Quotulatiousness

May 21, 2026

Explaining why more men are “opting out”

Filed under: Business, Education, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, Bettina Arndt shows some of the reasons why men are less and less willing to commit — not just to relationships, but to huge swathes of what we used to call “adult life”:

The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic — inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture, and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible, and less than a real man.

Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame, and the yoke comes off.

Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. One in three American men — roughly 33% — were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.

The trend is not confined to America. Australian men’s workforce participation has fallen from around 79% in 1978 to approximately 71% today (see below), while similar declines — though less dramatic than in the United States — have occurred in the UK and Canada.

[…]

If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.

The modern woman: a prospectus.

  • They are the most miserable, anxious, and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.
  • Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.
  • Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.
  • They’ve gone full throttle left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.
  • They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.
  • Yet their hypergamy (desire to marry up) is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.
  • The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.
  • They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.

What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?

QotD: “Theory” in film interpretation

Filed under: Books, Education, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[David G. Hughes] You often situate your ideas in reference to things like geography, the animal kingdom, sexuality, history, and tidbits of quirky detail — earthly, tangible things. It’s different from the dominant theoretical approach in film interpretation, and there’s humour. Would you describe your work as atheoretical, or even anti-theoretical?

[Camille Paglia] What has been called “theory” since the arrival of deconstruction in elite U.S. universities in the 1970s is in my view one of the most pointless and pretentious movements in modern cultural history. The catastrophic results should be obvious by now: the humanities are in ruin and have lost public respect and even internal support in academe, where budget reduction has come to the fore. I would refer those seeking greater specifics to my long attack on poststructuralism, Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, published by Arion in 1991. Seven years ago, I did a follow-up assessment of current “theory” when the Chronicle of Higher Education asked me to review three new academic books by women about the bondage and domination trend. My unhappy response was “Scholars in Bondage”, which laments the damage done to promising young professors by a tyrannical academic establishment still chained to the bleached-out corpse of “theory”.

My approach to art is grounded in the sensory. Art is not philosophy. Art by definition refracts meaning through some medium of the material world. Hence my interpretation of art is grounded in the five senses. Perhaps the only theorist who fully grasped this issue was Gaston Bachelard in his 1957 book, The Poetics of Space, animated by a phenomenology that partly aligns with my own practice. It is no coincidence that I have spent most of my teaching career at art schools, where the body remains front and center in most art forms. Digital genres are certainly spreading and flourishing, but dance, music, and theater remain grounded in physicality — which is partly why art schools are finding it so difficult to adapt to the harsh, distancing realities of the virus crisis.

“David G. Hughes talks to Professor Camille Paglia about her work on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and much more”, Electric Ghost, 2020-05-28.

May 19, 2026

The War People by Lucian Staiano-Daniels

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Dead Carl and You, Kiran Pfitzner reviews The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War and finds it has value in bringing to life some of the ordinary people involved in that bloody, interconnected series of wars that we group together as the Thirty Years’ War:

“Their word for themselves was People. Early seventeenth-century common soldiers were Die Leute, Das Volk, les gens, or la gente. They were Das Kriegsvolk, Die Kriegsleute, les gens de guerre, the War People.” So begins Lucian Staiano-Daniels’s aptly titled The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War. Using the technique of micro-history, Staiano-Daniels follows the Mansfeld regiment from its raising in 1625 to its unhappy dissolution in 1627. This unexceptional regiment is notable because of the primary source documentation that survives, specifically its original internal legal records — investigations, debts, trials, and last testaments. Through this unusually immediate resource, we gain glimpses of the reality of the 17th century common soldier and so a clearer view of the social conditions he lived within.

One way Staiano-Daniels situates this investigation is in terms of the relationship between military organization and state-building. Describing the existing historiography, he writes: “In this argument, early-modern states increased their control over their civilian populations in part to raise tax money for larger armies that were inhabited by soldiers who were themselves increasingly well-disciplined”. He instead finds, “neither an intensification of military discipline nor unadulterated thuggishness. The military community was made up of systems of relationships that were subtle, intricate, and disorganized.” (7). These findings are well evidenced, and significant, as earlier literature (drawing on more normative sources like manuals and regulations) asserted the intensification of discipline as part of the emergence of the modern state. Instead, we see states forced to engage in the paradoxically complexly and loosely organized world of the mercenary, unable in this time of crisis and state-emergence to fully subordinate the armed forces they employed.

The 17th century and the Thirty Years’ War serve as an important benchmark in understanding the development of war. In witnessing the lives of the kind of men with which wars of the 17th century were fought, we gain a greater understanding of the society that they moved in. In so doing, we can more easily conceptualize the forces that both constrained and enabled war in the 17th century, producing its particular form. This conception provides the opportunity to more easily understand war in other places and times and what conditions reduced or intensified its violence.

Reading this work as a Clausewitz scholar, I could also not help but see a connection between the culture of the war people and Clausewitz’s support for a national militia or Landwehr as a step towards more inclusive governance. There is, of course, a great distance between the unruly mercenaries of the Thirty Years’ War and the “nation in arms” envisioned by Clausewitz and the other Prussian reformers, but at its core we find a common phenomenon: the connection between military service and rights, personal and political.

This book demonstrates well the value of microhistory; in looking closely at the practices and prevalent attitudes of these soldiers of the 17th century, we gain a more concrete view of the prevailing social conditions. This is not just of interest for its own sake (as social history), but because social conditions greatly shape the practice of war, as Clausewitz tells us. This is so because social conditions both reflect and affect the political conditions that create war, as well as the political purpose that exercises a continuous influence upon it.

May 12, 2026

QotD: “… this pattern will be immune to all but the most draconian interventions, such as legally-imposed quotas”

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

In many nations and for many people, the sex difference in occupational attainment is a social pathology that begs for corrective intervention. The ultimate societal goal for many is equal numbers of high-achieving men and women across high-status fields, including those that typically draw more of one sex or the other (e.g., men in engineering). Here, I place the sex difference favoring men in occupational attainment in an evolutionary perspective and show that this pattern will be immune to all but the most draconian interventions, such as legally-imposed quotas. The reason for this is simple: The relation between social dominance and reproductive success is typically stronger for males than for females, and this in turn favors the evolution of traits that facilitate male status striving.

[…] the achievement of social status and some degree of success in culturally-important domains are more strongly related to men’s than women’s reproductive prospects and success. The sex difference here is found in hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and agricultural societies, as well as in early empires, developing nations, and the modern world. One result is that men have an evolved motivation to increase their social status and to attempt to gain control of culturally-important resources, whether these resources are cows or cash. Women of course also benefit from improved status and resource control, but the evolutionary costs and benefits differ for each sex and have resulted in stronger status-related motivations and behaviors (e.g., long work hours) in men than women.

The expression of men’s status striving strongly contributes to the sex difference in occupational attainment that continually frustrates gender activists and thwarts policy edicts aimed at equality of outcomes. […] sex differences in status striving manifest in modern contexts and […] these are entirely consistent with broader patterns found across human cultures, human history, and in most species.

David C. Geary, “Sex Differences in Occupational Attainment are Here to Stay”, Quillette, 2020-11-02.

May 11, 2026

A tale of how the people lost faith in the Oracle

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eve Keneinan tells a story about a people who once depended on the words of the Oracle and why they eventually stopped listening:

Once upon a time, the people of a certain land were blessed with an oracle of uncanny precision and depth in its predictions and information.

The people rose to prominence and prosperity thanks to consulting the oracle.

However, the people were never allowed to consult the oracle directly, but only through the priests that carried their questions to it, and brought the oracle’s responses back to them.

Eventually, the priests began to confuse the virtues and gifts of the oracle as their own, and began no longer to bother asking the oracle questions before deciding on what “its” answers would be.

Thus it transpired that, while the oracles was a reliable and beneficial as it ever was, since its true answers no longer reached the people, but merely the false and self-serving answers of the priests, the act of “consulting the oracle” became no longer beneficial.

So people stopped consulting the oracle.

The priests were mystified by this.

“The oracle is as reliable as ever,” they said amongst themselves. “Why do the people then no longer trust it?”

And yet they had done it themselves.

QotD: The cultural importance of the church in early Medieval Europe

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We should start by charting the broad outlines of the place of the medieval church in Western Europe. I should start off by noting that this is a huge topic – as will swiftly become clear, there was almost no part of society in which the Church did not play a significant role – and I will only be offering a broad-strokes overview here, sufficient to provide a basis of comparison for [Game of Thrones]. Most of this discussion will principally concern the Latin Church (what today is the Catholic Church) in the West. Since this discussion is – importantly! – about the state of affairs before the reformation, I will tend to refer to the Latin Church simply as “the Church” for brevity’s sake.

The very first thing to note is that the Church (in this case, both the Latin West and the Greek East) pre-dated the Middle Ages themselves. The Church arrived in the Middle Ages as relic of the Roman Imperial past. It inherited Roman Imperial organization – the diocese, for instance, derived from the boundaries of Roman super-provinces called dioceses (Greek: διοίκησις). Unlike the new medieval aristocracy, which tended to rule from fortified estates in the countryside, the Church remained centered in towns and cities, many of which had been major centers under the Romans. As the Roman provincial administration collapsed, it largely fell to the Church – as one of the few surviving literate institutions – to replace some of the core functions, like record keeping and the preservation of literature and learning. This was less true [in] Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, places where the Church was a relative late-comer, but for most of Western Europe, the Church was not some new institution grafted on to a pre-existing society (as it had been under the Romans), but rather part of the bedrock cultural foundation upon which that new society was constructed (fellow pedants! – please note carefully the phrase part of in the previous sentence; I am aware there were other things).

That said, the institutional power of the Church (and here we really do mean what would be the Roman Catholic Church) begins to change dramatically in the 11th century, right as we enter the High Middle Ages, and continues for the next several centuries (keeping in mind that Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire really evoke the High and Late Middle Ages, rather than the Early period). In short, the institutional heft of the Church grows dramatically. Quite a few things begin happening which are linked together: the Popes begin trying to wrest control over the Church’s hierarchy (specifically, the investiture of bishops) from secular rulers. Clerical celibacy was more stringently enforced. The Church intruded into warfare (as we’ve discussed with the Peace of God / Truce of God movements). It began to more directly attempt to regulate marriage, especially among the powerful (marriage was a made a sacrament in 1184). By the 1300s, this included keeping detailed records in many parts of France about births, deaths and marriages, in part to ensure no one married a close relative.

(And, of course, for those of you thinking, “wait, isn’t this also the period of the Crusades – military expeditions called by and at least nominally (but not in practice) under the auspices of the Pope?” Yes, it is, and that’s not an accident either).

In my experience teaching this, it is the next step that baffles my students the most. This vast increase in the institutional power of the Church was made possible, not by armies or shrewd real-politic (though both were involved), but by belief. The primary weapon wielded by Popes in this effort was the threat of excommunication, which (under Catholic doctrine) cut off the excommunicated individual or community from salvation, potentially damning them for all eternity. But of course that threat is only real if you believe the Pope has that power. And therein is the key point: most of Europe did believe. As I tell my students, it is safe to assume, as a general matter, that people in the past believed their own religion. Of course there are exceptions, but the general rule remains.

In the conflicts that arose – because, as you might imagine, secular rulers were unwilling to give up their prerogatives – it did not actually much matter if the king or emperor believed in the power of excommunication, because no one rules alone. Thus when the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV was excommunicated by Pope Gregory VII in 1076, the audience for this act wasn’t Henry himself (who had already declared Gregory illegitimate anyway). It was directed at all of Henry’s vassals and supporters, releasing them from their oaths of allegiance and essentially saying, “stick with this guy, and he’ll take you to hell with him”. It worked, sparking a major rebellion and forcing Henry to humiliatingly apologize the following year.

(History note: this would be “round 1” in a multi-round fight that wasn’t settled until 1122 with the Concordat of Worms; in the end the Papacy mostly won, sharply limiting the Holy Roman Emperors’ power over their bishops).

Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part II”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-04.

May 10, 2026

The Ancient Greeks: 01 – What Made Them Special? (b) Slavery, Violence, and the Reality of Greek Life

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 31 Jan 2026

This section confronts the social realities of Greek civilisation that are often ignored or idealised.

It examines the position of women, the central role of slavery, ritualised violence against children, infant exposure, and what we would now describe as widespread paedophilia. Drawing on ancient sources such as Plutarch, Demosthenes, and Aristotle, it shows that these practices were not marginal, but embedded in Greek social norms and justified as rational policy.

Victorian and modern idealisations of Greece are critically dismantled in favour of historical evidence.

The aim is not moral condemnation, but historical clarity.

May 7, 2026

QotD: The loss of male spaces led to today’s epidemic of male loneliness

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

Before men were lonely, there were places.

Places where men showed up without an agenda. Where conversation happened sideways, not face-to-face. Where no one asked men to perform vulnerability, explain themselves, or justify their presence.

Those places didn’t disappear because men rejected connection. They disappeared because our culture decided male-only spaces were no longer acceptable. And once they were gone, men were told that their resulting loneliness was a personal failure.

There has been a noticeable shift in recent months. A growing number of articles now
acknowledge male loneliness and even gesture toward men’s emotional needs. On the surface, this looks like progress — and in one narrow sense, it is. For decades, male loneliness was either ignored or mocked.

But many of these pieces commit the same quiet betrayal.

After briefly acknowledging that men are lonely, many articles abandon subtlety altogether and place responsibility squarely on men themselves. Men don’t open up enough. Men don’t try hard enough. Men don’t build friendships properly. Men resist emotional growth.

What is missing is the most obvious factor of all: our culture systematically dismantled the spaces where men and boys once formed friendships.

Men Did Not “Forget” How to Connect, They Lost the Places Where Connection Happened

Male friendships have never primarily formed through structured emotional disclosure. They formed through shoulder to shoulder shared activity, regular presence, and low-pressure companionship. Men bonded by working alongside one another, not by facing one another across a table and “processing”.

For generations, this happened naturally in male-only spaces:

  • Service clubs
  • Fraternal organizations
  • Trade guilds and apprenticeships
  • Male sports leagues
  • Scout troops
  • Men’s religious groups
  • Informal gathering places like barbershops and workshops

These environments weren’t about exclusion. They were containers — places where boys learned how to be men from men, and where adult men maintained connection without self-consciousness or surveillance.

Now consider what has happened.

  • Barbershops are co-ed and transactional.
  • Service clubs are now largely co-ed, and the informal freedoms that supported male bonding in male-only environments have largely disappeared.
  • Community sports are co-ed or heavily regulated.
  • Even the Boy Scouts are co-ed.

One by one, male spaces disappeared — not because men abandoned them, but because our culture increasingly viewed male-only environments as suspicious, outdated, or morally problematic.

The Asymmetry No One Wants to Name

At the same time male spaces were dismantled, female-only spaces proliferated.

  • Women-only gyms are accepted.
  • Women-only scholarships are celebrated.
  • Women-only commissions exist at every level of government.
  • Women-only networking events, parking, subway cars, retreats, and support groups are commonplace.

“Women-only” is understood as necessary, protective, and empowering.

“Men-only”, by contrast, is treated as exclusionary at best and dangerous at worst.

The result is an unspoken rule that everyone knows but few admit:

Women may gather without men. Men may not gather without women.

This is not equality. It is a double standard — and it has consequences.

Tom Golden, “The Quiet Lie Behind Male Loneliness”, Men Are Good, 2026-01-05.

May 4, 2026

Our genetic heritage and our culture

Filed under: Business, Education, Health, History, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby look at our genetic inheritance and how it continues to shape our culture:

From Wikipedia:

    The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck refers to a period around 5000 BC where the diversity in the male y-chromosome dropped precipitously across Africa, Europe and Asia, to a level equivalent to reproduction occurring with a ratio between men and women of 1:17. Discovered in 2015, the research suggests that the reason for the bottleneck may not be a reduction in the number of males, but a drastic decrease in the percentage of males with reproductive success in Neolithic agropastoralist cultures, compared to the previous hunter gatherers.

The development of farming and then animal herding greatly increased the number of humans — which continued to have evolutionary consequences for our species — and created productive assets (farms and animal herds) worth fighting over. Successful male teams (typically organised as clans) wiped out unsuccessful male teams and took their women as spoils.

Hence, there is a dramatic bottleneck in male lineages but not in female lineages. This pattern stopped with the development of chiefdoms and especially states, though not so much on the Steppes, whose states were more like super-chiefdoms and where intense competition over resources (and women) continued.1

This had consequences. A major one is that the male expression of human genes became dramatically better at forming and maintaining teams — as there was drastic selection pressure for that — but the female expression of human genes did not.

This is why young schoolboy sporting teams regularly crush adult women’s national teams in team sports such as soccer. It is not that schoolboys have the strength advantage over women associated with adult men (they are often not particularly advantaged around age 14-15). It’s simply that human males are much more likely to “get” teamwork at a visceral level.

At least some of the differences in the statistical distribution of cognitive traits between men and women comes from this genetic bottleneck’s intense selection pressure differences. This is particularly clear in social patterns. For instance, men readily form hierarchies — often using physical cues such as height to do so.

Men focus on roles, suppressing or otherwise managing their emotions to do so. They regularly test each other — hence ragging each other, making appalling jokes, etc. Such mechanisms generate trust, as they test whether you will fold under pressure, whether one can say outrageous things and still get support. Hence the popular quip:

    Men insult each other but they don’t mean it. Women compliment each other but they also don’t mean it.

Men roast each other as tests because so much male interaction is about teamwork, and the roles and reliability that requires, while women typically look to emotional connection. Given that the latter requires a lot of interaction to build up trust, yes, female friendships can be quite intense, but relations between human females can also be viciously unstable and fissile.

These differences have other social consequences. Men are notably more positive about free speech than women, because men often see speech as a test while women are more likely to see it as a threat. As universities have feminised, the male-female differences on free speech among students have become more pronounced. Men are systematically more tolerant of alternative points of view than are women.

Orwell’s famous comment in his novel 1984:

    It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

Was a great novelist doing what great novelists do: noticing.

As part of the teamwork focus, men tend to be the social solidarity sex while women are not. Women are much less likely to have friends of lower socio-economic status than are men. For women, such friends are much less likely to be worth the emotional investment. For men, they may be useful members of a future team.

As institutions, occupations and public discourse become more feminised, there has been a shift in patterns of language. A massive study of patterns of language use found a dramatic shift since the 1980s, such that:

    our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.

All this means that male-dominated institutions and spaces will be generally better, often much better, at generating and managing feedback than female-dominated spaces. When people note that feminising institutions and occupations have a strong tendency to become less functional, it is precisely because they are worse at generating and managing feedback, and at generating and maintaining trust.

  1. This paper attempts to explain the extreme narrowing of surviving male lineages by the adoption of patrilineal systems and polygyny. While the shift to patrilineal systems in itself does increase unequal lineage success—as does polygyny—much of the point of the shift to patrilineality was precisely that warriors who grow up together are better warrior teams.

    2. Moreover, there is considerable evidence of violence after the shrinkage of male lineages dramatically slowed — and then reversed — with the development of chiefdoms, and especially states. These suppressed violence, but not patrilineality or polygyny. In many societies, polygyny actually intensified with the rise of states.

    The bottleneck effects continued to echo down populations. The extraordinary reproductive success of particular male lineages is associated either with pastoralist violence and conquest and/or early state creation. Further, the notion that the majority of male lineages just passively accepted their reproductive exclusion flies in the face of a huge amount of evidence — especially as the examples of very successful pastoral lineages occurred in societies with notoriously high levels of violence, including as raiders, such as across the Steppes and in Ireland.

    Moreover, polygyny is associated with higher rates of violence, single-spouse marriage with higher social cohesion. Nor was the creation and maintenance of states typically a peaceful process: periodic violent peaks in Chinese history, for example, were extraordinary. It was precisely the creation of a reproductively-excluded underclass that provided so much of the impetus for the banditry and mass peasant revolts that are such a feature of Chinese history. So, while patrilineality and polygyny were definitely factors in the wildly differentiated success rates of male lineages, considerable levels of violence and contestation over resources and women — that selected in favour of male teamwork — were clearly also very much in play.

May 3, 2026

Reasons people romanticize their college experience

Filed under: Education, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to comments about people wanting the world to be like they remember their time at college:

People romanticize college because for four years of their lives they:

1. Had all the rights of adults but none of the responsibilities.

2. Lived in a closed community with sealed borders that kept out low IQs and anti-socials.

3. Were young, energetic, healthy, and attractive.

4. Were thrown together with a bunch of similar people who had no predefined power- or need-based relationship with them, which is how friendships form.

This last is the important one, especially as fertility rates decline.

People with children transition to making friends with other parents of children in the same age group, because events and networks centered around those children throw them together with other parents in the same way.

But childless people have few or no opportunities to make friends after college. So they are left with a slow dwindling circle of college based relationships, remembering the days when it was all easy, and they weren’t so isolated, and they didn’t have to work so hard.

Couple that with having to complete with infinity immigrants in the job market, so they can pay taxes to support infinity boomers and government bureaucrats, while being passed over for the best jobs and careers in favor of infinity DEI incompetents, who they also have to support …

Well, for a lot of people born into what was once the American middle class, college was their first and last experience of an adult life wherein they weren’t being systematically and deliberately routed into the formation of a new underclass.

A special form of underclass who are still expected to be productive enough to materially support all the non-producing people who were positioned as their social superiors despite being their intellectual inferiors.

So, yeah, they wish they could go back to college.

Is anyone surprised by this?

April 29, 2026

QotD: The battlefield role of the general in pre-modern battles

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We have to start not with tactics or the physics of shouting orders, but with cultural expectations. First, we need to establish some foundations here. First, in a pre-modern battle (arguably in any battle) morale is the most critical element of the battle; battles are not won by killing all of the enemies, but by making the enemies run away. They are thus won and lost in the minds of the soldiers (whose minds are, of course, heavily influenced by the likelihood that they will be killed or the battle lost, which is why all of the tactics still matter). Second, and we’ve actually discussed this before, it is important to remember that the average soldier in the army likely has no idea if the plan of battle is good or not or even if the battle is going well or not; he cannot see those things because his vision is likely blocked by all of his fellow soldiers all around him and because (as discussed last time) the battlefield is so large that even with unobstructed vision it would be hard to get a sense of it.

So instead of assessing a battle plan – which they cannot observe – soldiers tend to assess battle commanders. And they are going to assess commanders not against abstract first principles (nor can they just check their character sheet to see how many “stars” they have next to “command”), but against their idea of what a “good general” looks like. And that idea is – as we’re about to demonstrate – going to be pretty dependent on their culture because different cultures import very different assumptions about war. As I noted back in the Helm’s Deep series, “an American general who slaughtered a goat in front of his army before battle would not reassure his men; a Greek general who failed to do so might well panic them.” An extreme example to be sure, but not an absurd one. In essence then, a general who does the things his culture expects from him is effectively performing leadership as we’ve defined it above.

But the inverse of this expectation held by the soldiers is that generals are not generally free to command however they’d like, even if they wanted to (though of course most generals are going to have the same culturally embedded sense of what good generalship is as their soldiers). Precisely because a general knows his soldiers are watching him for signs that he is their idea of a “good general”, the general is under pressure to perform generalship, whatever that may look like in this cultural context. That is going to be particularly true because almost all of the common models of generalship demand that the general be conspicuous, be available to be seen and observed by his soldiers. As a result, cultural ideals are going to heavily constrain what the general can do on the battlefield, especially if they demand that the general engage personally in combat.

Different sorts of generals

We can actually get a sense of a good part of the range simply by detailing the different expectations for generalship in ancient Greek, Macedonian and Roman societies and how they evolved (which has the added benefit of sticking within my area of expertise!).

On one end, we have what we might call the “warrior-hero general”. This is, for instance, the style of leadership that shows up in Homer (particularly in the Iliad), but this model is common more broadly. For Homer, the leaders were among the promachoi – “fore-fighters”, who fought in the front ranks or even beyond them, skirmishing with the enemy in the space between their formations (which makes more sense, spatially, if you imagine Homeric armies mostly engaging in longer range missile exchanges in pitched battle like many “first system” armies).

The idea here is not (as with the heroes of Homer) that the warrior-hero general simply defeats the army on his own, but rather that he is motivating his soldiers by his own conspicuous bravery, “leading by example”. This kind of leadership, of course, isn’t limited to just Homer; you may recall Bertran de Born praising it as well:

    And I am as well pleased by a lord
    when he is first in the attack,
    armed, upon his horse, unafraid,
    so he makes his men take heart
    by his own brave lordliness.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the pure “general as commander” ideal, where the commanding general (who may have subordinates, of course, who may even in later armies have “general” in the name of their rank) is expected to stay well clear of the actual fighting and instead be a coordinating figure. This style […] is fairly rare in the pre-gunpowder era, but becomes common afterwards. Because in this model the general’s role is seen primarily in terms of coordinating various independently maneuvering elements of an army; a general that is “stuck in” personally cannot do this effectively. And it may seem strange, but violating these norms with excessive bravery can provoke a negative response in the army; confederate general Robert E. Lee attempted to advance with an attack by the Texas Brigade at the Battle of the Wilderness (May 6, 1864) only to have his own soldiers refuse to advance until he retired to a more protected position. Of course this sort of pure coordination model is common in tactical video games which only infrequently put the player-as-general on the battlefield (or even if the “general” of the army is represented on the battlefield, the survival of that figure is in no way connected to the player’s ability to coordinate the army).

In practice, pre-modern (which is to say, pre-gunpowder) generals almost never adopt this pure coordination model of generalship. The issue here is that effective control of a gunpowder army both demands and allows for a lot more coordination. Because units are not in melee contact, engagements are less decisive (units advance, receive fire, break, fall back and then often reform to advance again; by contrast a formation defeated in a shock engagement tends not to reform because it is chased by the troops that defeated it), giving more space for units to maneuver in substantially longer battles. Moreover, units under fire can maneuver, whereas units in shock generally cannot, which is to say that a formation receiving musket or artillery fire can still be controlled and moved about the field, but a unit receiving sword strikes is largely beyond effective command except for “retreat!”

In between these two extremes sits variations on what Wheeler terms a “battle manager”, which is a bit more complex and we’ll return to it in a moment.

What I want to note here is that these expectations are going to impact where the general is on the battlefield and thus what he can do to exert command. A general in a culture which expects its leaders to be at the front leading the army has the advantage of being seen by at least some of his soldiers (indeed that is the point – they need to see him performing heroic leadership), but once engaged, he cannot go anywhere or command anyone. This is also true, by the by, in cultures where the general is expected to be on foot to show that they share in the difficulties and dangers of the infantry; this is fairly rare but for much of the Archaic and Classical periods, this was expected of Greek generals. Even if a general on foot isn’t in combat directly, their ability to see or move about the battlefield is going to be extremely limited.

On the flipside, a general who is following the “commander” ideal is likely to be in the rear, perhaps in an elevated position for observation. The obvious limitation here is that such a commander is going to struggle to display leadership because no one can see them (everyone is facing towards the enemy, after all). But that also impacts their ability to command – no one is looking at them so if they want to change their plans on the fly they need to send word somehow to subordinate officers who are with or in front of the battle line who can then use their visibility to communicate those orders to the troops.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part II: Commands”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-03.

April 28, 2026

QotD: The cultural history of the Tidewater and Deep South regions of the United States

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The first nation [as described in American Nations, by Colin Woodard] that struck my interest was Tidewater, earliest of the English nations. (El Norte and New France, as Woodard names them, are the remnants of colonial empires that predate English settlement in North America.) Founded on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay by gentlemen from southern England, and with a sizeable population influx a generation later from Royalists who had found themselves on the losing side of the English Civil War, Tidewater began with an aristocratic ethos. Its gentlemen wanted to recreate the rural manor life of the English landowners: ruling benevolently over their estates and the tenants who inhabited the associated villages, presiding over the courts and local churches, hunting and visiting their neighbors and paying for the weddings and funerals of the poor. To play the role of the peasantry in this semi-feudal system, they imported indentured servants from among the English poor. But unlike English villagers, who were engaged in a variety of subsistence farming endeavors or local forms of production in much the same way that their ancestors had been, the indentured servants of Tidewater were mostly put to work farming tobacco for export.

This may not seem like a huge difference — does it really matter if you’re growing wheat or tobacco, if you’re farming someone else’s land? — but it had profound implications for what happened after the indenture. In theory, the formerly-indentured should have taken on the role of either the English tenant farmer (think Emma‘s Robert Martin) or yeoman/freeholder (a small-time landowner but not of the scale or social class to be a “gentleman”). In practice, though the colony was a plantation economy exporting a cash crop: there was very little local manufacturing, since it was so easy for a ship from London or Bristol to sail right up to some great landowner’s dock on the river and unload whatever he might have ordered. Independent small-scale farmers simply couldn’t compete for tobacco export with their larger neighbors, and especially not if they also had to pay rent. But luckily for them, they had something no Englishman had had for centuries: empty land nearby. Or, you know, sort of empty. (Several of the rebellions in early Virginia were fought over the colonial government’s refusal to drive the Indians off the land former servants wanted to settle.) They could just leave.

The obvious solution for the Tidewater elites — the clear way for gentlemen to maintain an aristocratic lifestyle without a peasantry tied to the land — was African slaves. And here’s the important difference between Tidewater and it neighboring nation, the Deep South: Tidewater turned to slavery in the hopes of perpetuating their social structures, while the Deep South was envisioned from the first as a slave society.

The Deep South had been founded in the 1670s by Barbados sugar planters who ran out of room on their tiny island and were now exporting their particularly brutal combination of slave gangs and sugarcane to the coastal lowlands around Charleston Harbor. (Like the Tidewater gentry, the Barbadians had originally experimented with indentured servants from Britain, but they were worked to death so rapidly that the authorities objected.) The planter class quickly became phenomenally wealthy — by the American Revolution, per capita wealth in the Deep South was four times that of Tidewater and six times either New York or Philadelphia, and the money was much more concentrated than anywhere else in the colonies — but unlike the manorial idyll of Tidewater, with its genteel pursuits and colonial capitals all but abandoned when the legislature was out of session, the Deep South planters spent as much time as possible in the city.

Charles Town (later Charleston), South Carolina, modeled on the capital of Barbados, was filled with theaters, taverns, brothels, cockfighting rings, private clubs, and shops stocked with goods imported from London. Life in the city was a constant churn of social engagements, signalling, and status competition: in 1773, a pseudonymous correspondent wrote in the South Carolina Gazette that “if we observe the Behavior of the polite Part of this Country, we shall see, that their whole Lives are one continued Race; in which everyone is endeavouring to distance all behind him, and to overtake or pass by, all before him; everyone is flying from his Inferiors in Pursuit of his Superiors, who fly from him with equal Alacrity …” The planters of the Deep South had no interest in being lords of their estates, which were managed by overseers, or indeed in their land or the people who worked it. Certainly there existed poor whites in the colonies of the Deep South, but they never entered into the conversation: where Tidewater imagined agricultural labor performed by the English “salt of the earth” but had to fall back on slaves, the Deep South always planned on slaves.

This may not seem like an important difference, especially if you’re a slave,1 but it matters a great deal for national character. Culture, after all, lives as much in a people’s values and ideals as in their daily routines: a culture that praises loyalty to clan and family will behave very differently from one that lauds fair dealing with strangers. And the Deep Southern ideal, the nation’s vision of how life ought to be, was more or less Periclean Athens: a tremendous efflorescence of wealth, art, and personal distinction for the great and the good, with no consideration whatsoever for the slaves and metics who made up the bulk of the population. A good life meant leisure and luxury, wealth and freedom, the full exploration of personal capacity for the few and who cares about the many. The Tidewater ideal, on the other hand, was basically the Shire: bucolic, rural, politically dominated by a cousinage of great families who shared a profound sense of noblesse oblige and populated by a virtuous, hardworking yeomanry who knew their place but were worthy of their betters’ respect.

Did that world actually exist? Of course not, neither here or in its English model,2 any more than the Puritans’ commonwealth in Massachusetts Bay was a new Zion inhabited by saints. But a culture’s picture of how life ought to be determines its reaction to changing circumstance, and Tidewater pictured an enlightened rural gentry ruling benevolently over lower orders who nevertheless mattered. In contrast to the aggressively middle class northern nations, the fiercely independent Appalachians, and the elite-centric Deep South, Tidewater imagined itself as an aristocracy. And it was the only one among the American nations.

Tidewater had a disproportionate influence on the early United States, contributing far more than its fair share of early statesmen and generals as well as a healthy dose of the philosophical underpinnings for many of our founding documents. Unfortunately for the lowland Virginia gentlemen, however, they were hemmed in to the west by the hill people of Greater Appalachia: when the other nations began to expand deeper into the continent after 1789, Tidewater was stuck in its starting position. Soon the nation that had been “the South” on the national stage was dwarfed by Greater Appalachia (more than doubled between 1789 and 1840) and especially by the Deep South (ten times larger). When the young United States began to polarize over the issues of slavery, Tidewater — by then a minority in Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, and even Virginia3 — had to retreat to the political protection of the Deep South and began to lose its cultural distinctiveness. It never really emerged again as its own ideological force.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: American Nations, by Colin Woodard”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-02-19.

  1. Though it actually mattered a great deal to slaves, who were imported to the Deep South in great waves only to be worked to death; the enslaved population of Tidewater, by contrast, increased steadily over the entire antebellum period.
  2. Though I will point out that Akenfield suggests the total immiseration of the tenant farmers in the early 20th century has something to do with the land being owned by rich farmers and implies that the local gentry are more generous employers.
  3. West Virginia’s eventual secession back to the Union would put Tidewater back in the majority there.

April 27, 2026

Abstract Expressionism “… wasn’t even real art … just a psyop”

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

When I first got married, we had several friends in the Toronto arts community, and while I enjoyed their company, for the most part I heartily disliked their art. Everything seemed to be consciously designed to be unpleasant to look at: jagged, rusty metallic edges, weird proportions, bilious colour choices, and so on. I was assured more than once that this was what “art” was meant to be: if it didn’t evince a strong reaction, it wasn’t doing its job. On Substack, Celina discusses the claim that modern art was actually a psyop sponsored by, inter alia the CIA:

Abstract Expressionism is arguably the most famous American art movement of the 20th century.

There’s a 95% chance you’ve seen a painting by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, or Mark Rothko, even if you didn’t know their names.

And if you’ve spent any time online, you’ve probably heard the rumours:

They were funded by the CIA.
It was all propaganda.
It wasn’t even real art … just a psyop.

That sounds absurd.

Except … there is a large, large grain of truth behind it.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA.

Manufacturing Consent

After the First World War, the journalist Walter Lippmann helped pioneer the view that the control of information and, more importantly, the control of public response, had become essential to the stability of modern democracy. This was especially true in moments when the state required certain reactions from the public, as it did during wartime. Lippmann, who famously popularised the phrase “the manufacture of consent“, argued that representative government could no longer function without the deliberate use of mass communication in the supposed service of the public good:

    That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements, no one, I think, denies. The creation of consent is a very old act, which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy, but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.1

Lippmann’s ideas about the “manufacture of consent” would not remain theoretical for long. After the Second World War, they were tested on an unprecedented scale by the American establishment.

Poets, philosophers, critics, and intellectuals became participants in it. They were recruited, funded, and mobilised to form the cultural front line of a struggle against the Soviet Union. But this was not a conventional war. There were no trenches, no battlefields, no declarations.

Instead, it was a war of ideas, fought in publishing houses, universities, art galleries, and across the airwaves. At the centre of this effort stood the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

And its story reveals just how far a democracy was willing to go in shaping what its citizens and the world would come to believe.

  1. Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Tolerance

Filed under: History, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort explains why tolerating people who want to kill you is a fatal mistake:

There is no such thing as coexistence in a scenario where people want to murder you.

The side that is the least tolerant of the other, wins. Every time.

Intolerance is the mindset of the victor.

Therefore the leftist ideologue will win in this scenario, barring some renewed resolve.

You see the signs every day.

> Their “politicians” dog whistle for murder and jail
> Their “media” dog whistles for murder and jail
> Their “protestors” will scream DEATH TO TYRANTS at you while you’re fleeing an active assassination attempt against you

You forget, we all seem to forget, that THIS ideology during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, caused people to dig up the bodies of dead nuns for very public desecration.

You can’t comprehend the level of hate that it takes to do something like that. None of us can. But they can.

So they will win, because we tolerate it.

And tolerance is a poisonous virtue when intolerance is pointing a gun at your head.

Tolerance is a noble thing among the civilized. Against the butcher, it is only a prettier name for death. When violence enters the room, tolerance becomes surrender.

We get what we tolerate. And we tolerate everything.

He’s quite right about the exhumation and desecration of the bodies of nuns during the Red Terror in Spain:

Pillaging and desecration of Catholic church institutions by supporters of the Republicans; the corpses of nuns from a monastery in Barcelona were ripped out of graves and displayed on a wall.

Celina wrote about the Red Terror recently.

April 26, 2026

South Korea’s switch from an exporting heavyweight to a cultural juggernaut

Filed under: Asia, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte looks at the importance of a South Korean government report to changing the structure of the South Korean economy and making the country far more visible culturally on the world stage:

South Korea, in the latter half of the twentieth century, was building its economy almost entirely by exporting manufactured goods, everything from home electronics to ships to automobiles. That changed, as the story goes, when the country’s Presidential Advisory Board on Science and Technology released a report on digital technology in May 1994. It noted that a single Hollywood film, Jurassic Park, with its computer-generated dinosaurs, generated the same amount of foreign sales as 1.5 million Hyundai cars. The darling of Korean industry, Hyundai was exporting 640,000 cars a year in 1994. So one film was worth more than two years of heavy industrial production requiring enormous plant, equipment, capital investment.

The report stunned Koreans — “literally sent shock waves across the country”, writes Doobo Shim, a Seoul-based professor of media and communication. At the time, culture and entertainment were viewed as ephemeral and unlikely to contribute to Korea’s core mission of “improving the material conditions of the people”. The country decided it needed to change its game in order to thrive in the twenty-first century economy.

It wasn’t a straight line from the Presidential Advisory Report to Parasite, Squid Game, BTS, Blackpink, and Han Kang’s Nobel prize, but it’s straighter than you might think. Seoul is now a top-five world cultural center, and arguably top two if we’re talking pop culture and anything that appeals to under-thirties. How it happened tells us a great deal about Canada’s relative failure to develop home-grown cultural and entertainment industries.

The Presidential Advisory Board report alone did not alter Korea’s strategy. The country was starting from way behind. First came democratic reforms and media deregulation. That birthed new commercial TV channels and a variety of independent publications. Now with an independent (from government) domestic media sector, Korea tried to protect it by limiting the amount of foreign cultural product in its market. That didn’t work. In 1993, 90 of the top 100 video rentals in the country were from Hollywood; only five were domestic. Sound familiar, Canada?

Protection wasn’t going to work, anyway. Another factor at play was the Uruguay Round, an international accord negotiated between 1986-1994 that decisively liberalized the global economy, forcing all 123 signatory countries to open their markets for a vast range of goods and services, including communications services and entertainment product. It was clear to Korea that efforts to protect heritage and culture by shutting out the world had no future. It needed to upgrade its efforts in the cultural sphere if it wanted to avoid being swamped by content from multinational companies, and not just American ones. Satellite television services out of Japan and Hong Kong were already making inroads in Korea.

Another thing: Korea had noticed that Japan, its nearest rival in the home electronics sector, was making investments in content. Sony had bought Columbia pictures and CBS records. It was the nineties, the age of synergy, or vertical integration. Companies making devices — video players, portable music players — also wanted to own what played on them. Korean firms such as Samsung and Daewoo, makers of TVs and VCRs, felt a need to be vertically integrated, too.

So the Presidential Advisory Report landed on fertile ground. Korean businesses felt an imperative to pay attention to content. The Korean government felt itself under siege from foreign cultural and entertainment product. “Gone are the days”, said one expert interviewed in the newspaper Dong-A Ilbo, “when the government could appeal to the people to watch only Korean programs out of patriotism”.

All that notwithstanding, the report mostly resonated because it presented culture as an opportunity. It asked Koreans to recognize the potential of arts and entertainment to improve the material conditions of the people. Instead of resisting the emerging global marketplace, the power of multinational corporations and platforms, and the free movement of talent, it needed to master this new system, compete commercially, and take Korean culture to the world.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress