You may have noticed that [Against the Grain author] James C. Scott is not a fan of the state. He tends to describe it as a sort of alien intrusion into the human world, an aggressive meme that’s colonized first our material environment and then our minds, imposing its demands for legibility in order to expropriate innocent peasants:
Peasantries with long experience of on-the-ground statecraft have always understood that the state is a recording, registering, and measuring machine. So when a government surveyor arrives with a plane table, or census takers come with their clipboards and questionnaires to register households, the subjects understand that trouble in the form of conscription, forced labor, land seizures, head taxes, or new taxes on cropland cannot be far behind. They understand implicitly that behind the coercive machinery lie piles of paperwork: lists, documents, tax rolls, population registers, regulations, requisitions, orders — paperwork that is for the most part mystifying and beyond their ken. The firm identification in their minds between paper documents and the source of their oppression has meant that the first act of many peasant rebellions has been to burn down the local records office where these documents are housed. Grasping the fact that the state saw its land and subjects through record keeping, the peasantry implicitly assumed that blinding the state might end their woes. As an ancient Sumerian saying aptly puts it: “You can have a king and you can have a lord, but the man to fear is the tax collector”.
This “state as egregore” language recurs throughout the book. Scott writes that the state “arises by harnessing the late Neolithic grain and manpower module as a basis of control and appropriation”. It “battens itself” on the concentration of grain and manpower to “maximiz[e] the possibilities of appropriation, stratification, and inequality”, and with its birth “thousands of cultivators, artisans, traders, and laborers [are] … repurposed as subjects and … counted, taxed, conscripted, put to work, and subordinated to a new form of control”.1 But it’s vital to remember that this metaphor is just a metaphor: the state isn’t actually an alien brainworm or a memetic infohazard that will hijack your neocortex the moment you set eyes on a triumphal arch and force you to spend the rest of your life making lists of things and renaming roads with numbers;2 it’s just an institution that people have invented, because hierarchy and inequality are inescapable facts of life in a society of any scale and the state is a particularly effective bundle of social technologies to leverage those hierarchies. There’s a reason that, after states had their “pristine” invention at least three separate times, they’ve proliferated across every part of the world that can support them!
But more interesting than “are we better off with the state?” is to ask ourselves, as Ronald Blythe does in Akenfield, what has been lost. Here Scott offers some fascinating musings on the way not merely the state but the entire agriculturalist life-world limits us:
We might … think of hunters and gatherers as having an entire library of almanacs: one for natural stands of cereals, subdivided into wheats, barleys and oats; one for forest nuts and fruits, subdivided into acorns, beechnuts, and various berries; one for fishing, subdivided by shellfish, eels, herring, and shad; and so on. … one might think of hunters and gatherers as attentive to the distinct metronome of a great diversity of natural rhythms. Farmers, especially fixed-field, cereal-grain farmers, are largely confined to a single food web, and their routines are geared to its particular tempo. … It is no exaggeration to say that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal-grain farming as cereal-grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work on a modern assembly line. Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks.
The Neolithic Revolution, he argues, was like the Industrial Revolution, a great boost to human productivity and social complexity but at the same time a de-skilling. The surface area of our contact with the world shrank from hundreds of plants and animals, used in different ways at different times of year, to a mere handful of domesticates whose biological clocks became the measure of our lives. Of course, the modern contact area is smaller still — dimensional lumber purchased from a store in place of felling and milling your own trees, natural gas at the turn of a knob with nary a need to build a fire — and is sometimes reduced all the way to your fingertip on a smooth glass screen. The ease and efficiency are undeniable, and I’m sure a forager or premodern farmer would kill for Home Depot and seamless pizza delivery (I certainly wouldn’t want to give them up). But there has been “a contraction of our species’ attention to and practical knowledge of the natural world” because that knowledge and attention is no longer necessary, and I think that Scott is right to suggest that there is something richer about a more extensive involvement with the world. That said, Scott’s case is somewhat overstated: after all, even hunter-gatherers have specialized craftsmen who engage deeply with particular materials at the expense of other endeavors, and farmers3 have a far more intimate relationship with their animals than a hunter does with his many different kinds of prey. Similarly, farmers may be on one particular bit of land but (especially in a preindustrial context) all that plowing and hedging and draining and spiling, not to mention the gathering of various woodland foodstuffs, can rival forager familiarity when it comes to their bit of landscape. (My new favorite poem is Kipling’s “The Land“, on just this idea.)
Scott closes the book with an elegy for the “late barbarians”, who had the best of both worlds: healthier and longer-lived than farmers, and with greater leisure, they were “not subordinated or domesticated to the hierarchical social order of sedentary agriculture and the state” but were still able to benefit tremendously from lucrative trade with those states. Unfortunately, much of that trade was in weaker non-state peoples whom they captured and sold as agricultural slaves, thereby “reinforc[ing] the state core at the expense of their fellow barbarians”, and much of the rest was in their own martial skills as mercenaries (which of course also served to protect and expand the influence of the state). It’s a salutary reminder for the aspiring modern barbarian: the best place to be is just outside the purview of the state, where you can reap its benefits4 without being under its control. But beware, because in a world of states even those “outside the map” must fill niches created by the state. It’s great to have a cushy work-from-home laptop job that lets you live somewhere nice, with trees and no screaming meth-heads on your subway commute, but more land comes under the plow every year, and your time, too, may come.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: Against the Grain, by James C. Scott”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-21.
- And of course Scott argues that the state is a parasite in the most literal way, since the word derives from the Greek παρά “beside” + σῖτος “grain.”
- Although this would be a pretty sweet novel, sort of a Tim Powers alt-history: anarcho-primitivist occultists go back in time to ancient Mesopotamia to destroy the me of kingship and render the state metaphysically impossible. Someone write this.
- Like Scott, in fact, who keeps sheep on 46 acres of Connecticut. There’s a funny little aside in the book where he complains about people using “sheeplike” in a derogatory sense, given that we’ve spent several millennia selectively breeding sheep to behave that way.
- Better yet, wait for the peasants to do the reaping then ride in on your shaggy little ponies and take it all. Uh, metaphorically.
August 25, 2025
QotD: The rise of the state … the rise of the egregore
August 18, 2025
QotD: Dostoevsky’s Demons can be read as “one long, savage parody of Fathers and Sons“
The macro-structure of Demons mirrors this so closely, you can almost read the book as one long, savage parody of Fathers and Sons.1 The sunny opening section is a satire of the boomer liberals, and the big vibe shift part way in is their kids coming back from college. But that’s where things go off the rails. In this book, the next generation shares their parents’ anti-religious and anti-monarchist attitudes, but unlike in Fathers and Sons, the kids in Demons are disgusted by the hypocrisy and cowardice of their genteel liberal parents, and eager to plunge Russia into a hyper-totalitarian nightmare. The exact contours of that nightmare are something they frequently argue about and change their minds over, but they can all agree that it will need to begin with an enormous mountain of skulls, and that their town is as good a place as any to start.
Dostoevsky’s other works put individuals front and center, his stories have unbelievably rich characterization (Nietzsche once said that Dostoevsky was the greatest psychologist to ever live), because for Dostoevsky the very highest stakes, the most important questions in the world, were about the damnation or salvation of individual souls. But Demons is different: here the characters all blur together, their names are disgorged to you in a never-ending torrent, and only a few of them are distinctive in any way.2 How could Dostoevsky think these people don’t matter? It’s because they aren’t real people anymore. It’s because they’re possessed. Their brains have been scooped out and all you can see in their eyes is a writhing mass of worms. Their ideas and ideologies have hollowed them out and are wearing their skins as suits.
But what if the ideas don’t matter either? It’s easy to interpret the second half of Demons as a novel of ideas, but it really isn’t. Your first clue is that the ideas are just so goofy. There’s one guy who thinks that by killing himself he will become God (don’t ask, it’s Dostoevsky, man). Another has written a book with ten chapters, explaining how “Beginning with the principle of unlimited freedom I arrive at unlimited despotism”, and proposing a method of brainwashing for reducing ninety percent of humanity to a mindless “herd”. Yet another thinks that everything can be solved by killing one hundred million people, but laments that even with very efficient methods of execution this will take at least thirty years.3 My own favorite might be the guy who refuses to explain what his system is, but just smugly declares that since everybody is going to end up following it eventually, it’s pointless for him to explain it.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.
- Further evidence for this reading: the book contains a character, the great writer “Karmazinov”, who is a straightforward expy of Turgenev himself.
- That said if you do need to keep track of them, this alignment chart made by some genius on the internet is a pretty handy guide: link.
- This one probably seems less funny after the 20th century than it did when Dostoevsky wrote it.
August 7, 2025
QotD: The lost-then-found-again Hittite civilization
… Mycenaean Greece was as much an outlier as sub-Roman Britain: the civilizational collapse in the Aegean was unusually prolonged and severe compared to the fates of many of the other peoples of the Late Bronze Age. Here I have helpfully reformatted Cline’s chart of how resilient the various societies proved:
Let’s take a brief tour through the various fates of these societies. I’ll come back to the Phoenicians at the end, because their example raises interesting questions when considered in contrast with the Mycenaeans. For the moment, though, let’s begin like civilization itself: in Mesopotamia.
Before the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the Assyrian and Babylonian empires had numbered among the Great Powers of the age: linked by marriage, politics, war, and trade to the other mighty kings, they spent much of their time conducting high-level diplomacy and warfare. As far as we can tell, they did well in the initial collapse: there’s a brief hiatus in Assyrian royal inscriptions running from about 1208 to 1132 BC, but records resume again with the reign of Aššur-reša-iši I and his repeated battles with his neighbor to the south, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar I (no relation). But although the kings of the late twelfth century continued much as their Bronze Age predecessors had — waging war, building palaces, going hunting, accepting tribute, collecting taxes, and ordering it all recorded in stone and clay — the world had changed around them. No longer were there huge royal gifts sent to and from fellow great kings, “My Majesty’s brother”1 overseas; now their diplomatic world consisted of tiny petty kings of nearby cities who could be looted or extorted at will.
Mesopotamia didn’t escape unscathed forever: beginning around 1080 BC, texts begin to record severe droughts, invading Aramaeans, and total crop failures. There was a major drought in 1060 BC, and then both the Assyrian and Babylonian records record further drought every ten years like clockwork — sometimes accompanied by plague, sometimes by “troubles and disorder” — until the end of the eleventh century BC. Most of the tenth century was equally dire, with chronicles recording grain shortages, invasions, and a cessation of regular offerings to the gods.
But unlike the Mycenaeans, and in spite of real suffering (ancient Babylonia is estimated to have lost up to 75% of its population in the three hundred years after the Collapse), both Mesopotamian empires were able to hang on to civilization. There were still kings, there were still scribes, and there were still boundary stones on which to record things like “distress and famine under King Kaššu-nadin-ahhe”. And when conditions finally improved, Assyria and Babylonia were both able to bounce back. When at last the Assyrian recovery began under Aššur-dan II (934-912 BC), for example, he (or more realistically, his scribe) was able to write: “I brought back the exhausted people of Assyria who had abandoned their cities and houses in the face of want, hunger, and famine, and had gone up to other lands. I settled them in cities and homes which were suitable and they dwelt in peace”. Clearly, Assyria still retained enough statehood to effect the sort of mass population transfer that had long been a feature of Mesopotamian polities.2
Over the next few centuries, the Neo-Assyrian Empire would come to dominate the Near East, regularly warring with (and eventually conquering) Babylon and collecting tribute from smaller states all over the region. At its peak, it was the largest empire history had ever known, covering a geographic extent unsurpassed until the Achaemenids. The Babylonians had to wait a little longer for their moment in the sun, but near the end of the seventh century they overthrew their Assyrian overlords and ushered in the Neo-Babylonian Empire. (Less than a century later, Cyrus showed up.)
So how did Babylon and Assyria hold on to civilization — statehood, literacy, monumental architecture, and so forth — when the Greeks lost it and had to rebuild almost from scratch? Unfortunately, Cline doesn’t really answer this. He offers extensive descriptions of all the historical and archaeological evidence for the diverse fates of various Late Bronze Age societies, but only at the very end of the book does he briefly run through the theories (and even then it’s pretty lackluster). He does have a suggestion about the timing — the ninth century Assyrian resurgence lines up almost perfectly with the abnormally wet conditions during the Assyrian megapluvial — but why was it the Assyrians who found themselves particularly well-positioned to take advantage of the shift in the climate? Why not, say, the Hittites?
Sometime around 1225 BC, the Hittite king Tudhaliya IV wrote to his brother-in-law and vassal, Shaushgamuwa of Amurru, that only the rulers of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria were “Kings who are my equals in rank”.3 A mere thirty years later, though, his capital city of Hattusa would lie abandoned and destroyed. Modern excavators describe ruins reduced to “ash, charred wood, mudbricks and slag formed when mud-bricks melted from the intense heat of the conflagration”.
And with that, the Hittites essentially vanished from history.
They were so thoroughly forgotten, in fact, that when nineteenth-century archaeologists discovered the ruins of their civilization in Anatolia, they had no idea who these people were. (Eventually they identified the new sites with the Hittites of the Bible, who lived hundreds of years later and hundreds of miles to the south, out of sheer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.)4
What happened to the Hittites? Well, Cline suggests the usual mélange of drought, famine, and interruption of international trade routes, as well as a potential usurpation attempt from Tudhaliya’s cousin Kurunta, but the actual answer is that we’re not sure. Given the timing, they may have been the first of the Late Bronze Age dominos to fall; given the lack of major rivers in central Anatolia, they may have been uniquely susceptible to drought. Hattusa may have been abandoned before the fire — its palaces and temples show little sign of looting, suggesting they [may] already have been emptied out — but many other sites in the Hittites’ central Anatolian heartland were destroyed around the same time, and some of those have bodies in the destruction layer. But whatever the order of events, Hittite civilization collapsed as thoroughly and dramatically as the Mycenaeans’ had done, and with a similar pattern of depopulation and squatters in the ruins. Unlike the Mycenaeans, though, the Hittites would never be followed by successors who inherited their culture; the next civilization of Anatolia was the Phrygians, who probably arrived from Europe in the vacuum following the Hittites’ fall.
There was one exception: in the Late Bronze Age, cadet branches of the Hittite royal family had ruled a few small satellite statelets in what is now northern Syria, and many of these “Neo-Hittite” polities managed to survive the Collapse. A tiny, far-flung corner of a much greater civilization, they nevertheless outlasted the destruction of their metropole and maintained Hittite-style architecture and hieroglyphic inscriptions well into the Iron Age.5 (They would be swallowed up by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the late eighth century BC.) And though the Neo-Hittite kings ruled over tiny rump states, we’re now able to translate inscriptions in which they referred themselves by the same titles the Bronze Age Hittite “Great Kings” had employed. The records of their larger neighbors, which had a much greater historical impact, seem to have followed suit: the Neo-Hittites in Syria probably actually were the Hittites of the Bible! Chalk up another one for nineteenth century archaeology.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: After 1177 B.C., by Eric H. Cline”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-07-08.
1. I really think we should bring back monarchs referring to themselves as “my Majesty”. So much cooler than the royal “we”. Or combine them: “our Majesty”!
2. The Babylonian Captivity, much later in the Iron Age, was far from historically unique.
3. The list actually reads, “the King of Egypt, the King of Babylonia, the King of Assyria,
and the King of Ahhiyawa” — the strikethrough appears in the original clay tablet! A generation earlier, under Tudhaliya’s father Hattusili III, the Hittite texts had consistently referred to the king of Ahhiyawa as a “great King” and a “brother”, but apparently the geostrategic position of the Mycenaean ruler had degraded substantially.4. We now know that the Hittites spoke an Indo-European language and referred to themselves “Neshites”, but the name has stuck.
5. I went looking for a good historical analogy for the Neo-Hittite kingdoms and discovered, to my delight, the Kingdom of Soissons, which preserved Romanitas for a few decades after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Neo-Hittites lasted a lot longer.
July 28, 2025
QotD: The technology ecosystem
Technology is also an ecosystem, not the way bluechecks talk about it, but in this more profound sense. A Boeing or a Google is like a tiger: the highly-visible culmination of a vast subterranean drama. Turn over a spade and you’ll find them — the suppliers and subcontractors, investor networks, tooling manufacturers, feeder universities, advisors, researchers, shipping and packaging experts, friendly bankers and government officials, producers of upstream technological inputs, and a vast collection of lower-tier companies in related markets that act like an economic flywheel, absorbing and releasing excess labor as the economy shudders through its fits and starts.
In nature, it’s energy and nutrients that move through the food webs. Here their analogues are capital and knowledge. It’s hard to miss the money sloshing back and forth — world-changing companies are nurtured through their awkward adolescence by sophisticated and patient pools of capital, and the high-flying champions of those companies become the next generation’s venture investors after cashing out. Harder to see but even more influential is the vast economic dark matter made up of professionals who struck it rich enough to live comfortably but not rich enough to fly private. These unobtrusive capitalists are the first to hear through professional whispernets that so-and-so has quit his job to work on such-and-such. Since they’re still in the rat-race, they can have an informed opinion on the caliber both of the idea and of the team around it, and are usually the early champions of the most unusual and speculative ventures. And finally, money sloshes around between the companies themselves through a complicated network of deals, joint ventures, and strategic investments.
The money is more visible, but the way knowledge moves is more important. Part of it is academic, propositional knowledge or technical data whose discovery is accelerated when a dozen different teams are on its scent, sometimes racing each other to the prize, sometimes egging each other on and celebrating each others’ victories. But the bulk of what makes this ecosystem hum, the true currency that drives nearly every barter or exchange, is practical, process knowledge of the sort that 莊子 first described and Michael Oakeshott later re-popularized for our benighted and ignorant age. What makes process knowledge unusual is that by its very nature it cannot be separated from people, cannot be digitized or divorced or attached to an email. It is at once the nous of a technological ecosystem and the thing that makes it fundamentally illegible — an immaterial, intangible essence that inheres only in individuals, like a mind or a soul.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Flying Blind by Peter Robison”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-06.
July 18, 2025
QotD: Christianity destroyed the ancient Graeco-Roman culture
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 6, 2025
QotD: After the Bronze Age Collapse
But what surprised me most about After 1177 B.C. is how short this era was. In some places, anyway.
We have a vague picture of what happens after a civilizational collapse, but it’s been disproportionately influenced by two particularly dramatic examples: sub-Roman Britain and the Greek Dark Ages. This was perfectly sensible coming from the Anglo historians and archaeologists who have dominated the public conception of the field — after all, the only thing more interesting than the history of your own island is that of the classical world you’ve been studying since you got your first Latin grammar at age six — but it turns out that neither of these are the general rule. Foggy, faraway Britain, so reliant on imported goods and troops, was far more seriously impacted by the withdrawal of Rome than was most of the Empire and saw a longer and more significant reduction in cultural complexity, standards of living, average stature, and of course population. (Imagine what would happen to a Mars colony if the connections to the home planet stopped working.)
Greece after the fall of the Mycenaeans suffered an even more striking decline. As Austrian archaeologist Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy summarizes:
The impressive palatial structures were not rebuilt, and very little of the representational arts and crafts of the palaces seems to have survived. The complex forms of political, social, and economic organization fell into oblivion. Palaces, kings, and royal families became matter for Greek myths. The art of writing was lost for centuries. In short, Greek civilization was reduced to the level of a prehistoric society.
The Greeks of the classical era had little conception that the Mycenaeans had even existed, let alone that they were their own ancestors: they retained a vague mythological tradition of past kings, but they attributed the few surviving Mycenaean structures to the work of cyclopes. In fact, the disconnect between the civilization of the Late Bronze Age and the later classical world was so great that until Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B, it was an open question whether the people responsible for the Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atreus were even Greeks at all. (The answer, in case you’re wondering, is yes: Linear B turns out to be a syllabic script for the most ancient attested form of Greek. It features a number of uniquely Greek words and deity names even in the limited surviving corpus. More recently, ancient DNA has confirmed the linguistic evidence: the classical Greeks were the descendants of the Mycenaeans.)1
But the more you look at the archaeological record, the more you can pick out signs of cultural continuity. Agricultural practices don’t seem to have changed much, nor did Mycenaean pottery styles, and the names and attributes of the gods preserved in Linear B are close if not identical to their forms as codified in Homer and Hesiod. Even the cyclopean architecture continued to provide shelter: the Mycenaean palace at Pylos was almost completely destroyed in the Collapse, but the few rooms that survived intact show signs of having been inhabited by squatters over the next century or two.
Homer too is chock full of details that turn out to be distant memories of the Mycenaean world, somehow preserved in the oral tradition until writing was reintroduced to Greece.2 For instance, he describes a kind of boar’s tusk helmet that, by his time, no one had worn for centuries, but which archaeologists have since regularly discovered in Mycenaean shaft graves throughout the Aegean. But my favorite example, which is of course linguistic, is the word for “king”: Homer describes Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus and others with the word anax, which is recognizably the Linear B word 𐀷𐀙𐀏, wa-na-ka, used in the Bronze Age to describe the supreme rulers of the Mycenaean palatial societies. (The w sound was lost with the tragic death of the digamma.) By the classical era, however, anax had fallen out of use in preference for basileus (Linear B 𐀣𐀯𐀩𐀄, qa-si-re-u), which in the Mycenaean period had referred to a much lower-level chieftain.
This all paints an evocative picture of a post-apocalyptic world. You can imagine it transplanted to an American context, with the scattered survivors of some great cataclysm huddled around fires built in the corners of a crumbling Lincoln Memorial. You can picture them passing on stories of the great men of the past with their tall tube-shaped hats and the shiny black stones they carried in their pockets. And by the time this remnant rebuilt, they might well have forgotten the word “President” except as an archaism; after centuries of as a small-scale society, “Mayor” might become so deeply engrained as the highest title that two thousand years later they would still use it to refer to their emperor.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: After 1177 B.C., by Eric H. Cline”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-07-08.
1. It’s slightly more complicated than that, because of course it is; see here for more detail from Razib Khan.
2. A reasonable ballpark guess is that the poems traditionally attributed to Homer were composed in something like their current forms around 750 BC and written down for the first time shortly before 525 BC, although like the dating of Beowulf there’s a great deal of argument.
June 27, 2025
QotD: The dangers of “doing too much principal component analysis”
[…]
By the way, the fact that models are beautiful in a highly specific way, and that there exist women who are similarly beautiful but condemned to be “civilians”, is a good reminder of the dangers of doing too much principal component analysis.2 In so many areas of life, we are obsessed with collapsing intrinsically high-dimensional phenomena onto a single uni-dimensional axis. You see this a lot with the status games that leftists play around privilege and oppression — I feel like a rational leftist would say that a disabled white lesbian and a wealthy scion of Haitian oligarchs are just incomparable, each more privileged than the other in some senses and less in other senses. But no, instead there’s an insistence that we find an absolute total ordering of oppression across all identity categories, a single hierarchy that allows us to compare any two individuals and produce a mathematical answer as to which one is more deserving of DEI grants. My hunch is a lot of the internal tensions and bickering within American leftism are actually produced by this insistence, which makes sense because it’s totally zero sum.
But the disease of trying to pin everything to a single number is hardly confined to the left. You see it on the right in the obsession with IQ, as if a single number could capture the breathtaking range of variation of cognitive capabilities across all humanity. I mean for goodness sake, Intel learned the hard way that this doesn’t even work for computers, and human brains are much weirder and more complicated than microprocessors. But the even dumber version of this is the 1-10 scale of female beauty. There’s something so sublime about seeing a beautiful human being, because so much of it is either bound up in subtle interrelationships between different features (this is why plastic surgery often makes people uglier — there’s no such thing as a “perfect nose”, and if you pick one out of a catalog you’ll probably end up with one that doesn’t fit your face), or it’s irretrievably evanescent — a fleeting glance, or the way her hair falls across her face just so, gone the moment after it happens. Taking something so ineffable and putting it on a 1-10 scale only makes sense as a form of psychological warfare. And I get it, amongst the young people relations between the sexes have degenerated to the point of more or less open warfare, but come on, this is pornbrained nonsense.
Speaking of both the DEI olympics and the classification of female beauty, some parts of this book are really charmingly naive, and I snickered a bit at Mears’s mystification at why all of the models are white and blonde. The really funny part is that she says something like: “I expected this legacy of white supremacy to be in retreat given that so many of the big spenders in clubs these days are from Asia and the Middle East”. Is she really not aware that men of other races have an even stronger aesthetic preference for white women than white men do?3
John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.
1. In fact, an unusually high proportion of models are intersex individuals with a Y-chromosome and androgen insensitivity syndrome.
2. Not the only danger of too much principal component analysis!
3. Gabriel: Kimberly Hoang did an ethnography as a bar girl in several Vietnam bars. At the bar that catered to Vietnamese elites, the other bar girls made her lighten her skin with cosmetics and wear a black minidress, with the target look being tall, pale, and slender K-pop idol. When she moved to another bar catering to white sex tourists, the other bar girls told her to wear bronzer and a slutty version of traditional Asian dress with the target look being exoticized sexiness. See: Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. University of California Press.
June 12, 2025
QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte, arch-meritocrat
Jane: But Napoleon was a meritocrat, in the strictest and most literal sense. He made himself emperor through sheer excellence, and the men he elevated were the same. I mean, let’s look at his first set of marshals: Augereau is the son of a fruit-seller, Ney’s father was a cooper, Masséna’s father was a shopkeeper, and Bessières’ was a doctor (in an era when that was a lot less prestigious than it is today). Bernadotte starts out the son of a provincial prosecutor and ends up king of Sweden. Only Davout had an aristocratic background. Obviously this was sort of inevitable, because the previous elite had been literally decapitated and a new one had to come from somewhere. Maybe it’s just what happens when you have a particularly profound disruption: people end up in power because they’re better than anyone else at making war to get the power in the first place. Just like you can’t follow the lineage of any European aristocrat back farther than the Germanic conquerors of the early Middle Ages. (The Psmiths, as is well attested, trace descent from the Viking Psmiðr who came to Normandy with Rollo in the 8th century.) But I think it’s more than that. Napoleon set up all kinds of meritocratic institutions outside the military: he had his competitive examination lycées, he was constantly promoting the talented young auditeurs he ran across in the Conseil … (Can you tell I liked the civil administration chapters better than the battle chapters? #thetwogenders)
So what is the difference between Napoleonic meritocracy and our present sort? I think the real difference is that in his case there was someone doing the choosing. This is important for a couple of reasons: first, because it takes a certain amount of talent to recognize excellence. You can get away with being a Salieri, but you need to have something. I think we’ve all seen institutions whose HR departments were so packed with drones that they couldn’t have recognized a genius if one fell into their laps, let alone wanted to work for them. And it’s way, way harder to keep around an institution full of competent intelligent people with correctly aligned incentives than it is to just … be good at identifying talent, personally. Second, a person exercising judgment can take a way more holistic view than any standardized metric. This is what college admissions claims to be trying to do when they’re not just using it as an excuse to keep out Asians. But a well-functioning meritocracy — or an emperor picking his men — should be searching for excellence. Studying hard and doing well on a test not only fails to reliably indicate excellence, it actually encourages and cultivates habits of mind that undermine excellence.
But the biggest reason this is important, I think, brings us back to Napoleon again, and might be the key to what you described as the strange inconsistency between his loving concern for his men and his willingness to send them to a hideous death. Because I don’t actually think it’s an inconsistency at all! And it has to do with mission. What’s the deal with our current meritocratic system? “We want to have the smartest people in power”. Okay but why? “So they can be effective”. Effective at what?
No one ever had to ask Napoleon “effective at what”.
He was willing to throw himself, and his closest friends, and the meanest infantryman whose boots he nevertheless obsessed over, into some of the most hellish experiences yet devised by men1 in service of something greater. And you can be snide and say the something greater was “Napoleon”, and that’s sort of true, but to him and to France “Napoleon” had come to stand for law and knowledge and liberty and order and greatness itself. Napoleon’s meritocracy worked because it had a telos. Our meritocracy is the idiot fluting of a blind inhuman blob.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Napoleon the Great, by Andrew Roberts”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-21.
1. Another book recommendation! The Face of Battle.
May 31, 2025
QotD: Explaining the science to the non-scientific layperson
I’ve always thought that nearly all pop science books fall into one version or another of this trap. Either they abandon all attempts at explaining the difficult concept in simple terms, or they simplify and elide so much as to become actively misleading.2 I call the latter horn of the dilemma “string theory is like a taco”-syndrome, and it’s by far the more common failure case. This is because undersimplification makes your audience feel dumb, while oversimplification makes them feel smart, so you sell a lot more books by oversimplifying. Unfortunately the effects on the audience of oversimplification are far more dangerous and insidious. After reading something impenetrable, you at least still know that you don’t really understand it, so there’s still a chance for you to go on and learn it some other way. Reading an oversimplified explanation, however, can fool you into thinking that you now grasp the concept, when in reality all you’ve grasped is a lossy analogy that will lead you astray.
All of which is to say I think it’s pretty impressive how well [author David] Reich does at diving into some of the real statistical meat of his techniques while still making them comprehensible to a smart layman. He has the gift that the greatest scientific expositors possess of being able to communicate in simple terms what it is that makes a problem hard, and then also giving you the broad strokes of an elegant solution to that hard problem. He doesn’t pretend that he hasn’t left anything out, instead he points out exactly where he’s glossed over details, so that you can go back and look them up if you want. This doesn’t sound all that impressive, but it’s actually really freaking hard to pull off, especially in a field that’s new and hence hasn’t been reformulated and recondensed a hundred times until it’s turned into a crystalline version of itself.
Okay, what was your favorite interesting genetic fact that this book taught you about a contemporary population? Mine was definitely that the various Indian jatis are as genetically distinct from one another as the Ashkenazi Jews are from everybody else. Not one group, but hundreds and hundreds of groups, all living in close proximity to each other, have gone millennia with incredibly minimal genetic mixing. How is that possible? It makes me take some of the assertions made by classical Indian texts a little bit more seriously.
Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.
1. It always bothered me when people ragged on Insane Clown Posse for expressing humility and awe at magnets. In fact their attitude is exactly the appropriate one. Back when ICP were in the news more often, I made a minor hobby of demanding that anybody who made fun of them explain magnets scientifically to me on the spot. Nobody ever succeeded.
2. And sometimes, remarkably, a pop science book manages to make both mistakes at the same time. I’m reminded of Edward Frenkel’s horrible book Love & Math, which is full of passages like: “Think of the Hitchin fibration as a box of donuts, except that there are donuts attached not only to a grid of points in the base of the carton box, but to all points in the base. So we have infinitely many donuts — Homer Simpson would sure love that! It turns out that the mirror dual Hitchin moduli space, the one associated to the Langlands dual group, is also a donut topic/fibration over the same base. Donuts. Is there anything they can’t do?”
May 19, 2025
QotD: Food for Medieval English peasants
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
1. We’re used to thinking of plants as being seasonal, but until quite recently animal products were seasonal too: chickens won’t lay in the winter without artificial lighting, cows stop giving milk when their calves reach a certain age, and generally one would only slaughter an animal for its meat at the right time of year. Geese, for instance, were typically eaten either as a “green goose”, brought up on summer grasses and slaughtered as soon as it reached adult size around the middle of July, or a “stubble goose”, fattened again on what remained in the fields after harvest and eaten for Michaelmas (in late September). Feeding a goose all autumn and half the winter only to eat it for Christmas would have been silly.
2. It’s also typical of New England, which makes sense; the New Englanders by and large came from East Anglia, which is right on the Newcastle-London coal route and a region that adopted coal cookery relatively early.
May 7, 2025
QotD: China’s millennia-long struggles between farmers and nomads
But this time it wasn’t just Chinese peasants moving around and changing the way they lived. For the first time in recorded history, the Chinese civilizational heartland of the Yellow River valley was invaded and occupied by a massive number of non-Chinese people. It’s an extremely sensitive and difficult to discuss topic in China, but there is genetic evidence of substantial steppe admixture in Northern Chinese lineages, and it seems likely that this is around when it kicked off. Meanwhile, remember that huge numbers of Northern Chinese were migrating to the South at around this time. Our best guess from both ancient DNA and linguistic2 evidence is that the modern Southern Chinese are pretty close to what the Northern Chinese were a couple thousand years ago, while the modern Northern Chinese have a good amount of Turkic and Mongolic ancestry.
The thing is you don’t even need to look at the genetics, it’s also quite apparent from the literary, artistic, and military record that over time a hybrid aristocracy emerged in the North with influences from both the old Chinese nobility and the invaders. The change is visible in everything from fighting style (suddenly Chinese armies are using cavalry), to fashion (pants!), to preferred hobbies (suddenly a lot more archery and falconry). It was this mixed-blood elite that finally reunified North and South China, and eventually gave rise to the glorious Tang dynasty.
This may have been the most shocking fact I learned from this book. I’d always thought of the Tang as the most quintessentially Chinese of all Chinese rulers (and moreover the real beginning of “modern” Chinese history). Chinese people tend to think that way too — “Tang” is a still-used archaic ethnonym for the Chinese ethnicity (the same way that it’s recently gotten trendy in the West to use a different archaic ethnonym, also the name of an ancient dynasty, “Han”).3 The idea that the Tang actually represented an intrusion of alien Turkic influences into Chinese society is not at all the mainstream view within China, but it’s pretty much the Western scholarly consensus, and Graff lays it out convincingly.
There’s a lot more to say about the great Tang, and this book has a lot of details on their expeditions past the Tarim Basin into Central Asia and their battles with Arab armies. But all of that is getting back into the well-covered part of Chinese history, the part that you can read about anywhere else. And I’ve gotten all the way to the end of this review while neglecting the most important part: were there preppers in the Jin dynasty, and if so how did they deal with the total breakdown of society followed by two centuries of anarchy?
Were there ever. While most of the country fell prey to bands of marauders and tribesmen who roamed the land committing unspeakable crimes, there were a few village headmen and petty aristocrats who constructed fortifications, stockpiled food and weaponry, and carved order out of chaos. There, in their redoubts, they kept the flame of civilization alive and sheltered their people against the long night. If you ever run into me at a party, there’s even odds I’ll quote this passage at you:
When his home was threatened by troops of one of the princely armies in 301, [Yu Gun, a minor official] led his kinsmen and other members of the community into the high country to the northwest. “In this high and dangerous defile, he blocked the footpaths, erected fortifications, planted [defensive] hedges, examined merit, made measurements, equalized labor and rest, shared possessions, repaired implements, measured strength and employed the able, making all things correspond to what they should.” On several occasions when bandits threatened his hilltop sanctuary, he was able to deter them simply by deploying his armed followers in orderly ranks.
There’s so much that’s beautiful in this passage, I feel like I could write an entire book about it. One thing I love is the way it embodies Joseph de Maistre’s aphorism that “contre-révolution ne sera point une révolution contraire, mais le contraire de la révolution.” Yu doesn’t just oppose strength with strength, he battles the insanity and entropic forces raging outside his walls by creating hierarchy, tranquility, and harmony within. His “armed followers in orderly ranks” are a military manifestation of the “making all things correspond to what they should” that preceded them. And there’s something very profound and very true in the image of the forces of disorder recoiling from his little island of civilization like a vampire faced with a crucifix.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900 by David A. Graff”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-06-05.
1. Yes, alas, this means some of the death tolls parodied in the “Chinese history be like” meme are almost certainly exaggerations. When the census says 160 million one year and 120 million the next, it’s possible that a ton of people died, but it’s also possible that it just got a lot harder to take a census.
2. All the high mountains and sheltered valleys in Southern China mean it has massively greater linguistic diversity than the North, but many of those languages actually turn out on closer inspection to be snapshots of Northern Chinese languages at some much earlier point in history. It’s more evidence, consistent with the genetic evidence, that repeated waves of migrants have entered Southern China from the North, and then stayed fairly isolated.
3. The word in Chinese for overseas Chinatowns literally translates as something like “Tang people street”.
April 23, 2025
QotD: Why most westerners aren’t having kids
John: I am a simple man, and prefer simple (preferably materialist) explanations. It’s effective birth control, duh.
Oh, I’m sure all the stuff [Family Unfriendly author Timothy P.] Carney talks about in his book plays some role. All the economic factors and the regulatory factors and the changed social expectations and the lack of sidewalks, and the blah blah blah. But why did those things all happen, all of a sudden? It’s actually very simple — now you can have sex without children necessarily resulting.
The correct way to view all the changes that Carney lists is as a sort of transmission belt that has slowly and inexorably propagated and magnified the effects of the one, very simple technological change that occurred. The story goes something like this: birth control is introduced, but large families are still normative and supported by generations of cultural accretion. So people still have an above-replacement number of kids, because they remember their mothers and grandmothers having 10 or 12 kids, and because society is still basically set up for families. But time passes, and culture gradually shifts to accommodate material reality. Law and economics follow culture. The next generation remembers their parents having 3 or 4, and maybe manages 1 or 2 themselves. The fewer people are having lots of kids, the less of a constituency there is for having lots of kids, and the harder society makes it, further turning the screws on marginal parents.
One objection from those who disdain the simple, materialist explanation is that the change didn’t happen overnight. The transmission belt theory nicely addresses this — it doesn’t happen overnight because societies have culture, and culture has inertia. Even insanely messed-up cultures that are inimical to human flourishing are hard to change. A residual, pro-childrearing cultural hangover can last for a while after the facts on the ground shift, and means people keep having babies for a little while. But it can’t last forever. Eventually it crumbles.
The other big objection to this theory, one Carney raises himself, is that if you do surveys of people, especially women, they report having fewer children than they want. So, the argument goes, it can’t just be birth control, because if it were people would have all the kids they want. But the answer to this is so obvious I’m shocked it isn’t apparent to Carney. People have high time-preference. People procrastinate. People are really bad at doing things which are hard in the short-term but make you happy in the long-term. The great thing about unprotected sex is that it connects your short-term and long-term happiness. As soon as you have the option to not have a baby right now, this time, it’s awfully tempting to say: “you know, I totally want all the diapers and spit-up eventually, but not this time, maybe next time”. In other words, people only reach the actual number of children they want via happy accidents or, in the old days, by having all thoughts of long-term consequences banished by good old-fashioned lust. This is literally why evolution made sex fun. The position of having to make an affirmative decision to have a baby is completely unnatural, and sometimes I’m amazed that anybody does it at all.
So you wind up with people like the friend I mentioned at the end of this book review (who, by the way, a year and a half later is still no closer to having a baby). Desperately wanting a child, sort of, but too neurotic or hesitant or conflicted or something to do it. In the old days, it would have been simpler, because they wouldn’t have had a choice. Biology would have made the decision for them, and a few years later they’d be happily bouncing a baby on their knee (or miserably bouncing a baby, whatever, the point is they’d have a baby). I really think that’s all there is to it. What truly blows my mind is that Carney wrote an entire book about this stuff while barely mentioning birth control (and only discussing its second-order cultural effects when he did). Presumably he had orders from his Jesuit masters to avoid the topic lest his cover be blown.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Family Unfriendly, by Timothy P. Carney”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-10-14.
April 13, 2025
QotD: The 15-minute city
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles C. Mann”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-01-22.
April 7, 2025
QotD: The new Neolithic agrarian villages allowed for the development of the parasitic state
And just as this way of life — [Against the Grain author James C.] Scott calls it the “Neolithic agro-complex”, but it’s really just another bundle of social and physical technologies — inadvertently created niches for the weeds that thrive in recently-tilled fields1 and the fleas that live on our commensal vermin, it also created a niche for the state. The Neolithic village’s unprecedented concentration of manpower, arable land, and especially grain made the state possible. Not that the state was necessary, mind you — the southern Mesopotamian alluvium had thousands of years of sedentary agriculturalists living in close proximity to one another before there was anything resembling a state — but Scott writes that there was “no such thing as a state that did not rest on an alluvial, grain-farming population”. This was true in the Fertile Crescent, it was true along the Nile, it was true in the Indus Valley, and it was true in the loess soils of “Yellow” China.2 And Scott argues that it’s all down to grain, because he sees taxation at the core of state-making and grain is uniquely well-suited to being taxed.
Unlike cassava, potatoes, and other tubers, grain is visible: you can’t hide a wheatfield from the taxman. Unlike chickpeas, lentils, and other legumes, grain all ripens at once: you can’t pick some of it early and hide or eat it before the taxman shows up. Moreover, unhusked grain stores particularly well, can be divided almost infinitely for accounting purposes (half a cup of wheat is a stable and reliable store of value, while a quarter of a potato will rot), and has a high enough value per unit volume that it’s economically worthwhile to transport it long distances. All this means that sedentary grain farmers become taxable in a way that hunter-gatherers, nomadic pastoralists, swiddeners, and other “nongrain peoples” are not, because you know exactly where to find them and exactly when they can be expected to have anything worth taking. And then, of course, you’ll want to build some walls to protect your valuable grain-growing subjects from other people taking their grain (and also, perhaps, to keep them from running for the hills), and you’ll want systems of measurement and record-keeping so you know how much you can expect to get from each of them, and pretty soon, hey presto! you have something that looks an awful lot like civilization.
The thing is, though, that Scott doesn’t think this is an improvement. It certainly wasn’t an improvement for the new state’s subjects, who were now forced into backbreaking labor to produce a grain surplus in excess of their own needs (and prevented from leaving their work), and it wasn’t an improvement for the non-state (or, later, other-state) peoples who were constantly being conquered and relocated into the state’s core territory as new domesticated subjects to be worked just like its domesticated animals. In fact, he goes so far as to suggest that our archaeological records of “collapse” — the abandonment and/or destruction of the monumental state center, usually accompanied by the disappearance of elites, literacy, large-scale trade, and specialist craft production — in fact often represent an increase in general human well-being: everyone but the court elite was better off outside the state. “Collapse”, he argues, is simply “the disaggregation of a complex, fragile, and typically oppressive state into smaller, decentralized fragments”. Now, this may well have been true of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium in 3000 BC, where every statelet was surrounded by non-state, non-grain peoples hunting and fishing and planting and herding, but it’s certainly not true of a sufficiently “domesticated” people. Were the oppida Celts, with their riverine trading networks, better off than their heavily urbanized Romano-British descendants? Well, the Romano-Britons had running water and heated floors and nice pottery to eat off of and Falernian wine to drink, but there’s certainly a case to be made that these don’t make up for lost freedoms. But compare them with the notably shorter and notably fewer involuntarily-rusticated inhabitants of sub-Roman Britain a few hundred years later and even if you don’t think running water is worth much (you’re wrong), you have to concede that the population nosedive itself suggests that there is real human suffering involved in the “collapse” of a sufficiently widespread civilization.3
But even this is begging the question. We can argue about the relative well-being of ordinary people in various sorts of political situations, and it’s a legitimately interesting topic, both in what data we should look at — hunter-gatherers really do work dramatically less than agriculturalists4 — and in debating its meaning.5 And Scott’s final chapter, “The Golden Age of the Barbarians”, makes a pretty convincing case that they were materially better off than their state counterparts, especially once the states really got going and the barbarians could trade with or raid them to get the best of both worlds! But however we come down on all these issues, we’re still assuming that the well-being of ordinary people — their freedom from labor and oppression, their physical good health — is the primary measure of a social order. And obviously it ain’t nothing — salus populi suprema lex and so forth — but man does not live by
breada mosaic of non-grain foodstuffs alone. There are a lot of important things that don’t show up in your skeleton! We like civilization not because it produces storehouses full of grain and clay tablets full of tax records, but because it produces art and literature and philosophy and all the other products of our immortal longings. And, sure, this was largely enabled by taxes, corvée labor, conscription, and various forms of slavery, but on the other hand we have the epic of Gilgamesh.6 And obviously you don’t get art without civilization, which is to say the state. Right?Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: Against the Grain, by James C. Scott”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-21.
1. Oats apparently began as one of them!
2. It was probably also true in Mesoamerica and the Andes, where maize was the grain in question, but Scott doesn’t get into that.
3. No, the population drop cannot be explained by all the romanes eunt domus.
4. That famous “twenty hours a week” number you may have heard is bunk, but it’s really only about forty, and that includes all the housekeeping, food preparation, and so forth that we do outside our forty-hour workweeks.
5. For example, does a thatched roof in place of ceramic tiles represent #decline, or is it a sensible adaptation to more local economy? Or take pottery, which is Bryan Ward-Perkins’s favorite example in his excellent case that no really, Rome actually did fall: a switch in the archaeological record from high-quality imported ceramics to rough earthenwares made from shoddy local clays is definitely a sign of societal simplification, but it isn’t prima facie obvious that a person who uses the product of an essentially industrial, standardized process is “better off” than someone who makes their own friable, chaff-tempered dishes.
6. Or food rent and, uh, all of Anglo-Saxon literature, whatever.
March 29, 2025
QotD: Becoming a human being
She had kids, so despite having some ideological resistance to getting it, she got it. I got it too. It’s hard to describe what “it” is if you haven’t gotten it, but I’ll try to explain. The moment I first held my child, I had a vision of every human being who had ever done the same. I stood paralyzed, rooted to the spot while before my eyes a whole field of ancestors stretched back into the forgotten past, each cradling a baby just like I was doing. What was I without them? Nothing at all. A cosmic joke, a fluke, or a random collection of atoms. But with them, I was one stage of a process, a chapter of a story.
And not only that, but I was also no longer alone. It had always seemed to me that the problem of intersubjectivity could never be conquered, that between minds there yawned an unbridgeable epistemic chasm. Yet here was an experience that I shared with countless others from the most varied places and times, an experience I shared with emperors and with slaves. André Maurois once said: “Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold”. I had always thought he meant this in a practical, or perhaps an emotional sense, but I now realized it was even truer cosmically. I had, as my aunt said, become a human being.
I didn’t just see the past. In that moment, the future also resolved itself into dreadful clarity. I had always known intellectually that someday I would die, and that the world would continue mostly as it had, but I never really believed it. Anything beyond the horizon delimited by my lifetime had been hazy and indistinct. Not anymore. Now I regarded the newborn squirming in my arms, and knew with absolute certainty that if things went well this child would bury me, and then continue living. Suddenly the far-future mattered, I had skin in the game now. I was no longer a temporal provincial, past and future both had an immediate and urgent reality, and I knew that I would never think the same way about them again.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Children of Men by P.D. James”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-04-17.
1. This was in the days before cancellation, I’ve often wondered since then whether she would have allowed herself to think the thought today.
2. It also caused me to wonder whether people without living descendants should be permitted any political representation at all.
