notice the moving car that hits him.
As opposed to the non-autistic, who is capable of “abstracting” that situation into a realistic threat assessment. He can’t even give you a ballpark guess of how many parked cars are in the lot, much less any details about any of them, because he has abstracted them out: “a bunch of parked cars” = no threat, so his attention is free to roam around looking for moving cars.
I instinctively want to argue against this, because it appears to me that Leftists are nothing but abstraction. They don’t see individuals; they see huge identity groups. That’s why they see an anti-feminist woman or a conservative homosexual or whatever as not really X. It makes sense to them, somehow, to say that Amy Coney Barrett isn’t really a woman, Clarence Thomas isn’t really black, and so on.
[…]
The non-autistic sees [a child’s drawing of a train as] a rectangle, two wheels, some lines underneath, and thinks “train,” because he’s boiled it down to the essentials — a train is a wheeled vehicle that moves on tracks. That’s good enough to cover pretty much all “train” situations; we can add or subtract details as needed to get to this or that particular train (e.g. electric vs. steam), or a wheeled vehicle which moves on tracks that’s not a train (e.g. a rollercoaster).
So, applied to people: I see a black man walking towards me on the street and I have one set of assumptions in my head. First I see just “person”; then I realize it’s a man; then I realize it’s a black man; then I realize it’s an elderly black man; then I realize it’s Clarence Thomas. All the while I’m dialing in both my perceptions and my behavior — I’m not at much physical risk from an elderly man, and I’m at nearly zero risk from Clarence Thomas, specifically, so I modify my behavior. When I was still just at the “black male” stage of the recognition process, I behaved very differently.
If I’m reading Zorost correctly, the autistic would do something like the reverse. He wouldn’t be able to make any judgments until he’d fully inspected the individual man in front of him at close range and verified that yes, this is Clarence Thomas. And then the confusion kicks in, because he — the autistic — has memorized the rule “black man = Liberal” and here’s Clarence Thomas. Error 404.
Severian, “Why Are They Always Underdogs?”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-07.
September 23, 2026
QotD: The EU as a modern Habsburg Empire
The irony is, of course, that Germany is once again by far the strongest power on the continent. Its interests are complex and no doubt contradictory: it wants the rest of Europe to continue to import its goods, but it does not want to fund, or mutualise, the debts that allow it to do so. The southern countries would like to either to mutualise the debts, or inflate them away by debasing the currency, but Germany will allow neither of these solutions to the imbalances within Europe. There would be no better way to re-awake German nationalism than follow the prescriptions of the southern nations; on the other hand, resentment of Germany will grow if they are not followed.
The author acknowledges the problems within Europe in his last chapter, up till which he has treated Europe as if it were one big happy family with a population gaily marching in unison behind its leadership. The truth is quite otherwise, which is why an example must be made of Britain. But the likelihood is that the more integration there is, the greater will be the tensions, both between and within countries. There is a class within countries that benefits mightily from the present arrangements, which in my opinion explains the paradox of Catalan, Flemish, and Scottish nationalism: for all these nationalisms are firm adherents to the ideal of European Union, namely a dilution of national sovereignty even greater than that which their nations already possess. Again to put it crudely, the leadership of these movements want their place not in the sun, but at the trough. They are pied pipers to their populations.
The book ends by quoting that old Mephistophelian, François Mitterand, to the effect that “Nationalism means war”. And of course this is true if by nationalism is meant an exaggerated and militant love of one’s own country and a hatred of, or disdain for, all other countries, particularly neighbouring ones. Yet at the same time, nation states — at least some of them — have been the only large-scale states able durably to protect the freedom of their populations. Moreover, if nationalism means war, it does not follow that supranationalism means peace. The European Union may be a Yugoslavia in the making, without a Tito to hold it together. As José Manuel Barroso, once President of the European Commission, former Maoist student leader and then Goldman Sachs executive (the thirst for power being the golden thread that runs through this diverse career) put it, Europe — using the word to mean the European Union, which is now more or less standard — is an empire, though of a new kind.
Perhaps not so new, in fact: a kind of Habsburg Empire without the charm and aesthetic sensibility. From the right it is attacked as a socialist enterprise, from the left as a neo-liberal one: corporatist is the word for it, that happy union between regulatory bureaucracy and large corporations.
Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.
September 22, 2026
QotD: Organized activities for children versus informal play
I didn’t ask why. I wish I had, because I’m sincerely curious — these were busy, active kids, actually in the process of racing around the playground with their buddies while the adults chatted, so it’s not as though they needed organized sports to keep them from merging with the couch cushions — but at the time it seemed rude and pushy so I changed the subject. Now, obviously not everyone is like this mom: some people, including Tim Carney, really do love sports and delight in sharing that love. But the truth is, people are obsessed with signing their kids up for stuff. Carney calls it the Travel Team Trap, and it’s probably most evident in youth sports culture, but it shows up everywhere. Your kid likes to write? Find a creative writing class! Having fun with chess? Quick, hire a tutor! My local rec center even offers courses in Dungeons & Dragons, taught by a real live professional nerd, because apparently eating Doritos in your mom’s basement while your friends mock you for touching the Sphere of Annihilation isn’t good enough any more.
And it’s a vicious cycle, because all these official activities crowd out informal play. If the artsy kids in your neighborhood are taking a musical theater class half an hour away, there’s no one to join your kids in pulling out the dress-ups and staging a drama of their own. If everyone is off at soccer practice, you can’t meet up at the park to kick the ball around. Sorry, Zerubbabel can’t come over and play Legos this week, he’s got his STEM Makers class on Wednesday and then Thursday afternoon is junior robotics team … Soon even the families who want a more relaxed, unprogrammed life are signing their kids up for things because it’s the only way they’ll ever see their friends.
There’s nothing wrong with formal instruction in its place, especially for things where technique really matters: the world needs basketball coaches and piano teachers, too. And sometimes it’s just fun! A big stage with lights and music and real costumes scratches an itch that Mom’s old prom dress and a dinosaur mask (“Velociraptorella”, currently in previews off-off-off-Broadway) just can’t touch. But when we regard these things as potentially interesting and entertaining, rather than absolutely vital to our children’s well-being, we can make sane tradeoffs about them. A day-trip to the awesome museum in a neighboring city is also potentially interesting and entertaining, but nobody thinks you’re a bad mom if you spend the weekend doing something else.
And what’s more, the push for legible achievement over experience, without regard for what’s good for your family — or even, apparently, whether your kids like it — robs them of the opportunity to motivate and direct their own lives. Basketball practice three times a week surely does more for your jump shot than a pickup game at the local park, but in the long term the ability to take ownership of your time, make and keep plans with your friends, sort out interpersonal disagreements, etc. are going to be a lot more useful. (And, sorry, I’m still stuck on this D&D thing: the threat of your friends losing interest and wandering off to play foosball instead is a much greater incentive to become a good DM than anything you could learn in a class.)
But it’s not actually surprising that people parent like this, because it’s how they grew up: today’s moms and dads are yesterday’s Organization Kids.1 Their image of the good life is tallying up achievement points on some great celestial board. And no wonder they’re desperate to tally up points for their kids, too: they think their futures depend on it! In fact, every time I bring this up, someone tells me that Harvard is full of kids whose parents drove themselves crazy coordinating travel sports schedules and private school dropoffs and chess tutors — all of which is true, and some of which is probably even causal. (Nobody appreciates achievement points tallied up on a great celestial board like a college admissions office.) But a lot of it is also because that’s how smart, conscientious, upper-middle-class parents are expected to raise their kids, and the best way to get into Harvard is to be the offspring of smart, conscientious, upper-middle-class people. (It also helps if they’re neither white nor Asian.)
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Family Unfriendly, by Timothy P. Carney”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-10-14.
- I hadn’t reread the article since I was in college, but revisiting it now it’s an amazing artifact. “No one is political, no one protests.” Things change!
September 21, 2026
QotD: Military doctrine
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
September 20, 2026
QotD: Brexit – the process is the punishment
Well, yes and no. There is little doubt that a large part of the political class, the upper bureaucracy and the intelligentsia did their very best to prevent, or at least obstruct, Britain’s departure from the European Union. The Prime Minister who followed Mr. Cameron, Mrs. May, was herself in favour of remaining, and yet she was put in charge of the negotiations on the British side. This was like putting an ardent pacifist in charge of an army, and indeed she managed to negotiate a deal that (from the British point of view) was the worst of both worlds.
It should have been obvious from the first that Brexit was an existential question for the European Union, as well as for Britain, of course. If Britain prospered, or simply failed to suffer greatly, after Brexit, this would have been a disaster for the European Union, in the populations of which there was significant and growing scepticism of or opposition to the “European Project” (it is the only project I know whose end is never stated, though I suspect it is a superstate in whose administration politics in the normal sense of elections, appeals to public opinion, etc., are not to be allowed to intrude). An example had to be made, and in effect has been made. No other member state will want to go through what Britain has gone through these last four years. The light must not be worth the candle.
Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.
September 19, 2026
QotD: Islam and the rise of Western hegemony
This, which claimed in its preamble that acknowledgement of “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”, was in reality not at all as “universal” as it affected to be. Standing recognisably in a line of descent from the proclamations of the French Revolution, it served as well as a repudiation of some of the more foundational assumptions of Islamic theodicy.
The concept of human rights was an alien one to Islam. Muslims, traditionally, had not believed in natural law. There were only laws authored by God. The insistence of United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the rights of man” derived, not from the great inheritance of the Sunnah, but from the philosophes of the 18th century. Tellingly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been signed — where else? — in Paris.
Western hegemony over the Islamic world, then, did not end with the collapse of direct rule over it by the European powers. Western values, Western assumptions, Western concepts of law, all of them packaged and marketed as “universal”, continued to exercise an overweening dominance in global affairs. If this was true for Muslims in lands that had sought to reconstitute themselves as nation states, then how much more so was it for Muslims who, in the decades that followed the Second World War, travelled to Europe, and settled there in growing numbers.
Tom Holland, “The age-old tension between Islam and France”, UnHerd, 2020-11-02.
September 18, 2026
QotD: Higher education as a vast money laundering racket
But when you consider just how much money is involved, it’s a lot harder to laugh. Your average tenured prof makes north of $100 K, and for every one of them, there are at least two administrators, four outreach coordinators, and uncountable Special Assistants to the Assistant Provost’s Special Assistant for Diversity and Inclusion. Not to mention all the classroom space, office space, etc. that this requires (including paying the very real people who have to coordinate that stuff — no easy task — the custodial staff and so on). I’d bet that just one of these programs, all in, runs at least a million dollars per year when you throw in bennies and whatnot.
That’s a LOT of scratch, for one or two classes a semester that barely even make their enrollment numbers.
I dunno what nefarious purpose the Angry Studies programs serve (aside from the obvious, perpetual one of “burning down ambient civilization, just because”), but the “national security” ones I’m sure are basically just “diplomatic” cover for cloak and dagger shit. They used to use academic conferences like that back during the Cold War — who else but an officially credentialed diplomatic representative gets to travel around his enemies’ territory? In this case, of course, none of these people are actually going anywhere near war zones (with the exception of Mx. Kagan, of course, who decided to take command of American forces in the field). But academic “conferences” are good ways to make contacts and pass suitcases full of cash and other goodies around …
… I suspect.
Severian, “Klown Kollege”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-28.
September 17, 2026
QotD: Boris Johnson
How can this possibly have happened to the land of Magna Carta and English Common Law, the heroic seafaring nation which coloured the atlas pink and stamped its character on half the world’s nations from Australia and the U.S. to India and South Africa, that invented most of the world’s best sports, produced most of its greatest literature, beat Philip II of Spain, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler and discovered almost everything worth discovering?
Just when did Britain become so incredibly, embarrassingly shit?
Well, it’s easy to blame Boris, as I have done on occasion, for being a priapic lard-butted lightweight chancer who should never have been given the keys to Number 10. As we’ve learned to our cost, he’s all mouth and no trousers, great for an impromptu bon mot or jolly photo op but perfectly useless in times of crisis, being too easily led, having no opinions of his own, the backbone of sponge and the moral character of a Plecostomus catfish.
James Delingpole, “Britain is now the sick man of Europe”, Breitbart, 2020-08-14.
September 16, 2026
QotD: Squeaky bum time
I blinked at them. “We’ve entered … what?”
“Squeaky bum time”, they repeated, as if this was a perfectly normal phrase that everyone uses. “You know, when it’s so tense you’re clenching.”
The first time I heard this phrase, I nearly fell off the couch laughing.
But now?
Now I find myself using it during American sports, muttering it to myself during tense moments, while my American family would have no idea what I’m on about.
This is what happens when you live in a British-American household. Your vocabulary becomes a delightful jumble that sounds slightly off to everyone.
Marianne Jennings, “Squeaky Bum Time and Other British Phrases I Never Knew I Needed”, An American’s Guide to British Life, 2025-10-05.
September 15, 2026
“Napoleon remains the ghost in professional military education”
InfantryDort responds to a complaint that military leaders are taught Clausewitz without the career of Napoleon for context:
THE THING WE STILL CAN’T TEACH
I’ll bite on this one. Napoleon remains the ghost in professional military education. Why? Let me take a stab at it …
Jomini watched him and tried to turn the phenomenon into rules. Anyone in the U.S. Army has seen this before. If you do something exceptional on the field (especially in training), then you’re often coached that you went outside the lines and need to get back in. You may have succeeded, but it COULD have been a disaster. So we try “putting baby in a corner” because the science of war is safe. The art scares people.
Clausewitz watched the same fire in Napoleon and concluded that rules would never be enough. Two centuries later we are still dissecting the campaigns, naming principles, drawing arrows on maps, and trying to explain what exactly lived inside that man.
Again, why?
There is a part of command that refuses to become curriculum. T.E. Lawrence called it the “kingfisher flash”. Clausewitz reached for the genius. It’s the instant when one mind sees through fog what a hundred educated men cannot see at all, then possesses enough violence of will to act before the moment disappears.
Read that last part again 👆
You can feed that gift with history, sharpen it through hardship. But you CANNOT manufacture it with another degree. It MUST be revealed.
Yet modern institutions are built around the opposite assumption. We stack schools, evaluations, gates, boards, and credentials high enough and convince ourselves that eventually genius will emerge from the assembly line. It won’t. It can’t. Ever.
Worse, the machine often recognizes the dangerous talent and rejects it precisely because it cannot reproduce it. The unusual man is “reckless”. The instinctive one is “unserious.” The officer who refuses the approved path becomes “unqualified”.
READ. IT. AGAIN. 👆 👆 👆
Then war arrives and burns the paperwork. That is the lesson Napoleon keeps trying to teach us from two hundred years away. You can study the flame forever. You still have to recognize it when it walks into the room.
The closest we can come to discovering this genius is testing our officers on it. No more reliance on pure paperwork. I say to these officers: Show us the gift you’re supposed to possess for the highest commands.
Or step aside for someone who will.
QotD: Auftragstaktik or “mission-type tactics”
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
September 14, 2026
QotD: “We have Homo Sovieticus in America”
The last numbers from Los Angeles County as a whole were for 2024, when 2,208 homeless people died on the streets. County officials celebrated, because that number was a sharp reduction, and a reflection of the success of programs like overdose intervention teams stationed around public parks.
Remember those numbers, and let’s talk about something else for a moment before we come back to them.
The Soviet writer Aleksandr Zinoviev told a joke that speaks fluent Californian: “In some institution a routine meeting was in progress. There were two points on the agenda: 1) the construction of a barn; 2) the creation of an abundance of consumer goods under communism. As they didn’t have enough planks to build the barn, they moved on at once to the second question.”
Maybe that joke doesn’t land if you don’t live in Los Angeles or Seattle, but from here it’s flawless. Take a quick look at the campaign page for María Elena Durazo, a state senator who just won a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Infrastructure and fire departments are in bad shape in the place where elected officials think that government exists to provide “economic justice” that restructures communities. When government exists to pay your rent, 911 response times soar.
They can’t fix a street, so they move on at once to managing all of society.
Here’s what Senator Durazo boasts about on her “Meet Maria” page: “Arrested over 13 times for leading non-violent Civil Rights and Worker Rights protests”. It’s the line that appears below “State Senator” on her list of accomplishments. Gentry socialists have high-status-marker arrest credentials, without the burden of low-status prosecution and jail terms.
Zinoviev gave us the term “Homo Sovieticus”, describing the human creature that shaped itself around the postures and predilections of Soviet culture. Humorless, a sanctimonious scold, a deeply selfish schemer while professing adoration for collectivism, comfortable reciting official slogans without feeling the need to believe them or examine them, reflexively conformist, not worried about truth. (X) has been advanced as party doctrine, so (X) is correct, and anyone suggesting (Not-X) is highly suspect. The official account is always correct.
We live among these people. We have Homo Sovieticus in America.
Chris Bray, “Homo Cosmopolitus Won’t Count the Costs”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2026-06-10.
September 13, 2026
QotD: Naming “Cathay”
You may think you’ve never heard of the Khitans (Chinese: 契丹 or “qidan“), but you probably have, albeit indirectly. “Khitan” is their ethnonym within their own proto-Mongolic branch of the Altaic languages. In the Turkic languages a little further West, the same people are called “Khitai“. A splinter group of the Khitans who settled in Dzhungaria and Transoxiana called themselves the “Kara-Khitai” (Black Khitans), a name that should be instantly recognizable to anybody who played Age of Empires II. If you prefer Paradox map-painting games to more traditional RTS, they do also show up in the Crusader Kings series, resulting in memes like this one. Oh dear, where was I? Right, the Khitans. The word “Khitai“, via a continent-wide game of Chinese whispers (get it?), became “Cathay”, which the confused Europeans took as the name of the Middle Kingdom itself, finally resulting in the birth of a wonderful airline.
Right, the Khitans. There they were, grazing their flocks on the Greater Khingan Mountains, just bein’ a horde, doing horde stuff. Suddenly, opportunity fell into their laps: the Tang empire was unravelling. The bustling cities and ports of Northeastern China were sitting right there, defenseless, full of gold, and skilled craftsmen, and all the soft and delicate sensuality of settled life. It was about to happen again, right? The nomadic horsemen riding in from the wild steppe, pillaging the effete townspeople and becoming their masters, only to succumb to pleasure and become effete in turn, the endless cycle of history? How could it be avoided? Here is how Mote (yes, we’ve finally gotten to the book) describes their Catch-22:
… the Khitans probably saw quite clearly that when a steppe people by degrees gave up its nomadic mobility in exchange for the more comfortable sedentary life, it ran great risks of having to compete with the Chinese on their ground. Losing in that way their comparative advantage inevitably cost the nomads their cultural integrity; they slowly became just “little Chinese” … no steppe people on China’s borders could become sinified and survive, except by migrating into China and being absorbed — another form of extinction … the warning to nomadic peoples was clear: they must master the art of drawing resources from China without sacrificing their steppe integrity … The wealth that could be wrung from it could give mastery over all Inner Asia.
The Khitan response to this pickle was unlike any I’ve ever heard. Roughly half of the Khitan aristocracy, including the royal clan, immediately adopted Chinese customs,1 moved to the city, and began building a bureaucracy. The other half, including the clan that Khitan kings traditionally picked their wives from, stayed in the steppe and had nothing to do with any of this. They then established two governments, two sets of laws,2 two taxation regimes, two writing systems, two of everything. One was civilized, the other was barbarian. Two completely incompatible social structures living side-by-side, passing through each other, but never interacting. Like dark matter, or like life-forms with mirror chirality. As a Khitan subject, you belonged to just one of these systems (if you were low class, you were sometimes allowed to pick!), and only that system had any authority over you.
The only point of official contact between the two worlds was at the top, where the Khitan king spent half the year reigning as a Chinese-style emperor, and half of it touring around his nomadic subjects as Great Khan in a mobile court. The Khitans recognized that although the king was theoretically 50-50, extended exposure to civilization would tend to Sinify him over time, and his descendants even more so. This is why they mandated that every empress was a pure-strain barbarian from a wild clan. They expected these formidable women to wield influence over their sons and to ensure that as the years rolled past and the royal clan grew more and more Chinese, they would be replenished each generation with the barbarian perspective of their mothers. This totally worked, but also resulted in no end of conflict between the empresses and their palace retainers, who exemplified different worlds.3
Sometimes you read about a social or legal system, and you are just certain that it could not be stable. I had this reaction reading about the Spartan diarchy as a kid, and I had it again reading about the Khitans last year. But their system not only endured, it flourished, and eventually turned into the Liao Dynasty which ruled China for centuries. And it functioned basically as it said it would on the tin — the civilized parts of their empire keeping things efficient and organized, supporting craftsmen and tradespeople; while the Strategic Nomad Reserve was always there ready to be called on in times of war, and prevented the administration from getting too soft and decadent.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Imperial China, by F.W. Mote”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-02-24.
- The decisive thing they actually did was to adopt surnames, which as James C. Scott will tell you is about the most forceful possible way to reject your barbarian heritage.
- The differences in laws could be extreme. For instance, under Chinese law, as in most “civilized” places, treason was punished with ultimate severity and brutality. But in many “barbarian” cultures, treason isn’t actually a huge deal (almost akin to a playground fight) and defeated rebels are customarily forgiven. The Khitans, again, simply did both. Traitors were executed if they lived under city law, and received amnesty if they were under tribal law.
- One such an empress, upon the death of her husband, was asked by a Chinese courtier if she would follow ancient custom and be buried alongside him. She responded: “I of course do not refuse to join the Emperor underground, but my children are young and the country has no leader, so I am not free to do that”. Then she ordered that her right hand be severed at the wrist to represent her within her husband’s tomb.
