The incorrigible ye have always with you, as somebody must’ve said. Social science types slice it different ways, call it different things — the free rider problem, the tragedy of the commons, etc. — but they all amount to the easily-observed fact that some folks just can’t play well with others. Not “won’t play well with others”; can’t play well with others. Any given population of sufficient size is going to have its unmanageable knuckleheads who are always working at cross-purposes against everyone else, who seem to just get off on causing chaos.
Even purpose-built groups of highly trained specialists fall victim to it, once a certain critical mass is reached. Sports teams call that kind of guy “the locker room cancer”, but it applies to any group. Get a team of five aeronautical engineers together and you’ll get a cool plane. Get a group of fifty together, and you’ll get nothing but a giant nerd slap fight.
There are three plausible explanations for this:
- Social
- Biological
- or some combo of the two.
The Left (by which I also mean the Right) will, of course, go all in on {1}. It’s an article of faith for them, but it’s not necessarily wrong because of that. See above: Every one of those aeronautical engineers engaged in the giant 50-nerd slap fight is, on his lonesome and in every other context, the definition of a solid citizen. Certainly nobody groans “There goes the neighborhood!” when someone from Lockheed Martin buys a house down the block. There must be something to the idea that social conditions cause knuckleheadery.
Severian, “The Scientific Management of Populations”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-15.
February 19, 2023
QotD: “… doesn’t play well with others”
February 18, 2023
QotD: The rise of the “demisexuals”
But if the whole thing seemed frankly silly and, okay, snowflakey, it also seemed pretty harmless. Gender and sexuality were just the latest lens through which young people were trying to understand their place in the world; “demisexuality” was to 2013 what being a little goth-curious was for a teen in 1995, more or less — except that with so much of life happening online, this identity was less about how you moved through the world than about finding just the right flag to affix to your social media profile. But unlike shopping at Claire’s Accessories, demisexuality didn’t stay a teenage conceit; a combination of creeping identitarianism in mainstream culture plus a general obsession with What The Youths Are Into eventually made the concept irresistible to adult millennial women.
“IT HAPPENED TO ME: I’m A Demisexual,” read the headline on a 2015 essay on the site XOJane, where the author boldly proclaimed that her inability to feel sexual attraction toward strangers made her “not quite heterosexual”.
The essay was met with a fair amount of ridicule, for all the obvious reasons — “they want to be oppressed so bad” was the unkind but not entirely untrue thrust of the critiques — but there was something about the way it lamented “the many struggles of living in such a sexually charged culture” that spoke to the anxieties of digital natives trying to navigate a post-sexual revolution dating scene. Hookup culture, dating apps, the endless sorting and filtering of potential suitors in a manner that resembled online shopping more than human connection: it’s no surprise that people struggling in this system jumped on a term, a hard-wired identity, that offered an explanation as to why. The young women who adopted a “demisexual” label as a means of opting out were less angry than their closest analogue, the young male incel, but both shared a sense that the system was broken. If male incels were made miserable by the spectre of the sex they wanted but could have, the demisexuals were perhaps equally tormented by the pressure to want, full stop.
Seven years after the XOJane essay, demisexuality remains a contested notion but also a far more visible one, in everything from beer marketing to dating guides, as with this recent dispatch from the dating app Hinge. A hypothetical demisexual dater asks, “What’s the best way to set expectations around waiting to get sexual?”, prompting a supportive but altogether unintelligible response from the app’s resident therapist that is short on actionable information and long on inscrutable axioms like: “Boundaries are bridges, not fences.” (Are they, though?)
Demisexual visibility seems to have less to do with a grassroots shift in human sexuality, and more to do with its corporate profitability. In a world of identity-driven marketing, a massive piece of the pie awaited any advertiser who figured out how to make young, male-attracted women (the group that includes most demisexuals) feel special and seen — and, of course, not quite heterosexual, thus saving them from the curse of being just another basic cishet bitch.
Kat Rosenfield, “Demisexuals are scared of sex”, UnHerd, 2022-11-07.
February 17, 2023
QotD: Risk mitigation in pre-modern farming communities
Subsistence farmers generally do not do this. Remember, the goal is not to maximize profit, but to avoid family destruction through starvation. If you only farm one crop (the “best” one) and you get too little rain or too much, or the temperature is wrong – that crop fails and the family starves. But if you farm several different crops, that mitigates the risk of any particular crop failing due to climate conditions, or blight (for the Romans, the standard combination seems to have been a mix of wheat, barley and beans, often with grapes or olives besides; there might also be a small garden space. Orchards might double as grazing-space for a small herd of animals, like pigs). By switching up crops like this and farming a bit of everything, the family is less profitable (and less engaged with markets, more on that in a bit), but much safer because the climate conditions that cause one crop to fail may not impact the others. A good example is actually wheat and barley – wheat is more nutritious and more valuable, but barley is more resistant to bad weather and dry-spells; if the rains don’t come, the wheat might be devastated, but the barley should make it and the family survives. On the flip side, if it rains too much, well the barley is likely to be on high-ground (because it likes the drier ground up there anyway) and so survives; that’d make for a hard year for the family, but a survivable one.
Likewise – as that example implies – our small farmers want to spread out their plots. And indeed, when you look at land-use maps of villages of subsistence farmers, what you often find is that each household farms many small plots which are geographically distributed (this is somewhat less true of the Romans, by the by). Farming, especially in the Mediterranean (but more generally as well) is very much a matter of micro-climates, especially when it comes to rainfall and moisture conditions (something that is less true on the vast flat of the American Great Plains, by the by). It is frequently the case that this side of the hill is dry while that side of the hill gets plenty of rain in a year and so on. Consequently, spreading plots out so that each family has say, a little bit of the valley, a little bit of the flat ground, a little bit of the hilly area, and so on shields each family from catastrophe is one of those micro-climates should completely fail (say, the valley floods, or the rain doesn’t fall and the hills are too dry for anything to grow).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
February 16, 2023
QotD: Obituaries
Most obituary notices are quite properly mealymouthed, the word “irreplaceable” being a standby. Strictly speaking, it is never false, for no one is exactly the same as anyone else, and therefore everyone is irreplaceable. “Sadly missed” is another favorite. “Yes, but by whom and for how long?” one is inclined to ask. Frankness is not the first thing that one looks for or expects in obituary notices.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Obit Snit”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-06-09.
February 15, 2023
QotD: The divine right of kings
England’s James I, for instance, was a deeply weird dude. Though he wrote a whole book about his divine right to rule, he kept his weirdness sufficiently in check so as not to alienate his court. Alas, his heir didn’t bother, and we know how that turned out. And so it went with just about any divine right monarch — the more people who actually saw him, the flimsier the theory seemed. History is full of examples of kingdoms “ruled” by insane kings, but not too many of kingdoms thriving when the people knew the king was a lunatic. Feebleminded monarchs are generally kept under lock and key by their courtiers, or they end up Epsteined.
Even democracies once understood this. Pick any 19th century American legislator, for example. As P.J. O’Rourke once said about rock stars, to call one of these guys a drunken, borderline-illiterate pervert just means you’ve read his autobiography. But they knew enough to keep it sufficiently in check around the voters, so that so long as they didn’t actually Chappaquiddick someone, they’d face no repercussions.
Speaking of Chappaquiddick, the Media has always been complicit in the great game of Fool-the-Rubes. They only do it for Democrats now, of course, but that’s the real problem these days: the Media has been doing all this for so long, and so successfully, that they no longer feel the need to bother. Just as Charles I decided to let his freak flag fly because hey, why not, I’m the king, so the Democrat-Media complex went all-in in 2008. You watch these guys — Don Lemon, say, mocking Trump voters as illiterate hicks — and the expression on their face is one of relief. It feels good to finally let it all out, and the more you do it, the better it feels.
Severian, “Rule by Lunatic”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-29.
February 14, 2023
QotD: Outrage
Julie Burchill, “The pervert community? Oh please”, Spiked!, 2019-05-08
February 13, 2023
QotD: Oaths in pre-modern cultures
Second, I should note that I’m drawing my definition of an oath from Alan Sommerstein’s excellent introduction in Horkos: The Oath in Greek Society (2007), edited by A. Sommerstein and J. Fletcher – one of the real “go-to” works on oath-taking in the ancient Mediterranean world. As I go, I’ll also use some medieval examples to hopefully convince you that the same basic principles apply to medieval oaths, especially the all-important oaths of fealty and homage.
(Pedantry note: now you may be saying, “wait, an introduction? Why use that?” As of when I last checked, there is no monograph (single author, single topic) treatment of oaths. Rather, Alan Sommerstein has co-authored a set of edited collections – Horkos (2007, with J. Fletcher), Oath and State (2013, with A. Bayliss) and Oaths and Swearing (2014, with I. Torrance). This can make Greek oaths a difficult topic to get a basic overview of, as opposed to a laundry list of the 101 ancient works you must read for examples. Discussions of Roman oaths are, if anything, even less welcoming to the beginner, because they intersect with the study of Roman law. I think the expectation has always been that the serious student of the classics would have read so many oaths in the process of learning Latin and Greek to develop a sort of instinct for the cultural institution. Nevertheless, Sommerstein’s introduction in Horkos presents my preferred definition of the structure of an oath.)
Alright – all of the quibbling out of the way: onward!
So what is an Oath? Is it the same as a Vow?
Ok, let’s start with definitions. In modern English, we often use oath and vow interchangeably, but they are not (usually) the same thing. Divine beings figure in both kinds of promises, but in different ways. In a vow, the god or gods in question are the recipients of the promise: you vow something to God (or a god). By contrast, an oath is made typically to a person and the role of the divine being in the whole affair is a bit more complex.
(Etymology digression: the word “oath” comes to us by way of Old English āþ (pronounced “ath” with a long ‘a’) and has close cousins in Dutch “Eed” and German “Eid”. The word vow comes from Latin (via Middle English, via French), from the word votum. A votum is specifically a gift to a god in exchange for some favor – the gift can be in the present tense or something promised in the future. By contrast, the Latin word for oath is ius (it has a few meanings) and to swear an oath is the verb iuro (thus the legal phrase “ius iurandum” – literally “the oath to be sworn”). This Latin distinction is preserved into the English usage, where “vow” retains its Latin meaning, and the word “oath” usurps the place of Latin ius (along with other words for specific kinds of oaths in Latin, e.g. sacramentum)).
In a vow, the participant promises something – either in the present or the future – to a god, typically in exchange for something. This is why we talk of an oath of fealty or homage (promises made to a human), but a monk’s vows. When a monk promises obedience, chastity and poverty, he is offering these things to God in exchange for grace, rather than to any mortal person. Those vows are not to the community (though it may be present), but to God (e.g. Benedict in his Rule notes that the vow “is done in the presence of God and his saints to impress on the novice that if he ever acts otherwise, he will surely be condemned by the one he mocks“. (RB 58.18)). Note that a physical thing given in a vow is called a votive (from that Latin root).
(More digressions: Why do we say “marriage vows” in English? Isn’t this a promise to another human being? I suspect this usage – functionally a “frozen” phrase – derives from the assumption that the vows are, in fact, not a promise to your better half, but to God to maintain. After all, the Latin Church held – and the Catholic Church still holds – that a marriage cannot be dissolved by the consent of both parties (unlike oaths, from which a person may be released with the consent of the recipient). The act of divine ratification makes God a party to the marriage, and thus the promise is to him. Thus a vow, and not an oath.)
So again, a vow is a promise to a divinity or other higher power (you can make vows to heroes and saints, for instance), whereas an oath is a promise to another human, which is somehow enforced, witnessed or guaranteed by that higher power.
An example of this important distinction being handled in a very awkward manner is the “oath” of the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones (delivered in S1E7, but taken, short a few words, verbatim from the books). The recruits call out to … someone … (they never name who, which as we’ll see, is a problem) to “hear my words and bear witness to my vow”. Except it’s not clear to me that this is a vow, so much as an oath. The supernatural being you are vowing something to does not bear witness because they are the primary participant – they don’t witness the gift, they receive it.
I strongly suspect that Martin is riffing off of here are the religious military orders of the Middle Ages (who did frequently take vows), but if this is a vow, it raises serious questions. It is absolutely possible to vow a certain future behavior – to essentially make yourself the gift – but who are they vowing to? The tree? It may well be “the Old Gods” who are supposed to be both nameless and numerous (this is, forgive me, not how ancient paganism worked – am I going to have to write that post too?) and who witness things (such as the Pact, itself definitely an oath, through the trees), but if so, surely you would want to specify that. Societies that do votives – especially when there are many gods – are often quite concerned that gifts might go awry. You want to be very specific as to who, exactly, you are vowing something to.
This is all the more important given that (as in the books) the Night’s Watch oath may be sworn in a sept as well as to a Weirwood tree. It wouldn’t do to vow yourself to the wrong gods! More importantly, the interchangeability of the gods in question points very strongly to this being an oath. Gods tend to be very particular about the votives they will receive; one can imagine saying “swear by whatever gods you have here” but not “vow yourself to whatever gods you have here”. Who is to say the local gods take such gifts?
Moreover, while they pledge their lives, they aren’t receiving anything in return. Here I think the problem may be that we are so used to the theologically obvious request of Christian vows (salvation and the life after death) that it doesn’t occur to us that you would need to specify what you get for a vow. But the Old Gods don’t seem to be in a position to offer salvation. Votives to gods in polytheistic systems almost always follow the do ut des system (lit. “I give, that you might give”). Things are not offered just for the heck of it – something is sought in return. And if you want that thing, you need to say it. Jupiter is not going to try to figure it out on his own. If you are asking the Old Gods to protect you, or the wall, or mankind, you need to ask.
(Pliny the Elder puts it neatly declaring, “of course, either to sacrifice without prayer or to consult the gods without sacrifice is useless” (Nat. Hist. 28.3). Prayer here (Latin: precatio) really means “asking for something” – as in the sense of “I pray thee (or ‘prithee’) tell me what happened?” And to be clear, the connection of Christian religious practice to the do ut des formula of pre-Christian paganism is a complex theological question better addressed to a theologian or church historian.)
The scene makes more sense as an oath – the oath-takers are swearing to the rest of the Night’s Watch to keep these promises, with the Weirwood Trees (and through them, the Old Gods – although again, they should specify) acting as witnesses. As a vow, too much is up in the air and the idea that a military order would permit its members to vow themselves to this or that god at random is nonsense. For a vow, the recipient – the god – is paramount.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Oaths! How do they Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-28.
February 12, 2023
QotD: The heyday of Victorian newspapers
Now, the principal quality or characteristic of the sellers of patent medicine has always been effrontery, that is to say the blatant insinuation of the false. Thomas Holloway’s innovation was to insinuate such falsehood on a mass or industrial scale. There was hardly a newspaper in which he did not place a weekly advertisement; moreover, he pioneered the advertisement that masquerades as news story. He would ensure that reports of miracle cures in faraway places, supposedly wrought by his pills and ointment, and written as matter-of-factly as possible, were placed in every newspaper, reports whose veracity no one could possibly check for himself, of course.
As Napoleon once said, repetition is the only rhetorical technique that really works — besides which hope and fear render people susceptible to effrontery. In Thomas Holloway’s time, the fear of illness was often, and the hope of cure rarely, justified; at least Holloway’s preparations were unlikely to do much harm (they contained aloe, myrrh, and saffron), unlike the prescriptions of the orthodox doctors of the time. They allowed for the possibility of natural recovery, whereas orthodox medicine often hurried its consumers into their graves. Nevertheless, the claims Holloway made for his ointment and pills were preposterous, and something is not curative just because it fails to kill.
Holloway made an immense fortune by his effrontery and founded a women’s college in the University of London on the proceeds.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Way of Che”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-10-28.
February 11, 2023
QotD: “The rest of philosophy is not, as Alfred North Whitehead would have it, a series of footnotes to Plato … but all secular religions are”
And Plato’s actually pretty clear, as philosophers go. You’d really get into trouble with a muddled writer … or a much clearer one. A thinker like Nietzsche, for example, who’s such a lapidary stylist that you get lost in his prose, not realizing that he’s often saying the exact opposite of what he seems to be saying. To briefly mention the most famous example: “God is dead” isn’t the barbaric yawp of atheism triumphant. The rest of the paragraph is important, too, especially the next few words: “and we have killed him.” Nietzsche, supposedly the greatest nihilist, is raging against nihilism.
[…]
So here’s what I’d do, if I were designing a from-scratch college reading list. I’d go to the “for Dummies” versions, but only after clearly articulating the why of my reading list. I’d assign Plato, for example, as one of the earliest and best examples of one of mankind’s most pernicious traits: Utopianism. The rest of philosophy is not, as Alfred North Whitehead would have it, a series of footnotes to Plato … but all secular religions are. The most famous of these being Marxism, of course, and you’d get much further into the Marxist mindset by studying The Republic than you would by actually reading all 50-odd volumes of Marx. “What is Justice?” Plato famously asks in this work; the answer, as it turns out, is pretty much straight Stalinism.
How does he arrive at this extraordinary, counter-intuitive(-seeming) conclusion? The Cliff’s Notes will walk you through it. Check them out, then go back and read the real thing if the spirit moves you.
Articulating the “why” saves you all kinds of other headaches, too. Why should you read Hegel, for example? Because you can’t understand Marx without him … but trust me, if you can read The Republic for Dummies, you sure as hell don’t have to wade through Das Kapital. Marxism was a militantly proselytizing faith; they churned out umpteen thousand catechisms spelling it all out … and because they did, there are equally umpteen many anti-Marxist catechisms. Pick one; you’ll get all the Hegel you’ll ever need just from the context.
Severian, “How to Read ‘The Classics'”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-13.
February 10, 2023
QotD: Before Star Wars or the MCU there was … the Arthurian Narrative Universe
The situation is almost exactly the same as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We have a major character named King Arthur, but he was linked to numerous spinoffs and sequels. The other heroes connected to him soon established their own brands — including Lancelot, Merlin, Gawain, Tristan, Percival, and many others. Readers who enjoyed one of the heroes, often became fans of others.
If you make a list, the Arthurian Narrative Universe (ANU) has more than fifty protagonists. Not all of them became major brands, but that’s no different from the movie business, where even Disney can’t keep every superhero on the payroll.
Even more to the point, these stories were business initiatives, expected to enrich their owners. It’s hardly a coincidence that the most influential collection of stories about King Arthur in English, Le Morte d’Arthur published in 1485, originated as a profit-making venture by the earliest commercial publisher in Britain.
William Caxton was not only the first person to set up a printing press in England, but also the first retailer of printed books in the country. He acquired the manuscript of Le Morte d’Arthur from Thomas Malory, the Stan Lee of his day, and turned it into the single most influential secular British book between the time of Chaucer and the rise of Shakespeare.
He didn’t do it because he loved English history. (The painful truth is that very little — in fact next to nothing — in the Arthurian tales comes from documented historical events.) He didn’t even publish the book because he loved a good story. Caxton wanted to make a buck — or a pound sterling, I ought to say. He had identified the right brand franchise, much like the Walt Disney Company in the current day, and would milk it for all it was worth.
But here’s the most amazing thing about his brand franchise: Arthurian stories had been circulating in manuscript for more than 300 years at this point. And many of the details in these narratives are much older than that, reaching back to accounts of knights who fought in the Crusades, if not earlier.
We can trace the story of Lancelot and his adulterous romance with Queen Guinevere at least back to 1180. The story of the knights’ quest for the Holy Grail dates at least back to 1190. The first mention of King Arthur is no later than 828 AD.
Stop and consider the implications. King Arthur was the most popular brand franchise in secular narratives when he was 650 years old!
Of course, it was absurd. Nobody undertook knightly adventures of this sort during the Renaissance, but storytellers pretended otherwise. Everything about these narratives was outdated, unrealistic, and repetitive — the people who read these tales didn’t own suits of armor or compete in jousting tournaments. Those things had disappeared from society. But the audience still wanted these stories, so the same plots and characters got recycled again and again.
Ted Gioia, “Don Quixote Tells Us How the Star Wars Franchise Ends”, The Honest Broker, 2022-11-09.
February 9, 2023
QotD: Collecting taxes, Medieval-style
(Note: for a more detailed primer on what this kind of apparatus can look like, check out Wayne Lee’s (@MilHist_Lee) talk “Reaping the Rewards: How the Governor, the Priest, the Taxman, and the Garrison Secure Victory in World History” here. He’s got some specific points he’s driving at, but the first half of the talk is a broad overview of the problems you face as a suddenly successful king. Also, the whole thing is fascinating.)
In a pre-modern society, this task – assembling and organizing the literate bureaucrats you need to run a state – is very difficult. Literacy is often very low, so the number of individuals with the necessary skills is minuscule. Training new literate bureaucrats is expensive, as is paying the ones you have, creating a catch-22 where the king has no money because he has no tax collectors and he has no tax collectors because he has no money. Looking at how states form is thus often a question of looking at how this low-administration equilibrium is broken. The administrators you need might be found in civic elites who are persuaded to do the job in exchange for power, or in a co-opted religious hierarchy of educated priests, for instance.
Vassalage represents another response to the problem, which is the attempt to – as much as possible – do without. Let’s specify terms: I am using “vassalage” here because it is specific in a way that the more commonly used “feudalism” is not. I am not (yet) referring to how peasants (in Westeros the “smallfolk”) interact with lords (which is better termed “manorialism” than as part of feudalism anyway), but rather how military aristocrats (knights, lords, etc) interact with each other.
So let us say you are a king who has suddenly come into a lot of land, probably by bloody conquest. You need to extract revenue from that land in order to pay for the armies you used to conquer it, but you don’t have a pile of literate bureaucrats to collect those taxes and no easy way to get some. By handing out that land to your military retainers as fiefs (they become your vassals), you can solve a bunch of problems at once. First, you pay off your military retainers for their service with something you have that is valuable (land). Second, by extracting certain promises (called “homage”) from them, you ensure that they will continue to fight for you. And third, you are partitioning your land into smaller and smaller chunks until you get them in chunks small enough to be administered directly, with only a very, very minimal bureaucratic apparatus. Your new vassals, of course, may do the same with their new land, further fragmenting the political system.
This is the system in Westeros, albeit after generations of inheritance (such that families, rather than individuals, serve as the chief political unit). The Westerosi term for a vassal is a “bannerman”. Greater military aristocrats with larger holding are lords, while lesser ones are landed knights. Landed knights often hold significant lands and a keep (fortified manner house), which would make them something more akin to European castellans or barons than, say, a 14th century English Knight Banneret (who is unlikely to have been given permission to fortify his home, known as a license to crenellate). What is missing from this system are the vast majority of knights, who would not have had any kind of fortified dwelling or castle, but would have instead been maintained as part of the household of some more senior member of the aristocracy. A handful of landless knights show up in Game of Thrones, but they should be by far the majority and make up most of the armies.
There’s one final missing ingredient here, which is castles, something Westeros has in abundance. Castles – in the absence of castle-breaking cannon – shift power downward in this system, because they allow vassals to effectively resist their lieges. That may not manifest in open rebellion so much as a refusal to go on campaign or supply troops. This is important, because it makes lieges as dependent on their vassals as vassals are on their lieges.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-12.
February 8, 2023
QotD: How do the “great works of art” become “great”?
That was what got him thinking.
Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture renowned as a classic, struggling to see what the fuss is about? If so, you’ve probably pondered the question Cutting asked himself that day: how does a work of art come to be considered great?
The intuitive answer is that some works of art are just great: of intrinsically superior quality. The paintings that win prime spots in galleries, get taught in classes and reproduced in books are the ones that have proved their artistic value over time. If you can’t see they’re superior, that’s your problem. It’s an intimidatingly neat explanation. But some social scientists have been asking awkward questions of it, raising the possibility that artistic canons are little more than fossilised historical accidents.
Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological mechanism known as the “mere-exposure effect” played a role in deciding which paintings rise to the top of the cultural league. In a seminal 1968 experiment, people were shown a series of abstract shapes in rapid succession. Some shapes were repeated, but because they came and went so fast, the subjects didn’t notice. When asked which of these random shapes they found most pleasing, they chose ones that, unbeknown to them, had come around more than once. Even unconscious familiarity bred affection.
Back at Cornell, Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch. Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of Impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings were canonical, included in art-history books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality. These were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group of students liked the canonical ones best. Cutting’s students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.
Cutting believes his experiment offers a clue as to how canons are formed. He points out that the most reproduced works of Impressionism today tend to have been bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. The preferences of these men bestowed prestige on certain works, which made the works more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in anthologies. The kudos cascaded down the years, gaining momentum from mere exposure as it did so. The more people were exposed to, say, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics created sophisticated justifications for its pre-eminence. After all, it’s not just the masses who tend to rate what they see more often more highly. As contemporary artists like Warhol and Damien Hirst have grasped, critical acclaim is deeply entwined with publicity. “Scholars,” Cutting argues, “are no different from the public in the effects of mere exposure.”
Ian Leslie, “The Mona Lisa Effect”, The Ruffian, 2022-10-29 (originally published in Intelligent Life in 2014.
February 7, 2023
QotD: The misery of certainty
So why are they always so fucking miserable?
Let’s stipulate, for instance, that gender really is just a social construction. Even if it’s not, you’re dogmatically certain of this. Crucially, everyone else in your world is equally dogmatically certain, so even if it’s not, it is. Shouldn’t you be much, much, much happier? So you’re really a wingless golden-skinned dragonkin. Cool. Everyone else is 100% on board with this. You should be the happiest wingless golden-skinned dragonkin on earth … but you’re not. You’re miserable, and you do your damnedest to make every single other person you come in contact with miserable, too.
As a wise man once put it, if you run into an asshole in the morning, well, you just ran into an asshole. If you run into nothing but assholes all day, then you’re the asshole.
Same question to atheists. I can understand nonbelievers being tormented by their uncertainty, but an atheist is dogmatically certain there’s no god … so why aren’t y’all happier? Why, exactly, does the kid with cancer make you mad? The universe, you’re sure, is nothing but the random collision of atoms. It sucks for the kid that those atoms collided in that particular way, but why are you mad? More to the point, why are you mad? It’s like getting mad at gravity for that apple bonking you on the head. There’s no cosmic injustice without cosmic justice. I’d expect a zenlike calm, but instead, every time I write something about atheism (which I really don’t very often), I get a whole bunch of sour, bitter, angry atheists dropping in to tell me that I’m the asshole.
Severian, “The Emotion is the Tell”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-24.
February 6, 2023
QotD: US railroad land grants
The speech was widely reprinted by those skeptical of government pork barrel (a term that first became popular about the time Knott gave his speech). Sixteen years later, Northern Pacific, which received what was probably the largest land grant to a private company in American history, reprinted the speech in this brochure.
This might seem strange except that NP annotated the speech with recent facts in bright red letters, such as that Duluth had grown to house 26,000 people by 1886, that more wheat was delivered to Duluth each year than to any other American city, and that it also saw deliveries of millions of board feet of lumber and hundreds of thousands of tons of iron ore each year.
NP didn’t say so in so many words, but its point was clearly that the land grants, contrary to Knott’s predictions, were a good thing for most if not all Americans. However, the brochure also didn’t mention that James J. Hill was proving that a railroad that didn’t receive any land grants or subsidies could provide just as many benefits without going bankrupt, which would leave both investors and taxpayers in the lurch. (The St. Paul & Pacific did receive a small land grant, but Hill paid fair market value for that railroad and land after it went bankrupt, thus Hill didn’t particularly benefit from the subsidy.)
Train Lover (Randal O’Toole), “Debate Over Railroad Land Grants”, Streamliner Memories, 2022-11-01.
February 5, 2023
QotD: Annual cycles of plenty and scarcity in pre-modern agricultural societies
That has more than just economic impacts because the family unit becomes more vulnerable as that food stockpile dwindles. Malnutrition brings on a host of other threats: elevated risk of death from injury or disease most notably. Repeated malnutrition also has devastating long-term effects on young children […] Consequently, we see seasonal mortality patterns in agricultural communities which tend to follow harvest cycles; when the harvest is poor, the family starts to run low on food before the next harvest, which leads to rationing the remaining food, which leads to malnutrition. That malnutrition is not evenly distributed though: the working age adults need to be strong enough to bring in the next harvest when it comes (or to be doing additional non-farming labor to supplement the family), so the short rations are going to go to the children and the elderly. Which in turn means that “lean” years are marked by increased mortality especially among the children and the elderly, the former of which is how the rural population “regulates” to its food production in the absence of modern birth control (but, as an aside: this doesn’t lead to pure Malthusian dynamics – a lot more influences the food production ceiling than just available land. You can have low-equilibrium or high-equilibrium systems, especially when looking at the availability of certain sorts of farming capital or access to trade at distance. I cannot stress this enough: Malthus was wrong; yes, interestingly, usefully wrong – but still wrong. The big plagues sometimes pointed to as evidence of Malthusian crises have as much if not more to do with rising trade interconnectedness than declining nutritional standards). This creates yearly cycles of plenty and vulnerability […]
Next to that little cycle, we also have a “big” cycle of generations. The ratio of labor-to-food-requirements varies as generations are born, age and die; it isn’t constant. The family is at its peak labor effectiveness at the point when the youngest generation is physically mature but hasn’t yet begun having children (the exact age-range there is going to vary by nuptial patterns, see below) and at its most vulnerable when the youngest generation is immature. By way of example, let’s imagine a family (I’m going to use Roman names because they make gender very clear, but this is a completely made-up family): we have Gaius (M, 45), his wife, Cornelia (39, F), his mother Tullia (64, F) and their children Gaius (21, M), Secundus (19, M), Julia1 (16, F) and Julia2 (14, F). That family has three male laborers, three female laborers (Tullia being in her twilight years, we don’t count), all effectively adults in that sense, against 7 mouths to feed. But let’s fast-forward fifteen years. Gaius is now 60 and slowing down, Cornelia is 54; Tullia, we may assume has passed. But Gaius now 36 is married to Clodia (20, F; welcome to Roman marriage patterns), with two children Gaius (3, M) and Julia3 (1, F); Julia1 and Julia2 are married and now in different households and Secundus, recognizing that the family’s financial situation is never going to allow him to marry and set up a household has left for the Big City. So we now have the labor of two women and a man-and-a-half (since Gaius the Elder is quite old) against six mouths and the situation is likely to get worse in the following years as Gaius-the-Younger and Clodia have more children and Gaius-the-Elder gets older. The point of all of this is to note that just as risk and vulnerability peak and subside on a yearly basis in cycles, they also do this on a generational basis in cycles.
(An aside: the exact structure of these generational patterns follow on marriage patterns which differ somewhat culture to culture. In just about every subsistence farming culture I’ve seen, women marry young (by modern standards) often in their mid-to-late teens, or early twenties; that doesn’t vary much (marriage ages tend to be younger, paradoxically, for wealthier people in these societies, by the by). But marriage-ages for men vary quite a lot, from societies where men’s age at first marriage is in the early 20s to societies like Roman and Greece where it is in the late 20s to mid-thirties. At Rome during the Republic, the expectation seems to have been that a Roman man would complete the bulk of their military service – in their twenties and possibly early thirties – before starting a household; something with implications for Roman household vulnerability. Check out Rosenstein, op. cit. on this).
On top of these cycles of vulnerability, you have truly unpredictable risk. Crops can fail in so many ways. In areas without irrigated rivers, a dry spell at the wrong time is enough; for places with rivers, flooding becomes a concern because the fields have to be set close to the water-table. Pests and crop blights are also a potential risk factor, as of course is conflict.
So instead of imagining a farm with a “standard” yield, imagine a farm with a standard grain consumption. Most years, the farm’s production (bolstered by other activities like sharecropping that we’ll talk about later) exceed that consumption, with the remainder being surplus available for sale, trade or as gifts to neighbors and friends. Some years, the farm’s production falls short, creating that shortfall. Meanwhile families tend to grow to the size the farm can support, rather than to the labor needs the farm has, which tends to mean too many hands (and mouths) and not enough land. Which in turn causes the family to ride a line of fairly high risk in many cases.
All of this is to stress that these farmers are looking to manage risk through cycles of vulnerability […]
I led in with all of that risk and vulnerability because without it just about nothing these farmers do makes a lot of sense; once you understand that they are managing risk, everything falls into place.
Most modern folks think in terms of profit maximization; we take for granted that we will still be alive tomorrow and instead ask how we can maximize how much money we have then (this is, admittedly, a lot less true for the least fortunate among us). We thus tend to favor efficient systems, even if they are vulnerable. From this perspective, ancient farmers – as we’ll see – look very silly, but this is a trap, albeit one that even some very august ancient scholars have fallen into. These are not irrational, unthinking people; they are poor, not stupid – those are not the same things.
But because these households wobble on the edge of disaster continually, that changes the calculus. These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated. Moreover, for most of these farmers, working harder and farming more generally doesn’t offer a route out of the small farming class – these societies typically lack that kind of mobility (and also generally lack the massive wealth-creation potential of industrial power which powers that kind of mobility). Consequently, there is little gain to taking risks and much to lose. So as we’ll see, these farmers generally sacrifice efficiency for greater margins of safety, every time.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
