Michael Pacitti
Published Dec 24, 2022Differentiating between Art Deco and Streamline Moderne can be difficult if you don’t know their history. They are two very different periods of design. Here is a look at those differences, characteristics, colors, transportation, influences, and more.
May 3, 2024
Art Deco vs Streamline Moderne
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QotD: Colonialism in the ancient Mediterranean
We should start with a basic understanding of who we are talking about here, where they are coming from and the areas they are settling in. First we have our Greeks, who I am sure that most of our readers are generally familiar with. They don’t call themselves Greeks – it is the Romans who do (Latin: graeci); by the classical period they call themselves Hellenes (Έλληνες), a term that appears in the Iliad but once (Homer prefers Ἀχαιοί and Δαναοί, “Achaeans” and “Danaans”). That’s relevant because a lot of the apparent awareness of the Greeks (or more correctly, the Hellenes) as a distinct group, united by language and culture against other groups, belongs to late Archaic and early Classical and the phenomenon we’re going to look at begins during the Greek Dark Age (1100-800) and crests in the Archaic (800-480).
Greek settlement in the late Bronze Age (c. 1500-1100) was focused on the Greek mainland, though we have Greek (“Mycenean”) settlements on the Aegean islands (and Crete) and footholds on the west coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Over the Dark Age – a period where our evidence is very poor indeed, so we cannot see very clearly – the area of Greek-speaking settlement in the Aegean expands and Greek settlements along that West coast of Asia Minor expand dramatically. Our ancient sources preserve legends about how these Greeks (particularly the Ionians, inhabiting the central part of that coastal strip) got there, having been supposedly expelled from Achaia on the northern side of the Peloponnese, but it’s unclear how seriously we should take those legends. But the key point here is that the outward motion of Greeks from mainland Greece proper begins quite early (c. 1100) and is initially local and probably not as organized as the subsequent second phase beginning in the 8th century, which is going to be our focus here.
Our other group are the Phoenicians. They did not call themselves that either; it derives from the Greeks who called them Phoinices (φοίνικες), which like the Roman Poeni may have had its roots in Egyptian fnḫw or perhaps Israelite Ponim.1 In any case, the word is old, as it appears in Linear B tablets dating to the Mycenean period (that 1500-1100 period). The Phoenicians themselves, if asked to call themselves something, would more likely have said Canaans, Kn’nm, though much like the Greeks tended to be Athenians, Spartans, Thebans and so on first, the Phoenicians tended to be Sidonians, Tyrians and so on first. They spoke a Semitic language which we call Phoenician (closely related to Biblical Hebrew) and they invented the alphabet to represent it; this alphabet was copied by the Greeks to represent their language, who were in turn copied by the Romans to represent their language, whose alphabet in turn was adopted by subsequent Europeans to represent their languages – which is the alphabet which I am writing with to you now.
Since at least the late bronze age, they lived in a series of city states on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean in Phoenicia in the Levant in what today would mostly be Lebanon. During the late bronze age, this was the great field of contested influence between the Hittite, (Middle) Assyrian and (New Kingdom) Egyptian Empires. The Late Bronze Age Collapse removed those external influences, leading to a quick recovery from the collapse and then efflorescence in the region. They had many cities, but the most important by this point are Sidon and Tyre; by the 9th century, Tyre emerged as chief over Sidon and may at times have controlled it directly, but this was short lived as the whole region came under the control of the (Neo)Assyrian Empire in 858. The Assyrians demanded heavy tribute (which may contribute to colonization, discussed below) but only vassalized rather than annexed Tyre, Byblos and Sidon, the three largest Phoenician cities.
Both the Greeks and the Phoenicians have one thing in common at the start, which is that these are societies oriented towards the sea. Their initial area of settlement is coastal and both groups were significant sea-faring societies even during the late Bronze Age and remained so by the Archaic period. Both regions, while not resource poor (Phoenicia was famous for its timber, Lebanese cedar), are not resource rich either, particularly in agricultural resources. Compared to the fertility of Mesopotamia, Egypt or even Italy, these were drier, more marginal places, which may go some distance to explaining why both societies ended up oriented towards the sea: it was there and they could use the opportunities.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Ancient Greek and Phoenician Colonization”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-10-13.
1. The former is what I’ve found in dictionary entries for etymologies, the latter is what Dexter Hoyos suggests, Carthaginians (2010), 1. I am not an expert on Semitic languages, linguistics or etymologies, so don’t ask me to decide between them.
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May 2, 2024
When Malcolm Muggeridge investigated P.G. Wodehouse for MI6
Alan Ashworth explains the circumstances under which the great P.G. Wodehouse became the subject of an MI6 (Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service) treason investigation near the end of the Second World War:
P.G. Wodehouse, circa 1904.
The American Legion Weekly, 24 October, 1919 via Wikimedia Commons.
[Malcolm Muggeridge:] “I first made Wodehouse’s acquaintance in circumstances which might have been expected to shake even his equanimity. This was in Paris just after the withdrawal of the German occupation forces. As Wodehouse well understood, the matter of his five broadcasts from Berlin would now have to be explained; and in the atmosphere of hysteria that war inevitably generates, the consequences might be very serious indeed. It would have been natural for him to be shaken, pale, nervous; on the contrary I found him calm and cheerful. I thought then, and think now more forcibly than ever, that this was due not so much to a clear conscience as to a state of innocence which mysteriously has survived in him.”
Muggeridge explains that he was attached to an MI6 contingent and a colleague “mentioned to me casually that he had received a short list of so-called traitors who cases needed to be investigated, one of the names being PG Wodehouse”. Muggeridge readily agreed to take on the case, “partly out of curiosity and partly from a feeling that no one who had made as elegant and original a contribution to the general gaiety of living should be allowed to get caught up in the larger buffooneries of war”. He duly visited Wodehouse at his hotel that same evening and the author described what had happened to him from the collapse in 1940 of France, where he was living with his wife Ethel, to his internment at a former lunatic asylum in Tost, Poland.
“The normal wartime procedure is to release civilian internees when they are sixty. Wodehouse was released some months before his sixtieth birthday as a result of well-meant representations by American friends – some resident in Berlin, America not being then at war with Germany. He made for Berlin, where his wife was awaiting him. The Berlin representative of the Columbia Broadcasting System asked him if he would like to broadcast to his American readers about his internment and foolishly he agreed, not realising the broadcasts would have to go over the German network and were bound to be exploited in the interest of Nazi propaganda.” [Here are German transcripts of the offending items.]
Muggeridge goes on: “It has been alleged that there was a bargain whereby Wodehouse agreed to broadcast in return for being released from Tost. This has frequently been denied and is, in fact, quite untrue but nonetheless still widely believed.”
Wodehouse came under virulent attack, particularly from Cassandra, the Daily Mirror columnist William Connor, who denounced him as a traitor to his country. Public libraries banned his books. Wodehouse wrote to the Home Secretary admitting he had been “criminally foolish” but said the broadcasts were “purely comic” and designed to show Americans a group of interned Englishmen keeping up their spirits. But the damage was done and the stigma stuck. After the war he spent the rest of his life in America.
In words that resonate half a century after their publication, Muggeridge says: “Lies, particularly in an age of mass communication, have much greater staying power than the truth.
“In the broadcasts there is not one phrase or word which can possibly be regarded as treasonable. Ironically enough, they were subsequently used at an American political warfare school as an example of how anti-German propaganda could subtly be put across by a skilful writer in the form of seemingly innocuous, light-hearted descriptive material. The fact is that Wodehouse is ill-fitted to live in an age of ideological conflict. He just does not react to human beings in that sort of way and never seems to hate anyone – not even old friends who turned on him. Of the various indignities heaped upon him at the time of his disgrace, the only one he really grieved over was being expunged from some alleged roll of honour at his old school, Dulwich.”
[…]
Muggeridge records that, when the war ended, the Wodehouses left France for America. “Ethel has been back to England several times but Wodehouse never, though he is always theoretically planning to come. I doubt if he ever will [he didn’t, dying in 1975 at the age of 93]. His attitude is like that of a man who has parted, in painful circumstances, from someone he loves and whom he both longs for and dreads to see again.”
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Gad Saad’s latest “affront to human dignity” kerfuffle
Gad Saad managed to do more than just ruffle the feathers of the Québécois last year by calling the Quebec accent “an affront to human dignity”:
In my 30-year career as a professor and public intellectual, I have never shied away from tackling sacred cows. As a free speech absolutist, I firmly believe that short of the usual caveats (e.g., direct incitement to violence, defamation), free speech is a deontological principle that is inviolable. As a Jewish person, I support arguably the most offensive speech possible, namely the denial of the Holocaust. Such is the price that we must pay to live in a truly free society.
As I explain in my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, the operative zeitgeist in the West is that one’s speech should be tempered in order to minimize the prospect of hurt feelings. This is a terrible reflex in that it forces people to engage in arguably the most pervasive form of censorship, self-censorship. The reality though is that truth must be anti-fragile to mockery, derision, satire, criticism and scrutiny. If it cannot withstand such stressors, it is undoubtedly false. Or as the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk remarked in Critique of Cynical Reason (p. 288): “How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can stand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot stand satire is false.”
This brings me to a bewildering episode that I faced last summer. The cancel mob came for me albeit in a truly unexpected manner. On July 25, I appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast for the ninth time to promote the release on that day of my latest book, titled The Saad Truth About Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life (paperback edition to be released on May 14, 2024). My conversations with Joe are always fun, informative and far-ranging. At one point during our chat, we were jocularly discussing various accents that I found to be auditorily unappealing. I remarked that my family and I had just returned from Portugal, and accordingly I had found the Portuguese accent to be less than attractive. I then qualified Hebrew as “violently ugly”. But it was the third accent that unleashed the tsunami of rage, insults, threats and calls to have me fired from my 30-year professorship. I jokingly said that the French-Canadian accent was an “affront to human dignity”. The sentence in question has become a trademark hyperbolic humorous phrase that I use when expressing an over-the-top esthetic opinion. It is a running gag that has appeared on numerous occasions on my X (formerly Twitter) feed. I have referred to The Beatles, musicals, Lionel Messi haters, fans of Cristiano Ronaldo, and the song “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette as an affront to human dignity/decency. If my wife burns our dinner, I might joke with her that the dish is an affront to human dignity.
In the past, I have triggered the ire of many ideological groups including Islamists, trans activists and vegans. But nothing compared to the unbridled hate that I received from some of my fellow Quebecers, which was largely set off by an article written by Marc Cassivi in La Presse regarding my apparent “linguistic genocide”. My stellar 30-year record as an academic and international bestselling author had never managed to capture the attention of French-Canadian society but once I dared to joke about the local accent, I had committed a linguistic capital crime. And it was time for me to pay!
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Rome’s Biggest Construction Projects
toldinstone
Published Jan 26, 2024Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
3:06 Domitian’s Temple of Jupiter
4:45 Aura
5:48 The Forum of Trajan
7:16 Nero’s Golden HouseMy new book, Insane Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines is now available! Check it out here: https://www.amazon.com/Insane-Emperor…
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QotD: Fomenting inter-generational hatred
“You’re in a heap o’ trouble, boy.” Or girl. What follows are the reasons — or at least the big ones — why you’re so thoroughly screwed, along with some suggestions for self-help at the end.
You tend to loathe Boomers and Generation X, I know. I don’t actually blame you for that, at least not entirely. Some of you, though, the Millennials who lump all the above together, without exception, strike me as singularly stupid and ignorant.
Moreover, the reasons you have for loathing them are somewhat misplaced. You tend to think — not without some reason — that the Boomers, especially, robbed their future, which is to say you, personally, to pay for largesse for themselves in the present.
It’s true enough, but it is neither the really awful thing they did to you nor does the complaint portray you in any particularly favorable light. “Those damned Boomers; they took everything and now there’s nothing left for us.” Yeah … you know what that sounds like? It sounds like the whining of one group of thieves over the success of a better or, in this case, merely luckier group of thieves who got to the big haul first. Yes, it really does.
Sorry, but the damage the Boomers and Xers did to you wasn’t primarily fiscal. No, no, the damage they did – or allowed – was to you, as a person. That’s the real crime. They didn’t just rob you of some money in advance. They didn’t just vote for a series of politicians and political programs and giveaways that ran the economy into the ground.
No, they stole from you — or allowed others to steal from you — some key elements of personhood, especially the ability to engage in critical, logical thinking. That’s right, you were not educated, whether in kindergarten or in the kindergartenesque, safe space segregated, snowflake sanctuary schools we call colleges and universities. Yes, these institutions of miseducation were supposed to teach you how to think. Instead, they taught you what to think and stunted your native ability to think. If you ever start to spout bright green feathers? Yes, this is the reason why; your teachers demanded that you become a parrot.
Tom Kratman, “It’s Up to You, Millennials. Deflect or Be Doomed”, Milo, 2017-12-06.
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May 1, 2024
The Supreme Court of Canada has created “Charter-free zones” in Canada
A recent Supreme Court of Canada decision to allow the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to be overridden in cases where First Nations’ laws conflict with the rights guaranteed to all Canadians by the Charter:
Governments of the over 600 First Nations bands and self-governing Indigenous communities across Canada have been given the green light by the Supreme Court to, in their laws, legally abrogate and override the civil liberties of their band members and citizens.
In its Dickson v. Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation decision the Court ruled that so long as an Indigenous government law “protects Indigenous difference — understood by the collective as interests connected to Aboriginal cultural difference, Aboriginal prior occupancy, Aboriginal prior sovereignty or Aboriginal participation in the treaty process” — then, despite the fact that the law infringes the Charter rights of its citizens, those Charter rights cannot have any application or be given any effect to.
Four of the seven Judges who ruled on the case ruled that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms prima facie applies to Indigenous government laws, but notwithstanding that, if the law is to “protect Indigenous difference”, and the exercise of a Charter right would have the effect of diminishing that “Indigenous difference”, then section 25 of the Constitution Act “shields” the law from Charter application.
A fifth Judge ruled that section 25 meant that the Charter didn’t apply at all to Indigenous government laws, not even prima facie.
Two of the seven judges dissented, one of whom very significantly was Madame Justice O’Bonsawin, the Indigenous person appointed to the Supreme Court supposedly to import an “Indigenous perspective” into its judgments. These two dissenting Justices wrote correctly that the majority opinion creates “Charter-free zones” in Canada. They further wrote:
Minorities with Indigenous communities (will) not be protected from the actions of their own governments. All Canadians, including Indigenous people, need constitutional tools to hold their governments accountable for breaches of their entrenched rights and freedoms. It is against the purposes of the Charter and s. 25, as well as being profoundly inequitable, to deny members of self-governing Indigenous nations similar, rights, remedies and recourse.
There are more than 1.8 million Indigenous Canadians, two-thirds of whom live “off-reserve” in Canada’s towns and cities. The Supreme Court of Canada has deprived all these Canadians of the protections afforded by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on their home reserves and territories.
The Court employed cloud castle reasoning to bring about this illiberal and un-Canadian result, heavy on empty verbal assertions and abstractions with little relation to practical life.
Cloud castles are pleasant and charming to conjure up, even more so because they have no foundations.
The factual foundations of the Court’s decision, such as they, like those of cloud castles, are mainly imaginary. To the extent that may exist in reality, they are wrong.
In an earlier article the writer wrote on this case Cindy Dickson discussed the discriminatory, black sheep treatment she faced when trying to run for office in Vuntut Gwitchin.
The article pointed out other negative, First Nations realities ignored by the majority of the Supreme Court of Canada in its judgement: the “banana republic” nature of small Indigenous governments, and alpha-type band chiefs and councils — “colonizers of their own people” — overseeing a conflicted, family-based system of self-dealing and crony capitalism.
Indigenous Justice O’Bonsawin, as part of her “Indigenous perspective”, expressly acknowledged these entrenched negatives and listed other illiberal aspects of the “Indigenous difference” that the Charter exists to prevent or remedy: the unequal role given men in debating constitutional reforms, band membership rules that excluded some women and their children, election codes that prevent individuals from running for office on the basis of their gender, marital status or sexual orientation, and warrantless searches of homes.
The Death of Adolf Hitler – WW2 – Week 296B – April 30, 1945
World War Two
Published 30 Apr 2024Europe is broken, its cities in ruins, and millions have died in war and genocide. The world has risen against the Nazi threat, and now the Nazi leader cowers in his bunker under Berlin — this is how Adolf Hitler’s last 15 weeks unfold, and why he ultimately chooses suicide to escape responsibility for his actions.
Watch the Führerbunker special here:
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Trudeau appeals to US-based podcasters to help him bring misguided Canadians to their senses
Tristin Hopper outlines Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s latest attempt to get his message out to the growing number of Canadians who are “misguided” enough to not want him back for another term in office:
Last week, Trudeau was the featured guest on two U.S. podcasts: Vox’s Today, Explained and Freakonomics Radio, where he outlined his plans to bring “fairness” to the Canadian economy and hold the line against what he framed as a populist uprising.
“I’m not worried about innovation and creativity,” he told Vox against claims that his budget would scare away investment. “I’m worried about people being able to pay their rent and eventually buy a home.”
Trudeau also described Canada as being seized by a focus on “individualism that I think is counterproductive to the kind of world we need to build”.
The Vox interview began with an actor doing a faux Canadian accent and pretending to be a kind of Trudeau-esque superhero. The Freakonomics interview introduced Trudeau as “possibly the most polite prime minister in the world; he most definitely stands on guard for thee”. So it’s clear from the outset that the interviewers only have a cursory knowledge of Canada and its contemporary political situation.
As such, Trudeau was able to get away with claims that even the friendliest of Canadian interviewers wouldn’t have tolerated.
Below, a quick summary of how Trudeau his pitching his re-election in the U.S.
He frames opposition to his government as a form of mass hysteria
Both interviews did note at the outset that Trudeau is polling quite poorly and that he faces likely defeat in the next election. As to why this is happening, Trudeau described his citizenry as being in the grip of a worldwide trend towards irrational populism, and expressed his hope that Canadians would ultimately come to their senses.
“In every democracy we’re seeing a rise in populists with easy answers that don’t necessarily hold up to any expert scrutiny. But a big part of populism is ignoring experts and expertise, so it sort of feeds on itself and relies on a lot of misinformation and disinformation,” he told Vox.
While he never mentions Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre by name, Trudeau says he’s facing opponents who offer naught but “easy shortcuts”, “buzzwords” and “clever TikTok videos”. The Conservatives, he said, are arguing that “everything I’ve done” is “why life is difficult right now.”
“When in actual fact … all those things have made life better in meaningful ways and it would be much worse if we hadn’t done all those things,” he said.
I don’t know why everyone is down on Justin Trudeau. His brilliant economic and environmental plan is working to perfection: Canadians are eating less unhealthy food (because they’re eating less food overall except for what they can shoplift from Loblaws). Businesses are closing down left and right, which significantly reduces our harmful production of CO2, to allow China and India to build more coal power plants. Community-oriented businesses like pawnshops, used clothing stores, needle exchanges, and food banks are booming all across Canada, increasing our community involvement. Poor, uneducated, undocumented immigrants are flooding into the country to take advantage of the free food, free housing, free healthcare, and income subsidies our munificent governments make available to non-citizens. The first post-national country on the planet — which actively discourages out-of-date patriarchal white-supremacist ideas like individual pride and patriotism — continues to follow the wise guidance of the World Economic Forum, whose goal is a much smaller world population devoted to serving the elites hand-and-foot.
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Lobscouse, Hardtack & Navy Sea Cooks
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jan 23, 2024Hearty meat and potato stew thickened with crushed hardtack (clack clack)
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QotD: Entitlement politics
Janice Rogers Brown, Speech at McGeorge School of Law, 1997-11-21.
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April 30, 2024
TikTok for Tots (and Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter, and …)
Ted Gioia has some rather alarming information on just how many kids are spending a lot of time online from a very early age:
The leader in this movement is TikTok. But the other major platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) are imitating its fast-paced video reels.
My articles have stirred up discussion and debate—especially about the impact of slot machine-ish social media platforms on youngsters.
So I decided to dig into the available data on children and social media. And it was even worse than I feared.
30% of children ages 5 through 7 are using TikTok — despite the platform’s policy that you can’t sign up until age 13.
The story gets worse. The numbers are rising rapidly — usage among this vulnerable group jumped 5% in just one year.
By the way, almost a quarter of children in this demographic have a smartphone. More than three-quarters use a tablet computer.
These figures come from Ofcom, a UK-based regulatory group. I’ll let you decide how applicable they are to other countries. My hunch is that the situation in the US is even worse, but that’s just an educated guess based on having lived in both countries.
What happened in 2010?
One thing is certain — the mental health of youths in both the US and UK is deteriorating rapidly. There are dozens of ways of measuring the crisis, but they all tell the same tragic story.
Something happened around 2010, and it’s destroying millions of lives. […]
As early as age 11, children are spending more than four hours per day online.
Here’s a comparison of time spent online by age. Even before they reach their teens, youngsters are spending more than four hours per day staring into a screen.
Here’s what a day in the digital life of a typical 9-year-old girl looks like.
I don’t find any of this amusing. But if you’re looking for dark humor, I’ll point to the four minutes spent on the Duolingo language training app at the end of the day. This provides an indicator of the relative role of learning in the digital regimen on the rising generation.
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The CDU’s “five-point plan to protect German democracy from … the free and open internet”
German mainstream politicians are struggling to keep extreme right populist anti-democratic voices from being heard by innocent and trusting German voters, so the leader of the CDU in Thuringia has a master plan:
The duel between our leading Thuringian politicians was all but unwatchable, as indeed almost all political debates turn out to be. While [AfD leader Björn] Höcke could’ve acquitted himself better, [CDU leader Mario] Voigt’s performance was flat, uninspired and profoundly banal. Among other things, the man suffers from a peculiar rodentine aspect; he bites his way stiffly through bland preformulated arguments like a squirrel chewing a stale nut or a beaver gnawing through saplings. After the event, the CDU took to the press to declare victory, but polls showed that viewers found Höcke on balance more persuasive, which is of course the real reason that everybody told Voigt to avoid the confrontation. Voigt is intensely democratic and therefore extremely right about everything, but somehow – and this is very awkward to discuss – his being eminently righteous and correct in all things does not manifest in an ability to defeat the very wrong and evil arguments of his opponents. It’s very weird how that works, perhaps somebody should look into it.
Stung by this failure, Voigt has set off to find other means of defending democracy. This week, in the Thüringen state parliament, he gave an amazing speech outlining a five-point plan to protect German democracy from that other great menace, the free and open internet:
So how do we protect democracy in the area of social media? There are five approaches:
Ideally, we should agree to ban bots and to make the use of fake profiles a criminal offence.
There is also the matter of requiring people to use their real names, because freedom of expression should not be hidden behind pseudonyms.
Then there’s the question of whether we should create revocable social media licences for every user, so that dangerous people have no place online.
We need to consider how we can regulate algorithms so that we can revitalise the diversity of opinions in social networks.
And we also have to improve media skills.
For all that Björn Höcke is supposed to be a “populist authoritarian” opposed to representative government, I’ve never heard him say anything this crazy. Voigt, meanwhile, is a leading politician for the officially “democratic” Christian Democratic Union (you know they are democratic because the word is in their name), and he’s actually dreaming of requiring Germans to obtain state-issued licenses for permission to post their thoughts to the internet.
Because Voigt’s regulatory regime would entirely abolish online “freedom of expression”, it is unclear how banning bots and pseudonymity could ever defend it. Generally speaking, for a thing to be defended, it must first exist. Equally curious is Voigt’s belief that any “diversity of opinion” will survive his social media license scheme to benefit from the regulation of social media algorithms.
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DNA and India’s caste system
Earlier this month, Palladium published Razib Khan‘s look at the genetic components of India’s Caste System:
Though the caste system dominates much of Indian life, it does not dominate Indian American life. At slightly over 1% of the U.S. population, only about half of Indian Americans identify as Hindu, the religion from which the broader categories of caste, or varna, emerge. While caste endogamy — marrying within one’s caste — in India remains in the range of 90%, in the U.S. only 65% of American-born Indians even marry other people of subcontinental heritage, and of these, a quick inspection of The New York Times weddings pages shows that inter-caste marriages are the norm. While tensions between the upper-caste minority and middle and lower castes dominate Indian social and political life, 85% of Indian Americans are upper-caste, broadly defined, and only about 1% are truly lower-caste. Ultimately, the minor moral panic over caste discrimination among a small minority of Americans is more a function of our nation’s current neuroses than the reality of caste in the United States.
But this does not mean that caste is not an important phenomenon to understand. In various ways, caste impacts the lives of the more than 1.4 billion citizens of India — 18% of humans alive today — whatever their religion. While the American system of racial slavery is four centuries old at most, India’s caste system was recorded by the Greek diplomat Megasthenes in 300 BC, and is likely far more ancient, perhaps as old as the Indus Valley Civilization more than 4,000 years ago. Indian caste has a deep pedigree as a social technology, and it illustrates the outer boundary of our species’ ability to organize itself into interconnected but discrete subcultures. And unlike many social institutions, caste is imprinted in the very genes of Indians today.
Of Memes and Genes
Beginning about twenty-five years ago, geneticists finally began to look at the variation within the Indian subcontinent, and were shocked by what they found. In small villages in India, Dalits, formerly called “outcastes,” were as genetically distinct from their Brahmin neighbors as Swedes were from Sicilians. In fact, a Brahmin from the far southern state of Tamil Nadu was genetically closer to a Brahmin from the northern state of Punjab then they were to their fellow non-Brahmin Tamils. Dalits from the north were similar to Dalits from the south, while the three upper castes, Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, tended to cluster together against the Sudras.
Some scholars, like Nicholas Dirks, the former chancellor of UC Berkeley, argued for the mobility and dynamism of the caste system in their scholarship. But the genetic evidence seemed to indicate a level of social stratification that echoes through millennia. Across the subcontinent, Dalit castes engaged in menial and unsanitary labor and therefore were considered ritually impure. Meanwhile, Brahmins were the custodians of the Hindu Vedic tradition that ultimately bound the Indic cultures together with other Indo-European traditions, like that of the ancient Iranians or Greeks. Other castes also had their occupations: Kshatriyas were the warriors, while Vaishyas were merchants and other economically productive occupations.
Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas were traditionally the three “twice-born” castes, allowing them to study the Hindu scriptures after an initiatory ritual. The majority of the population were Sudras (or Shudras), India’s peasant and laboring majority. Shudras could not study the scriptures, and might be excluded from some temples and festivals, but they were integrated into the Hindu fold, and served by Brahmin priests. A traditional ethnohistory posits that elite Brahmin priests and Kshatriya rulers combined with Vaishya commoners formed the core of the early Aryan society in the subcontinent, with Shudras integrated into their tribes as indigenous subalterns. Outcastes were tribes and other assorted latecomers who were assimilated at the very bottom of the social system, performing the most degrading and impure tasks.
The caste system as a layered varna system with five classes and numerous integrated jati communities.
Razib KhanThis was the theory. Reality is always more complex. In India, the caste system combines two different social categories: varna and jati. Varna derives from the tripartite Indo-European system, in India represented by Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. It literally translates as “color”, white for Brahmin purity, red for Kshatriya power, and yellow for Vaishya fertility. But India also has Shudras, black for labor. In contrast to the simplicity of varna, with its four classes, jati is fractured into thousands of localized communities. If varna is connected to the deep history of Indo-Aryans and is freighted with religious significance, jati is the concrete expression of Indian communitarianism in local places and times.
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3 Chisel Mortise Method | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published Jan 19, 2024Sometimes, we avoid simple joinery because we believe it cannot be done well, and efficiently by hand. This mortise, 4″ long and 1 1/2″ deep by half an inch, took me around seven minutes.
In any hardwood, oak, for instance, it might take a minute longer, but no more. I did this video to show a technique using my mortise guide and a strategic way using three standard chisels and a method.
I am making a bed with eight mortise and tenon joints, and the mortise I chopped here is one of them.
Enjoy real woodworking with me; it doesn’t always need to be called work!
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