Quotulatiousness

October 11, 2024

“[T]he past is like a thriving civilization; they do things better there”

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Another recommended link from the “Your Weekly Stack” set of links to interesting posts on Substack. This, like the previous post, is from an author I hadn’t read before and thought was worth sharing with you.

This is from The American Tribune, making the case that modern Americans (and westerners in general) are in a similar situation to the white minority in Rhodesia:

We stand today in the ruins of civilization. Much as the 9th Century Anglo-Saxons looked at the stone works of the Romans and thought they must have been giants,1 or the Greeks of the post-Sea Peoples Dark Age saw the works of the Minoans and Myceneans and thought only Cyclopses could have constructed such structures,2 we stare at the achievements of the 19th and early 20th Centuries in near-disbelief.

The moon hasn’t been stepped upon since the 70s. Mars remains uncolonized. Municipal infrastructure like water treatment and provision is falling apart and the government either can’t or won’t respond to natural disasters.3 Whereas we once built beautiful buildings that lasted for centuries, structures such as Chatsworth and the Horse Guards Building of Whitehall, now we have ugly structures of concrete and steel that are falling apart already.4

The situation as regards crime and squalor is even worse. As Curtis Yarvin notes in “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives”:

    If you read travel narratives of what is now the Third World from before World War II (I’ve just been enjoying Erna Fergusson’s Guatemala, for example), you simply don’t see anything like the misery, squalor and barbarism that is everywhere today. (Fergusson describes Guatemala City as “clean”. I kid you not.) What you do see is social and political structures, whether native or colonial, that are clearly not American in origin, and that are unacceptable not only by modern American standards but even by 1930s American standards.

So whereas Guatemala was once clean, now America’s cities are towers of concrete surrounded by piles of refuse, mobs of zombie-like drug addicts living on the streets,5 and infested with criminals of both the petty and highly violent variety. As Hartley put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. More accurately, the past is like a thriving civilization; they do things better there.

In short, we, like those in the Belgian Congo after the Belgians left, live in an “Empire of Dust” where much of what remains is the ruin of a prior civilization destroyed not because it didn’t work, but because the demented ideology of the present conflicted with its continued, functional existence.6

What happened? A sort of decolonization inflicted upon the Great Powers themselves — namely America, Germany, Britain, and France — after the outlying colonies had long been destroyed. The decay of law and order, the promotion of anti-white hatred, the decay of infrastructure, and the filling of positions with corrupt thugs rather than honorable gentlemen,7 all of it is more or less what happened to the colonies in the ’50s and ’60s. Further, it is similar to what happened later on in South Africa, where a collection of communists, leftists, and NGOs with like mindsets and funded by those like George Soros turned a formerly thriving civilization into what now amounts to a land like Mad Max but with more murder.8

But while the South Africanization of America is certainly an issue that we face,9 it’s not the most accurate comparison to our present problem. South Africa was, when it fell, filled with decades of racial hatred sparked by decades of apartheid that ended only then (though was somewhat overblown), something that Europe never had and nowhere in America has had in over half a century. That unique circumstance created a degree of hatred that was overpowering and, though one with which we largely disagree, understandable. We, then, are somewhat different in terms of where we are and what is happening.

September 12, 2024

QotD: The collapse of early civilizations in Mesopotamia

Filed under: Government, History, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Early states were pretty time-limited themselves. [In Against The Grain,] Scott addresses the collapse of early civilizations, which was ubiquitous; typical history disguises this by talking about “dynasties” or “periods” rather than “the couple of generations an early state could hold itself together without collapsing”.

    Robert Adams, whose knowledge of the early Mesopotamian states is unsurpassed, expresses some astonishment at the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III), in which five kings succeeded one another over a hundred-year period. Though it too collapsed afterward, it represented something of a record of stability.

Scott thinks of these collapses not as disasters or mysteries but as the expected order of things. It is a minor miracle that some guy in a palace can get everyone to stay on his fields and work for him and pay him taxes, and no surprise when this situation stops holding. These collapses rarely involved great loss of life. They could just be a simple transition from “a bunch of farming towns pay taxes to the state center” to “a bunch of farming towns are no longer paying taxes to the state center”. The great world cultures of the time – Egypt, Sumeria, China, whereever – kept chugging along whether or not there was a king in the middle collecting taxes from them. Scott warns against the bias of archaeologists who – deprived of the great monuments and libraries of cuneiform tablets that only a powerful king could produce – curse the resulting interregnum as a dark age or disaster. Probably most people were better off during these times.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.

July 10, 2024

After 1177 B.C.

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jane Psmith reviews the follow-on book from Eric Kline’s bestseller about the Bronze Age Collapse, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations:

Sometime around 1150 BC, the dense network of politically, economically, and culturally interdependent states around the eastern Mediterranean collapsed. In 2014, GWU archaeologist Eric Cline wrote a book about it. And then, surprisingly, it became a bestseller.

Okay, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise: most people can recognize an obvious historical analogy when it hits them over the head, and the globalized1 state system of the Late Bronze Age has extremely clear parallels to the modern day. An interconnected and cosmopolitan world? Centralized state bureaucracy? High-level diplomacy between ruling elites? A technologically complex civilization enabled by extensive international trade along lengthy and elaborate supply chains? Well, gosh, that seems remarkably familiar. An audience that had just weathered a global financial crisis (and, later, a global pandemic) was perfectly poised to appreciate Cline’s exploration of the fragility of complex systems. No wonder it sold! (A copy entered the Psmith household in early 2020 for, uh, obvious reasons.)

Cline’s basic argument in the book was that the Collapse was due not to any single cause but to a “perfect storm” of calamities: drought and accompanying famine, earthquake, internal rebellion, external invasion. These were all problems that the civilizations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean had faced and survived in the past, but under their combined onslaught the most fragile parts of the system at last began buckle. When one society disintegrated, its sudden absence from the interconnected global economy became a new stressor on its surviving neighbors — until at last, domino-like, the whole thing came down.2 It would be decades, or in some places centuries, before the standard of living returned to anything like its previous level, and it would be nearly five hundred years before an international system as complex and sophisticated as the world of the Late Bronze Age emerged.

Now, a decade after his original book, Cline has a sequel exploring what happened after the Collapse. Which civilizations were able to rebound to something approaching their former glory, which barely managed to limp along into the Iron Age, and which vanished into the sands of time? And, more importantly, why?

This is a much more difficult story to tell. The original 1177 B.C. spent much of its page count on the zenith of Bronze Age civilization, the 15th through 13th centuries BC, to explain what it was that did the collapsing. It’s a sweeping tale, full of wonderful stories and fascinating digressions into the historicity of the Trojan War (yes) and the Exodus (not archeologically substantiated) as well as being a compelling portrait of a complicated set of societies. Cline’s narrative darts from Egypt to Assyria to the Aegean to the Hittites, treating each in turn as he moves forward through time towards what we all know is coming.

But chronological framing is impossible for the sequel. There is, definitionally — there can be — no grand narrative of regional divergence after the fall of a “world-system“. The fate of Mesopotamia is no longer linked to that of Greece; there are no more Cretan envoys in New Kingdom tomb reliefs, no more battles between the Hittite Great King and the wanax of a Mycenaean palatial center, no more Uzbek tin shipwrecked off the coast of Anatolia. Once the ties are cut, each story must stand alone, and accordingly Cline gives each region its own chapter.

Alas, this is a lot less fun to read.

    1. For sufficiently small values of “globe”. But larger than you might expect!

    2. The revised 2021 edition apparently gives a larger role to climate factors, especially the 3.2kya megadrought, but that’s not the one I read and anyway the other elements were still present.

May 21, 2024

Tribalism

Filed under: Africa, Americas, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Theophilus Chilton pulls up an older essay from the vault, discussing tribalism, how it likely arose, and examples of cultures that relapsed into tribalism for various reasons:

In this post, I’d like to address the phenomenon of tribalism. There can be two general definitions of this term. The first is attitudinal – it refers to the possession by a group of people of a strong ethnic and cultural identity, one which pervades every level and facet of their society, and which serves to separate (often in a hostile sense) the group’s understanding of itself apart from its neighbours. The second definition is more technical and anthropological, referring to a group of people organised along kinship lines and possessing what would generally be referred to as a “primitive” governmental form centered around a chieftain and body of elders who are often thought to be imbued with supernatural authority and prestige (mana or some similar concept). The first definition, of course, is nearly always displayed by the second. It is this second definition which I would like to deal with, however.

Specifically, I’d like to explore the question of how tribalism relates to the collapse of widely spread cultures when they are placed under extreme stresses.

There is always the temptation to view historical and pre-historical (i.e., before written records were available) people-groups which were organised along tribal lines as “primitives” or even “stupid”. This is not necessarily the case, and in many instances is certainly not true. However, tribalism is not a truly optimal or even “natural” form of social organisation, and I believe is forced onto people-groups more out of necessity than anything else.

Before exploring the whys of tribalism’s existence, let’s first note what I believe can be stated as a general truism – Mankind is a social creature who naturally desires to organise himself along communal lines. This is why cities, cultures, civilisations even exist in the first place. Early in the history of Western science, Aristotle expressed this sentiment in his oft-quoted statement that “Man is by nature a political animal” (ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον). This aphorism is usually misunderstood, unfortunately, due to the failure of many to take its cultural context into account. Aristotle was not saying that mankind’s nature is to sit around reading about politicians in the newspaper. He was not talking about “politics” in some sort of demotic or operational sense. Rather, “political” means “of the polis” [” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>link]. The polis, in archaic and classical Greece, was more than just a city-state – it was the very sum of Greek communal existence. Foreigners without poleis were not merely barbarians, they were something less than human beings, they lacked a crucial element of communal existence that made man – capable of speech and reason – different from the animals and able to govern himself rationally. “Political” did not mean “elections” or “scandals”, as it does with us today. Instead, it meant “capable of living with other human beings as a rational creature”. It meant civilisation itself. Tribalism, while perhaps incorrectly called “primitive”, nevertheless is “underdeveloped”. It is in the nature of man to organise himself socially, and even among early and technologically backwards peoples, this organisation was quite often more complex than tribal forms. While modern cities may be populated by socially atomised shells of men, the classical view of the city was that it was vital to genuine humanity.

My point in all of this is that I don’t believe that tribal organisation is a “natural” endpoint for humanity, socially speaking. The reason tribes are tribes is not because they are all too stupid to be capable of anything else, nor because they have achieved an organisation that truly satisfies the human spirit and nature. As the saying goes, “The only morality is civilisation”. The direction of man’s communal association with man is toward more complex forms of social and governing interactions which satisfy man’s inner desire for sociability.

So why are tribal peoples … tribal? My theory is that tribalism arises neither from stupidity or satisfaction, but as a result of either environmental factors such as geography, habitability, etc. which inhibit complexification of social organisation, or else as a result of civilisation-destroying catastrophes which corrode and destroy central authority and the institutions necessary to maintain socially complex systems.

The first – environmental factors – would most likely be useful for explaining why cultures existing in more extreme biomes persist in a tribal state. For example, the Arctic regions inhabited by the Inuit would militate against building complexity into their native (i.e. pre-contact with modern Europeans) societies. The first great civilisations of the river valleys – Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, and China – all began because of the organisation needed to construct and administer large scale irrigation projects for agriculture. Yet, the weather in the Arctic precludes any sort of agriculture, as well as many other activities associated with high civilisation such as monumental architecture and large scale trade. The Inuit remained tribal hunter-gatherers not because they were inherently incapable of high culture, but because their surroundings inhibited them from it. Likewise, the many tribal groups in the Rub’ al-Khali (the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula) were more or less locked into a semi-nomadic transhumant existence by their environment, even as the racially and linguistically quite similar peoples of Yemen and the Hadramaut were developing complex agricultural and commercial cultures along the wadis.

However, I believe that the more common reason for tribalism in history is that of catastrophes – of various types, some fast-acting and others much slower – which essentially “turned the world upside down” for previous high civilisations which were affected by them. I believe that there are many examples of this which can be seen, or at least inferred, from historical study. I’ll detail five of them below.

The first is an example which would formerly have been considered to fall into the category of tribes remaining tribal because of geographical factors, but which recent archaeological evidence suggests is not the case. This would be the tribes (or at least some of them) of the Amazon jungles, especially the Mato Grosso region of western Brazil. Long considered to be one of the most primitive regions on the planet, one could easily make the argument that these tribes were such because of the extreme conditions found in the South American jungles. While lush and verdant, these jungles are really rather inhospitable from the standpoint of human habitability – the jungle itself is extremely dense, is rife with parasites and other disease-carriers, and is full of poisonous plants and animals of all kinds. Yet, archaeologists now know that there was an advanced urban culture in this region which supported large-scale root agriculture, build roads, bridges, and palisades, and dammed rivers for the purpose of fish farming – evidently the rumours told to the early Spanish conquistadores of cities in the jungle were more than just myth. This culture lasted for nearly a millennium until it went into terminal decline around 1550 AD, the jungle reclaiming it thoroughly until satellite imaging recently rediscovered it.

What happened? We’re not sure, but the best theory seems to be that diseases brought by Europeans terminated this Mato Grosso culture, destroying enough of its population that urban existence could no longer be sustained. The result of this was a turn to tribalism, a less complex form more easily sustained by the post-plague population. The descendants of this culture are the Kuikuro people, a Carib-speaking tribe living in the region, and probably also other tribes living in the greater area around the Matto Grosso. In the case of the Mato Grosso city culture, the shock of disease against which they had no immunity destroyed their population, and concomitantly their ability to maintain more complex forms of civilisation.

The conical tower inside the Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe.
Photo by Marius Loots via Wikimedia Commons.

The second example would be that of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe, centered around its capital of “Great Zimbabwe,” designated as such so as to distinguish it from the 200 or so smaller “zimbabwes” that have been scattered around present-day Rhodesia and Mozambique. Great Zimbabwe, at its peak, housed almost 20,000 people and was the nucleus of a widespread Iron Age culture in southern Africa, and this Bantu culture flourished from the 11th-16th centuries AD before collapsing. It is thought that the decline of Zimbabwean culture was due to the exhaustion of key natural resources which kept them from sustaining their urban culture. The result, if the later state of the peoples in the area is any indicator, was a conversion to the tribal structures more typically associated with sub-Saharan Africa. The direct descendants of the Zimbabwean culture are thought to be the various tribes in the area speaking Shona, a Bantu language group with over 8 million speakers now (post Western medicine and agriculture, of course). Once again, though, we see that when conditions changed – the loss of key resource supports for the urban culture – the shock to the system led to a radical decomplexification of the society involved.

December 26, 2023

The awe-inducing power of volcanoes

Filed under: China, Environment, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West considers just how much human history has been shaped by vulcanology, including one near-extinction event for the human race:

A huge volcano has erupted in Iceland and it looks fairly awesome, both in the traditional and American teenager senses of the word.

Many will remember their holidays being ruined 13 years ago by the explosion of another Icelandic volcano with the epic Norse name Eyjafjallajökull. While this one will apparently not be so disruptive, volcano eruptions are an under-appreciated factor in human history and their indirect consequences are often huge.

Around 75,000 years ago an eruption on Toba was so catastrophic as to reduce the global human population to just 4,000, with 500 women of childbearing age, according to Niall Ferguson. Kyle Harper put the number at 10,000, following an event that brought a “millennium of winter” and a bottleneck in the human population.

In his brilliant but rather depressing The Fate of Rome, Harper looked at the role of volcanoes in hastening the end of antiquity, reflecting that “With good reason, the ancients revered the fearsome goddess Fortuna, out of a sense that the sovereign powers of this world were ultimately capricious”.

Rome’s peak coincided with a period of especially clement climatic conditions in the Mediterranean, in part because of the lack of volcanic activity. Of the 20 largest volcanic eruptions of the last 2,500 years, “none fall between the death of Julius Caesar and the year AD 169”, although the most famous, the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, did. (Even today it continues to reveal knowledge about the ancient world, including a potential treasure of information.)

However, the later years of Antiquity were marked by “a spasm” of eruptions and as Harper wrote, “The AD 530s and 540s stand out against the entire late Holocene as a moment of unparalleled volcanic violence”.

In the Chinese chronicle Nan Shi (“The History of the Southern Dynasties”) it was reported in February 535 that “there twice was the sound of thunder” heard. Most likely this was a gigantic volcanic explosion in the faraway South Pacific, an event which had an immense impact around the world.

Vast numbers died following the volcanic winter that followed, with the year 536 the coldest of the last two millennia. Average summer temperature in Europe fell by 2.5 degrees, and the decade that followed was intensely cold, with the period of frigid weather lasting until the 680s.

The Byzantine historian Procopius wrote how “during the whole year the sun gave forth its light without brightness … It seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear”. Statesman Flavius Cassiodorus wrote how: “We marvel to see now shadow on our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigour of the sun’s heat wasted into feebleness”.

A second great volcanic eruption followed in 540 and (perhaps) a third in 547. This led to famine in Europe and China, the possible destruction of a city in Central America, and the migration of Mongolian tribes west. Then, just to top off what was already turning out to be a bad decade, the bubonic plague arrived, hitting Constantinople in 542, spreading west and reaching Britain by 544.

Combined with the Justinian Plague, the long winter hugely weakened the eastern Roman Empire, the combination of climatic disaster and plague leading to a spiritual and demographic crisis that paved the way for the rise of Islam. In the west the results were catastrophic, and urban centres vanished across the once heavily settled region of southern Gaul. Like in the Near East, the fall of civilisation opened the way for former barbarians to build anew, and “in the Frankish north, the seeds of a medieval order germinated. It was here that a new civilization started to grow, one not haunted by the incubus of plague”.

September 19, 2023

The end of the Western Roman Empire

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Theophilus Chilton updates a review from several years ago with a few minor changes:

British archaeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkin’s excellent 2005 work The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization is a text that is designed to be a corrective for the type of bad academic trends that seem to entrench themselves in even the most innocuous of subjects. In this case, Ward-Perkins, along with fellow Oxfordian Peter Heather in his book The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, sets out to fix a glaring error which has come to dominate much of the scholarly study of the 4th and 5th centuries in the western Empire for the past few decades.

This error is the view that the western Empire did not actually “fall”. Instead, so say many latter-day historical revisionists, what happened between the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378 AD and the abdication of Romulus Augustulus, the last western Emperor, in 476 was more of an accident, an unintended consequence of a few boisterous but well-meaning neighbors getting a bit out of hand. Challenged is the very notion that the Germanic tribes (who cannot be termed “barbarians” any longer) actually “invaded”. Certainly, these immigrants did not cause harm to the western Empire — for the western empire wasn’t actually “destroyed”, but merely “transitioned” seamlessly into the era we term the Middle Ages. Ward-Perkins cites one American scholar who goes so far as to term the resettlement of Germans onto land that formerly belonged to Italians, Hispanians, Britons, and Gallo-Romans as taking place “in a natural, organic, and generally eirenic manner”. Certainly, it is gauche among many modern academics in this field to maintain that violent barbarian invasions forcibly ended high civilization and reduced the living standards in these regions to those found a thousand years before during the Iron Age.

Ward-Perkins points out the “whys” of this historical revision. Much of it simply has to do with political correctness (which he names as such) — the notion that we cannot really say that one culture is “higher” or “better” than others. Hence, when the one replaces the other, we cannot speculate as to how this replacement made things worse for all involved. In a similar vein, many continental scholars appear to be uncomfortable with the implications that the story of mass barbarian migrations and subsequent destruction and decivilization has in the ongoing discussion about the European Union’s own immigration policy — a discussion in which many of these same academics fall on the left side of the aisle.

Yet, all of this revisionism is bosh and bunkum, as Ward-Perkins so thoroughly points out. He does this by bringing to the table a perspective that many other academics in this field of study don’t have — that of a field archaeologist who is used to digging in the dirt, finding artifacts, drawing logical conclusions from the empirical evidence, and then using that evidence to decide “what really happened”, rather than just literary sources and speculative theories. Indeed, as the author shows, across the period of the Germanic invasions, the standard of living all across Roman western Europe declined, in many cases quite precipitously, from what it had been in the 3rd century. The quality and number of manufactured goods declined. Evidence for the large-scale integrative trade network that bound the western Empire together and with the rest of the Roman world disappears. In its place we find that trade goods travelled much smaller distances to their buyers — evidence for the breakdown of the commercial world of the West. Indeed, the economic activity of the West disappeared to the point that the volume of trade in western Europe would not be matched again until the 17th century. Evidence for the decline of food production suggests that populations fell all across the region. Ward-Perkins’ discussion of the decline in the size of cattle is enlightening evidence that the degeneration of the region was not merely economic. Economic prosperity, the access of the common citizen to a high standard of living with a wide range of creature comforts, disappeared during this period.

The author, however, is not negligent in pointing out the literary and documentary evidence for the horrors of the barbarian invasions that so many contemporary scholars seem to ignore. Indeed, the picture painted by the sum total of these evidences is one of harrowing destruction caused by aggressive, ruthless invaders seeking to help themselves to more than just a piece of the Roman pie. Despite the recent scholarly reconsiderations, the Germans, instead of settling on the land given to them by various Emperors and becoming good Romans, ended up taking more and more until there was nothing left to take. As Ward-Perkins puts it,

    Some of the recent literature on the Germanic settlements reads like an account of a tea party at the Roman vicarage. A shy newcomer to the village, who is a useful prospect for the cricket team, is invited in. There is a brief moment of awkwardness, while the host finds an empty chair and pours a fresh cup of tea; but the conversation, and village life, soon flow on. The accommodation that was reached between invaders and invaded in the fifth- and sixth- century West was very much more difficult, and more interesting, than this. The new arrival had not been invited, and he brought with him a large family; they ignored the bread and butter, and headed straight for the cake stand. Invader and invaded did eventually settle down together, and did adjust to each other’s ways — but the process of mutual accommodation was painful for the natives, was to take a very long time, and, as we shall see …left the vicarage in very poor shape. (pp. 82-83)

Professor Bret Devereaux discussed the long fifth century on his blog last year:

… it is not the case that the Roman Empire in the west was swept over by some destructive military tide. Instead the process here is one in which the parts of the western Roman Empire steadily fragment apart as central control weakens: the empire isn’t destroy[ed] from outside, but comes apart from within. While many of the key actors in that are the “barbarian” foederati generals and kings, many are Romans and indeed […] there were Romans on both sides of those fissures. Guy Halsall, in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (2007) makes this point, that the western Empire is taken apart by actors within the empire, who are largely committed to the empire, acting to enhance their own position within a system the end of which they could not imagine.

It is perhaps too much to suggest the Roman Empire merely drifted apart peacefully – there was quite a bit of violence here and actors in the old Roman “center” clearly recognized that something was coming apart and made violent efforts to put it back together (as Halsall notes, “The West did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”) – but it tore apart from the inside rather than being violently overrun from the outside by wholly alien forces.

September 10, 2023

QotD: The hill people and the valley people

Filed under: China, Europe, History, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s a clichéd history of civilization which goes something like: once upon a time all human beings lived in wandering hunter-gatherer bands where everybody was directly involved in food production. Then while sojourning through a fertile river valley, some of these groups discovered agriculture. The relative predictability and reliability of farming, coupled with the much higher caloric yield per hour of labor,1 made it possible to support a denser population, and for only a portion of it to be directly involved in food production. The rest of them could become soldiers, artisans, priests, and scribes. They could develop technology, pass on their knowledge through writing, and develop complex systems of taxation, bureaucracy, and forced labour. Along the way, they made picturesque little walled farming villages […]

This is not their story. Instead it’s the story of the people who live in the hills behind that village. Without knowing anything at all about the place that picture depicts, you can probably tell me a lot about the people in those hills. Hill people are hill people, the world over. What are the odds that they’re clannish? Xenophobic? Backwards! Unusual family structures. Economically immiserated (probably due to their own paranoia and indolence). Deviant in their religious, commercial, and sexual practices. Illiterate, or at best poorly-read. They also probably talk funny. Basically they’re barbarians, but not the impressive kind who ride out of the steppe to massacre and enslave the soft city-dwellers. No, something more like living fossils — our ancestors were once like that, but then they got with the program. Well if they could do it, why don’t those hill dwellers move down here too, like normal people?2 They’re up to no good up there.

That’s certainly been the traditional view from the valleys, and there’s some truth to it, but there’s one important detail that we valley-dwellers get wrong. Far from being aboriginal holdovers of some previous phase of humanity, it’s relatively easy to determine from genetic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence that the hill people are largely descended from … the valley people!3 But … that would mean that there are people who look around at our beautiful civilization and reject its fruits — you know, art, technology, fusion cuisine, and uh … taxation, conscription, epidemic disease, corvée labour … How dare they!

You would never know it from reading the reports of the valley-bureaucrats, but the great agricultural civilizations of classical antiquity were in a near-constant state of panic over people wandering away from their farms and becoming barbarians.4 There are estimates that over the course of the empire something like twenty-five percent of the inhabitants of Roman border provinces quietly slipped across the limes for the proud life of the savage. In Ancient China, the movement was more cyclical — in times of war, or epidemic, or famine, entire villages might give up rice agriculture and vanish into the hills. Then, when the situation had stabilized, the human tide would reverse, and the hills would disgorge barbarians eager to be Sinicized (or really re-Sinicized, as their parents and grandparents had been). In both these cases and more, the boundary between “civilized” and “savage” was a great deal more porous, and the flow a great deal more bi-directional than we might realize. Like a single substance in two phases, now boiling, now condensing, changing back and forth in response to changes in the temperature.

So why then is it that hill people5 the world over have so much in common? Scott argues pretty convincingly that something like convergent cultural evolution for ungovernability is at work — that is, the qualities we stereotypically associate with backwards and barbarous peoples are precisely the traits that make one difficult to administer and tax. Some examples of this are very obvious to see — for instance physical dispersal in difficult terrain makes it harder to be surveilled, measured, or conscripted. Scott also talks a lot about the crops that hill people like to grow, and how the world over they tend to be either crops that are amenable to swiddening and don’t require irrigation, or things like tubers that mature underground and can be harvested at irregular times. Both patterns make it easy to lie about how much food you’ve planted and where, hence difficult for others to tax or control you.

What about illiteracy? Scott finds that many hill people around the world have oral legends about how they once had writing, but no longer do. Of course this is exactly what we would expect if, contrary to the usual story, the hill people are not the ancestors of the valley people, but their descendants. Yet the question remains, why give up writing? Scott posits several benefits of illiteracy: one is just that the inability to write removes any temptation to keep written records of anything, and written records are the kind of thing that can be used against you by a tax collector or an army recruiter.

But more fundamentally, a reliance on oral history and genealogy and legend is powerful precisely because these things are mutable and can be changed according to political convenience. Anybody who’s read ancient Chinese accounts of the steppe peoples or Roman discussions of Germanic barbarians has probably recoiled from the confusing profusion of tribes, peoples, and nations; the same ethnonyms popping in and out of existence over a vast area, or referring to a band of a few hundred one year and a nation of millions a decade later. Scott argues that the reason we see this is that the very notion of stable ethnic identity is a fundamentally “valley” conceit. Out in the hills or on the far wild plains, people exist in more of a quantum superposition of identities, and the nonsensical patterns you see in the histories come from imperial ethnographers feverishly making classical measurements in a double-slit experiment and trying to jam the results into a sensible form.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-16.

    1. Scott has yet another book about how this important detail of the stock story is totally false. In Scott’s telling, early agriculture produced fewer calories per hour of work than hunting and foraging. The entire increase in social complexity associated with primitive agriculture came not from a food surplus, but from the fact that it was easier to measure how much food everybody was producing and confiscate a portion of it.

    2. Maybe then one of their descendants can go to Yale Law School and write a book about it.

    3. Next time you’re driving through Montana, try to count how many people are transplants from New York or California.

    4. Once you know this fact, you can go back and read those classical texts esoterically, and nervous panic over people defecting from civilization is practically all you will see.

    5. I’ve used “hill people” throughout this review as a synecdoche for groups that have rejected a life-pattern involving settled agriculture and tax-paying, but as Scott points out there are many kind of terrain unsuitable or difficult for state administration. Marshes have historically been another magnet for those rejecting polite society, as have deserts and open plains.

September 3, 2023

“This is the world of the Spring and Autumn Annals, and the Zuozhuan“

Filed under: China, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Another anonymous book review at Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten considers the Zuozhuan, a commentary and elaboration of the more bare-bones historical record of the Spring and Autumn Annals:

The first page of the Li Yuanyang edition of Zuo zhuan (16th century).
Wikimedia Commons.

To tell the story of the fall of a realm, it’s best to start with its rise.

More than three thousand years ago, the Shang dynasty ruled the Chinese heartland. They raised a sprawling capital out of the yellow plains, and cast magnificent ritual vessels from bronze. One of the criteria of civilization is writing, and they had the first Chinese writing, incising questions on turtle shells and ox scapulae, applying a heated rod, and reading the response of the spirits in the pattern of cracks. “This year will Shang receive good harvest?” “Is the sick stomach due to ancestral harm?” “Offer three hundred Qiang prisoners to [the deceased] Father Ding?” The kings of Shang maintained a hegemony over their neighbors through military prowess, and sacrificed war captives from their campaigns totaling in the tens of thousands for the favor of their ancestors.

But the Shang faced growing threat from the Zhou, a once-subordinate people from west beyond the mountains. Inspired by a rare conjunction of the planets in 1059 BC, the Zhou declared that there was such a thing as the Mandate of Heaven, a divine right to rule—and while the Shang had once held it, their misrule and immorality had forced the Mandate to pass to the Zhou. Thirteen years later, the Zhou and their allies defeated the Shang in battle, seized their capital, drove their king to suicide, and supplanted them as overlords of the Central Plains.

If the Shang were goth jocks, the Zhou were prep nerds. In grave goods, food-serving vessels replaced wine vessels. Mass human sacrifice disappeared, while bureaucracy expanded. The Shang lacked the state power to administer their surrounding subject peoples so much as intimidate them into line; the Zhou, galvanized by a rebellion not long after the conquest, put serious thought into consolidating their control. While the king remained in the west to rule over the original Zhou lands, he sent relatives and allies east into the conquered territories to establish colonies at strategically important locations, anchoring Zhou rule in a sprawling network of hereditary regional lords bound together by blood, marriage, custom, and ancestor worship of the Heaven-blessed founding Zhou kings.

For generations, the system worked, ensuring military successes at the borders and stability in the interior. The first reigns of the dynasty became a golden age in the cultural imagination for thousands of years. But by the dynasty’s second century, barbarian incursions were putting the state on the defensive, and surviving records hint at waning control over the regional lords and power struggles at court. 771 BC marked a breaking point, when barbarians allied with disgruntled nobles to overrun the royal domain and kill King You of Zhou.

Legend has it that the king was bewitched by his new consort, a melancholy beauty born from a virgin impregnated by the touch of a black salamander. Desperate to make her laugh, the king pranked his lords by lighting the beacon fires intended to summon them in case of invasion. When she delighted at the sight, he kept playing the same trick until the lords got sick of him and stopped coming, which doomed him when the barbarians actually invaded.

But the historical reality seems to be the usual sordid political struggle around a new consort — and heir — threatening the power of the old one. The original queen’s powerful father allied with barbarians to root out the upstart, only to get maybe more than he bargained for. Sure, he put his grandkid on the throne in the end, but the royal house had been devastated. It would never regain the ancestral lands it had lost to the barbarians, the direct holdings that filled its treasury and provided for its armies. The king retreated east into the Central Plains, playing ground of lords that were now more powerful than him. While the royal line remained symbolically important, as holder of the Mandate of Heaven from which all the states derived their legitimacy, the loss of central authority in every other sense would unleash centuries of intensifying interstate warfare and upheaval.

This is the world of the Spring and Autumn Annals, and the Zuozhuan.

The Spring

“Spring and Autumn Annals” is a bit of a redundant translation, since “spring and autumn” was just an old way of saying “year”, and thus, “annals”. And technically, there were multiple Spring and Autumn Annals — every state kept, in addition to court and administrative documents, its own laconic record of each year’s wars, diplomacy, natural phenomena, major rites, and notable deaths. But the state of Lu’s is special, because Confucius was from Lu. He’s said to have personally edited and compiled the extant version of its 242-year-long Spring and Autumn, loading each character with weighty yet subtle moral deliberation. This ensured it a place in the Confucian canon, and its survival where every other state’s annals have been lost to time. The era that it covers is named the Spring and Autumn period after the text, not the other way around.

Taken on its own, though, the Annals is little more than a list of dry facts. For example, the first year reads:

    The first year, spring, the royal first month.

    In the third month, our lord and Zhu Yifu swore a covenant at Mie.

    In summer, in the fifth month, the Liege of Zheng overcame Duan at Yan.

    In autumn, in the seventh month, the Heaven-appointed king sent his steward Xuan to us to present the funeral equipment for Lord Hui and Zhong Zi.

    In the ninth month, we swore a covenant with a Song leader at Su.

    In winter, in the twelfth month, the Zhai Liege came.

    Gongzi Yishi died.

Who is Zhu Yifu? Who’s Duan? What’s all this about “overcoming”? Where does the moral deliberation come in? This canon badly needs meta, and the most notable of the ancient commentaries written for the Spring and Autumn Annals is the Zuozhuan. Ten times as long as the text it’s for, the Zuozhuan is the flesh on the Annals‘ bare bones, one of the foundational works of ancient Chinese literature and history-writing in its own right.

While tradition attributes the text’s authorship to Zuo Qiuming, a contemporary of Confucius, most modern historians date its compilation to the century after. In its extant form, it’s presented interleaved with the Annals, so that after the Annals’ account of each year, with entries such as …

    In summer, in the sixth month, on the yiyou day (26), Gongzi Guisheng of Zheng assassinated his ruler, Yi.

… you have the Zuozhuan’s account of the year, mostly composed of elaborations upon the above entries, such as:

    The leaders of Chu presented a large turtle to Lord Ling of Zheng. Gongzi Song and Gongzi Guisheng were about to have an audience with the lord. Gongzi Song’s index finger moved involuntarily. He showed it to Gongzi Guisheng and said, “On other days when my finger did this, I always without fail got to taste something extraordinary.” As they entered, the cook was about to take the turtle apart. They looked at each other and smiled. The lord asked why, and Gongzi Guisheng told him. When the lord had the high officers partake of the turtle, he called Gongzi Song forward but did not give him any. Furious, Gongzi Song dipped his finger into the cauldron, tasted the turtle, and left. The lord was so enraged that he wanted to kill Gongzi Song. Gongzi Song plotted with Gongzi Guisheng to act first. Gongzi Guisheng said, “Even with an aging domestic animal, one is reluctant to kill it. How much more so then with the ruler?” Gongzi Song turned things around and slandered Gongzi Guisheng. Gongzi Guisheng became fearful and complied with him. In the summer, they assassinated Lord Ling.

    The text says, “Gongzi Guisheng of Zheng assassinated his ruler, Yi”: this is because he fell short in weighing the odds. The noble man said, “To be benevolent without martial valor is to achieve nothing.” In all cases when a ruler is assassinated, naming the ruler [with his personal name rather than his title] means that he violated the way of rulership; naming the subject means that the blame lies with him.

There’s a few too many mythological creatures and just-so stories for the Zuozhuan to be taken entirely at face value, but it’s clear that its creator(s) had access to diverse now-lost records for the era portrayed. For example, some of the events show a two-month dating discrepancy — one of the states used a different calendar, and most likely the creator(s) overlooked the difference when borrowing from sources from that state. While the overall level of historical rigor versus 4th century BC authorial invention remains under heated debate, the Zuozhuan is undeniably the most comprehensive written source on its era that we have.

And importantly, it’s enjoyable.

You can think of the Zuozhuan as the Gene Wolfe of ancient historical works. It’s not an easy read, especially in translation, where names that are visibly distinct in the original (e.g. 季, 急, 姬, etc.) all get unhelpfully collapsed into one transliteration (Ji). The work drops you into a whirl of nouns and events, some of them one-off asides, others part of long-running narrative threads that might only surface again decades of entries later. While a casual readthrough still offers plenty of rewards, putting together all the subtext, references, and connections between entries is an endeavor that’s occupied readers for millennia. Your unreliable narrator remains enigmatic on most of the events he presents, leaving interpretation as an exercise for the reader; when he does speak, either directly or in the voice of the “noble man”, he can raise more questions than he answers. For one, the rule about the naming of an assassinated ruler largely holds in the Annals, but seems to have some notable exceptions.

But if you’re willing to plunge in, the work offers an experience unlike anything else.

August 12, 2023

The urge to compare our own culture to the declining Roman Empire

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In UnHerd, Alexander Poots wants pundits to stop comparing this or that country in the West to the latter stages of the Gibbonian decline of Rome:

“The Course of Empire – Desolation” by Thomas Cole, one of a series of five paintings created between 1833 and 1836.
Wikimedia Commons.

On both sides of the Atlantic, hysterical comparisons between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the senile polities of the modern West have become the journalistic norm. Every major problem facing our society — from climate change to Covid to inflation — has received the Gibbon treatment.

There are, of course, regional variations. The British, tied by geography to Europe’s fortunes, tend to favour the definitive fall of the Western empire in AD 476. The Americans, ever fearful of an over-mighty executive, linger on the collapse of senatorial authority in 49 BC. And it is also more than a journalistic trope, with the unacknowledged legislators of our world also playing the same game. Elon Musk recently suggested that today’s baby drought is analogous to the low birth rates of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship. Marc Andreessen has compared California to Rome circa AD 250. Joe Rogan, meanwhile, is beginning to suspect that all this gender business might have a worrying ancient precedent.

Such appeals to the past are only human. The fourth word in Virgil’s Aeneid is Troiam. This is the first fact that we learn about Aeneas: he is from Troy. Virgil does not even bother to tell us his hero’s name until the 92nd line. Doubtless, the poets of Ur and Hattusha had their own Troys. And perhaps the first men who placed one mud brick upon another sang of flooded valleys, choked caves and herds that no longer ran. But Rome has been our common loss since the early Middle Ages. As Virgil looked back to Priam, so we look back to Virgil. In 1951, it was perfectly natural for W. H. Auden to compare a dying Britain with a dead Rome: “Caesar’s double-bed is warm / As an unimportant clerk / Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK / On a pink official form”

But journalists and billionaires do not work in a poetic register. They deal in facts and lucre. When they say that Britain or America is following imperium Romanum down the dusty track to oblivion, they seem to be speaking literally. This is not a mistake that Virgil would have made. It is all very well to evoke Rome as an elegiac warning. But if we believe that there are concrete lessons to learn from the Roman Empire’s decline and fall, then we will have to examine the mother of cities as she really was. The results are surprising.

In AD 384, 400 years after Virgil composed his Aeneid, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus had a bridge problem. Symmachus was Urban Prefect of Rome, a role of huge responsibility. By the fourth century, the city of Rome was no longer the imperial capital of the western empire; it had been replaced in 286 by Mediolanum (modern Milan), which was a good deal closer to the empire’s febrile northern borders. But Rome remained the nation’s hearthstone. Her good governance was of the highest priority. The Urban Prefect dispensed justice, organised games, fed the mob and looked after the material fabric of the city. It was not an enviable position. One man had to keep the vast, turbulent metropolis ticking over with the minimum of rioting. Symmachus was well aware of the touchiness of the Roman pleb. His own father had been burned out of his house and chased from the city after making a catty remark of the “let them eat cake” variety during the wine shortage of 375.

The bridge problem went like this. Around 382, the emperor Gratian ordered that a new bridge be built across the Tiber. It soon became clear that construction was taking too long and costing too much. Two years later, as the project neared completion, one span collapsed. Such waste of public funds could not be ignored, and so an inquiry was launched. A specialist diver was engaged to examine the structure; he discovered that the job had been bodged. The engineers responsible for the project, Cyriades and Auxentius, were summoned to account for their failure. Each blamed the other, before Auxentius, who had been caught backfilling sections of the bridge with bales of hay, fled the city — pockets doubtless jingling with public gold.

On the face of it, this sounds like a very late Roman story: a nation once famous for its engineering prowess could no longer build a bridge across the Tiber without everything going horribly wrong. But I’m not sure that’s true. Problems arise all the time, and in themselves tell us very little about a society. What matters is the response to those problems. And Symmachus’s dispatches to the imperial court make it clear that his response was considered and comprehensive. The bridge was completed in the end, and stood for over 1,000 years until its demolition in 1484. Now think of 21st-century London: remember what happened the last time we tried to build a bridge across the Thames?

June 17, 2023

QotD: Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I used to think there’d be no Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo in this country because nobody had any real reason to fight. The Left (retaining that term strictly for convenience) don’t know what they want. They have never known. Flipping cars and lighting shit on fire is the sum total of their political philosophy. As we call it around here, the Great Inversion — whatever is, is wrong, and since there’s a level of “what is” that is impervious to even the most nonintersectional, genderfluid level of make believe, they’d rather burn the whole world down than admit it. Still, while “burn the motherfucker down!” is a fun chant with which to replace the Pledge of Allegiance — coming to your kids’ kindergarten classroom, Spring 2021 — it doesn’t really rally the troops.

The Right, meanwhile (and again, strictly for convenience), had an equally impossible fantasy, since however it manifested itself — CivNat, BoomerCon, Normie, pick your Internet-speak — it was predicated on the “Left” being physically capable of leaving well enough alone. Alas, “the motherfucker” which the Left feels compelled to burn down includes institutions, infrastructure, the foundations of empirical knowledge, along with the idea of “knowledge” itself — in short, ambient civilization. It’s not that they won’t leave you alone, gang, it’s that they can’t, since whatever is, is wrong.

Will it be a nicely organized civil war, with Ordinances of Secession and neato-looking battle flags and stirring speeches and truly excellent beards on all the general officers? Doubtful. See above. The whole “secession” schmear takes some doing, and we’re living in a world where the mere ability to walk slightly faster than a reanimated corpse is an appealing-enough fantasy to keep a tv series running for over a decade. But people these days absolutely loathe each other, to the point that, when someone finally does pull the trigger — and someone will — the killing won’t stop for a long, long, long time, McDonald’s be damned.

Severian, “Random Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-17.

April 1, 2023

Athenian or Visigoth? Western civilization or barbarism?

Filed under: History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jon Miltimore recalls Neil Postman’s 1988 essay titled “My Graduation Speech”, which seems even more relevant today than when he wrote it:

Alaric, King of the Visigoths, entering Athens in 395 AD.
Public domain illustration originally published in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1920 via Wikimedia Commons.

What seemed to bother Postman was a nagging suspicion that modern humans were taking civilization for granted. This sentiment was more clearly expressed in one of Postman’s less-known literary works, his 1988 essay titled “My Graduation Speech“.

In his speech, Postman discusses two historic civilizations familiar to most people today — Athenians and Visigoths. One group, the Athenians, thrived about 2,300 years ago. The other, the Visigoths, made their mark about 1,700 years ago. But these civilizations were separated by much more than time, Postman explained.

The Athenians gave birth to a cultural enlightenment whose fruits are still visible today — in our art, education, language, literary works, and architecture. The Visigoths, on the other hand, are notable mostly for the destruction of civilization.

Postman mentions these peoples because, he argued, they still survive today. Here is what he wrote:

    I do not mean, of course, that our modern-day Athenians roam abstractedly through the streets reciting poetry and philosophy, or that the modern-day Visigoths are killers. I mean that to be an Athenian or a Visigoth is to organize your life around a set of values. An Athenian is an idea. And a Visigoth is an idea.

But what ideas? What values? Postman explains:

    To be an Athenian is to hold knowledge and, especially the quest for knowledge in high esteem. To contemplate, to reason, to experiment, to question — these are, to an Athenian, the most exalted activities a person can perform. To a Visigoth, the quest for knowledge is useless unless it can help you to earn money or to gain power over other people.

    To be an Athenian is to cherish language because you believe it to be humankind’s most precious gift. In their use of language, Athenians strive for grace, precision, and variety. And they admire those who can achieve such skill. To a Visigoth, one word is as good as another, one sentence in distinguishable from another. A Visigoth’s language aspires to nothing higher than the cliché.

    To be an Athenian is to understand that the thread which holds civilized society together is thin and vulnerable; therefore, Athenians place great value on tradition, social restraint, and continuity. To an Athenian, bad manners are acts of violence against the social order. The modern Visigoth cares very little about any of this. The Visigoths think of themselves as the center of the universe. Tradition exists for their own convenience, good manners are an affectation and a burden, and history is merely what is in yesterday’s newspaper.

    To be an Athenian is to take an interest in public affairs and the improvement of public behavior. Indeed, the ancient Athenians had a word for people who did not. The word was idiotes, from which we get our word “idiot”. A modern Visigoth is interested only in his own affairs and has no sense of the meaning of community.

Postman said all people must choose whether to be an Athenian or a Visigoth. But how does one tell one from the other? One might be tempted to think that education is the proper path to becoming an Athenian. Alas, Postman argued that this was not the case.

    I must tell you that you do not become an Athenian merely by attending school or accumulating academic degrees. My father-in-law was one of the most committed Athenians I have ever known, and he spent his entire adult life working as a dress cutter on Seventh Avenue in New York City. On the other hand, I know physicians, lawyers, and engineers who are Visigoths of unmistakable persuasion. And I must also tell you, as much in sorrow as in shame, that at some of our great universities, perhaps even this one, there are professors of whom we may fairly say they are closet Visigoths.

Postman concluded his speech by expressing his wish that the student body to which he was speaking would graduate more Athenians than Visigoths.

The production of educated barbarians was relatively low in 1988, despite Postman’s pessimism. The production of such modern-day Visigoths is unimaginably higher now than the tail end of the Cold War when he was writing. I fear we have already made our decision … and may God have mercy upon our souls.

March 4, 2023

Persistent fantasies about lost Ice Age civilizations

Filed under: Environment, History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

When I was a teen, there seemed to be a lot of pop-sci books on the racks at our local variety store pushing various notions about “highly advanced” but lost civilizations, often attributing things like UFO sightings to these imagined prehistoric groups and tying various conspiracy theories back to them. At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander argues against today’s fans of such unlikely scenarios:

You can separate these kinds of claims into three categories:

  1. Civilizations about as advanced as the people who built Stonehenge
  2. Civilizations about as advanced as Pharaonic Egypt
  3. Civilizations about as advanced as 1700s Great Britain

The debate is confused by people doing a bad job clarifying which of these categories they’re proposing, or not being aware that the other categories exist.

2 and 3 aren’t straw men. Robert Schoch says the Sphinx was built in 9700 BC, which I think qualifies as 2. Graham Hancock suggests “ancient sea kings” drew the Piri Reis map which seems to depict Antarctica; anyone who can explore Antarctica must be at least close to 1700s-British level.

I think there’s weak evidence against level 1 civilizations, and strong evidence against level 2 or 3 civilizations.

Argument 1: Where Are The Sites?

Supporters of ice age civilizations argue that sea level rose 120 meters as the Ice Age glaciers melted, flooding low-lying coasts and destroying any evidence of coastal civilizations.

Areas likely above water during the Ice Age are in orange-brown (source)

What would happen to the ancient civilizations we know about if sea level rose an additional 120m? We would lose Babylon, Rome, and most of Egypt. But:

  • The Acropolis of Athens is 150m above sea level, and would be preserved for future archaeologists. Sparta (200m) and Thebes (250m) would also be fine.
  • The Hittite capital of Hattusa is almost 1,000m above sea level and would be totally unaffected.
  • The two biggest cities in Assyria, Ashur and Nineveh, would both make it.
  • Zhengzhou, the capital of the Shang in ancient Chinese, would survive.
  • Mohenjo-Daro would sink, but Harappa would be fine.
  • Basically nobody in Elam/Medea/Persia would even notice.
  • The top 80m of the Great Pyramid would rise above the waterline, forming a little island. The part of the Pyramid above the water would still be taller than the entire Leaning Tower of Pisa. It would be pretty hard to miss!

So a 120m sea level rise wouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of our crop of ancient civilizations, and shouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of a previous crop, unless they had a very different geographic distribution than ours.

February 15, 2023

Refuting The End of History and the Last Man

Filed under: Books, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Freddie deBoer responds to a recent commentary defending the thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man:

… Ned Resnikoff critiques a recent podcast by Hobbes and defends Francis Fukuyama’s concept of “the end of history”. In another case of strange bedfellows, the liberal Resnikoff echoes conservative Richard Hanania in his defense of Fukuyama — echoes not merely in the fact that he defends Fukuyama too, but in many of the specific terms and arguments of Hanania’s defense. And both make the same essential mistake, failing to understand the merciless advance of history and how it ceaselessly grinds up humanity’s feeble attempts at macrohistoric understanding. And, yes, to answer Resnikoff’s complaint, I’ve read the book, though it’s been a long time.

The big problem with The End of History and the Last Man is that history is long, and changes to the human condition are so extreme that the terms we come up with to define that condition are inevitably too contextual and limited to survive the passage of time. We’re forever foolishly deciding that our current condition is the way things will always be. For 300,000 years human beings existed as hunter-gatherers, a vastly longer period of time than we’ve had agriculture and civilization. Indeed, if aliens were to take stock of the basic truth of the human condition, they would likely define us as much by that hunter-gatherer past as our technological present; after all, that was our reality for far longer. Either way – those hunter-gatherers would have assumed that their system wasn’t going to change, couldn’t comprehend it changing, didn’t see it as a system at all, and for 3000 centuries, they would have been right. But things changed.

And for thousands of years, people living at the height of human civilization thought that there was no such thing as an economy without slavery; it’s not just that they had a moral defense of slavery, it’s that they literally could not conceive of the daily functioning of society without slavery. But things changed. For most humans for most of modern history, the idea of dynastic rule and hereditary aristocracy was so intrinsic and universal that few could imagine an alternative. But things changed. And for hundreds of years, people living under feudalism could not conceive of an economy that was not fundamentally based on the division between lord and serf, and in fact typically talked about that arrangement as being literally ordained by God. But things changed. For most of human history, almost no one questioned the inherent and unalterable second-class status of women. Civilization is maybe 12,000 years old; while there’s proto-feminist ideas to be found throughout history, the first wave of organized feminism is generally defined as only a couple hundred years old. It took so long because most saw the subordination of women as a reflection of inherent biological reality. But women lead countries now. You see, things change.

And what Fukuyama and Resnikoff and Hanania etc are telling you is that they’re so wise that they know that “but then things changed” can never happen again. Not at the level of the abstract social system. They have pierced the veil and see a real permanence where humans of the past only ever saw a false one. I find this … unlikely. Resnikoff writes “Maybe you think post-liberalism is coming; it just has yet to be born. I guess that’s possible.” Possible? The entire sweep of human experience tells us that change isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable; not just change at the level of details, but changes to the basic fabric of the system.

The fact of the matter is that, at some point in the future, human life will be so different from what it’s like now, terms like liberal democracy will have no meaning. In 200 years, human beings might be fitted with cybernetic implants in utero by robots and jacked into a virtual reality that we live in permanently, while artificial intelligence takes care of managing the material world. In that virtual reality we experience only a variety of pleasures that are produced through direct stimulation of the nervous system. There is no interaction with other human beings as traditionally conceived. What sense would the term “liberal democracy” even make under those conditions? There are scientifically-plausible futures that completely undermine our basic sense of what it means to operate as human beings. Is one of those worlds going to emerge? I don’t know! But then, Fukuyama doesn’t know either, and yet one of us is making claims of immense certainty about the future of humanity. And for the record, after the future that we can’t imagine comes an even more distant future we can’t conceive of.

People tend to say, but the future you describe is so fanciful, so far off. To which I say, first, human technological change over the last two hundred years dwarfs that of the previous two thousand, so maybe it’s not so far off, and second, this is what you invite when you discuss the teleological endpoint of human progress! You started the conversation! If you define your project as concerning the final evolution of human social systems, you necessarily include the far future and its immense possibilities. Resnikoff says, “the label ‘post-liberalism’ is something of an intellectual IOU” and offers similar complaints that no one’s yet defined what a post-liberal order would look like. But from the standpoint of history, this is a strange criticism. An 11th-century Andalusian shepherd had no conception of liberal democracy, and yet here we are in the 21st century, talking about liberal democracy as “the object of history”. How could his limited understanding of the future constrain the enormous breadth of human possibility? How could ours? To buy “the end of history”, you have to believe that we are now at a place where we can accurately predict the future where millennia of human thinkers could not. And it’s hard to see that as anything other than a kind of chauvinism, arrogance.

Fukuyama and “the end of history” are contingent products of a moment, blips in history, just like me. That’s all any of us gets to be, blips. The challenge is to have humility enough to recognize ourselves as blips. The alternative is acts of historical chauvinism like The End of History.

June 20, 2022

QotD: Swinish western civilization

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The foreground question, that has been disturbing me for some time, and obsessing me lately, is whether what we call for shorthand “Western Civ” is salvageable. That it would be worth salvaging (we live in the age of gerunds, don’t we?) I take for granted. We are alive; we have to live somehow; better that it be in the highest of civilizations, than in barbarous filth. Not everyone agrees with me on this. The great majority, even within my Church, would prefer to live in a moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual pigsty of consumerism, in which the swineherds are provided by Twisted Nanny State.

Now traditionally, pigs had extended sharp tusks, and were death on swineherds. They still have them, but diminished in size by breeding, and sometimes even the wee vestigial bumps are removed, at the risk of cracking our jaws. This does not mean the captive suid is perfectly contented; only that he has been disarmed.

(I have a theory that humans are descended from pigs, not monkeys. I don’t actually believe it, but the argument can be developed in a way that will drive the village Darwinist crazy. Note: the average pig is smarter than a monkey; and can’t be bothered climbing trees.)

But I seem to be distracting myself into zoology, and my purpose was hardly to advance naturalism. Indeed, my self-assigned brief is for supernaturalism. My affection for pigs is just an aside. In the end it must be said there has never been a pig civilization, and the prospect that one may emerge by the ministrations of animal rights activists is, to my mind, dim.

David Warren, “A rant for Saint David’s Day”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-03-01.

April 29, 2022

QotD: The Rooftop Koreans

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We should all be ready to do our duty as American citizens and, when duty calls, each of us should embrace our inner Rooftop Korean.

The year was 1992, 27 years ago right about now, and the city was Los Angeles. Several police officers who got into a videotaped brawl with a petty criminal named Rodney King were acquitted of beating him up. The city exploded. It was chaos.

I was a first-year law student, back a year from the Gulf War, and I had just joined the California Army National Guard. My unit was the 3rd Battalion, 160th Infantry, and we got called up early the first night and were on the streets for three long weeks. Making it even more delightful was the fact that the unit was in Inglewood, which was pretty much on fire. They burned most everything around, except our armory – that would have gone badly for them – and the Astro Burger.

My battalion commander grabbed then-First Lieutenant Schlichter, and we went all over the city in his humvee as he led his deployed and dispersed troops. Our soldiers came, in large part, from the areas most effected by the riots, and they were notably unpleasant to the thugs and criminals who quickly discovered our guys had no patience for nonsense. One dummy discovered that the hard way when he tried to run over some Guard soldiers from another battalion; he had a closed casket funeral.

The city went insane. Order simply ceased to exist. It was Lord of the Flies. I remember a cop totally breaking down because everything was completely out of control.

But I had a M16A1 – a real assault rifle – and I had a bunch of buddies with M16A1s. The regular folks … not so much. The decent people of LA were terrified, and with good reason. See, the dirty little secret of civilization is that it’s designed to maintain order when 99.9% of folks are orderly. But, say, if just 2% of folks stop playing by the rules … uh oh. Say LA’s population was 15 million in 1992 … that’s 300,000 bad guys. There were maybe 20,000 cops in all the area agencies then, plus 20,000 National Guard soldiers and airman, plus another 10,000 active soldiers and Marines the feds brought in. Law enforcement is based on the concept that most people will behave and that the crooks will be overwhelmed by sheer numbers of officers. But in the LA riots, law enforcement was massively outnumbered. Imposing order took time.

And until then, our citizens were on their own, at the mercy of the mob. Betting that the cavalry was going to come save you was a losing bet.

LA’s Korean shopkeepers knew that. They operated many small businesses in some of the least fashionable areas of Los Angeles, and they were already widely hated by activists, being scapegoated for problems and pathologies that long pre-dated their immigration to Southern California. So, they became targets for the mobs.

Bad decision by the mobs.

See, most of these Koreans had done their mandatory service in the Republic of Korea’s Army. Those ROK soldiers are the real deal – the Norks are not a theoretical threat and the South Korean army does not spend a lot of time talking about feelings. They were some solid dudes. So, when the local dirtbags showed up for some casual looting, they noticed the rooftops were lined with hardcore guys packing some serious heat, including the kind of scary rifles that the Democrats want to ban.

The Rooftop Koreans.

It did not take long for the bad guys to realize that the Rooftop Koreans were not playing games – they were playing for keeps. The mob went away in search of softer targets.

There’s a lesson there.

Kurt Schlichter, “Be A Rooftop Korean”, Townhall.com, 2019-05-02.

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