Reading this book really makes it clear how nearly every aspect of Christianity was like a laser-guided bomb aimed at one or more of the pillars holding up the social order of ancient Mediterranean civilization.
Consider celibacy: Fustel de Coulanges examines several ancient legal codes and finds that in all of them the deliberate refusal to procreate was a crime that carried severe punishments. This makes total sense in light of all you’ve said — a man does not belong to himself, he belongs to his family, a diachronic (or transtemporal?) entity that lives in and through and above individuals. Deliberate celibacy would be like your hand or your kidney refusing to perform its assigned function and trying to murder you instead. Cancer, in other words. And the solution to cancer is to cut it out and destroy it.
Now imagine a religion praising cancer and vaunting the tumor as the highest form of biological life, and maybe we can feel a sliver of the horror that the ancients must have felt towards Christianity. And it wasn’t just celibacy either — in area after area Christianity emancipated individuals from the dense, ancient web of obligations, loyalties, and client-patron relationships. Loyalty to the city and loyalty to the family were both such incomparably important qualities for the ancients that Sophocles got several tragedies out of the collisions when they came into conflict, but Christianity in its most radical form says that both are ephemeral and contingent, and must be subordinated to a higher loyalty — fidelity to the Truth. To the ancients I bet this didn’t just seem like antisocial behavior, I bet it seemed like the apocalypse. No wonder there were so many martyrs. No wonder so many of them were martyred by their closest relations.
I’m almost tempted to say that that old snake Gibbon was right, it was Christianity that destroyed the Roman Empire, destroyed the entire ancient Mediterranean civilization that had lasted for a millennium or more, first bit-by-bit then all at once. But of course that isn’t quite right either. By the time Pentecost occurred, the dissolution was already well underway. Christianity massively accelerated a process that was inexorable by then, and changed the shape of what was to come after it, but the collapse was baked in.
Read any of the Roman authors from either shortly before or shortly after the Lord’s birth — Virgil, Cicero, Pliny, Suetonius — all of them, in one way or another, are obsessed with the unraveling of the matrix of tribal and familial relationships that Fustel de Coulanges describes. There were a lot of reasons for it, including but not limited to: mass migration to the cities, economic rationalization that replaced freehold farming with massive latifundia (plantations), and just the accumulated stresses from centuries of continuous warfare and expansion. The cumulative effect of all this was that a society formerly governed by ritual, familial and civic piety, tribe, and clan was transformed into an ocean of atomized and deracinated individuals engaging in mass politics.1
One of my favorite passages in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall2 is in the intro to the chapter on Alaric’s invasion of Italy. Gibbon contrasts this with Hannibal’s invasion 700 years earlier, and goes on this beautiful riff about how on paper, the Rome of the 5th century AD looks incomparably stronger than that of the 3rd century BC — it had a massively larger population, greater wealth, a greater technological edge over its opponents, etc. And yet when it came to a responsibility as basic as that of defense against a foreign invasion, all the GDP and technology in the world wasn’t able to make up for a lack of asabiyyah. When Hannibal annihilated the legions at the Battle of Cannae, something like 20% of the entire adult male population of Rome was killed, including most of her military and political leadership, to which the Romans simply gritted their teeth and raised a few more armies. The descendants of those heroes, despite having a vastly larger population to draw from, weren’t able to muster a single legion or a single capable commander, and surrendered their city to the Visigoths almost without a fight.
Rome was a rocket that soared into the sky and then came crashing back down, and it’s easiest to see it right at the apogee, the point midway between the first and the last great invasions of Italy. The first century glory days of Rome, the time that we moderns consider the height of her power, were actually a moment of deep institutional and social decay. Like an exothermic reaction — a bonfire or an explosion or a fireworks display — what we notice immediately is the ebullient, magnificent blaze. But it’s easier to miss all the fuel that’s being consumed: solidarity, economic resilience, social technology, all of it woven through with the tight bands of ancient law and custom that Fustel de Coulanges documents. Just as the Greek philosophy we love was an uncharacteristic flash in the pan, an evanescent moment that subverted and destroyed the culture that had given rise to it; so too the Roman imperial achievement was an engine fueled by a society and a citizen-soldiery that it quickly burned to cinders.
I wonder if every civilizational golden age would turn out to have this unsustainable character if you inspected it closely. If so it would explain a historical mystery, which is why these epochs are rare, and why they never last long. From this angle history looks a bit like a 2-stage cyclic phenomenon wherein the long “dark ages” are actually epochs of patient stewardship of economic, cultural, and demographic resources, whilst the short “golden ages” are a kind of manic civilizational fire sale of the accumulated inheritance. Maybe we need a new historiography founded on the idea that what we have heretofore considered dark ages are the true golden ages, and vice versa. This transvaluation of values would be like a temporal version of James Scott’s attempted reversal of civilization and barbarism.
Alas, while peasants could vote with their feet and migrate across the imperial frontier, our options for time travel are a bit more limited. Would we prefer to live in the cozy but constricting deep prehistory of a civilization, or in the wild glory of its last days? No doubt it would depend a lot on who we imagine being in each of these phases, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter, because we don’t have a choice. May as well sit back and enjoy watching the blaze. It will be beautiful and exhilarating while it lasts.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.
1. If this sounds familiar, it should. Whenever I read about first century Rome I always come away with a weirdly twentieth century vibe.
2. Yes, I’ve read the whole thing cover-to-cover. What? Why are you looking at me like that? There was a pandemic happening, okay?
July 18, 2025
QotD: Christianity destroyed the ancient Graeco-Roman culture
July 17, 2025
Afghan refugees and the British government
On Substack, Fergus Mason explains why the British government got deep into a secretive program to bring thousands of former Afghan soldiers and their families to Britain:
So here’s what we know so far. In February 2022 a Royal Marine officer, working for the Director of Special Forces, sent an email to several Afghans in Britain. These people were involved in the effort to rescue former interpreters and Afghan National Army special forces soldiers who were at risk of reprisals from the Taliban regime, and the Marine wanted to know whether some Afghans who claimed to be ex-special forces really were. The officer intended to attach a filtered list of around a hundred names from an Excel spreadsheet, but inadvertently attached the whole file — which contained around 25,000 names. One of the Afghans he sent the list to immediately passed it on to someone else – this time in Afghanistan. MoD sources are stressing that these were all trusted Afghans, but … well, we’ll get to that shortly.
And then nothing much happened for 18 months. The Taliban didn’t round up and shoot everyone on the list, even though they now claim to have had it since early 2022. But then, in August 2023, an Afghan man — a former soldier who had applied for asylum in Britain, but been rejected — popped up on Facebook. He promptly released part of the spreadsheet, then threatened to post all of it. At this point the government swung into action. First, it pressured Meta, which owns Facebook, to shut down the group the data was posted in and remove the user. Then the Ministry of Defence, under former defence secretary Ben Wallace, applied for a super-injunction to prevent the media from reporting anything about the leak, what the government planned to do about it, or what it was going to cost. It even banned anyone from revealing the existence of the injunction itself. That injunction was granted to Wallace’s successor, Grant Shapps, and the entire story was killed before it became public. The government was already drawing up a plan to bring tens of thousands more Afghans to Britain; the media and Parliament weren’t allowed to mention it; the British people, of course, were not to be allowed to know a thing. The degree of secrecy imposed was truly extraordinary.
And, over the last 18 months or so, the government has quietly been running a huge and very expensive operation to bring those identified as being at risk to Britain. From those listed on the spreadsheet, 23,900 former Afghan soldiers, policemen and intelligence officers were deemed to be in danger because of the leak. So, of course, were their families. How many people does the government plan to bring in under this scheme, in total? Nobody knows. Early estimates, according to court documents, were that 43,000 Afghans would be given asylum in Britain. Yesterday, officials insisted the real total was 6,900; even that dramatically lower number is a big addition to the 24,000 Afghans the government has admitted to bringing in under other, declared schemes. However, horrifyingly, last June three judges — Sir Geoffrey Vos, Lord Justice Singh and Lord Justice Warby — issued a written (but, of course, secret) ruling that up to a hundred thousand people could be at risk if the Taliban got their hands on the list.
Embarrassment for the British government, certainly, both for the initial cock-up and the ridiculous follow-up. It’s going to be expensive to resettle all those refugees and their often quite large families (guesstimates range from £850 million up to £6 billion), but not really a big deal, right? Well, about that …
I’ve already mentioned Afghan culture’s horrific misogyny. This leads to some truly dire attitudes towards women who don’t comply with Afghan society’s draconian rules of female behaviour (which boil down to having no rights and not being allowed to leave the house without a burqa and a male relative). One of the consequences of this is that Afghan men have unleashed a tidal wave of sexual assaults across Europe. At least one migration expert has noted that as well as their frequency, assaults by Afghans are remarkable for their brutality, audacity and often downright stupidity. Austrian political scientist Cheryl Benard wrote:
Can these men possibly expect that their attempts will be successful? Do they actually think they will be able to rape a woman on the main street of a town in the middle of the day? On a train filled with other passengers? In a frequented public park in the early afternoon? Are they incapable of logical thought — or is that not even their aim? Do they merely want to cause momentary female hysteria and touch some forbidden places of a stranger’s body? Is that so gratifying that it’s worth jeopardizing their future and being hauled off to jail by scornful and disgusted Europeans? What is going on here? And why, why, why the Afghans? According to Austrian police statistics, Syrian refugees cause fewer than 10 percent of sexual assault cases. Afghans, whose numbers are comparable, are responsible for a stunning half of all cases.
Type two words into Google — Afghane and Vergewaltigung — and a cornucopia of appalling incidents unfolds before you.
Incidentally, to all you lefties who’re undoubtedly sputtering with fury as you read this, don’t even think of writing Benard off as an anti-Afghan racist. Her husband is former US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is Afghan.
But surely, the “trusted” former Afghani soldiers, police and intelligence officers being brought in are bound to be much better able to adapt to British culture, right? Uh, well …
The government has been very reluctant to release — or even admit it possesses — statistics on the link between nationality and crime, but under pressure from independent MP Rupert Lowe it finally did so in March. This showed that among Afghans in Britain, 59 per 10,000 have been convicted of a sexual offence — 22.18 times higher than British men, at 2.66 per 10,000:
By the way, yes, I know the graph is from the Centre for Migration Control — but the data is from the Ministry of Justice and was obtained by a Freedom of Information request. I’ve checked the graph against the data, and it’s accurate.
[…]
Does this photo of Afghan men watching a young boy dance give you the creeps? It should.
It’s not only women at risk, by the way. Afghan men aren’t averse to raping young boys, either. One of the most revolting aspects of Afghan culture — and that’s saying something — is the tradition of bacha bazi (Dari for “boy play”). Prepubescent boys are forced to dress up as girls then dance for, and “entertain”, men. This strain of paedophilia was common among anti-Taliban warlords and the Afghan security forces, particularly the police. The Taliban claim to be against the practice; their founder, the late Mullah Omar, actually was violently opposed to it. However, many prominent Taliban commanders also enjoy a spot of recreational pederasty.
Of course the obvious answer to this is “But most Afghan men aren’t rapists!” I agree; most of them aren’t. But an alarmingly high percentage of them are, and our governments clearly can’t keep the rapey ones out. The graph and its underlying statistics prove that beyond any possible doubt. And while it’s easy to downplay the statistics by saying it’s still “only” 77 sexual offences committed by Afghans over a two-year period, bear in mind that a) that’s 77 offences that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t let any Afghans in and b) this number is only convictions. In Britain just 3.1% of sexual offences reported to the police (around a third of which are rapes) lead to a conviction, which brings the potential number of Afghan suspects up to 2,484. The police estimate that only 10-15% of sexual offences are even reported; that could mean Afghans committed between 16,500 and 25,000 sexual offences across that same two-year period. Afghans would have to be bringing stupendous benefits to this country to make 25,000 sexual offences a worthwhile price to pay; indeed, many (emphatically including me) would argue that it wouldn’t be an acceptable price under any circumstances.
In Spiked, Tim Black on the government’s decision to hide everything for as long as they possibly could … for reasons:
Yet as catastrophic an error as this data leak was, the state has somehow managed to compound it with a series of decisions that made a terrible situation even worse. Successive Conservative and Labour governments effectively mounted a cover-up of both the data breach itself and the response. They slowly undertook a secret evacuation and relocation programme for the Afghans without telling even the Afghans affected about the data breach and the fact their lives were at risk. At the same time, they sought to hide all this from the British public, too, even while thousands of Afghan refugees were quietly being deposited in hotels and in military accommodation across the country. All with no explanation.
It is this de facto cover-up, this attempt on the part of ministers and senior officials to hide state errors and actions from public view, which is the most disturbing aspect of this whole sorry affair. They set about shielding a data breach followed by a costly, large-scale asylum scheme from any form of accountability, criticism or debate. And they did so by exploiting a legal tool that has never been used before by a British government – namely, the superinjunction.
This effective cover-up did not happen immediately. In fact, it wasn’t until early August 2023, a whole 18 months after the data breach took place, that the leak was finally brought to the attention of officials. A support worker responsible for settling Afghans in the UK emailed Luke Pollard, Labour MP for Plymouth, and James Heappey, the then Conservative defence minister, warning them that he’d seen the database circulating online. Days later, journalists also became aware of the leak. It was this that finally prompted the Ministry of Defence and the government to launch a covert mission, codenamed Operation Rubific, to shut down the leak and help Afghans put at risk get to the UK (after being vetted in Pakistan).
It was at this point that the authorities took the unprecedented step of applying for a superinjunction. This legal tool doesn’t only prevent journalists from reporting on the subject of the injunction. It also prevents anyone from acknowledging that the injunction even exists. Ministers argued that this extreme free-speech-defying measure was necessary to prevent the Taliban from becoming aware of the datasheet’s existence. Granted in September 2023, the superinjunction acted like a form of legal dark magic, rendering the data breach and the government response to it invisible. It insulated both from even the possibility of scrutiny.
Members of parliament could have still used their parliamentary privilege to speak up. But since all reporting had been prohibited, MPs found themselves in the same place as the wider public – in the dark. For nearly two years, then, we have all borne blind witness to the state’s conspiracy of silence. Until this week, that is, when defence secretary John Healey decided the superinjunction was no longer necessary.
It wasn’t just the British having issues with Afghan forces, as @InfantryDort recounts on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:
Among the Wildflowers @deaflibertarian
Did the high ranks really tell American soldiers to stand down and not interfere when children were being sexually assaulted in the Middle East region?TLDR, but you need to read it to get what I’m saying. I know it may be hard to understand how American Soldiers could witness horrors in Afghanistan and feel powerless to stop them. But let me try to explain. Fellow veterans, feel free to add on or correct me, because this rot ran deep.
1. We were forged to kill, then reprogrammed to hesitate. The warrior was replaced with a social worker in a helmet. Instead of rehearsing “react to contact,” we sat through PowerPoints on cultural sensitivity. Our edge dulled by doctrine that taught us empathy for the enemy and suspicion of ourselves.
2. We were ordered to practice “courageous restraint”. Sounds noble. It wasn’t. It meant ignoring your instincts. It meant second-guessing every shot, every step. The Army trained us to fight, then punished us for following that training. We were told killing the enemy might make things worse, as if leaving them alive made anything better.
3. Every success was credited to the Afghan army. Every failure pinned on us. We propped up a Potemkin military, full of cowards and thieves, and were ordered to salute the illusion. We whispered truths in smoke pits while speaking lies in briefings.
4. Under certain generals, aggressiveness was punished harshly. They’d clip the wings of the hawks and reward the peacocks. It’s like blaming a wolf for baring its teeth when surrounded by jackals.
5. “Green on Blue” attacks poisoned every partnership. The Taliban infiltrated Afghan ranks so deeply we stopped sleeping. Trust vanished. No one dared provoke them. Not over child rape, not over beatings, not over anything. Every Blue 1 report was a career landmine, so the truth stayed buried.This was the cocktail we drank every day:
• Restraint over reaction
• Illusion over integrity
• Shame over strengthWe were taught to see women as property, not to intervene. To accept children as sexual currency for Afghans, not to interfere. That the blame for every failure lay with us, not the corrupt warlords we empowered.
And was it non-consensual sexual currency? Because the culture was so backwards, we were told villagers would give their kids to powerful Afghans as tribute. And that the kids themselves understood the assignment. How f****d is that? How evil? How diametrically opposed to everything we believe?
And once you’re complicit in enough sin, it gets easier to stay silent. When you’ve spent years maintaining a lie, the truth becomes radioactive. Ripping off the bandage would mean admitting the whole war was infected.
We stood “shonna ba shonna” or shoulder to shoulder with some of the worst people humanity ever produced. And we called it partnership.
That’s how this happened.
A culture of confusion.
A doctrine of deceit.
A war that killed our ability to fight the very evil we were sent to destroy.There is a silver lining here. History has proven that our suspicions were right. And luckily, many of us are still in uniform or in charge of the DoD apparatus. We will NEVER let this happen again. And I will shout this from the rooftops to make sure that’s the case.
Infantry Dort, X.com, 2025-07-16.
QotD: War elephants in India
This may seem a strange approach to use to end a discussion of war elephants – after all, these are war elephants – but as will soon become apparent, war elephants are almost impossible to fully understand outside of the social and political context in which they are most useful.
First, we are going to look at how elephants fit into the ancient and medieval political systems which used them as weapons of war. I want to stress very strongly here that what I am presenting is essentially the main argument of Trautmann’s Elephants and Kings (2015), not something I dreamed up. For the sake of brevity, I am leaving out a lot of detail here – but you know where to go to find the argument in full.
Last time, we introduced a problem: while awesome, war elephants were very expensive and relatively easy to counter on the battlefield. This answered the question of why the Romans and Chinese mostly ignored the elephant as a weapon-system despite having access to it, but it raised a second question: if the elephant was at best a limited weapon, why did its use persist in India? After all, if the Romans could figure out how to beat these things, surely the Indians could too!
Part of the answer, of course, is that some of the logistical problems that existed for states located at the edges of elephant’s natural range simply don’t apply to states closer to the source. Indian kings could (and did!) deploy elephants in far greater numbers than Seleucid or Roman armies could. In particular, North Indian rulers, rather than relying on long distance trade, could acquire elephants through trade relations with “forest peoples” in their own hinterland. We have reports of armies with not hundreds but thousands of elephants from, for instance, the Nanda or Maurya empires. Nevertheless, while these factors simplified elephant logistics, they hardly made the use of the animals cheap.
What Trautmann instead observes is that the rise of war elephants occurred specifically in the context of kingship in India. Indeed, elephants were associated with kingship through royal elephant hunts and domesticated elephants kept for show even before war elephants were developed. Around 1400 B.C. the chariot arrives in India, bringing with it a military aristocracy where the nobles – and the noblest of all nobles is, of course, the king – rode into battle.
(I keep finding myself recommending it, but I’ll again note – for a good rundown of the value of chariots as royal symbols more than battlefield weapons, check out chapter 2 of Lee, Waging War (2016).)
That was the context the war elephant emerged into. By the fifth century or so, the war elephant seems to be displacing the chariot as the quintessential vehicle of the warrior-aristocrat (and thus the ultimate warrior-aristocrat, the king). Interestingly, the Mahabharata (fourth century B.C., but with components that may date as early as the ninth) preserves some of this shift, with a mix of aristocrats on chariot and aristocrats on elephant. As chariots faded (they were tactically inferior to true cavalry which was arising at this time), elephants progressively became the vehicle for the important warriors.
It’s not hard to see the appeal. For the warrior-aristocrat, battle isn’t just about winning, but is also about social status and position. Put another way: why does anyone put up with warrior-aristocrats, who get to live in luxury and boss everyone around? The implicit reason (sometimes explicit) across cultures is that it is the martial prowess – typically the personal, physical combat skill – that justifies the existence of the military aristocrat. You need Sir-Better-Than-You (to use a European framing) because you need someone who has mastered a difficult combat art (mounted combat) and is very, very good at it.
The warrior-aristocrat needs to be seen being a warrior aristocrat. For this purpose the elephant (much like its chariot forerunner) is perfect. Fighting from the back of an animal is a difficult skill which requires a lot of training the common folk do not have time to do. It also requires being able to afford and maintain a very expensive military asset commoners cannot afford. And not only does it allow the warrior-aristocrat to have an out-sized impact on the battle, but it literally elevates him over his fellow men so he can be seen (and it could not have escaped anyone that this was a physical realization of his actual high status). So long as the elephant remained even moderately militarily valuable, it was a perfect vehicle for a warrior-aristocrat to display his power and prowess.
And even more so for the king. Not only can the king ride his own elephant, but with his vast resources, he can procure elephants for his retainers. What is more impressive than a warrior aristocrat who has his own elephant? A warrior-king who has hundreds or thousands of elephants and his own warrior aristocrats to mount them. The thing is, a king’s actual power derives from the perception of his power – showing off the king’s military might makes him more likely to be obeyed (in ways – like tax collection – which allow him to further enhance his military might). This isn’t just a vanity project for the king (though it is that too) – extravagant displays of royal power are a key component of remaining king (the key big-word idea here is legitimacy).
This pattern in turn becomes self-reinforcing: as kings use elephants to show off (and thus reinforce) their power, elephants become symbols of royal power all on their own. Trautmann (2015) tracks this spread, particularly in South-East Asia – as the Indian model of kingship spreads into that region, war elephants spread with it. Whereas in places where there is plenty of contact, but the institution of Indian-style kingship doesn’t spread, war elephants are used rarely, if at all.
This in turn answers another quandary: why war elephants appealed to Hellenistic (that is, the heirs of Alexander) monarchs. Macedonian monarchy was not a form of Indian kingship – it had grown up in Macedon and been influenced by exposure to the Great Kings of Persia all on its own – but it was very similar in many ways. Compatible, we might say. Macedonian monarchs did not ride elephants (they rode horses), but they did need to be seen demonstrating martial excellence before their armies, just like Indian kings. In that context, the display of wealth and royal power implied by fielding a large elephant corps could be powerful, even if the king himself didn’t ride on an elephant. This is, perhaps most vividly demonstrated with Seleucus I Nicator, who earned himself the nickname “The Elephant King” and even produced coins advertising that fact […] This tie between elephants and kings seems to have been quite strong. Trautmann (2015) notes that even within India, states without kings (oligarchies, independent tribes and cities, etc) only rarely acquired elephants and never in the same sort of numbers as kings. So even when elephants are cheaper – because they are close by – unless you need elephants as physical symbols of the power and legitimacy of the king and his warrior-aristocrats, they are largely not worth the effort to procure.
The one great exception is Carthage – by the time it was using war elephants, Carthage was a mixed republic (much like Rome), and yet employed elephants extensively. Unfortunately, we have no sense of if Carthage – like Rome – would have abandoned elephants given time. The earliest attestation we have of Carthaginian war elephants is 262 B.C. (although they would have encountered them earlier from Pyrrhus of Epirus) and Carthage is completely gone in 146 B.C. It is possible Rome simply caught Carthage in the same “trying them out” phase of elephant use Rome would undergo in the second century B.C. and that Carthage may too have largely abandoned war elephants had it not been destroyed.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part III: Elephant Memories”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-09.
July 15, 2025
American (religious) exceptionalism
Christianity has been in retreat across the western world for decades, with the United States being the laggard in abandoning the faith. Canada is closer to the western European rate of secularization. On Substack, Fortissax explains why it has become uncommon to find a believing Christian outside the US in response to a query on X about people turning to various neopagan faiths:
First, I believe there are two factors at play. One is the divide between the United States and the rest of the Western world. The United States still has the highest percentage of weekly churchgoers in the West, at around 24 percent. In the U.S., Christianity remains a living tradition. Millions still attend church, or at least try to. Many people share a common faith, believe in God, and are familiar with Christian references in public life, politics, and law. In contrast, in countries like Canada and much of Europe, regular church attendance is closer to 5 percent. That number often includes recent immigrants who tend to be more socially conservative. Among native-born Canadians and Europeans, especially in urban areas, church attendance is even lower. Religion in these places is often kept alive only by older or rural populations. Among the youth, it has largely faded. Second, many Western countries have experienced secularization for much longer.
I believe this first one is not obvious to a majority of people. There are significant cultural differences and experiences within in the United States and outside of it. I believe it would be appropriate to say that the U.S. is still a Christian country, and not just nominally, regardless of whether or not it was established on Lockean principles and Greco-Romain inspiration (some would say revision), of the liberal enlightenment. Sure, the faith is not what it used to be, but probably the majority of Americans at least understand Christian references in common parlance.
I can share a personal anecdote that I believe is fairly typical.
I was born and raised in a region where Christianity had long disappeared from everyday life, following a slow process of state secularization. My great-grandfather was Catholic, but he changed denominations to marry my great-grandmother in the 1930s. It was a utilitarian choice. He believed in God but didn’t care for the petty tyrannies of ethnic and cultural association by denomination. His son, my grandfather, saw hypocrisy in both Catholic and Protestant institutions. As a boy, he was told he could not be friends with a Protestant by a the Catholic priest of his best friend, and he was kicked out of the house by his mother for attending Catholic mass with his girlfriend, even though his father had once been Catholic. My parents were irreligious agnostics. They were not hostile to Christianity, just indifferent, because they were not raised in it. As for me, I grew up in a post-liberal, post-Christian society. I believe in the divine and understand the importance of religion to civilization, but I have no living connection to what came before. In my country of Canada and among my people, Christianity is no longer part of the cultural fabric. I believe this to be the case in Western Europe as well.
There is a common joke that if someone likes paganism so much, they should try the most pagan tradition of all: converting to Christianity. But the unfortunate reality is that secular liberalism has exercised a longer and deeper influence in the modern West than many realize. In response, one could just as easily say that the most Christian tradition of all is converting to secular liberalism, which has formally shaped the cultural and institutional framework of the West for more than 275 years.
For people raised in multi-generational secularized liberal contexts, there is nothing to return to. Christianity is not a living tradition. They cannot come home to Jesus the way many Americans still can, and they cannot undo the liberal Enlightenment. They can only move forward through it. At best, something new might be reinterpreted or reformed from its remnants. But Christianity was never part of their lived experience. It was not seen, heard, or practiced. Churches were never attended. Christmas and Easter functioned as civic holidays focused on family rather than faith. Christianity resembled a historical artifact, something like a beautiful mantelpiece in an old house. It had aesthetic and historical value, but no emotional, cultural, or spiritual presence. This situation is common in much of the non-American West.
This is why many contemporary efforts at Christian revival often feel disconnected. They are built on the assumption that secular individuals are lapsed believers who simply need to be reminded of what they once knew. But these individuals are not returning exiles. They are cultural natives of a secular world. They did not lose the faith, it was never given to them. There were no prayers at the dinner table, no hymns embedded in childhood memory, no sacred calendar shaping the flow of life. Organized religion belonged to the past, replaced with secular civic cults they’re largely unaware of. It was something other people had, something no longer meant for them. This group is not necessarily hostile to Christianity. In many cases, they admire it. They recognize its role in shaping art, architecture, law, and moral tradition. When foreigners attack these, they defend them. They understand its civilizational significance. But the faith speaks a language they do not understand. Its metaphors do not resonate. Its moral claims appear without context. Its stories feel distant.
A useful comparison can be found in the Heliand, a ninth-century Old Saxon gospel poem that re-imagined the life of Christ using the language and imagination of Germanic warrior culture. In that version, Christ is not a wandering teacher from a distant land, but a noble chieftain surrounded by loyal retainers. His mission is framed in terms of honor, loyalty, kinship, fealty, and sacred duty. The gospel message is not altered in its substance, but it is reshaped so that it resonates with the values, social structures, and poetic traditions of a people for whom neither Scripture nor Roman religious order had any living relevance.
This work was part of a broader process of the Germanization of Christianity, a phenomenon that has been studied in detail by scholars like James C. Russell and Fr. G. Ronald Murphy, SJ. Russell, in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, argues that the conversion of the Germanic peoples did not consist merely in the passive reception of Christian doctrine, but in a complex synthesis between Germanic folk-religious consciousness and Christian metaphysics. The resulting Christianities of the early medieval West were distinct, rooted in local mythic frameworks, and expressed through tribal loyalty, sacrificial kingship, and heroic virtue. Murphy, in works such as The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, explores how the Heliand uses alliteration, formulaic verse, and martial imagery to make Christ intelligible to a newly converted warrior society. He shows how the gospel was not just translated into the Saxon tongue, but into the Saxon soul.
This is the historical precedent that today’s Church must study carefully. The peoples of early medieval Europe were not apostates. They were unbaptized, uncatechized, and culturally alien to Christianity. They were brought into the faith through through cultural immersion. Christianity did not ask them to surrender their world entirely. It entered their world, dignified their heroic values, and redirected them toward the divine. Only then did conversion become possible.
Even those outside the Church understand that this work is urgent. The crisis of meaning in secular liberal societies is visible. The desire for transcendence, rootedness, and spiritual structure has not disappeared. It has been redirected into political identity, consumer behavior, and digital escapism.
If Christianity is to succeed, the same kind of work is needed today. Christianity must once again become a missionary faith. This time, the mission field is not a remote foreign land, but the secularized cities and postmodern suburbs of the Western world. The people being addressed are cultural outsiders. Many were born into environments where the gospel was never lived, never spoken, never embodied. Christianity was not abandoned. It was never truly encountered.
A future for Christianity in the West will not be built on appeals to lost memory or civilizational guilt. It will not be recovered through progressive accommodation or through aesthetic traditionalism that treats churches, vestments, and relics as ornaments of cultural decline. It will only re-emerge through an act of deep cultural translation. That act must begin with an honest assessment of what has been lost, and a willingness to reframe the sacred in terms that can again be understood.
The alternative is a continued descent into spiritual confusion and civilizational forgetfulness. Christianity may continue to grow in the Global South. It may endure as a global religion. But in the West, it will only live again if it learns how to speak, once more, to those who were never taught how to listen.
Looking in from the outside, it seems to me that the majority of Christian priests and ministers have already made their peace with the inevitable extinction of their faith and far too many of them are actively working toward that end. Feminist and progressive currents move far more local Christian leaders than the message of the faith itself, hence any hopes of western Christianity reforging itself depend on a tiny minority of the clergy.
July 6, 2025
The purpose of primary and secondary schools in the west
About a week ago, I linked to a parent’s review of “Alpha School” at Astral Codex Ten. Perhaps as an unintended counter-point, here’s another anonymous essay discussing existing public school systems in the West:
Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. – G.K. Chesterton
What Do Schools Do?
Imagine for a moment that you visit 100 random classrooms in 100 random schools across the country. You’ll be impressed by some teachers; you won’t think much of others. You will see a handful of substitute teachers struggling to manage their classrooms. You’ll see some schools where the energy is positive and students seem excited to learn, and others where it feels like pulling teeth. Two commonalities you might notice are that first, in the vast majority of classrooms, the students are grouped by age and taught the same content. And second, you might notice that the learning isn’t particularly efficient. Many students already know what is being taught. Others are struggling and would benefit from a much slower pace. You will see plenty of sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen, or activities that seem designed to take up time and not to maximize learning.
What do schools do? Your first thought might be that schools exist to maximize learning. Observing 100 random classrooms may disabuse you of that notion. It sure doesn’t seem like school is doing a good job of maximizing learning. So what are schools doing?
Context
This essay is a review of school as an institution. It is an attempt to write something that is true and insightful about how school is designed and why the structure of school has proven so durable. In particular, I’m trying to describe why those two commonalities – age-graded classrooms and inefficient learning – are so widespread. I’m not trying to provide solutions. Everyone seems to have a pet idea for how schools could be better. I do think that most people who think they have the prescription for schools’ problems don’t understand those problems as well as they should. For context, I am a teacher. I have taught in public, private, and charter schools for 13 years. I have also had the chance to visit and observe at a few dozen schools of all types. I’m writing based on my experience teaching and observing, and also drawing on some education history and research. My experience and knowledge are mostly limited to the United States, so that’s what I’ll focus on and where I think my argument generalizes. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to think about how these ideas apply to other countries.
Thesis
Here’s the thesis, the point of this essay. School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.
This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent … except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.
The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school”. Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale. If you have a boutique solution that works for your kid in your living room, that’s nice, but that isn’t likely to scale to the size at which we ask our education system to operate.
Motivation for What?
So school is designed to motivate kids. But motivate them to do what? Do kids learn anything in school?
There are plenty of depressing statistics out there about what people don’t learn in school, but they do learn things. You can look at longitudinal studies where on average students make academic progress. For a broader sample size, the NWEA assessment is given at thousands of schools across the country each year. You can see from the average scores they publish that the average student does improve at math and reading – especially through the end of middle school. We also had a natural experiment a few years ago. The pandemic closed schools across the country, shifting to online or part-time learning for anywhere from three months to a year and a half. The result is now well-known as “learning loss”. The nationally-sampled NAEP assessment is the most objective measure, though learning loss shows up across various assessments. There’s some variability between states, subjects, and ages. For one example, 8th grade math scores declined by about 0.2 standard deviations. This is a relatively small but significant decline. It’s a good example of the broader principle: students learn less in school than we would like, but students do learn things.
It’s useful to pick a few specific examples. Do you know the meaning of the word “relevant?” Do you know what photosynthesis is? Where do you think you learned those facts? I’m sure some readers learned them by being avid readers and curious humans, outside of the school curriculum. But many kids learn stuff like that in school. If you’re skeptical, stop by a middle school classroom when they’re learning photosynthesis, or when they’re working on identifying relevant evidence in their writing. You’ll see plenty of kids who already know both, but plenty more who know neither. A lot of learning is this kind of gradual, incidental knowledge that we often take for granted.
So students can read and do arithmetic and maybe they learn about photosynthesis, but isn’t that all learned in elementary school? A number of studies suggest that additional years of education lead to IQ gains of 1-5 IQ points per year of schooling. These studies often use a change in compulsory education laws or age discontinuities as quasi-experiments. In particular, changes in compulsory education laws are typically at upper middle school or high school levels. Those are the places where we might be most skeptical of the value of education. Sure, schools teach kids how to read, but once students know how to read do schools really add any value? Kids don’t remember how to factor quadratics, yet they gain IQ points from the time they spent in school not learning how to factor quadratics, at least on average.
That gain in IQ points is worth lingering on. This might seem hard to believe for people who are skeptical of the value of school. And to be clear, the fact that school raises IQ doesn’t mean that school is designed optimally. Maybe there’s a better way to design school that would raise IQ even more? But I think that, if we all imagine a world where we give up on education and the average person had a significantly lower IQ, is that a world you want to live in? We don’t have good experiments on IQ, but higher IQs are correlated with all sorts of things that we might want – lower probability of committing crime, higher career earnings, and better physical and mental health. It’s tough to pin down exactly what students learn in school that sticks, particularly for the higher grades. During those visits to 100 classrooms you would’ve seen a lot of classrooms where not much learning was happening. Yet despite all those bad optics, school still raises IQ. Before we tear down the fence, we should think carefully about the purpose this particular fence serves.
I don’t want to overstate the case here. We should be skeptical of school learning. Kids don’t learn as much as we might hope. They forget all sorts of stuff you would think they’d remember if school was operating well. But at a basic level, most students learn to read and do arithmetic, some learn much more than that, and on average school seems to add to IQ. Revisiting Chesterton’s fence, those are the benefits of school we need to understand before we tear anything apart.
July 1, 2025
QotD: Canadian measuring “systems”
We measure weather and room temperature in Celsius, but we still bake in Fahrenheit. Your weight is in pounds, but your car’s weight is in kilograms. You drink alcohol by the ounce, but soda by the millilitre. The phenomenon was summed up in an imaginary dialogue by Canadian comedian Janel Comeau. Scene: An American, a European and a Canadian. The American says “I use miles and pounds”. The European says “I use kilometres and kilograms”. The Canadian takes an assortment of global measuring systems, crushes them into a powder, and snorts them like cocaine before declaring, “I’m 5’3, I weigh 150lbs, horses weigh 1000kgs, I need a cup of flour and 1L of milk”.
And none of this is an accident. Canada’s bizarre system of half-imperial, half-metric represents the truce lines of a culture war battle whose scale and ferocity is all but forgotten today. There were people in the 1970s who wanted to purge this country of any memory of the imperial system. Feet, inches and gallons were a relic of a backwards, colonial age, and the future belonged to rationalist, scientific metrication. A small army of bureaucrats armed with meter sticks and one-litre jugs were dispatched to spread the metrication gospel. And if you didn’t comply with the new metric zeitgeist, you could face severe consequences. For example, if you were a gas station continuing to sell gas by the gallon instead of by the litre, you could be fined.
But this grand plan to reprogram the Canadian psyche was thwarted, and thwarted forever. And when you buy beef by the pound or do your carpentry with inches and feet, you are the unwitting legacy of a populist, anti-government protest movement that hated the metric system and went all-out to stop it. We’re talking protests. Lawsuits. Civil disobedience. This story will literally feature a group of pissed-off Conservative MPs opening a “freedom” gas station to defy federal mandates to sell gasoline by the litre.
Tristin Hopper The metric schism | Canada Did What?”, National Post, 2025-03-11.
June 27, 2025
The fading Boomer Laurentianus
Last week in The Critic, Charles Kirwin described the people who saddled us with three terms of Justin Trudeau and hope to continue their reign of error by supporting Mark Carney with his Europhile whims and intolerance for dissent:
Boomer Laurentianus is a Canadian subspecies of Boomerus Senectus, so named because he models himself on the so-called Laurentian Elite, Canada’s governing class that inhabit the “Laurentian corridor”, the narrow strip of land along the Saint Laurence river between Montreal and Toronto that, for a certain kind of Canadian, is the only bit of the country that matters.
In spirit, he is a child of the sixties and still believes he is a radical at heart. Despite this he expects to be treated with the deference reserved for those awarded the Victoria Cross, despite his closest experience to combat being glancing longingly at pictures of the cancelled Avro Arrow or campaigning to defend the local parking lot from being turned into affordable houses.
Like his British and American cousin, he supports progressive policies like safe supply of drugs, lenient sentences and bail conditions for criminals, and whatever economic policies keep his pension fund high and his property values increasing. Naturally, he lives in neighbourhoods untouched by the crime and addiction that are the direct result of the policies he supports.
It is important to note that while his modes of thinking and beliefs are those of the Laurentian Elite, his mind is shaped by the institutions of the Laurentian Elite: The Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Governor General’s Literary Award, various other high-minded organisations that form the intellectual life of Laurentian Canada, Boomerus Laurentianus is not necessarily “of” them.
Molson Canadian is the spirit of his patriotism. In 2000, Molson released a beer advertisement in which a typical Canadian played by actor Jeff Douglas shouts into a microphone to an audience of Americans, dismissing various Canadian stereotypes (we say aboot, drive dogsleds, are all lumberjacks and fur traders et cetera) and notes some of the differences that make Canada not the US. “I have a Prime Minister not a President … I believe in Peacekeeping not policing … I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack while travelling”. The advertisement is something of a cult hit in Canada and has been parodied by just about everyone including William Shatner.
This one-minute advertisement swells at the heart of the Boomer Laurentianus view of his country. It is both superficial and, in places, factually incorrect (the equivalent of the US president is not the Prime Minister but the King or Queen of Canada). But he has built his entire sense of nationalism around myths such as peacekeeping or being liked by foreigners more than Americans. This last point is sacred to his sense of identity.
Boomerus Laurentianus exists in a superposition state usually reserved for Schrödinger’s cat wherein he is both completely American and not American at all. It was often claimed of Rhodesians that they were “More British than the British”. Boomer Laurentianus is more Yank than the Yanks. Despite his reverence for the CBC, he gets his recipes from the New York Times and his opinions from CNN. He watches American television, travels to the US frequently, may even own a second home there. He can almost convince himself that they are the same country, sometimes to the point of putting up signs supporting, Democratic political candidates, seemingly unaware that he cannot vote in foreign elections.
June 23, 2025
80% of top-grossing movies are prequels, sequels, spin-offs, remakes or reboots
Ted Gioia on the death of creativity in the movie business, which also seems to be tracking almost exactly with the trend in music business profits:
I’m not shocked when I look in the mirror. Yeah, the Honest Broker isn’t getting any younger. But that’s the human condition.
Maybe I should start using a moisturizer. What do y’all think?
Nah. I’ll just let this aging thing play out.
On the other hand, I’m dumbfounded at everything in public life getting older — even older than me! Consider the current political landscape.
With each passing year, the US Congress looks more like the College of Cardinals (average age =78) or the Rolling Stones (average age = also 78).
We’re gonna need a lot of moisturizer.
But Congress is young and spry compared to Hollywood.
Back in 2000, 80% of movie revenues came from original ideas. But this has now totally flip-flopped.
Today 80% of the movie business is built on old ideas — remakes, and spin-offs, and various other brand extensions. And we went from 80% new to 80% old in just a few years.
Source: Experimental History
[…]
Look at music — and you see the same thing.
The share of old songs on streaming will soon reach 80%. It’s not quite there yet — the latest figures are 73%. But it was at 63% back in 2019. So it’s just a matter of time.
In 2000, streaming didn’t exist, so we looked to the Billboard chart to gauge a song’s success. And new music made up more than 80% of charted songs. So here — just like the movies — we’re flip-flopping from 80% new to 80% old over the course of a few years.
I don’t have good figures on publishing. But I’m pretty sure that AI-generated books and articles will soon represent 80% of the marketplace. Maybe we’ve already reached that threshold.
AI is deliberately designed to cut-and-paste, rehashing past work as its modus operandi. And it will do this to every field — replacing originality with repetition and regurgitation.
This is the new 80% rule.
Just imagine if traditional businesses operated this way.
- “Welcome to our restaurant, 80% of the food is leftovers.”
- “Welcome to our boutique, 80% of clothing is secondhand.”
- “Welcome to our dating service, 80% of the choices are your ex-girlfriends (or ex-boyfriends).”
None of that sounds very appetizing.
June 8, 2025
“If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town”
Ted Gioia points out that momentous changes in society are not often noticed until they’ve taken place, and provides ten warning signs of such a change happening right now:
Would you believe me if I told you that the biggest news story of our century is happening right now — but is never mentioned in the press?
That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
But that is often the case when a bold new worldview appears.
- How long did it take before the Renaissance got mentioned in the town square?
- When did newspapers start covering the Enlightenment?
- Or the collapse in mercantilism?
- Or the rise of globalism?
- Or the birth of Christianity or Islam or some other earthshaking creed?
The biggest changes often happen long before they even get a name. By the time the scribes notice, the world is already reborn.
You can take this to the bank: If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town.
For example, the word Renaissance got introduced two hundred years after the start of the Renaissance. The game was already over.
The same is true of most major cultural movements — they are truly the elephants in the room. And the elites at the epicenter of power are absolutely the last to notice.
Tiberius may run the entire Roman Empire, but he will never hear the Good News.
There’s a general rule here — the bigger the shift, the easier it is to miss.
We are living through a situation like that right now. We are experiencing a total shift — like the magnetic poles reversing. But it doesn’t even have a name — not yet.
So let’s give it one.
Let’s call it: The Collapse of the Knowledge System.
We could also define it as the emergence of a new knowledge system.
In this regard, it resembles other massive shifts in Western history — specifically the rebirth of humanistic thinking in the early Renaissance, or the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century.
In these volatile situations, the whole entrenched hierarchy of truth and authority gets totally reversed. The old experts and their systems are discredited, and completely new values take their place. The newcomers bring more than just a new attitude — they turn everything on its head.
That’s happening right now.
The knowledge structure that has dominated everything for our entire lifetime — and for our parents and grandparents — is collapsing. And it’s taking place everywhere, all at once.
If this were just an isolated situation — a problem in universities, or media, or politics — the current hierarchy could possibly survive. But that isn’t the case.
The crisis has spread into every sector of society which relies on clear knowledge and respected authority.
The ten warning signs
June 1, 2025
Ted Gioia on stopping AI cheating in academia
I’ve never been to Oxford, either as a student or as a tourist, but I believe Ted Gioia‘s description of his experiences there and how they can be used to disrupt the steady take-over of modern education by artificial intelligence cheats:
How would the Oxford system kill AI?
Once again, where do I begin?
There were so many oddities in Oxford education. Medical students complained to me that they were forced to draw every organ in the human body. I came here to be a doctor, not a bloody artist.
When they griped to their teachers, they were given the usual response: This is how we’ve always done things.
I knew a woman who wanted to study modern drama, but she was forced to decipher handwriting from 13th century manuscripts as preparatory training.
This is how we’ve always done things.
Americans who studied modern history were dismayed to learn that the modern world at Oxford begins in the year 284 A.D. But I guess that makes sense when you consider that Oxford was founded two centuries before the rise of the Aztec Empire.
My experience was less extreme. But every aspect of it was impervious to automation and digitization — let alone AI (which didn’t exist back then).
If implemented today, the Oxford system would totally elminate AI cheating — in these five ways:
(1) EVERYTHING WAS HANDWRITTEN — WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TYPEWRITERS.
All my high school term papers were typewritten — that was a requirement. And when I attended Stanford, I brought a Smith-Corona electric typewriter with me from home. I used it constantly. Even in those pre-computer days, we relied on machines at every stage of an American education.
When I returned from Oxford to attend Stanford Business School, computers were beginning to intrude on education. I was even forced (unwillingly) to learn computer programming as a requirement for entering the MBA program.
But during my time at Oxford, I never owned a typewriter. I never touched a typewriter. I never even saw a typewriter. Every paper, every exam answer, every text whatsoever was handwritten—and for exams, they were handwritten under the supervision of proctors.
When I got my exam results from the college, the grades were handwritten in ancient Greek characters. (I’m not making this up.)
Even if ChatGPT had existed back then, you couldn’t have relied on it in these settings.
(2) MY PROFESSORS TAUGHT ME AT TUTORIALS IN THEIR OFFICES. THEY WOULD GRILL ME VERBALLY — AND I WAS EXPECTED TO HAVE IMMEDIATE RESPONSES TO ALL THEIR QUESTIONS.
The Oxford education is based on the tutorial system. It’s a conversation in the don’s office. This was often one-on-one. Sometimes two students would share a tutorial with a single tutor. But I never had a tutorial with more than three people in the room.
I was expected to show up with a handwritten essay. But I wouldn’t hand it in for grading — I read it aloud in front of the scholar. He would constantly interrupt me with questions, and I was expected to have smart answers.
When I finished reading my paper, he would have more follow-up questions. The whole process resembled a police interrogation from a BBC crime show.
There’s no way to cheat in this setting. You either back up what you’re saying on the spot — or you look like a fool. Hey, that’s just like real life.
(3) ACADEMIC RESULTS WERE BASED ENTIRELY ON HANDWRITTEN AND ORAL EXAMS. YOU EITHER PASSED OR FAILED — AND MANY FAILED.
The Oxford system was brutal. Your future depended on your performance at grueling multi-day examinations. Everything was handwritten or oral, all done in a totally contained and supervised environment.
Cheating was impossible. And behind-the-scenes influence peddling was prevented — my exams were judged anonymously by professors who weren’t my tutors. They didn’t know anything about me, except what was written in the exam booklets.
I did well and thus got exempted from the dreaded viva voce — the intense oral exam that (for many students) serves as follow-up to the written exams.
That was a relief, because the viva voce is even less susceptible to bluffing or games-playing than tutorials. You are now defending yourself in front of a panel of esteemed scholars, and they love tightening the screws on poorly prepared students.
(4) THE SYSTEM WAS TOUGH AND UNFORGIVING — BUT THIS WAS INTENTIONAL. OTHERWISE THE CREDENTIAL GOT DEVALUED.
I was shocked at how many smart Oxford students left without earning a degree. This was a huge change from my experience in the US — where faculty and administration do a lot of hand-holding and forgiving in order to boost graduation rates.
There were no participation trophies at Oxford. You sank or swam — and it was easy to sink.
That’s why many well-known people — I won’t name names, but some are world famous — can tell you that they studied at Oxford, but they can’t claim that they got a degree at Oxford. Even elite Rhodes Scholars fail the exams, or fear them so much that they leave without taking them.
I feel sorry for my friends who didn’t fare well in this system. But in a world of rampant AI cheating, this kind of bullet-proof credentialing will return by necessity — or the credentials will get devalued.
(5) EVEN THE INFORMAL WAYS OF BUILDING YOUR REPUTATION WERE DONE FACE-TO-FACE — WITH NO TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED
Exams weren’t the only way to build a reputation at Oxford. I also saw people rise in stature because of their conversational or debating or politicking or interpersonal skills.
I’ve never been anywhere in my life where so much depended on your ability at informal speaking. You could actually gain renown by your witty and intelligent dinner conversation. Even better, if you had solid public speaking skills you could flourish at the Oxford Union — and maybe end up as Prime Minister some day.
All of this was done face-to-face. Even if a time traveler had given you a smartphone with a chatbot, you would never have been able to use it. You had to think on your feet, and deliver the goods with lots of people watching.
Maybe that’s not for everybody. But the people who survived and flourished in this environment were impressive individuals who, even at a young age, were already battle tested.
May 31, 2025
Social Hierarchy in the Early Roman Empire
seangabb
Published 31 Dec 2024The second lecture in the series – an exploration of social divisions within the Early Roman Empire. Contents include:
00:00:00 – Introduction
00:05:37 – The Roman Social Structure
00:09:02 – The Position of the Emperor
00:11:49 – Perception and Role of the Emperor
00:19:24 – Evolution of the Imperial Senate
00:22:19 – What Kind of Men became Senators?
00:25:34 – The Functions of Senators
00:27:41 – The Equestrian Order
00:30:56 – Local Government
00:35:49 – The Imperial Bureaucracy
00:37:16 – Narcissus, Pallas, Felix
00:42:12 – Ordinary People
00:43:06 – Roman Citizenship
00:45:15 – How to Become a Citizen?
00:47:21 – Justice According to Class
00:51:34 – How was Status Legally Determined?
00:59:44 – Patron and Client
(more…)
May 23, 2025
“‘[D]isrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”
William M. Briggs uses the most recent installation of a statue of a black woman in highly public spaces to explore the idea that even black people “have Black Fatigue”:
Statues of fat ugly lumpen surly ill-kempt statues of black women, all in poses to accentuate their quarrelsome uselessness, are being placed in prominent places in the West. The Latest, rising like a creature in a 1960s Japanese monster movie, is in Times Square. The person who created these blots of bad taste said they were “a way of ‘disrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”.
He’s right. These figures do represent triumph. DIE requires elevating the least and representing them as the best, and forcing all to pretend the charade is real. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a more perfect representation of the true spirit of DIE than these misshapen piles of metal. They demand you say they are equivalent to great men whose statues we are no longer allowed to have.
If it were only statues, there would be no story. But everybody knows that bad black behavior of all kind is being ignored, excused or outright celebrated.
One example will suffice. After the lifelong thug and criminal lowlife George Floyd met his expected end — poisoning himself with drugs and engaging in all manner of misbehavior — our rulers and “elites” fell to their knees, even in Congress itself, to show their adoration of black criminality. Not to mention Floyd’s own statues which cropped up like poisonous mushrooms, each encouraging emulation of Floyd’s exasperating antics.
It’s so bad now that parents of white kids murdered by blacks rush out to forgive or excuse the killers, lest anybody dare to think they would condemn bad black behavior.
The question is why.
Before you answer, understand this is not only your “racist” Uncle Sergeant Briggs asking this question. Blacks themselves are asking.
There is an entire growing genre of YouTube videos of blacks telling us they grow weary of the constant misadventure of “ratchet blacks” (their word, not mine) and our culture’s welcoming attitude toward them. Take “Why Black Fatigue Is On The Rise“. Black fatigue is the natural exhaustion from having to deal routinely with with misbehaving blacks, where “dealing with” means having to pretend, while in polite society, we are not seeing what we are all seeing.
Watch just the first two minutes if you haven’t the time for more. The man in the inset quite rightly points out that blacks are now, as everybody always wanted, being judged by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. The problem is the content of their character, or at least the character of those who are celebrated for misdeeds. As one commenter to the video said, the problem are blacks who are “Offended by everything. Ashamed of nothing. Entitled to everything. Responsible for nothing.”
The natural desire for separation, and to be with ones’ own, leads blacks to label blacks not confirming to expected behavior as “acting white”. The natural solution would be a formal separation: you go your way, we go ours. That, of course, would never be countenanced, and is anyway not desired by the majority. One thing absolutely demanded by our elites is “diversity”, by which they mean strict uniformity of belief. Our betters weep fake tears over things like colonization, which we know are fake because when we ask them to let us go our own way they say no.
If we can’t separate, then we have to find a way to get along with each other. Whatever this way is, it can’t have a basis in transparent lies.
May 21, 2025
QotD: The sandpaper people
On the other hand, most people aren’t artistes, so a well-ordered society is a well-lubricated society (“ah so!” yells our Japanese businessman, and look, y’all, much like my poor old high school physics teacher, we’re just going to have to ignore the obvious sexual connotations for the sake of the lesson). “Better a false ‘good morning!’ than a sincere ‘go to hell!'”, the old proverb runs, and that’s because the false “good morning!” is social lubricant; it keeps the friction of living packed cheek-to-jowl with a bunch of strangers down to a manageable level.
That’s what that mystifyingly old-timey word “manners” really means. What the frustrated artistes of the 20th century decried as stultifying conformity is actually lubricant. You don’t do that whole bourgeois thing, maaaannn, because you like being a sheep; you do it because that’s what keeps your world from catching on fire. Replace enough false good mornings with sincere go to hells, and pretty soon you’ve got Chicago, Philadelphia, Bodymore Murderland …
Alas, modern prosperity enables the sandpaper people. If normal people oil themselves up with manners before they go out into the world, these freaks wrap themselves in sandpaper. The really gritty stuff, too, the real paint-strippers you load onto big belt sanders. The kind of assholes who make up elaborate pronouns for themselves and get theatrically mad on social media when normal people can’t figure out what the hell they’re talking about, for instance.
And in an at least Alanis-level irony, the sandpaper people do some of their most abrasive work by pretending, high school physics-style, that obviously frictive situations are frictionless. […]
And so it goes … except physics is a real thing that exists. Our high school teacher instructed us to ignore things like wind resistance in order to teach us the basics. We all knew there was a lot more than F=MA to answering even so basic a question as whether or not Mickey Mantle’s line drive cleared the fence. Not only do the sandpaper people not know that, they wouldn’t care if they did, because equations be rayciss. Alas for them — and us — friction is real. Ever seen a car engine catch fire? Too much friction for the lubricant to handle, and the lubricant becomes a fire accelerant.
Severian, “The Sandpaper People”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-03.
May 19, 2025
1949: What are those kids listening to? – W2W 29
TimeGhost History
Published 18 May 2025There seems to be an evolution, that may one day become a revolution, in popular music in the US. Songs with amplified electric guitars, wailing saxophones, and backbeat rhythms are being released more and more often, but it’s not just R&B or jump blues, this is a bit of a different style — a new style. And it’s spreading quickly thanks to a vinyl record revolution that’s also getting in gear. Looks like exciting times ahead for the youth of America, and maybe even the whole world.
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May 17, 2025
Learning racism in Japan
John Carter recounts how his views and opinions on racism changed while living for an extended period in Japan:
We started the conversation talking about the Shiloh Hendrix affair, but ultimately got onto the subject of the Land of the Rising Sun. As it turns out, Alexandru and I have both spent quite some time living in Japan, an experience which contributed to both of us becoming incorrigible racists. This is a very common occurrence: almost anyone who spends a significant amount of time living in a very different country will start to draw conclusions about the differences between human groups. Your levels of epistemic closure need to be extraordinarily high to avoid this.
When I first moved to Japan I was, in most ways, an unreconstructed liberal. I took the axiomatic precept of the Boomer Truth Regime – that stereotypes are both incorrect and evil, because all people are basically the same – more or less for granted. This was very easy for me to do: I’d grown up in a remote, homogeneously Anglo part of rural Canada, and while I’d had some degree of exposure to different ethne at university, this was during a period in which Canada was making a real effort to filter immigrants for quality, and most of the non-white, second-generation immigrants I interacted with were heavily westernized. I wasn’t unaware of cultural differences, but I generally assumed that it went no deeper than that, and that inside every human being there was a liberal Anglo struggling to break free.
Japan of course is a completely alien culture. Among the many profound differences with the contemporary West is that the Japanese are, famously, intensely and unashamedly racist, or “xenophobic” as it is usually framed. I was initially taken aback by how frank the Japanese could be about this, for instance by asking questions about me that were clearly in rooted in their stereotypical understanding of what young North American white boys were generally like. But there were two things about this experience that quickly made me stop and think. First, these questions were almost never hostile, but rather came from a place of genuine curiosity: they were simply trying to get to know me, which they would do by starting with a default mental picture and then testing to see if and how I conformed or departed from that picture so that they could update their model accordingly. Yet I had been assured my entire life, by every TV show, movie, and teacher, that stereotypes were always hateful! Second, a great many of their stereotypical assumptions about me were uncomfortably accurate. Yet I had been assured my entire life, by every TV show, movie, and teacher, that stereotypes were always wrong!
It didn’t take me long to get over this cognitive dissonance, which I resolved by the simple expedient of concluding that I’d been lied to by my culture, which is something that even then I’d realized happens a lot. This then gave me internal permission to observe the Japanese themselves, to notice the myriad differences in character and behaviour as compared to my own people, and to connect these individual level differences to their emergent societal consequences.
Learning racism in Japan is a humbling experience for a Westerner. I’ve travelled to a lot of different countries, and everywhere else I’ve either felt like my own people were basically on the same civilizational level (Europe), or at a noticeably higher level (South America). Japan is the only place I’ve ever been where I felt like an unlettered, uncouth, savage, stinky barbarian primitive one step removed from the cave – where it was obvious that my own people could learn quite a bit about how to comport themselves in a civilized fashion. Then again, at the same time, this taught me to value that very barbarism: it’s quite possible, as the Greek understood when regarding the Mede, to be overcivilized.
I could go on about this subject for hours, but I’ve got things I need to do today – like go to the gym and get some work done on other projects I’ve been engrossed in – and I wanted to get this out fast. In any case, I did go on about this subject for hours, with Alexandru and Phisto, so if you’d like to hear more about Japan you’ll just have to click through and listen.
