Reading this book really makes it clear how nearly every aspect of Christianity was like a laser-guided bomb aimed at one or more of the pillars holding up the social order of ancient Mediterranean civilization.
Consider celibacy: Fustel de Coulanges examines several ancient legal codes and finds that in all of them the deliberate refusal to procreate was a crime that carried severe punishments. This makes total sense in light of all you’ve said — a man does not belong to himself, he belongs to his family, a diachronic (or transtemporal?) entity that lives in and through and above individuals. Deliberate celibacy would be like your hand or your kidney refusing to perform its assigned function and trying to murder you instead. Cancer, in other words. And the solution to cancer is to cut it out and destroy it.
Now imagine a religion praising cancer and vaunting the tumor as the highest form of biological life, and maybe we can feel a sliver of the horror that the ancients must have felt towards Christianity. And it wasn’t just celibacy either — in area after area Christianity emancipated individuals from the dense, ancient web of obligations, loyalties, and client-patron relationships. Loyalty to the city and loyalty to the family were both such incomparably important qualities for the ancients that Sophocles got several tragedies out of the collisions when they came into conflict, but Christianity in its most radical form says that both are ephemeral and contingent, and must be subordinated to a higher loyalty — fidelity to the Truth. To the ancients I bet this didn’t just seem like antisocial behavior, I bet it seemed like the apocalypse. No wonder there were so many martyrs. No wonder so many of them were martyred by their closest relations.
I’m almost tempted to say that that old snake Gibbon was right, it was Christianity that destroyed the Roman Empire, destroyed the entire ancient Mediterranean civilization that had lasted for a millennium or more, first bit-by-bit then all at once. But of course that isn’t quite right either. By the time Pentecost occurred, the dissolution was already well underway. Christianity massively accelerated a process that was inexorable by then, and changed the shape of what was to come after it, but the collapse was baked in.
Read any of the Roman authors from either shortly before or shortly after the Lord’s birth — Virgil, Cicero, Pliny, Suetonius — all of them, in one way or another, are obsessed with the unraveling of the matrix of tribal and familial relationships that Fustel de Coulanges describes. There were a lot of reasons for it, including but not limited to: mass migration to the cities, economic rationalization that replaced freehold farming with massive latifundia (plantations), and just the accumulated stresses from centuries of continuous warfare and expansion. The cumulative effect of all this was that a society formerly governed by ritual, familial and civic piety, tribe, and clan was transformed into an ocean of atomized and deracinated individuals engaging in mass politics.1
One of my favorite passages in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall2 is in the intro to the chapter on Alaric’s invasion of Italy. Gibbon contrasts this with Hannibal’s invasion 700 years earlier, and goes on this beautiful riff about how on paper, the Rome of the 5th century AD looks incomparably stronger than that of the 3rd century BC — it had a massively larger population, greater wealth, a greater technological edge over its opponents, etc. And yet when it came to a responsibility as basic as that of defense against a foreign invasion, all the GDP and technology in the world wasn’t able to make up for a lack of asabiyyah. When Hannibal annihilated the legions at the Battle of Cannae, something like 20% of the entire adult male population of Rome was killed, including most of her military and political leadership, to which the Romans simply gritted their teeth and raised a few more armies. The descendants of those heroes, despite having a vastly larger population to draw from, weren’t able to muster a single legion or a single capable commander, and surrendered their city to the Visigoths almost without a fight.
Rome was a rocket that soared into the sky and then came crashing back down, and it’s easiest to see it right at the apogee, the point midway between the first and the last great invasions of Italy. The first century glory days of Rome, the time that we moderns consider the height of her power, were actually a moment of deep institutional and social decay. Like an exothermic reaction — a bonfire or an explosion or a fireworks display — what we notice immediately is the ebullient, magnificent blaze. But it’s easier to miss all the fuel that’s being consumed: solidarity, economic resilience, social technology, all of it woven through with the tight bands of ancient law and custom that Fustel de Coulanges documents. Just as the Greek philosophy we love was an uncharacteristic flash in the pan, an evanescent moment that subverted and destroyed the culture that had given rise to it; so too the Roman imperial achievement was an engine fueled by a society and a citizen-soldiery that it quickly burned to cinders.
I wonder if every civilizational golden age would turn out to have this unsustainable character if you inspected it closely. If so it would explain a historical mystery, which is why these epochs are rare, and why they never last long. From this angle history looks a bit like a 2-stage cyclic phenomenon wherein the long “dark ages” are actually epochs of patient stewardship of economic, cultural, and demographic resources, whilst the short “golden ages” are a kind of manic civilizational fire sale of the accumulated inheritance. Maybe we need a new historiography founded on the idea that what we have heretofore considered dark ages are the true golden ages, and vice versa. This transvaluation of values would be like a temporal version of James Scott’s attempted reversal of civilization and barbarism.
Alas, while peasants could vote with their feet and migrate across the imperial frontier, our options for time travel are a bit more limited. Would we prefer to live in the cozy but constricting deep prehistory of a civilization, or in the wild glory of its last days? No doubt it would depend a lot on who we imagine being in each of these phases, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter, because we don’t have a choice. May as well sit back and enjoy watching the blaze. It will be beautiful and exhilarating while it lasts.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.
1. If this sounds familiar, it should. Whenever I read about first century Rome I always come away with a weirdly twentieth century vibe.
2. Yes, I’ve read the whole thing cover-to-cover. What? Why are you looking at me like that? There was a pandemic happening, okay?
July 18, 2025
QotD: Christianity destroyed the ancient Graeco-Roman culture
July 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.
March 20, 2025
QotD: “[T]here is no such thing as a secular society, every country has a state religion, and you won’t get very far opposing it”
Obviously I had to physically restrain myself from laughing at her. Assuming for the sake of argument that such differences exist and are easily measurable, only somebody totally autistic would think that mere scientific evidence for them would cause them to be acknowledged.2 Just look at all the ridiculous “sky is green” type beliefs that society already successfully forces everybody to internalize. You mentioned biological and cognitive differences between men and women, which are far more obvious and noticeable than those between populations, but which we successfully force everybody to pretend do not exist. And that’s far from the silliest thing everybody pretends to believe, in our society or in others.
Put it another way: there is no such thing as a secular society, every country has a state religion, and you won’t get very far opposing it. Were there people in Tenochtitlan who secretly believed that blood pouring down the sides of the great step pyramid day and night wasn’t actually necessary to placate the gods? Yeah probably, but if any of them had tried to point that out, they would have been laughed at (and sacrificed). Were there people in the Soviet Union who privately doubted whether dialectical materialism was the true engine of history? Probably, yes, but everybody besides Leonid Kantorovich was smart enough not to mention it.
What are the religious precepts on which our society is founded? There are a few, but a belief in absolute racial equality is clearly one of them, and that view is now enshrined in the “real” constitution (civil rights caselaw and its downstream effects on corporate HR). Anything which contradicts that precept is just a total nonstarter. If a few nerds somewhere found irrefutable evidence of important differences between groups, they would quietly hide it, and if some among them were like Reich too autistic or principled to do that, they would be ignored, shouted down, or persecuted. Possibly this would even be a good thing — every society needs its orthodoxies, and sometimes those who corrupt the youth need to drink the hemlock.
We’ve gotten far afield, though. As an inveterate shape-rotator, my favorite part of the book was Reich’s description of the statistical and mathematical techniques that can be used to determine when population bottlenecks occurred, how recently two populations shared a common ancestor, and when various mixing events occurred.
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. Not to get all “Dems are the real racists”, but anecdotally this view does seem slightly more prevalent among my left-wing friends than my right-wing friends, though that seems to currently be changing.
2. Somebody totally autistic or somebody who had already drunk the kool-aid on literally every other ridiculous official viewpoint imposed by our society. In her case it was probably the latter. As I said she was a leftist, and women in general are much less likely to be autistic but much more likely to value social conformity.
March 12, 2025
QotD: A different parable of democracy’s origins
Then one day, somebody came up with a daring suggestion: what if instead of actually fighting a civil war, they instead had a pretend civil war. The two contenders for the throne would arm-wrestle, and everybody would treat the winner as if he had actually won the civil war, and thus many lives would be saved. Everybody applauded this idea, unfortunately the first time it was tried the loser of the arm-wrestling contest decided to try his luck anyways, broke the deal, started the civil war, and won. The problem with this approach is that it’s “unstable”, because one’s ability to win an arm-wrestle is only loosely correlated with one’s ability to win a hypothetical civil war. The rule-by-arm-wrestle system can work so long as nobody challenges it, but as soon as somebody does, it’s prone to collapse.
Then somebody else observed that in the last few civil wars, the side with the bigger army always won, and proposed that instead of settling the succession on the battlefield, the two sides simply count up the number of soldiers they would be able to muster, and the side with the largest hypothetical army would win without the war being fought. Note how different this situation is from the previous proposal! This time, the defeated party of the fake, simulated war has good reason not to be a sore loser, because he’s just seen that if the matter really came to blows, he’d probably lose. The solution is “stable” in this sense, all sides are incentivized to accept the outcome. And thus democracy was born.
I like this as a pragmatic argument for a loosely democratic system. It has nothing to do with the moral case for popular sovereignty, or whether it is right and just for the governed to have a say in government, it’s simply about avoiding violent instability by giving everybody a sneak peek at how the putative civil war might turn out, then all agreeing to not have it. But this theory has another selling-point, which is that it also tells us why democracy arose when it did, and why it may now be on the way out. If the principle is that governments will tend towards a form and structure and rule of succession that’s closely tied to their ability to fend off challengers, the that suggests that the most common form of government will depend heavily on what the dominant military technology and strategy of its era happens to be.
For example: in the early Middle Ages, wars were fought by a much smaller number of people, and success in warfare was more dependent on the actions of an elite group of professional soldier-aristocrats. And sure enough, political power was also concentrated in the hands of this much smaller group, because in the event that somebody decided to contest the state, it was the opinion of this group that mattered, not the opinions of everybody.
Sometime in the nineteenth century, the “meta” for total warfare changed dramatically. The combination of mass production, replaceable parts in machinery, and new weaponry that was deadly even in the hands of the untrained masses, all meant that suddenly the pure, arithmetic quantity of men under arms on each side became a much more potent factor in the military calculus. Is it any wonder that a little while later, democracy began to spread like wildfire around the globe? Mass suffrage and mass conscription are inextricably bound with one another. The people have generally ruled in our lifetimes, but only because a little while before (these things always operate on a lag) wars were decided by masses of conscripts with rifles.
There’s no rule that says this connection between military success and popular support has to hold true forever, and in fact it probably won’t. You can imagine this going a few different ways. Perhaps the conflicts of the future will be settled by vast swarms of autonomous killer robots, and the winner will be whoever can produce the best robots the fastest. This world might be conducive to rule by industrial conglomerates and robber-barons, a return to the great age of oligarchy, but with a less aristocratic, more plutocratic spin. If we look to the past, there was a class of societies whose militaries had an extreme ratio of capital intensity to labor intensity — the Mediterranean merchant republics with their fleets and their mercenary armies of condottieri. If future wars are settled by robots, we may find ourselves bowing to a new, doubtless very different, doge.
There’s another possible world, where control of information becomes supreme. You can think of this world as being an intensification of our current one, with an arms race of ever more sophisticated techniques for swaying the masses. Surface democracy spins out of control as an ecosystem of competing psychological operations vie to program or reprogram or deprogram swarms of bewildered and unsuspecting voters, alternatingly using them as betting chips and battering rams. This is a world ruled by the meme lords — brutally efficient teams of spin doctors, influencers, AIs, and the occasional legacy media organization. Like I said, pretty much just an intensified version of our current world.
My guess, however, is that neither of these worlds will come to pass, but instead a third one. The history of military technology is a history of the ancient contest between offensive technologies and defensive technologies, with both sides having held the crown at various points. We may be about to see the balance shift decisively in favor of offensive technologies, with extreme political consequences. Arguably we’ve been in that world ever since the invention of the atom bomb, but WMDs haven’t affected this strategic calculus as much as you might guess, due to all the issues surrounding their use (to be clear, this is a good thing).
Technology marches on, however, and I believe there’s a chance that it’s about to deliver us into a new golden age of assassination.1 Between miniaturized drones with onboard target recognition, bioengineered plagues designed to target exactly one person, and a host of more creative ideas that I don’t even want to write about for fear of summoning them into existence, it may soon become very dangerous to be a public figure with any enemies — that is to say, dangerous to be a public figure at all. What kind of men will rule such a world, where your reign could end the moment somebody discovers it?
Two kinds of men: men with nothing to lose, and men that you will never find. This world of ever-present threat to those with power is a world eerily well adapted to governance by grey, faceless men in grey, faceless buildings. A world of conspiracies hatched in unobtrusive exurban office parks, of directives concealed within stacks of paperwork, where the primary goal of power is to hide itself from view. In other words it’s the world that MITI already inhabits. As in so many things, the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: MITI and the Japanese Miracle by Chalmers Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-04-03.
1. Japan had a high-profile and socially traumatizing assassination just recently. I find it noteworthy that Abe was killed when he wasn’t Prime Minister anymore, but was perhaps more influential than ever as a deep state power player.
February 27, 2025
QotD: The ANC, the Inkatha Freedom Party, and the Zulus during Apartheid
Those lessons were enthusiastically put into practice — the ANC set up a network of death camps in Angola at which traitors and enemies and just plain inconvenient people were worked or tortured to death. They also founded a paramilitary terrorist army called uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) that waged a brutal dirty war, supposedly against the apartheid government but actually against anybody they didn’t like. The vast majority of the victims of MK were black people who happened not to support the ANC, especially Zulus in their tribal homeland in what’s now KwaZulu-Natal province, who were subjected to regular massacres in the 80s and early 90s.
The ANC and the MK had a special hatred for the Zulus. In part, because the ANC’s leadership was disproportionately Xhosa, and their ancestors had suffered during King Shaka’s wars of expansion in the 19th century. But this ancient ethnic grudge wasn’t the fundamental problem, and indeed it was later papered over. The real problem was that the Zulus dared to engage in political organization outside the ANC and its subsidiary, the South African Communist Party (SACP). The preferred Zulu political vehicle was the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which was associated with the Zulu monarchy and the traditional amakhosi (chieftains). This made it an independent base of power within black South Africa, and a competing claim on the loyalty of Zulu citizens. The ANC considered this situation unacceptable.
Like many avowedly communist organizations, the ANC was allergic to political competition of any sort. Internally, the party practiced an especially harsh form of democratic centralism — most policy decisions were made by a tiny and incestuous central committee, and members were expected to be totally submissive in the face of party discipline. This extended even to the point of party permission being necessary for senior members to marry. Externally, the party had an entitled attitude common to successful revolutionary organizations from North Korea to Albania — they were the incarnation of the aspirations of the South African people and the vanguard of their brilliant future, so all other political organizations were ipso facto illegitimate. Can you guess what happened when these people were handed power?
John Psmith, “REVIEW: South Africa’s Brave New World, by R.W. Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-03-20.
February 16, 2025
QotD: Why we’re stagnating
Their explanation for our doldrums is simple: we’re more risk averse, and we don’t care as much about the future. Risk aversion means stagnation, because any attempt to make things better involves risk: it could also make things worse, or it could fail and turn out to be a waste of time and money. Trying to invent a crazy new technology is risky, going into consulting or finance is safe. Investing in unproven startups or speculative bets is risky, investing in index funds is safe. Trying to overturn the scientific consensus is risky, keeping your head down and publishing papers that don’t say anything is safe. Producing challenging new art is risky, spewing an endless stream of Marvel superhero capeshit is safe. Even if, in every case, the safe option is the “rational” choice for an individual actor in maximin expected value terms, the sum total of these individually rational choices is a catastrophe for society.
So far this is a lame, almost tautological, explanation. Even if it’s all true, we still haven’t explained why people are so much more fearful of failure than they used to be. In fact, we would naively assume the opposite — society is much richer now, social safety nets much more robust, and in the industrialized world even the very poor needn’t fear starvation. In a very real sense, it’s never been safer to take risks. Failing as a startup founder or academic means you experience slightly lower lifetime earnings,1 while, in the great speculative excursions of the past, failure (and sometimes even success) meant death, scurvy, amputations, destitution, children sold into slavery or raised in poorhouses — basically unbounded personal catastrophe. And yet we do it less and less. Why?
Well, for starters, we aren’t the same people. Biologically, that is. We’re old, and old people tend to be more risk-averse in every way. Old people have more to lose. Old people also have less testosterone in their bloodstream. The population structure of our society has shifted drastically older because we aren’t having any children. This not only increases the relative number (and hence relative power) of older people, it also has direct effects on risk-aversion and future-orientation. People with fewer children have all their eggs in fewer baskets. They counsel those kids to go into safe professions and train them from birth to be organization kids. People with no children at all are disconnected from the far future, reinforcing the natural tendency of the elderly to favor consumption in the here and now over investment in a future they may never get to enjoy.
Old age isn’t the only thing that reduces testosterone levels. So does just living in the 21st century. The declines are broad-based, severe, and mysterious. Very plausibly they are downstream of microplastics and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals. The same chemicals may have feminizing effects beyond declines in serum testosterone. They could also be affecting the birth rate, one of many ways that these explanations all swirl around and flow into one another. Or maybe we don’t even need to invoke old age and microplastics to explain the decline in average testosterone of decisionmakers in our society. Many more of those decisionmakers are women, and women are vastly more risk-averse on average.2
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Boom, by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-11-11.
1. And given the logarithmic hedonic utility of additional money and fame, that hurts even less than it sounds like it would.
2. If you’re too lazy to read Jane’s review of Bronze Age Mindset but just want the evidence that women are more cautious and consensus-seeking than men on average, try this and this and this for starters.
