My other moment of Argh was occasioned by younger son. No, that doesn’t mean younger son did something wrong. He didn’t. It’s more that younger son told me about something. (Oh, dear Lord, why does he do that?) and what he told me about was that some show introduced the concept of “Galentine’s” on the 13th. This is a day for “ladies to celebrate ladies”. What was driving younger son bananas (with a side of kiwi) is that he seeing all his female friends fall into this.
The idea is frankly loony. Valentine’s itself is highly commercialized, but most of the time, my husband I circumvent it by having walks together, or just watching a movie together. However, a day to celebrate being a couple is useful (and it wasn’t proclaimed by some government. In fact, I’m fairly sure what it is in the US grew organically, because it’s not the same anywhere else. In Portugal it’s considered “boyfriend/girlfriend day” but it mostly amounts to some kissing and maybe flowers. Or it did in my day.) Trust me, in the years of raising toddlers, any time to remember yes, you’re in love, and what brought you together is important.
But Galentine? What the actual heck? It’s not bonding, and it’s not building a relationship that is a cornerstone of society. No. It’s … putting up lists of your friends who are female and celebrating them BECAUSE THEY’RE FEMALE. This is something they were born, and can’t help being, and … what are we celebrating, precisely?
It’s not that I object to “ugly/awkward girls get a day too.” No. It’s the undertones of it. It’s the “It’s just as good to be a woman as a couple (you know, the future would beg to differ) and how being a woman is something you should celebrate because … because … because … I don’t know? Because we have vaginas?
Picture guys saying that being a man is something to celebrate, because … they have penises? Mind you, I’m a big fan of both men and their ah implement, but seriously? It would be laughable. And celebrating because you’re a woman is equally laughable.
Mind you, I’m probably the voice crying in the wilderness in the days of pussy hats and women marching around with signs painted with vulvas or proudly proclaiming they have a vulva, but it seems to me if what makes you special is the non-thinking thing between your legs, you’re doing life wrong, you’re doing equality wrong and MOST importantly, you’re doing SPECIAL wrong.
Sarah Hoyt, “Dance To The Music”, According to Hoyt, 2017-02-14.
February 14, 2025
QotD: “Galentine’s Day”
January 29, 2025
Canadians – “polite lunatics”
In The Line, Mitch Heimpel talks about a Canadian culture from a time before a Canadian PM could get away with maligning the country as having “no core identity”:
In recent days, The Line has spoken of the need for Canada to go “full psycho”. To “Make ‘Canada’s back’ a threat”. And, specifically, to recapture a Canadian identity that was, not long ago, widely shared — Canadians as scary and even dangerous. My own mind had been on similar topics of late, and I’d been thinking, specifically, about how those representations used to show up not just in our pop culture, but in American pop culture.
And in at least one place, you can find it still: Shoresy, a hilarious comedy show about Canadian hockey hosers that has found success on both sides of the border.
Shoresy is interesting not because it’s new, but almost because it’s retro. Once upon a time, the kind of Canadian identity shown in Shoresy was just … Canadian identity. Here’s a great example of what I mean that I suspect many readers will have seen: 1968’s The Devil’s Brigade, a film about the First Special Service Force, a joint Canadian-American unit that would become the forerunner to the American Green Berets. The film is a remarkable reflection of the attitudes that the two cultures had about each other. In one particular scene, after the Americans (predominantly tough guy actors Claude Akins and James Coburn) have spent days making sport of the Canadians, a new Canadian sergeant — played by Jeremy Slate — is introduced in a mess hall scene. Mild-mannered, lithe, and even bespectacled, the Sergeant sits down next to Akins and begins to insult him. He starts by literally elbowing the American bully for room at the table in the Mess and proceeds to call him a fat tub of lard.
Sgt. Patrick O’Neill (Jeremy Slate) in the mess hall scene in The Devil’s Brigade (1968).
Once Akins has had enough, he attacks the Canadian sergeant, who reveals himself to be the unit’s new hand-to-hand combat instructor, and proceeds to pummel Akins while barely smudging his glasses. After having bruised the American’s body, as well as his ego, he returns to dinner and punctuates it by asking Akins for the salt. Akins hands it over.
This was not a remarkable representation. The Americans used to view us as polite lunatics. This showed up not just in American media, but also our stories about ourselves. Characters like Slate’s sergeant Patrick O’Neill showed up in the songs of Stompin’ Tom, Ian Tyson, and even Gordon Lightfoot. They’re memorialized in the works of Robert Service and Al Purdy. Purdy, in particular, describes this archetype well, both in At the Quinte Hotel and in The Country North of Belleville:
backbreaking days
in the sun and rain
when realization seeps slow in the mind
without grandeur or self-deception in
noble struggle
of being a fool –A country of quiescence and still distance
a lean land
not like the fat south.In those few lines, Purdy captures Canadiana so easily. A people shaped by distance and the harshness of the land. Capable of the toughness needed to endure. With just a little foolishness mixed in for good measure.
Polite lunatics.
January 14, 2025
QotD: Ritual in medieval daily life
First, n.b. that “private” is in quotation marks up there. Medieval men didn’t have private lives as we’d understand them. Indeed, I’ve heard it argued by cultural anthropology types that medieval men didn’t think of themselves as individuals at all, and while I’m in no position to judge all the evidence, it seems to accord with some of the most baffling-to-us aspects of medieval behavior. Consider a world in which a tag like “red-haired John” was sufficient to name a man for all practical purposes, and in which even literate men didn’t spell their own names the same way twice in the same letter. Perhaps this indicates a rock-solid sense of individuality, but I’d argue the opposite — it doesn’t matter what the marks on the paper are, or that there’s another guy named John in the same village with red hair. That person is so enmeshed in the life of his community — family, clan, parish, the Sacred Confraternity of the Holy Whatever — that “he” doesn’t really exist without them.
Should he find himself away from his village — maybe he’s the lone survivor of the Black Death — then he’d happily become someone completely different. The new community in which he found himself might start out as “a valley full of solitary cowboys”, as the old Stephen Leacock joke went — they were all lone survivors of the Plague — but pretty soon they’d enmesh themselves into a real community, and red-haired John would cease to be red-haired John. He’d probably literally forget it, because it doesn’t matter — now he’s “John the Blacksmith” or whatever. Since so many of our problems stem from aggressive, indeed overweening, assertions of individuality, a return to public ritual life would go a long way to fixing them.
The second huge advantage, tied to the first, is that community ritual life is objective. Maybe there was such a thing as “private life” in a medieval village, and maybe “red-haired John” really was a reprobate in his, but nonetheless, red-haired John performed all his communal functions — the ones that kept the community vital, and often quite literally alive — perfectly. You know exactly who is failing to hold up his end in a medieval village, and can censure him for it, objectively — either you’re at mass or you’re not; either you paid your tithe or you didn’t; and since the sacrament of “confession” took place in the open air — Cardinal Borromeo’s confessional box being an integral part of the Counter-Reformation — everyone knew how well you performed, or didn’t, in whatever “private” life you had.
Take all that away, and you’ve got process guys who feel it’s their sacred duty — as in, necessary for their own souls’ sake — to infer what’s going on in yours. Strip away the public ritual, and now you have to find some other way to make everyone’s private business public … I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Calvinism is really Karen-ism, and if it IS unfair, I don’t care, because fuck Calvin, the world would’ve been a much better place had he been strangled in his crib.
A man is only as good as the public performance of his public duties. And, crucially, he’s no worse than that, either. Since process guys will always pervert the process in the name of more efficiently reaching the outcome, process guys must always be kept on the shortest leash. Send them down to the countryside periodically to reconnect with the laboring masses …
Severian, “Faith vs. Works”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-07.
January 8, 2025
QotD: “Striver” lifestyles for each generation
That’s why everything was suddenly so Xxxtreeeeem!!! in the early 90s through the Naughts. We can’t afford to fly to Gstaad for a ski weekend, but we can buy a snowboard. Dad might be on Wife 3.0 at that point, and she’s younger than us, but our girlfriends — marriage is for squares — are so much more environmentally friendly. We can’t compete with their high-end clothes, so we’ll push for “business casual” in the office, homeless-casual in our personal lives (everyone can afford thrift store flannel). And so on.
The Millennials and Gen Z, lacking the wherewithal to do even that (what with the six figure college debt and all), invented the “persona striver” as their means of intra-group social competition. For the low low price of a smartphone and a data plan, you too can pretend to be The Most Interesting Persyn in the World online. I’m told there are entire subcultures online, “cottagecore” and the like, revolving around aping the style and mannerisms of prior eras. “Anonymous” seems to think that these kids are actually, physically doing this stuff — that the “cottagecore” lesbians really are moving into little houses on the prairie to bake bread by hand — but it’s obvious that’s not necessary, as this is an entirely online thing and Photoshop exists.
Either way, it’s sufficient for our purposes to note that the cost of entry keeps dropping, while the “totalization” (for lack of a better word) of the lifestyle keeps growing. An old-fashioned, conspicuous-consumption style striver was free to be an individual. Yeah, sure, they were all “yuppies”, but there were Protestant yuppies and Catholic yuppies (and atheist yuppies and everything in between). There were Liberal yuppies and Conservative yuppies (and Libertarian yuppies and everything in between). You might find the same few standard books on all their shelves — management meatball crap; the novels of Danielle Steele and Sydney Sheldon — the same way you’d find the same basic kinds of clothes in their closets, but there was still a lot of individual variety within those broad constraints. You could predict a few broad, superficial things about a yuppie from his business card, but there were no safe bets on anything else.
The lifestyle and persona strivers, on the other hand, are much more narrow. While the yuppie might go to Molokai this summer on vacation, next summer to Italy, because why not?, the lifestyle striver was pretty much trapped in his niche — it’s trail hiking or bust. And the persona striver can’t afford to go anywhere, so xzhey have to make up elaborate justifications for it (“by staying home and baking these muffins from an original 18th century recipe, I’m being completely carbon neutral”). It’s no accident, in the Marxist sense, that marathons and Crossfit and all that shit really took off after the turn of the century, as well as the whole “animal rescue” deal — it’s both a lifestyle and a persona, and it costs next to nothing, and you can, indeed must, do it all day every day.
Severian, “Striving for Revolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-11.
January 5, 2025
“Everything humans build starts with human and social capital. This includes everything economic.”
Lorenzo Warby explains why he has always disagreed with the “standard model” of economic growth, as it fails to include the biggest cultural variables that matter enormously for economic development:
“Hyderabad bazaar” by ruffin_ready is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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The seminal theory of economic growth is the Solow Growth Model (technically, the Solow-Swan model). The model can be easily expressed mathematically.
I have never liked the model, nor its later variations.1 The intuition behind my dislike was that societies — and indeed different ethnic groups within societies — obviously varied enormously in their capacity to use, to “put together”, the factors of production. They also vary enormously in their capacity to generate factors of production: specifically capital, the produced means of production. The model implies that there will be a general convergence between economies that has not happened.
Updating the model by including human capital was a gesture in that direction but did not fix the problem with the model, which is much more basic. The update attempted to grapple with the failure of investment to flow to poorer countries and, by implication, the long-term, systematic failures of foreign aid. The failures of foreign [aid] also supported my intuition.
The most recent (2024) Nobel memorial was for work that also directly supports my intuition — how much institutions matter for economic growth. The long-term economic growth literature — identifying culture as very much mattering for economic growth — also supports my intuition.
Skills and knowledge (human capital) are basic
To explain why the entire approach — basically, fiddling with some version of the Cobb-Douglas production function — is fundamentally mistaken, we need to go back to the origins of human economic growth. I mean, right back — all the way to foragers.
What are the original forms of capital? Well, there are tools, which are the original form of physical capital. But without the skills to make and use the tools, they either do not exist, or they are useless.
So, we start with skills and knowledge, with human capital. It takes almost 20 years to train a young human forager to be a subsistence adult — that is, to forage as much nutrition as they consume. The need to stuff the human brain with skills and knowledge — and the need to grow a brain that can be so stuffed — is why we have the most biologically expensive children in the biosphere. The need to impart skills to biologically expensive children is fundamental to the dynamics of all human societies.
Human capital — skills and knowledge — is not an “add on”. It is basic.
So are social connections (social capital)
Foragers do not live as atomistic individuals. They live in families and (fluid) foraging bands. Families and foraging bands are vehicles for our highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies.
That we are the tool-making and tool-using species lacking tearing teeth and claws with the most biologically expensive offspring is why we have highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies. It is also why we are so much the normative species — enabling robust cooperation based on convergent expectations — and why we have prestige and propriety as forms of status.
Both these forms of status represent currencies of cooperation. Prestige grants people status for doing things which are risky, clever, hard, entertaining. It is status by conspicuous competence. It provides a way to reward people for engaging in activities which generate wider social benefits — what economists call positive externalities. It also encourages people to want to associate with you.2
The other form of status — propriety — grants status to those who uphold the norms of the group. In particular, it wields stigma against those deemed to have violated those norms. It provides a way to punish people for engaging in activities which generate wider social costs — what economists call negative externalities. It helps solve the free-rider problem regarding the effort to enforce norms.
Reversing (i.e. perverting) status patterns so that people get prestige from victimhood — extending to various forms of failures of competence or even wildly anti-social behaviour — while stigmatising people who conspicuously successful (as oppressors or exploiters) is deeply destructive of human flourishing.3 We can see this pattern currently operating in “progressive” US states, and especially cities, but murderous versions of it operated in various Communist states. These things affect economic activity, but cannot be discerned by a Cobb-Douglas production function.
It is not true that scientists have never discovered Homo economicus. Unfortunately, Homo economicus is not a member of genus Homo. It is Pan troglodytes (chimpanzees) playing strategy games in a lab. It is precisely because we Homo sapiens are more normative, allowing us to encapsulate the social conquest of the Earth, that there are billions of us and only a few thousand of them.
We — as a highly social, indeed ultra-social, species — engage in both individual and social calculations. Different cultures notoriously generate different patterns for, and balances between, such calculations.
1. The model has some utility for short-term calculations of growth.
2. As with any social benefit, the knock-on dynamics of prestige can be complex, but status from conspicuous competence is at the heart of it.
3. The November 2014 Shirtgate controversy — where a rocket scientist who had led the technically incredibly difficult task of landing a probe on a comet was publicly humiliated over the shirt he wore (a gift from a female friend it turned out) — represented conspicuous achievement (prestige) being trumped by feminist stigmatisation (propriety).
January 4, 2025
More on the “Boomers and Year Zero” thing
I sent the link I posted yesterday to Severian and asked for his reaction, saying that “Eric is three years older than me, so I’m on a cultural time-delay both for that and for not being American, but I still felt he was much more right than wrong here”. Sev’s thoughts as posted at FQ in the weekly mailbag post:
The upshot is that it isn’t the Boomers’ fault — they got tricked into it by Marxists, for whatever value of “it” is foremost in your mind, every time you’re tempted to say “OK, Boomer.”
I largely agree, with the caveat that “tricked” is a bit strong. There were conscious, indeed State-directed, attempts at outright cultural subversion — Raymond cites Yuri Bezmenov, and we’re all familiar with that. But there’s a limit to how much damage that kind of thing can do. What mostly happened, I think, circles back to that “excess calories” bit, above. That’s overly reductive — it’s a springboard for discussion, not a categorical statement — but the fact is, you need a certain baseline of physical security before Chesterton’s Fence becomes a thing. Or, as Confucius (or whoever) said, “The man with an empty belly has one problem, but the man with a full belly has a thousand”.
By 1960, at least in AINO, you had a critical mass of people who had never gone to bed hungry. Ever. And so it never crossed their minds that “going to bed hungry” is a thing people have to worry about. That had profound effects, that we’re still working through. It was never the case, ever, in the entire history of mankind, that the average person didn’t have to put some thought into where his next meal was coming from.
The entire human organism — physically, mentally, culturally — is oriented around the problem of caloric supply. Again, I acknowledge that’s overly reductive, but roll with me here: Our biochemistry has been profoundly fucked up by high fructose corn syrup, for the simple reason that a teaspoon of that shit has more, and more highly bioavailable, energy than an entire feast for our Paleolithic ancestors. At the risk of looking like a fool for using an engineering, especially an automotive, metaphor with this crowd, it’s like trying to run rocket fuel through a Model T.
You cannot blame the Boomers for fumbling a situation that has never before been seen, in the history of mankind.
And it’s even hard to blame them for not getting it, even now. One’s mental habits ossify, like one’s tastes, sometime in one’s twenties. It is very, very hard to break the conditioning of a lifetime, and it gets exponentially harder the older you get. I myself thought Ace of Normies was just crazy edgy — how can that maniac say these things?!? — when I first started reading him …
… back around 2004. That’s because I was in my 30s, which means my worldview was stuck a decade earlier. Even now, all my go-to cultural touchpoints are in the 1990s — Alanis, obviously, but pretty much all of them; the 21st century might as well not exist for me, culturally, if you go just by what I’ve written here. Which means that my own worldview tends to be kinda Boomerish, thanks to that weird telescoping effect TV had on the culture. The Boomers grew up watching TV, and then they made TV, such that you can ask anyone who was there — your typical college campus in 1994 was all but indistinguishable from a “liberal” campus in 1968 (your typical college campus in 1968 would’ve had sex-segregated dorms, a whole bunch of “married student housing”, and so on).
I got over it, obviously — and just as obviously tend to go a little overboard with my getting over it — but it takes tremendous effort. As I like to say, the Red Pill is really a suppository, usually administered by jackhammer. To expect a Donald Trump (born 1946), to say nothing of a million lesser lights, to fundamentally grok that it’s not 1968 anymore, is asking an awful lot. It is what it is.
January 3, 2025
The Boomers and “reset to Year Zero”
On Twit-, er, I mean “X”, ESR responds to a post from Devon Eriksen decrying the Baby Boomers for effectively destroying the culture of the postwar “American Dream”:
… I’m a late Boomer, born in ’57. I can dimly remember the day JFK was shot. I watched the moon landing. My teens and early twenties coincided with the 1970s. I was there for it all.
And even then, even in the 1970s, feeling a sense of subtle disintegration all around me, I already dimly grasped that we weren’t just falling. We were being pushed.
But I was very young then; I wouldn’t come to fully understand why, and by whom, for almost another 30 years
We Boomers didn’t burn down our heritage in a fit of thoughtless hedonism. I mean, we did some thoughtless hedonism, yeah, but that’s not where the real damage came from.
If you want to know where the damage came from, look up Yuri Bezmenov. Listen to him explain “demoralization” and the long game of Soviet culture-jamming against the West in general and the U.S. in particular.
Reset to year zero was a Marxist idea. It was part of a suite of memetic weapons, infectious propaganda bombs deployed against the social and cultural cohesion of the “main enemy”.
Often, they were successful in damaging us by leveraging not our vices but our virtues. Valorizing tolerance and liberality until they became helplessness in the face of more and more extreme forms of deviance was one of their attacks.
We didn’t fall on our own. We were pushed. The Boomer fault wasn’t that we were hedonists or nihilists, it’s that we didn’t have sufficient cultural immune defenses against what was being done to us.
Why that is exactly is a long sad story that I’m still not sure I completely understand. But I can hit some highlights.
One is that religion failed us. This is nobody’s fault and I don’t think it could have gone differently; it’s a failure that had been on the cards ever since the mechanistic worldview reached effective completion by Darwin. One of the things the Marxists did was work to accelerate the inevitable decay of religious authority.
Secular conservatives failed us, too. They had one job — just one job — which was to explain why all those Chesterton’s fences shouldn’t be torn down. They utterly flubbed that on all three levels of awareness, analysis, and persuasion. That could have gone differently.
It didn’t help that after the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 conservatives developed a severe case of cowardice about calling out Communist subversion.
That may have been their single greatest dereliction of duty. The result was that over the next 50 years Communist institutional capture of academia and other institutions went almost unopposed. Which is why today we struggle with “woke”.
Most of us Boomers weren’t wreckers, even by accident. Most of us were duped. It’s easy to say in hindsight we should have done better, but the enemy was very clever and determined.
Try not to judge us too harshly, kids. It’s nice to think that a later generation might have done better, but … I haven’t seen it happen yet.
QotD: Whimsy
Grant McCracken, “Discontinuous innovation and the mysteries of Roger Ebert”, This Blog Sits at the, 2005-08-03.
January 2, 2025
QotD: Sincerity
This is what the French call le horse pucky. If we may be so bold as to speak of “the human spirit” — which is pretty heavy for a column starting with a professional wrestler — the 90s killed it stone cold dead. The human spirit can flourish in the most awful situations, but one indispensable requirement is: Sincerity. You just can’t be snarky about the “Ode to Joy” or ironic about the Sistine Chapel. If you do, then there really is no difference between Beethoven and MC Funetik Spelyn, nothing to choose between Michelangelo and a dog turd on the sidewalk — someone placed them there intentionally, which is the only distinguishing characteristic of “art” possible in a world overrun by Postmodernists and Deconstructionists.
Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.
December 31, 2024
QotD: Pre-revolution Russia satirized by Dostoevsky
As the book unfolds, the satire gets more and more brutal. The real Dostoevsky knew this scene well — remember he spent his early years as a St. Petersburg hipster literary magazine guy himself — and he roasts it with exquisite savagery. As a friend who read the book with me put it: the men are fatuous, deluded about their importance, lazy, their liberal politics a mere extension of their narcissism. The woman are bitchy, incurious about the world except as far as it’s relevant to their status-chasing, viewing everyone and everything instrumentally. Nobody has any actual beliefs, and everybody is motivated solely by pretension and by the desire to sneer at their country.
But this is no conservative apologia for the system these people are rebelling against either, Dostoevsky’s poison pen is omnidirectional. Many right-wing satirists are good at showing us the debased preening and backbiting, like crabs in a bucket, that surplus elites fall into when there’s a vacuum of authority. But Dostoevsky admits what too many conservatives won’t, that the libs can only do this stuff because the society they despise is actually everything that they say it is: rotting from the inside, unjust, corrupt, and worst of all ridiculous. Thus he introduces representatives of the old order, like the conceited and slow-witted general who constantly misses the point and gets offended by imagined slights. Or like the governor of the podunk town where the action takes place, who instead of addressing the various looming disasters, sublimates his anxiety over them into constructing little cardboard models.2 If there’s a vacuum of authority, it’s because men like these are undeserving of it, failing to exercise it, allowing it to slip through their fingers.
All of this is very fun,3 and yet not exactly what I expect from a Dostoevsky novel. It’s a little … frivolous? Where are the agonizingly complex psychological portraits, the weighty metaphysical debates, the surreal stroboscopic fever-dreams culminating in murder, the 3am vodka-fueled conversations about damnation? Don’t worry, it’s coming, he’s just lulling you into a false sense of security. After a few hundred pages a thunderbolt falls, the book takes a screaming swerve into darkness, and you realize that the whole first third of this novel is like the scenes at the beginning of a horror movie where everybody is walking around in the daylight, acting like stuff is normal and ignoring the ever-growing threat around them.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.
1. In an incredible bit of translation-enabled nominative determinism, the main cuckold is a character named Virginsky. I kept waiting for a “Chadsky” to show up, but alas he never did.
2. Look, the fact that he’s sitting there painting minis while the world burns makes the guy undeniably relatable. If you transported him to the present day he would obviously be an autistic gamer, and some of my best friends, etc., etc. Nevertheless, though, he should not be the governor.
3. For some reason, there are people who are surprised that Demons is funny. I don’t know why they’re surprised, Dostoevsky is frequently funny. The Brothers Karamazov is hilarious!
December 30, 2024
What was a Viking Funeral really like?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 20 Aug 2024Multigrain flatbread strung on a metal ring in the style of findings at Viking funeral sites
City/Region: Various Viking Sites
Time Period: 9th-11th CenturiesWhile there is evidence of bread being laid beside the dead during Viking funerals, we have no written recipe. Analysis of the ingredients of fragments from various Viking funeral sites shows that there was no one way of making funeral bread, so you can either follow my recipe or make up your own using a combination of barley, oat, wheat, rye, peas, flaxseeds, water, milk, butter, whey, and blood. Any version is just as likely as being accurate as another.
In my version, the mix of rye, whole wheat, and oat flour bring more complexity and depth to an otherwise very pita-like flatbread. You could cook the bread longer to get a drier, more cracker-like bread, and I think that they would be great with butter (a period-accurate accompaniment).
(more…)
December 28, 2024
QotD: “If women ran the world” reality check
Severian “… if women were in charge there’d be no war …”
Backinmyyouth, early 20s or so, I was an even bigger smart ass than I am now. I had a class with one of those new-fangled feminists that people were talking about back then. She made that argument, about how if only women were in charge there would be no more wars. So as a polite smart ass I raised my hand, and she called on me.
I said, “I completely agree with you. I’d even say that if women had been in charge from the beginning that there would only have been one war in all of human history. It would have started in the stone age, and would still be doing on today, with no one remembering what it was about.”
After being warned by one of my spies in the feminist camp (wanted the professional hookup, but liked other kinds of hookups too if you know what I’m sayin’), I made sure to never take that professor for another class as she held a grudge against me till the end of time. An undying grudge for me pointing out that women hold undying grudges …
The reason I was aware of that particular female quirk was that I had recently been made aware that two of my aunts had been in a death-feud since before I was born. Pretty sure it’s still going on today in spite of one of them being dead.
Zorost99, commenting on “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2024-09-27.
December 22, 2024
Canada’s founding peoples
Fortissax contrasts Canadians and Americans ethnically, culturally, and historically. Here he discusses Anglo-Canadians and French-Canadians:
The arms of Canada include those of England, Scotland, Ireland and France in that order.
To understand Canada, you must first understand its foundations.
Canada is a breakaway society from the United States, like the United States was a breakaway society from the British Empire. You might even argue that Britain represented a thesis, America an antithesis, and Canada the synthesis.
Anglo-Canadians
Anglo-Canadians are descendants of the Loyalists from the American Revolution. They were North Americans, not British transplants, as depicted in American propaganda like Mel Gibson’s The Patriot. They shared the same pioneering and independent spirit as their Patriot counterparts. All were English “Yeoman” or free men. American history from the Mayflower to 1776 is also Canadian history. It is why both nations share Thanksgiving. Some historians have identified the American Revolution as an English civil war, and this is a fairly accurate assessment.
The United States’ founding philosophy was rooted in liberalism; it is a proposition nation based on creed over blood, shaped by Enlightenment thinkers like Edmund Burke and John Locke, now considered “conservative”. American revolutionaries embraced ideals of meritocracy, individualism, property rights, capitalism, free enterprise, republicanism, and democracy, which empowered the emerging middle class.
Anglo-Canada’s founding philosophy is British Toryism, emerging as a traditionalist and reactionary force in direct response to the American Revolution. During the revolution, many Loyalists had their private property seized or redistributed, suffered beatings in the streets, and in the worst cases, faced public executions or the infamous punishment of tar and feathering. Canadian philosopher George Grant, who is considered the father of Anglo-Canadian nationalism, traced their roots to Elizabethan-era Anglican theologian Richard Hooker.
Canada’s motto, Peace, Order, and Good Government (POGG), reflects a philosophy in stark contrast to the American ideal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Anglo-Canadians valued God, King, and Country, emphasizing public morality, the common good, and Tory virtues like noblesse oblige — the expectation and obligation of elites to act benevolently within an organic hierarchy. While liberty was important, it was never to come at the expense of order. Canadian conservatism before the 1960s was not a variation of liberalism, as in the U.S., but a much older, European, and genuinely traditional ideology focused on community, public order, self-restraint, and loyalty to the state — values embedded in Canada’s founding documents.
Section 91 of the Constitution Act, 1867, empowers Parliament to legislate for the “peace, order, and good government” of Canada, giving rise to Crown corporations like Ontario Hydro, the CBC, and Canadian National Railway — state-owned enterprises. Canada’s tradition of mixed economic policies is often misunderstood by Americans as socialism, communism, or totalitarianism. These state-owned enterprises have historical precedents, such as state-controlled factories during Europe’s industrial revolution, often run by landed nobility. Going further back, state-owned mines in ancient Athens and Roman Empire granaries also exemplify this model, which cannot be simplistically labeled as “Islamofascist communism” — a mischaracterization of anything not aligned with liberalism by many Americans, and increasingly many populist Canadians.
It is also a lesser-known historical fact that Canada was almost ennobled into a kingdom rather than a dominion. This idea was suggested by Thomas D’Arcy McGee, a prominent Irish-Canadian politician, journalist, and one of the Fathers of Confederation. Deeply involved in the creation of Canada as a nation, McGee proposed in the 1860s that Canada could be formed as a monarchy with a hereditary nobility, possibly with a viceroyal king, likely a son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He believed this would provide stability and continuity to the fledgling nation. While this idea was not realized, its influence can be seen in the entrenched elites of Canada, who, in a sense, became an unofficial aristocracy.
An element of Canada’s conservative origins can also be found in its use of traditional British and French heraldry. Every province, for example, has a medieval-style coat of arms, often displayed on its flag, which reinforces this connection to the old-world traditions McGee sought to preserve.
McGee’s vision was rooted in his belief in the importance of monarchical institutions and his desire to strengthen Canada’s bond with the British Crown while fostering a distinct Canadian identity. He argued that ennobling Canada would give the country legitimacy and elevate it in the eyes of Europe and the wider world.
French-Canadians
French Canada, with Quebec as its largest and most influential component, has a distinct history shaped by its French colonial roots. Quebec was primarily settled by French colonists, and its unique culture and identity have evolved over the centuries, heavily influenced by Catholicism and monarchical traditions.
The Jesuits and other Catholic organizations played a pivotal role in shaping early French Canadian society. They not only spread Christianity but also laid the foundation for Quebec’s social and cultural identity. The Jesuits, part of the Society of Jesus, were among the first Catholic missionaries to arrive in New France. Invited by Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec, in 1611, they helped convert Indigenous populations to Catholicism but often remained separate from them. By 1625, they had established missions among various Indigenous nations, including the Huron, Algonquin, and Iroquois.
Unlike France, Quebec bypassed the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Isolated from the homeland, the Catholic Church in Quebec consolidated its power, and French colonists faced the threat of extinction due to their initially low numbers, particularly during the one-hundred-year war with the Iroquois. This struggle only strengthened their resolve. Over time, this foundation gave rise to Clerico-Nationalism, particularly exemplified by figures like Abbé Lionel Groulx, a theocratic monarchist and ultramontanist influenced by anti-liberal Catholic nationalist movements in France. Groulx and his contemporaries emphasized loyalty to the Pope over secular governments, and their influence was so strong that the Union Nationale government of Maurice Duplessis embodied many of their beliefs.
Attempts to secularize education in the 1860s were thwarted, as the Catholic theocracy shut them down and restored control to the Church. Quebec remained a theocracy well into the 20th century, with the Catholic Church controlling public schooling and provincial healthcare until the 1960s. For much of its history, Quebecois culture saw itself as the last bastion of the traditionalist, Catholic, monarchist Ancien Régime of the fallen Bourbon monarchy. Liberal republicanism and the French Revolution were regarded as abominations, and French-Canadians believed they were the true French.
This mindset persists today, especially regarding Quebecois French. The 400-year-old dialect, rooted in Norman French and royal court French, is still regarded by many French-Canadians as “true French”. However, Europeans often deny this claim, pointing out the influence of anglicisms and the use of joual, a working-class dialect that was deliberately encouraged by Marxist intellectuals and separatists during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s to proletarianize the population.
December 15, 2024
“Outside Sub-Saharan Africa, Homo sapiens are vermin, in the Australian sense — an introduced species with no co-evolved local predators”
You have to admit that Lorenzo Warby has a way with words to introduce a new essay, yes?
Outside Sub-Saharan Africa, Homo sapiens are vermin, in the Australian sense — an introduced species with no co-evolved local predators. That means that their strongest selection pressures — both genetic and cultural — have almost always been about dealing with other humans.
We are the cultural species par excellence. Cultures can be reasonably thought of as collections of life-strategies. Culture tends to be persistent — aspects of culture can be highly persistent.
It is worth keeping in mind that genetic selection can occur surprisingly quickly — i.e., in a relatively short number of generations, depending on the intensity of the selection pressures. A very clear example of this is the evolution of lactase persistence in pastoralist, or agro-pastoralist, populations. (The decades-long experiment in domesticating silver foxes is an extreme example.)
The great advantage of cultural selection is that it is faster than genetic selection but culture still has to show some “stickiness”, some persistence, to be useful. Especially in the evolution of signals, norms and social strategies.
The regions where the local physical environment has been successfully managed longest — or most thoroughly — are Europe, particularly North-West Europe, East Asia and India (especially by high-jati Indians). So, those are the areas where natural and cultural selection has been most focused on selection for dealing usefully with other humans. Those populations have also been the most successful in dealing with the modern world, wherever they go. This hardly seems a coincidence.
The regions where dealing with the local physical environment has been most salient are Sub-Saharan Africa — all those co-evolved parasites, pathogens, predators and mega-herbivores — and Australia — which is full of deserts and spiky things likely to poison you. Much of Africa is also semi-desert forager lands, while the tsetse fly stopped the central African plains generating the equivalent of the connecting — for good or ill — pastoralist cultures of the Eurasian steppes. Both continental-scale regions therefore historically had low human population densities.
The consequence in Africa was that Sub-Saharan Africa has, for millennia, been a region of endemic slavery. Labour was more valuable than land, which led — as it usually did historically — to labour bondage: the violent/coercive extraction of labour’s scarcity value. In this case, the low population density meant that folk were regularly seized and transported, thus requiring the level of domination for folk to be moved at will — i.e., slavery rather than some form of serfdom.
Increased selection to deal with the physical environment meant comparatively less selection to deal with other humans. Sub-Saharan African and Australian Aboriginal populations have been rather less successful at dealing with the modern world than have other populations. (Claims about the success of recent African immigrants seem to be overstated.) The key element of the modern world is domination of social outcomes by human interactions to the greatest extent yet achieved in history. Again, that relative lack of success hardly seems like a coincidence.
Yes, it is true that selection for transportation across the Atlantic as slaves was negative in all sorts of senses. The churn of slavery massively undermined cultural transmission, the selection was for physical robustness and, if anything, against executive functions (which are highly heritable). Nevertheless, with the partial exception of recent African immigrants — who are selected for initiative and education — both populations have been markedly less successful than other groups.
There are certainly factors which affect that either way. Not inflicting on Australian Aborigines the dual metabolic disasters of the farming and processed-food revolutions at the same time would be good. Not under-policing the localities in which folk live is also good.
Nevertheless, there is no reason to think that capacities — which are a genetic, epigenetic and cultural matter — will be evenly distributed across all populations. Indeed, we have very good reasons to think that that will not be the case, due to the variations in selection pressures — whether genetic, environmental or cultural, including interactions between the three. It is not a good idea, for instance, to spend 1400 years marrying your cousins.
Even when means and medians are the same in the distribution of some trait across groups, differences in the size of tails — i.e. the number of extreme outliers — can lead to differences in the distribution of outcomes. Any population with a persistently larger tail of high physical robustness and lower executive functions — which can be an ethno-racial pattern but also a class pattern — will tend to have higher rates of violent crime. Conversely, any population with a smaller tail of lower executive functions — for example, East Asians with a long history of underclass males not breeding but selection for reproductive success through passing examinations and cooperative farming — will tend to have lower rates of violent crime.
Sufficient variance in traits — so having a larger “right tail” of positive-for-human-flourishing characteristics — can be enough on its own to increase a group’s success. Tail effects matter.1
The persistence of gene flows across human populations does undermine any strong notion of human subspecies among Homo sapiens. It does not imply equal distributions of capacities across human populations.
Hence, evolutionary thinking is neither comfortable nor comforting.
1. Given that human males — like males across species — have a flatter distribution of traits — so more positive and negative outliers — having equal numbers of males and females at the top ends of hierarchies suggests some level of discrimination against males. Conversely, having female prison populations begin to approach male populations in size suggests some level of discrimination against, even persecution of, females.
December 13, 2024
The influence of Mesopotamian cultures on ancient Greece
James Pew and Scott Miller begin their series on the history of western education by looking at the way Greek civilization was influenced by the Mesopotamian cultures who used cuneiform writing for three thousand years:
An example of a clay tablet inscribed with cuneiform text (in this case, a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh)
In the 19th century, three new discoveries began to militate against “the image of pure, self-contained Hellenism”. They were: “the reemergence of the ancient Near East and Egypt through the decipherment of cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing, the unearthing of Mycenaean civilization, and the recognition of an Orientalizing phase in the development of archaic Greek art”.
To sketch the significance of just one of these discoveries, what the discovery of cuneiform writing means for the history of writing and literature, we have with cuneiform not only the first writing system in human history, but also the longest running (it was in use for over 3,000 years); cuneiform texts are, at the same time, the best preserved and most numerous textual records from the ancient world by far (there are hundreds of thousands of cuneiform documents in museum archives today because the signs were inscribed on clay tablets which preserve better across time than other materials used for writing in ancient times). This complex writing system, consisting of thousands of signs, was developed first in Mesopotamia by the Sumerians and, subsequently, it was adopted by the Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians in the same area. It emerged c. 3200 B.C. as a response to social and economic complexities generated by the world’s first cities: invariably, the impetus to create a writing system comes down to the need to document and track the transfer of food stuffs, material goods, temple offerings, and so forth, the administration of complex urban society. On the other hand, written literature in the form of myth, poetry and the like, are secondary developments that may follow a long time later (if at all). In centuries to follow, Mesopotamian scribes would begin to write down epic tales telling the exploits of heroic kings, such as Gilgamesh, along with hymns and prayers to the Mesopotamia gods, incantations to ward off demons and diseases, texts containing lists of known phenomena, proverbs, reports of astrological phenomena and their omens, medical and magical texts to be used by the healing expert, and many text types besides.
On the Question of Greek Borrowing from the more ancient East: This series will delve into the work of many of these cutting-edge historical scholars who follow the evidence from Orient to Occident. Academic’s like Albin Lesky, M.L. West, Walter Burkert, Margalit Finkelberg, Harald Haarmann, Daniel Ogden, Mark Griffith, and more.
It is no easy task to establish links between Greece and ancient Near Eastern civilizations, and the difficulty has to do with more than vast expanses of time and space. Typically, modern scholars of classical Greece have a tendency to “transform ‘oriental’ and ‘occidental’ into a polarity, implying antithesis and conflict”. According to Burkert, it was not until the Greeks fought back the Persian Empire that they became aware of their distinct identity (as separate from the orient). In addition, it was not until many years later, during the crusades, that “the concept and the term ‘Orient’ actually enter(ed) the languages of the West”. The reluctance on the part of many scholars to accept a universal conception of cultural development which involved “borrowing”, “loan words”, and “cultural diffusion” amongst the different ancient peoples living in both the Near East and the Aegean regions, is due to intellectual currents that first took shape in Germany over two centuries ago. In Burkert’s words, “Increasing specialization of scholarship converged with ideological protectionism, and both constructed an image of a pure, classical Greece in splendid isolation”.
It was essentially a trio of academic fads that “erected their own boundaries and collectively fractured the Orient-Greece axis”. The first was the breaking apart of theology and philology. Until well into the 18th century, “the Hebrew Bible naturally stood next to the Greek classics, and the existence of cross-connections did not present any problems”. The second was the rise of the ideology of Romantic Nationalism, “which held literature and spiritual culture to be intimately connected with an individual people, tribe, or race. Origins and organic development rather than reciprocal cultural influences became the key to understanding”. And the third was the discovery by linguistic scholars of “Indo-European”, the “common archetype” of most European languages (as well as Persian and Sanskrit).
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff offered a “scornful assessment” indicative of the faddish and far more isolated conception of ancient Greece in 1884: “the peoples and states of the Semites and the Egyptians which had been decaying for centuries and which, in spite of the antiquity of their culture, were unable to contribute anything to the Hellenes [the Greeks] other than a few manual skills, costumes, and implements of bad taste, antiquated ornaments, repulsive fetishes for even more repulsive fake divinities …” A common take at the time which would later prove to be quite incomplete. It should be noted that Romantic Nationalism, coupled with the discovery of Indo-European (which demonstrates no link between European and Semitic languages) seems to have contributed to what gave “anti-Semitism a chance”. Tragically, it was at the point when the Jews were finally being granted full legal equality in Europe when national-romantic consciousness and the rejection of orientalism helped set the stage for the escalation in Jewish persecution that eventually led to the horror of horrors: the Holocaust.
The Mesopotamians would never, as the later Greeks did c. 600 B.C., formulate an abstract concept of “nature” and analyze phenomena as having a natural developmental explanation rather than the traditional explanation (that being, e.g. the gods made it so). Thus, they would never develop philosophy or science as we think of it, and so there are certain categories of analysis and knowledge that are uniquely Greek in the ancient world. However, as the innovators of a form of agrarian society that was productive and sophisticated enough to sustain the world’s first cities, Mesopotamians needed to be able to examine and quantify time (in order to know when to plant) and so they developed the lunar calendar of 12 months, they developed the 12 double-hour day, they gave names to the observable planets and charted the night sky into constellations; They needed to be able to measure physical space and allot pieces of land to land owners, and so they created the world’s earliest form of basic geometry. The types of knowledge just named are the types of knowledge that scholars believe would have been of interest to the Greeks, and, indeed, many suspect that iron age Greeks borrowed these insights from the Babylonians. Whether the Greek story of Heracles could have been influenced by Mesopotamian hero epics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh is a more contentious — though intriguing — topic.
So, how did Greece find itself in a position to receive the baton of civilization and even to carry it further forward? Because of the great work of modern scholars, we know that an informal but early (proto) archetypal version of education (not yet organized education) begins in the Mediterranean, in archaic Greece, before the classical period. Even before this, although it is not exactly clear as to the extent, it has been determined that Bronze Age Greek cultures located around the area of the Aegean sea (also known as Aegean Civilization) – the Mycenaean on mainland Greece, the Minoan on the island of Crete and the Cyclades (also known as the Aegean Islands) – were not only in contact with each other, but also with neighboring civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and the Levant.
