On the eloquence of the ancients

One of the frequent complaints about modernity that both reactionaries and conservatives agree upon is the lamentable decline in the standards of public discourse. This is pretty clearly true, and you can show it in various different ways.

For instance, Thomas Jefferson spoke English, French, Italian, Latin, and could also read Spanish and Greek. The highly educated Barack Obama spoke... just English.

If you want a non-political example, consider Paul Fussell's observation about World War I poetry. Wilfred Owen, when writing his poem "Dulce et Decorum Est", could write as the ending lines to his famous poem, an untranslated Latin phrase from Horace, with confidence that his audience, which included privates in the army, would know what he meant.

Or, if you think I'm cherry-picking this, price-onomics computed the reading grade-level of the State of the Union address over time. If you plot it versus the starting year of the president's term, this is what you get:

Which, I will readily acknowledge, looks a lot like a slow descent into idiocracy.

And, to be fair, this is my depressing first order assessment of how the matter stands.

But, if I were to put a small positive spin on this, it would be the following.

Suppose that the level of reading education has declined precipitously. Conceptually, this could be because

i) The total amount of education has declined. 

ii) The efficiency per hour of education has declined. 

iii) The fraction of education devoted to reading has declined

Out of these, I'm pretty sure #1 isn't the case. We spend more time in school and college than ever. Not only that, but the biggest increase is probably among the least educated, who once upon a time would have gone straight into agricultural jobs, etc.

The second part I'd be willing to believe. We spend endless time on pozz and diversity propaganda, whereas back in the past they were probably drilled on the important stuff and didn't screw around.

But I think the biggest underappreciated factor is #3.

In particular, it's easy to forget just how enormous the increase in education was in quantitative disciplines. I suspect, but can't prove, that the fraction of people that are learning calculus, chemistry, and physics is a lot higher. In particular, without a calculator, a lot of these disciplines become much more labor intensive in terms of how many calculation examples you can give to illustrate a principle. 

There's an even more concrete example.

The field of statistics as we know it didn't really exist until Sir Francis Galton invented it in the mid-19th century. Don't believe me? He came up with standard deviation, correlation, regression, and regression to the mean. Try, if you will, to imagine what your statistics class would have been like before that. There's the mean, and...um... the mean?

And without these tools, think how many other discussions become impoverished.

Economics doesn't have any data without computers. But without regression and correlation, it doesn't have any meaningful way to discuss causation, or to resolve arguments with data (even if you were willing to do it by hand). Hence the whole discipline becomes only theory. And theory back then was largely essays. Economics didn't become mathematical until Von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern and Paul Samuelson, all of whom did their major work after World War 2. Finance as a serious academic discipline didn't exist before Harry Markowitz, around the same time. And this is without discussing the disciplines that trivially didn't exist, like computer science, and those that only became formalised later, like psychology.

Take out all of the high school and college education devoted to these subjects, and ask yourself - what's left to do other than read the classics and learn languages? Not only this, if you could erase all your knowledge of the above subjects and replace it with more eloquence and knowledge of the classics...would you? Would the bargain seem worth it?

To me, it's not obvious at all.  

As I wrote about a while ago - expressions of a desire to do some self-improvement task are pretty much like a politician's unfunded campaign promises. That is, unless you specify exactly what in your week it is you're willing to give up in order to make it happen, it's not actually a serious plan. And just like in politics, the two standard answers are both bad. I'll get rid of waste and duplication! In your life, like in politics, there is assuredly waste and duplication, but it's similarly assured that you probably won't get rid of it. Or you'll just run a budget deficit by sleeping less. Which works in the long run about as well as you'd expect.

So it is with the importance of a classical education. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It just means that simply cutting out the modern leftist propaganda from the curriculum won't turn you into Jefferson. You've got to cut much closer to the bone, into subjects that actually do matter.

The other lesson, of course, is that Sir Francis Galton was a god damn genius, and is criminally underappreciated. It's hard to imagine the social sciences existing without him.

The Protocols of the Elders of Albion

As part of my slow, winding journey through the canon of Moldbug primary sources, I recently finished Ernst Graf zu Reventlow's "Vampire of the Continent". Moldbug describes it as "German World War I propaganda", and I think that's a fair description. If you know what I think on the subject of propaganda, I don't think this should even vaguely be a knock against reading it. A quick test is the following: can you accurately summarise a case for why the German cause in WWI was just? If not, chances are that reading a strident defense of the cause will be quite illuminating.

That said, the book is less a strict account of the leadup to WWI, and much more a general slander on Great Britain's character and history. You can think of it, in other words, as the Protocols of the Elders of Albion, except that instead of being a forgery that purported to be from the mouths of Britons themselves, it's just a standard case for the prosecution. Because the approximate message is "England is responsible for screwing up European countries for the last 500 years". This is an interesting counterpoint to the usual sins of the British Empire from the leftist perspective, which tend to wax lyrical about its treatment of native peoples in its colonies. But you seldom hear very much at all about its apparent injustices against other European countries.

Reventlow's history of England proposes several key aspects to the English character. In his telling, in the 16th and 17th century, England was essentially a pirate nation, using its large fleet to slowly predate on other nations' shipping. Having then an advantage on shipping, it used this to take over other European colonies - once cut off from reinforcements from home by the shipping advantage, they were unable to withstand English naval attacks, and so even though England discovered relatively few new land areas itself, it nonetheless ended up with a very large empire. From there, it pursued a strong policy of mercantilism, reacting hostilely to any other nation that seemed to be developing a significant trading and shipping business, partly by securing rights in foreign ports which it then used to monopolise trade in those areas. Finally, it pursued a policy on the continent of setting one European power against another, using others to fight its battles and form alliances against whichever country was looking most threatening at the time as a potential competitor.

Let's take this as all being true, if just for the purposes of argument. There's a couple of responses one might have to this as a European, and specifically a German:

1. Huh! Those Brits really are better at the Great Game than we are, and we are dupes and fools for repeatedly being suckered and bested. Hats off to them!

2. The British succeed by using low and disreputable tactics that mark them as villains and blackguards. They are hostis humani generis, and all civilised nations should ally to defeat them.

It seems pretty clear that #2 is what Reventlow is going for. He embraces the second half of #1 (many Germans are too honest and too naive to understand Britain's perfidy), but he seldom acknowledges what a Machiavellian would say - the Brits played a tight game, and honor be damned when it comes to nations.

You see this interplay in a variety of places. For instance, during the Napoleonic Wars, England's main early contribution was... the destruction of the Danish Navy in 1807. This was for the crime of continuing to trade with revolutionary France, but also just proved handy in general, because it's one less country with a threatening navy. Meanwhile, Spanish and German troops did most of the actual fighting against Napoleon, and Europe as a whole ended up significantly weakened.

#2 works pretty well for describing the ways Britain strangled other countries' navies and trade, which seem pretty grim, if effective.

But take #2 has a much harder time with the issue of why other European nations kept lining up to fight its battles. Ally with the Dutch to fight for independence against the Spanish when Spain was strong, and do so in the name of protecting Protestantism. Keep this up until the Dutch look like they might be getting too strong, then ally with France to fight the Dutch.  Ally with the German nations to beat Napoleonic France. When the Russians start looking too strong and might threaten business interests in Asia, ally with the Ottomans and the French to fight them and let the French take most of the casualties. Stay out of it when Prussia and France fight each other. etc.

In the Reventlow telling, Britain's opposition to Germany came relatively late, in part because Germany had been devastated by the 30 Years War. Hence the policy of "gang up on the most threatening European power" didn't turn its attention to Germany until the late 19th and early 20th century. Reventlow claims, quite credibly, that without the devastation of the 30 Years War, Germany might have been a major power much sooner.

If you want a summary of the mindset that does purport to be exactly the same sentiment, except spoken from the mouths of British civil servants, Yes Minister does it quite well:

Sir Humphrey: Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it's worked so well?

Hacker: That's all ancient history, surely?

Sir Humphrey: Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing [the EEC] up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work. Now that we're inside we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing — set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch... The Foreign Office is terribly pleased; it's just like old times.

Hacker: But surely we're all committed to the European ideal?

Sir Humphrey: [chuckles] Really, Minister.

Hacker: If not, why are we pushing for an increase in the membership?

Sir Humphrey: Well, for the same reason. It's just like the United Nations, in fact; the more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes.

Hacker: What appalling cynicism.

Sir Humphrey: Yes... We call it diplomacy, Minister.

Cynical, and yet apparently very effective.

On the other hand, there are certain actions that England took that do just look straight out predatory. If one is trying to evaluate a theory like the current one, it's somewhat useful to find facts where the theory offers a competing explanation to the standard one. Of course, to evaluate the relative merits often requires a lot more research. An easier test for the lazy, and somewhat more illuminating one, is to find facts where one realises that one essentially has no theory at all, and this offers the first one.

For instance, why is Quebec part of Canada? I knew about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, and the question of how it ended up part of Britain's colonies. But there's the other question of why. Suppose that you were a generally civic-minded leader of Britain. You already had a lot of colonies in North America by 1758. Not only that, it's a gigantic continent with a relatively sparse population, mostly made up of Indians that you have been pretty successful in driving out. The French have a few colonies up in the frozen north. Where would you choose to expand? Would you:

a) Live and let live, leave the French to their part, and settle somewhere else up the enormous East Coast of North America? Prosperous French colonies will then come to our aid if needed, or at least make good trading partners.

b) Instead of taking uninhabited land, engage in a seven years' long conflict to crush and subjugate all the French colonies in North America?

Obviously the answer is b)! And that's why you're some nice guy reading a blog, and not the leader of a world-bestriding empire.

Or, to take another example - what the hell happened to Spain? How did it go from being the most powerful country in the world in 1500, to being a joke and a basket case by 1900, getting humiliated and having most of its last of its colonies taken off it by the US?

I suspect most people don't have a good answer on hand to this question, other than some shrug and reference to the tides of history. But Reventlow has a theory. And it's that Britain invested heavily in shipping, and used this to predate on Spanish treasure ships coming back from its colonies. England fought off the Spanish Armada and sank a good fraction of its ships in 1588, carved off various colonies and bled Spain the War of the Spanish Succession (while again letting continentals do most of the fighting), fought the Spanish fleet again at Trafalgar, etc.

Spain's power was, in this retelling, worn down by British political intrigues, military attacks, predation, and the slow grind of centuries that didn't have a decisive single moment that you can readily point to.

Is this the full story? Almost certainly not. Does it have a ring of possible truth to it? You bet. Do you have a better theory? If so, leave it in the comments. I sure didn't.

Similarly, I didn't know exactly what happened to Holland either. There was the Dutch Golden Age starting in the mid 1600s, and ... then what? England allying with France to defeat it, and then subjugating it further in the War of the Spanish succession, is a definitely plausible theory.

The question is, should we be outraged? Reventlow wants us to be, but the basis for this is not exactly obvious. Full Machiavellianism is an entirely defensible position when it comes to international relations - whatever works. Reventlow views it as unsporting or ungentlemanly to predate on other Europeans. But one doesn't have to be a full leftist to see that there's quite a large ethical blind spot as to how the European powers got their colonies in their first place. It being the early 20th century, the native peoples don't even rate a mention. But even more strikingly, not everyone who we would consider modern Europeans even rates a mention. The most hilarious instance of this is from the translator (an Irishman)'s introduction:

Founded on piracy, the British Empire has been built up at the expense of humanity. The English commenced by robbing the Spanish treasure-ships — acts of murderous and dastardly brigandage which are held up to Englishmen to-day as deeds of prowess. 

They continued by robbing Canada and the States from the French, Gibraltar from the Spaniards, India from the French and the Portuguese, South Africa from the Dutch, Egypt and Cyprus from the Turks, Malta from the Italians — and last, but not least, Ireland from the Irish. 

Germany, in fighting for her own existence, is fighting also for the liberation of the world. The great day of liberation will surely come, sooner or later. The condition sine qua non of that liberation is the destruction of England's maritime supremacy. 

For as long as England rules the waves, humanity must remain her slave. This is a fundamental truth. And another fundamental truth is that England's maritime supremacy cannot be destroyed until IRELAND IS A FREE COUNTRY. 

The one criticism which can be levelled against Count Reventlow's admirable work is that it has not sufficiently insisted on this second great truth. As long as Ireland remains a British colony — or, rather, a British fortress — England can at any time shut off the whole of Northern and Eastern Europe from all access to the ocean; even as, by means of Gibraltar and Port Said and Aden, she can close the Mediterranean. Ireland is the key to the Atlantic. Release Ireland from her bondage, and the Atlantic is at once opened up to Europe. 

Therefore must Ireland be restored to Europe, if Europe is to be free. An independent, neutral Irish Nation would be the natural bulwark of European liberty in the West. The freedom of Europe depends on the freedom of the seas ; and the freedom of the seas depends on the liberation of Ireland. 

In other words - I spent ages translating this damn thing from German out of a hatred of England, and this bastard doesn't even have the courtesy to mention Ireland anywhere. The hilarious part of this pitch is that he's left arguing that Ireland is actually super strategically important you guys!!! . Reventlow didn't forget to mention us because we're unimportant peasants whose rights get reduced to zero in the same way the Native Americans and Caribbean people do, no, he did so as a terrible strategic oversight.  It's not enough to say "I'm pissed because I happen to be Irish", no, you, American reader, should be convinced of the importance of liberating Ireland for the sake of its crucial role in global peace. Ireland was, of course, liberated in 1922, at which point a lasting peace broke out and England was no longer able to threaten anybody on the continent. Of course.

Stealing, in both the Reventlow and translator world, is a crime, but only if carried out against other Europeans. These days this doesn't strike us as a particularly compelling moral line in the sand, but that's all the more reason to read what people actually used to think. This was considered a sufficiently plausible viewpoint that the Germans paid to get the English translation shipped to the US, during WWI, by U-Boat. I didn't even know they had them in WW1, but there you go.

There are lots of other nuggets in there that are fascinating too. For instance, King Edward VII was claimed to have played a significant diplomatic role in 1904 in personally steering diplomatic efforts with regard to the Austrian Empire, and would make annual visits to the Austrian Emperor to this effect. This is something I'm always apt to forget, but Henry Maine would be at pains to emphasise - Kings in England had real power, long after the Glorious Revolution, and their influence was only lost slowly and gradually. Apparently in 1900 they were still significant players in setting state policy.  

The other aspect that's interesting is that the leadup to WW1 is really freaking complicated. My school history class just parachuted us in at the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip as being some sort of trigger of an odd set of alliances, without any real explanation of who he was or why. The fact that Austria had just annexed Serbia wasn't mentioned, let alone the question of why they'd done so (Turkey under the Young Turks was threatening various Austrian possessions, and Austria in turn... see, I told you it was complicated). 

Finally, another reason to read it is to get a view into a very old and very unfashionable mindset these days - mercantilism. The Reventlow depiction of the English is almost incomprehensible to a reader steeped in modern economics. When other nations go into recession, that's bad news for us. Comparative advantage and trade make us all richer. We want other countries to become rich, to buy more of our stuff. 

Yeah, not these guys. They want other countries broke and isolated, because this ensures they won't be a political threat, and lets us ship more of our own goods to other countries to dominate international trade and shipping.

It may be dumb economics, but is it dumb politics? That's much harder to say. And given how successful the Brits were at it, if you believe Reventlow at all, you have to give the idea more credit than you might have otherwise.

Overall, the case is obviously a highly partisan exaggeration, but an informative one nonetheless. There is a right wing case against the British Empire, even if it's largely forgotten, and even if it's somewhat confused.

When all is said and done, I'll give Reventlow this: the old school English were some tough and shrewd bastards, who played a tight game for centuries, and were stone cold killers if you got on the wrong side of them. No matter what you think of the overall merits of the British Empire, if you were standing on some land that they decided they wanted, in the immediate future you were going to have a pretty bad time. A contrary to what modern leftists would have you believe, being Spanish or French, as opposed to Native American, Indian, African or anything else, didn't commend them to you in the slightest.

On the Cultural Aggression of the Quebecois

I was in Quebec recently. It's an odd place. Some parts, like the old part of Quebec City, feel like you've somehow set foot into a European town, with a walled city, cobblestone streets, and statues of local heroes from four hundred years prior. But then when you drive out of that part, especially between the major cities, it feels like you're in Anytown, USA, except that everything has been run through Google translate.

The attitude of the Quebecois towards their history is an interesting one. They very much celebrate their "Frenchness", but they're considered mostly as an object of humour and curiosity by the actual French themselves. In this regard, they share some similarities to the Northern Ireland Protestants, who are similarly ignored or viewed with mild embarrassment by the English. In the case of the Quebecois, their conception of France is also quite different to France itself. One aspect of this, that seems obvious and striking in hindsight, but is actually quite easy to overlook, is that the French Revolution never came to Quebec. The British took over in 1763, and so the Quebecois' conception of French rule dates back to this French Royal period. This is why you see the Fleur De Lis, the symbol of French monarchy, around everywhere. As I've written about before, you will walk around a long time in Paris before seeing many of these, or indeed any other celebration of the French Kings. But in Quebec, and indeed in Lousiana, the Fleur De Lis just means "French", not "Royal". 

The immediate aspect that strikes all tourists is of course the language. For a long time, I had always wondered about their stubborn intransigence towards issues of language and history. Not only do they insist on speaking French, but if anything they appear to have gotten more aggressive on the subject over time, not less. This includes the endless language police (an uber driver was recounting how a company he worked for was scrambling around to replace all the keyboards and telephone with French versions in advance of the language police visit). It also includes clamping down on English language education.

Not only that, but the Quebecois seem to have had a remarkable ability to shoot themselves in the foot with their endless hand-wringing about independence. They've managed to pick the worst possible outcome - neither becoming independent, nor being committed to staying part of Canada. Indeed, if you want a metric of just how much this screwed over Quebec, and Montreal specifically, consider the following: how many countries can you think of where most important city in the country changed in the past hundred years? London was the most important a century ago and is today, Paris was the most important a century ago and is today, Moscow was the most important city a century ago and is today, and so on. Not so in Canada. Montreal was the most important city for most of the 20th century. Then a wave of independence agitation, starting with the formation of Parti Quebecois in 1968 (of course! when else?) put paid to all that. You know who loves that kind of endless uncertainty? Businesses! Where do you think the operational headquarters of the Bank of Montreal are? Did you guess "Toronto"? They have been since 1977, when the bank decided to beat the rush ahead of the first referendum in 1980 on moves towards independence. 

I had just put all this down to the French generally being stubborn socialist assholes, and especially resenting Anglo-Saxons. Charles De Gaulle could never, ever forgive the British and Americans for kicking out the Nazis. It was almost easier to forgive the Nazis themselves. A recipient of charity nearly always hates his benefactor, as Orwell wisely observed. Quebec wasn't exactly in the same position, but resentment of the Anglos has a long, long history, dating at least back to the Plains of Abraham in 1759. It's not for nothing that the license plates read "Je Me Souviens" - "I remember". It's hard not to detect a vague note of sullen hostility in that, a determined insistence to bear a grudge. There are plenty of ways to remind people to celebrate their French heritage, and most of them sound more upbeat, like "Vive Le Français Canada".  Instead, it always seemed to imply to me "I remember when this used to be France".

But in any conflict, it's nearly always a useful exercise to consider "How did the other side think of the reasons behind the conflict?" One doesn't need to go full moral equivalence to think that if the Quebecois resent the Anglos, it's worth at least pondering why this might be. Actually, that's not quite sufficient, because that tends to lead one back to self-serving explanations. No, the better question is: what explanations might they have that, if true, were unflattering to our own self-image? This is nearly always the blind spot. "Why do they dislike us?" tends to produce answers like "They're assholes", "they're confused or misled" etc. "What did we do to provoke this?", even when asked in earnest, tends to produce answers like "We're too noble, too generous, too successful". You only get to the heart of the matter by asking "How might I be the asshole here?". Or as Mitchell and Webb put it - Are we the baddies?


Of course, the great irony in that skit is that while it's very funny, Mitchell and Webb could only jokingly portray Nazis asking this question of themselves, thereby displaying quite a high level of introspection. This is compounded by the fact that in the direct scene depicted, they appear to be fighting Stalin, who was a monster of the highest order. One does not have to be a Nazi sympathiser to reflect that on the Eastern Front, "good guys" were pretty damn thin on the ground.

But in the skit, there's no suggestion whatsoever that you, the audience member, should actually ponder the same question, even if just on the small scale of some pretty morally dubious choices. The point is not whether you or they are right overall, though that is surely important, and probably the most important question. But the other point is, do you know why the other side thinks you are in the wrong?

And one of the recurring themes that comes up among such honest questioning is that a lot of actions that seem to be aggressive offensive campaigns are perceived by those who wage them as actually defensive. Because we all live in America, the elephant in the room that we are all apt to leave out of the re-telling is America itself, the Vampire of the World. The ways in which the west may provoke things are rarely thought of, except to the extent that leftists claim that America provokes violence by being insufficiently progressive. 

I remember The War Nerd talking about this in the context of the Middle East. To America, jihad seems like an outrageous, insane form of unprovoked attack. But he makes a quite convincing case that many of the jihadis in the Middle East actually perceive it as a defensive war. How could that be?:

American exceptionalism is always just American provincialism, no matter how benevolent it seems. Not everyone is like us, and a lot of people are actively trying not to become like us. Jihadis are, roughly speaking, the armed wing of that group.

The truth about the clash of civilizations you hear people discussing is that it’s all the other way: The Mall is invading Islam, the Mall is taking over. There isn’t any Sharia Law in North Carolina, but there damn well are US-style malls in even the most conservative Islamic countries.

...

The Mutaween (“Society for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice”) has hundreds of men, and even a few women, working in Najran. Some wear the big beards and special headdress, but others are in disguise. And what these undercover morality police do, mostly, is patrol HyperPanda to see if boys are talking to girls, or looking at girls, or throwing girls little folded-up slips of paper with their cell phone numbers. That last one is perhaps the greatest threat to morality in town, and HyperPanda is the scene of most such crimes. The Mutaween mount multi-cop surveillance routines, with some disguised as Malays or Filipinos, to detect any instances of heterosexual contact at the mall.

The culture, the law, are very clear. No pre-marital fooling around, and that includes flirting at HyperPanda. Mall rules are very clear too: It’s an obvious place for boys and girls to check each other out. When mall meets culture, hijinks ensue—and murders sometimes follow, with the male relatives of the girl who’s been compromised at HyperPanda hunting down and killing the boy who accosted her.

And again:

The vectors for contagion in Najran are legion, starting with the usual suspects: Facebook, where daughters of respectable families maintain private accounts which feature “risqué” photos of young women without the niqab (face veil), hijab (head scarf), or abaya (black robe). These accounts also allow girls to “like” one professional footballer over another, an expression of preference in male appearance which violates every marriage norm in the rural-Arabian book.

Then there’s the cellphone itself, Ooredoo’s trademark product. Cellphones are lethal for traditional female prohibitions. In Najran, girls can’t leave the house without a male relative, even to visit female friends. But with a cellphone, they can jump outside the compound without breaking a sweat, texting unrelated males to say God knows what in that krazy lingo you kidz are using these days. And because the older generation in Najran grew up in a world without telephones of any kind, let alone cellphone culture, they’re hopeless at monitoring this coded, corrosive language.

And in a way, the most corrosive of all the alien influences attacking Najran were the most seemingly innocuous: K-Pop and Korean Soap Operas. It’s amazing that there are still people in the old countries, like the US, who don’t realize yet that Korea has taken over world culture. They don’t need your stinkin’ American pop no more. They’ve got Sistar and they’re humming “Can’t Go to Sinchon.”

The Korean dramas Najran girls watch on their computers are intensely romantic—and “romantic” is a Western, alien import, a very dangerous one in a world where marriage is between or within families, and where young women expect to feel little or no affection for their husbands. When you’re stuck in your room—and your room’s windows have been boarded up to prevent heterosexual gazes from passing in or out—it’s quite a trip to be suddenly transported to a Korean beach, where two young lovers are strolling, having a heart-to-heart on a program called “Autumn in My Heart.”

Read both those articles, they're eye-opening. Again, the point is not that Jihad is justified. Brecher's implication that there isn't any genuinely aggressive component of Muslim cultural expansion in the west (Europe in particular) seems, shall we say, naively optimistic. But that's not the question. The question is: how many Americans could think of any reasons why they might dislike the West that a) aren't entirely self-serving, and b) aren't just progressive talking points? I don't think Jihad was exactly the example that Moldbug has in mind, but if you want to understand how someone might consider America the Vampire of the World, you could do far worse.

Which brings us back to the Quebecois.

To wit: you simply cannot tell the story of Quebec's cultural aggressiveness without discussing America.

Because it doesn't take much pondering to realise that in the case of language and cultural preservation, the Quebecois almost certainly view their actions as entirely defensive.

And it doesn't take much more pondering to realise that they're almost certainly correct.

English is essentially like the Borg. If you're in North America, it just tends to creep in, with a thousand vectors of attack. The tourists come to Montreal and Quebec City with their US dollars (or even their Yen or Renminbi), which bring with them enormous incentives to speak English. If you're a shop owner in Montreal, how do you greet your customers? They seem to have settled on "Hello, Bonjour", an expression that must surely annoy the French-speaking locals. All the major movies and pop songs come in English. Educated French-speaking parents start thinking that it's important for their child to learn good English, so maybe they decide to send them to an English school, figuring they'll get the French at home anyway. Slowly, bit by bit, if you don't do anything, the degree of French-speaking gets chipped away.

This isn't even just hypothetical. We already have examples of what happens if you don't actively fight these trends.

 

New France extended over a huge territory, not just Quebec. So the question is: how much French is still spoken in these areas? Even the cities which were the biggest at the time, like New Orleans? To ask is to laugh. "French" becomes limited to street signs, a small section of historical architecture for the tourists, and the Fleur De Lis around the place. That's what happens when you aren't willing to aggressively insist on French being spoken in every official capacity. English slowly grinds you down until it's taken over, at which point it's probably there for good (or at least until the Chinese invade).

Even in this decayed age, America is still a great country. Yet it is one of the tragedies of our era that gradually everywhere is slowly turning into America. I like America, but I don't want everywhere to be America. To add to the tragedy, the main parts that seem to be most contagious are mass market consumer culture and humourless political correctness. But the vector of attack for all of this is the spread of the English language. It's no coincidence to me that, among first world countries, the Japanese have not only the least embrace of open borders diversity nonsense, but also the least embrace of spoken English.

The Quebecois seem to have little interest in fighting the message itself, at least that I've seen. But to the extent that they don't want to simply end up as American, I can entirely sympathise.

The Red, White and Green March

I write slowly and occasionally these days. Life gets busy (generally for good reasons, if you were worried), and the weeks slip by. Mostly, this is unfortunate for my writing, as I feel myself slipping into being a consumer of other people's thoughts, rather than a producer of something new. But one advantage is that sometimes I'm tempted to write about something, then events overtake me before I get around to it, and I'm forced to think harder about it.

Back in early April, you may remember a story about a coming gigantic migrant caravan making its way up from Honduras, through Mexico, to the US border.

April 2nd:

This year, the annual US-bound migrant caravan sparked a Trump tweetstorm

I'll bet you didn't know that America received an annual caravan of migrants turning up en masse before Trump tweeted about it, did you?

April 3rd:

Trump threatens Honduras' foreign aid over migrant caravan

April 7th

Trump Administration Sends Hundreds of National Guard Troops to U.S.-Mexico Border

You can tell that this was a big story, just by plotting the Google Trends search volume for "Camp of the Saints", Jean Raspail's prophetic novel about a mass refugee takeover of Europe. This really felt like the Camp of the Saints had arrived. Admittedly it was only a thousand people, whereas the million or so in Europe is much closer to Raspail's vision, but the organised aspect got people highly alarmed.

It was at about this point that I remember thinking about the two options given: threaten Mexico and Honduras to fix the problem, versus send the US troops to the border.

The first option seemed like a credible possibility. Unlike in Raspail's book, the caravan was coming over the land, not over sea. This means that if the land is owned by someone, and that someone can be threatened or cajoled by the US, you've probably got a good chance at it being in their interests to shut it down.

But it's worth pondering the following. Mexico is a broke, third world country, who ships lots of its own underclass to America, which is a large part of the overall immigration problem. And yet America is apparently relying on Mexico to police the flow of people from the even more wretched Honduras.  Which makes you wonder - why doesn't America do the job itself?

Which gets to the second policy - sending troops to the border. When I first heard about this, I suspected that it might turn into an absolute catastrophe.

You send the might of the US Army to the border. Then what?

Well, there's two possibilities, both of them bad. And both of them have actually happened.

The first is that the troops actually fire. This one played out in Israel, around the same time:

Israeli forces kill three Gaza border protesters, wound 600: medics

So what of that, you may say? 600 wounded to only 3 killed is actually a damn good ratio if you're trying to not kill them and you're vastly outnumbered.

But remember, this is America we're talking about, not Israel. And the key difference is that in Israel, there's enough political consensus backing these troops' actions that there was an effective fence there in the first place.

In America, the border wall will never get built, notwithstanding the hopes of Trump supporters. This is because the overwhelming majority of important political players oppose such a development. And this tells you what the reaction would be if the same thing happened here.

Let's consider the event where the protesters mass at the Mexican border and begin to stream across. Nation Guard units stand opposed, with instructions to stop them at all costs. The order is given to fire. Against all likelihood, the troops actually fire.

Congratulations, random National Guardsman who gave the order! You get to be painted as the modern William Calley, subjected to imprisonment and approbation for the rest of your life. Except it's The Current Year, not 1971, and some Democrat-appointed judge just can't wait to paste you with life in prison to set an example to not violate Steve Sailer's Zeroth Ammendment to the Constitution.

But deep down, everyone knows this is what will happen, and calculates accordingly. Plus people sign up for the US military with (optimistically) hopes of fighting against ISIS, not firing on women and children. And so, even if the order is given, nobody will actually fire.

Then what?

We'll we've seen that too. Welcome to one of the most criminally under-appreciated events of the 20th Century - the Green March.

The Green March was, to borrow from Boldmug, a little piece of 21st Century European history that somehow dropped into 20th Century Africa. 

Western Sahara was a Spanish Colony in the desert on the coast of North-West Africa. It was 1975, Franco was dying, and pretty much everybody knew the colonialism game in Africa was up. Spain was clinging onto control of the colony against an insurgency that had been going on for two years, out of Mauritania. Algeria and Morocco were similarly circling the sick wildebeest that the Spanish colony had become, hoping to take over once the Spanish retreated or were driven out.

And in this context, Morocco decided in November 1975 to do something brilliant. Instead of sending in the army, it assembled 350,000 Moroccan civilians, mostly women and children. This was symbolically chosen to be the number of births in Morocco that year. They were given the order to march on Western Sahara, waving flags and banners, green, the color of Islam.

It is an axiom of firearms training that you should understand the purpose of a gun. It is not a magic wand, a holy cross, or an amulet to ward off evil doers. It is a device constructed to end the life of its intended target. One of the first lessons any competent firearms instructor will tell you is to never, ever point a gun at anything you are not willing and intending to destroy right then.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you can't use a gun as a bluff. People do this all the time. But bluffing with a gun is a very dangerous game. You might be intending to bluff, and the gun goes off by accident. You might get your bluff called, and now you're in an even worse position than before. Your opponent now knows that you're unwilling to fire, and has a good chance of taking the gun off you.

An army is a merely a collection of men with guns. And having your troops point guns that they are unwilling to fire works no better at a national level than it does with the burglar in your home.

The bluff was called. The Moroccans marched, and the Spanish were unwilling to fire. Sensing that the jig was up, they even cleared away mines from some of the areas to avoid bloodshed. Ironically, Morocco's bigger problem turned out to be not the well-equipped but demoralised Spanish military, but the ramshackle yet willing troops of the Polisario Front out of Mauritania, with whom Morocco fought an ongoing insurgency for years afterwards. But win they did, and Morocco now firmly controls Western Sahara.

The Green March was a combination of weaponised mass immigration and weaponised non-violent protest. King Hassan II understood the Keyser Soze principle: to be in power, you didn't need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't. He was willing to get hundreds of thousands of civilians killed. Spain was not.

It is prophetic, because it forces starry-eyed immigration supporters to confront something quite uncomfortable. We can haggle over whether the current torrent of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East flooding Europe right now ought to be considered an invasion. Your mileage may vary. But it is very, very hard to argue that the Green March was anything other than an invasion. The fact that women and children armed with flags proved more effective than young men armed with AK-47s is irrelevant. Sovereign control was transferred, involuntarily. The population was replaced, involuntarily.  The fact that this met with virtually no resistance in the end is as irrelevant as the fact that Nazi Germany met with virtually no resistance when it took Denmark.

A rinky-dink group like "Pueblo Sin Fronteras" can organise a thousand Central Americans to turn up at once. Decentralized incentives, combined will pull factors like Angela Merkel idiotically signalling that everybody could come on in, will get you a million people shambolically turning up over a year or two.

But if you want 350,000 people to turn up, at the same place and time, with co-ordinated flags and banners, there is simply no substitute for a nation-state doing the organising. This allows for a formal transfer of sovereignty. But many similar effects are achieved by an informal transformation by population inundation.

Or, if one is talking to a progressive, there is an even stronger example. How should the Native Americans have thought of the Pilgrims turning up at Plymouth Rock in 1620? They may be just a small number of civilians at the time, against a far larger combined group of Native Americans. And they may not be immediately attacking you, or doing anything hostile. But make no mistake: they're here to take everything you have. And if you don't treat them as an existential threat and a military invasion, right now, they'll succeed.

Immigration can very easily be weaponised. And the distinctions between the weaponised and non-weaponised forms are surprisingly difficult to pin down.

But for our purposes, regardless of where you think the present case falls on the spectrum, the response of western authorities against undesired migrants tells you a lot about the defenses available to the west if immigration were to be weaponised.

The answer is not universal. Weaponised immigration is a powerful weapon against an opponent riddled with virtue-signalling, pathological altruism, and a divided political system. It is literal suicide against an opponent who lacks these traits.

And the western response is not uniform. It failed spectacularly in Israel, repeatedly. It failed recently in Hungary and Poland. It worked well in Italy, Germany and France.

How well might it do in America?

For better or worse, Trump in his presidency is much better at talking a big game than he is at delivering a big game. This goes triply so for cases where the achievement of the goal cannot be established just by executive edict, or by provoking an easily-outraged media. If the goal requires the assent of a large bureaucracy, expect a lot of talk and little action. See, for instance, The Wall.

The charitable reading of this is that Trump is an expert at understanding the problem of kings from time immemorial. The central challenge of a king with notionally broad powers is to know what orders will actually be obeyed if given, and limit oneself to only those orders. Do not brandish a gun you are unwilling to fire. Do not attempt to fire a gun that is empty. Do not give orders that will be openly disobeyed. So he'll go for a stripped down version that achieves some limited media victory, and can be implemented. Because giving an order and seeing it flouted would be worse than nothing. It would undermine his authority, on top of not getting the actions implemented.

The uncharitable explanations mostly involve him being too lazy and inattentive to see complicated things through, too narcissistic to properly co-ordinate with a faceless bureacracy, or an outright conman just tricking the right-wing rubes with empty promises.

Pick your theory. But the prediction is pretty reliable.

After threatening to send the troops, within a few days came the first signs that those hoping for a military confrontation would come away disappointed.

On April 9, the Washington Post openly mocked:

Troops sent by Trump to border will fly drones, gather intel — and clear brush, too

He's sending troops, alright, just not sending them to actually confront the people marching on the border.

The right was probably disappointed in this. I can't share this view at all. We can thank our lucky stars that Trump, or someone near to him, understood what a catastrophe it would have been to send armed troops to confront the caravan.

Behind Door Number One is My Lai. Behind Door Number 2 is Western Sahara. Which one would you prefer?

In this respect, Trump's initial instinct is right. Threatening Honduras and Mexico is actually the best possible response, because the alternatives are calamitous in The Current Year. It is much, much easier for Trump to effectively threaten the Mexican government than to effectively assert control of his own government. And if you're going to lose, it is far better to lose quietly, than to lose noisily with all the TV cameras rolling.

Here, I'm going to make a pretty confident prediction, for those of you that remember hearing about the initial story in early April.

You never heard about how the whole thing ended, did you? How do I know this? Same picture as before.

In our ADHD culture, the caravan simply took too long to arrive, and by the time it did, people had lost interest.

So allow me to fill you in. From April 30th, when the Caravan finally reached San Diego:

Everyone who has been waiting is still here. Nobody has been processed,” said Alex Mensing, from the group Pueblo Sin Fronteras.

“They have not processed anybody at San Ysidro port of entry,” Mensing said.

Organizers of the group told ABC News that there are about 100 people sleeping outside a port of entry in San Diego. 

...

 On Sunday evening, Border Patrol commissioner Kevin McAleenan released a statement saying that the San Ysidro port of entry had "reached capacity."

He suggested that could change but gave no timetable, saying that in the meantime "those individuals may need to wait in Mexico as CBP officers work to process those already within our facilities."

"As sufficient space and resources become available, CBP officers will be able to take additional individuals into the port for processing," McAleenan said in the statement.

From May 1st:

Slowly but steadily, caravan migrants who trekked across Mexico are pleading their cases to US authorities on why they should be granted asylum.

More than half of them have now been accepted to begin processing by US authorities at the border with Mexico, Alex Mensing -- whose group, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, organized the caravan -- said Wednesday.

Even though it's only a hundred of you, our boldest claim made by a government employee under the Trump presidency is that you may face some delays as the faceless bureaucracy processes your case. You start out claiming to be the mighty Parliament that toppled King Charles I. You end up being the modern House of Lords, with the ability to create mild inconvenience through small delay.

This much can be reliably inferred.

If the Mexican government ever decides to pull a King Hassan II, you would be a brave and foolish man to bet against them.

Narcissism and the Rise of Celebrity Culture

Narcissism is, as the Last Psychiatrist put it, the disease of our age.

But why this age, and not the ones before it? If we ended up in an age of trivia and self-centredness, how exactly did we get here?

A common theme through some of my recent writings is the idea that a lot of social and cultural problems may significantly stem from technological causes. It's not that the underlying human nature and cultural forces aren't important, of course. But technology opens up possibilities that weren't there before, for instance when it comes to immigration, birth rates, or sexual morality. As always, this isn't my theory on the whole story, or even necessarily the biggest part of the story. But it often makes up the part that goes most neglected, the assumption that gets taken for granted even though it's of very modern origin.

If you want to understand a society's values, look at who they venerate. Who do they hold up as examples of a life well-lived, as examples to emulate?

Like many aspects of culture, it is sometimes easier to understand this in past societies than your own. In your own time, the tawdry reality tends to get mixed up with the aspirational. 

Whom do we celebrate? Why, we celebrate geniuses like Nobel Prize winners!

Very well. Name me all the Nobel Prize winners you can, starting with a field that's not your area of professional employment. I'll wait.

Not so easy, is it? As it turns out, we celebrate the abstract idea of Nobel Prizes, but don't give two hoots about any of the winners. Your children are smart enough to tell the difference.

A necessary but insufficient condition of being celebrated is being known, being famous. It's possible to be infamous and hence not celebrated, like Hitler. But it's not possible to be celebrated and venerated, yet unknown.

The tawdry reality of who we actually celebrate is the list of people who appear on the cover of magazines in the supermarket. The aspiration of who we think we ought to celebrate is the people who appear on Google doodles. The overlap is the null set. Though I'll admit, it's possible to imagine some very odd scenario where Martin Luther King somehow manages to single-handedly fill out the middle of the Venn diagram.

Carlyle set up the National Portrait Gallery in London to inspire people with pictures of great men who did great things. I've written about this before, in both England and America. In the 19th century, you get Tennyson, Darwin, Browning, Wellington, Gordon, the whole deal. In the 20th century you get Sir Paul McCartney, Princess Diana and the Rolling Stones.

The most famous people today are entertainers. Actors and musicians, primarily. These are the pinnacle of adulation and interest. The young aspire to whatever is held up to have the highest status. You may scorn Kim Kardashian, but your daughter will be exposed to tales of her life nonetheless. She was the daughter of a lawyer who became famous for helping get a celebrity murderer off the hook, and she became more famous for releasing a celebrity sex tape, an idea that she wasn't even the first to come up with. What a joke, right? Except she ended up marrying one of the most famous rappers in the world. What lesson do you think the ten year old girls draw?

But you will not find any actors, or even many musicians, before the 20th century in the galleries. If you go back to Shakespeare's time, actors were considered a class barely above prostitutes. Disreputable phonies who pretend to be other people in order to get cheap applause from drunken idiots. The theatre was a necessary vice, a circus for the rubes. The people who wrote the plays may be celebrated, but the people who delivered them were considered beneath the dignity of polite society. You certainly wouldn't turn to them for guidance on the political goings of the day, as we absurdly do at the moment. Is it because we expect them to know anything about it? No, of course not. But we expect that the rubes will listen to them and follow, the way they do with high status people throughout history.

So how did actors suddenly change into world-bestriding celebrities?

Simple. Hollywood.

Not Hollywood as a cultural value. Hollywood as a technology to transmit moving pictures of actors to millions of people around the world. 

Before the age of movies and television, being an actor was profoundly unscalable. You could only get seen by however many people could fit into your auditorium. Which, around that time, also had unamplified sound. In other words, maybe a few hundred, tops. 

There is simply no way to create Brad Pitt in that environment. 

So actors were just performing a service. You turn up to see a play being performed by whatever troupe of ruffians happened to be in town at that time.

Of course, the written word back then was scalable, since the printing press. Hence why the authors of plays could become famous - the plays themselves could be printed and widely circulated. 

Something even more revealing is true of musicians. Without the phonograph, you needed to have lots of instruments to be heard by a large audience. An orchestra, in other words. As before, sheet music was scalable and could be sent around. So you got famous composers of orchestral music. Both parts are important. The composer got famous by having their name on the music, and the orchestra was needed to make sure that lots of people in the hall could hear without the possibility of speakers or microphones. Since this required large costs in people and equipment, it was limited to the elite, who were also the taste-makers. You did get folk music being spread around, from person to person, like modern memes. But in this case, the song became famous, and the composer became lost in the mists of time.

When the only scalable technology was the written word, the only way to become widely famous was either to write something, or do something sufficiently memorable that other people would write about it. 

Hence you got novels and poetry as celebrations of the written word. And you got military heroism and political leadership as gripping real-life narratives that could be written about in newspapers.

Of all the essays in Carlyle's excellent "Latter-Day Pamphlets", the one that seemed most alien to the modern world is "Stump-Orator". In it, Carlyle presents as an obvious fact of the age that the highest-praised skill was to be able to write and speak well.

It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech. Our earliest schoolmasters teach us, as the one gift of culture they have, the art of spelling and pronouncing, the rules of correct speech; rhetorics, logics follow, sublime mysteries of grammar, whereby we may not only speak but write. And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately deliver ourselves by tongue or pen,—this is the sublime goal towards which all manner of beneficent preceptors and learned professors, from the lowest hornbook upwards, are continually urging and guiding us.

Do you, dear reader, look at the world today and think that the most celebrated talent in the modern world is eloquence of speech? It seems almost unbelievable today, but that was once true.

And it bears emphasizing - while it may seem incredible given the degeneracy that was to come, Carlyle was writing this in order to bemoan the fact that celebrating speech in his time was coming at the expense of celebrating action and achievement.

I am glad for his sake that he did not live to see Paris Hilton. 

The first shift towards the Kardashian-isation of our society came with the photograph. Instead of writing well, people were noted for being good-looking. Without photographs, the only way to gain from good looks was from people who could see you personally, or the very expensive and unscalable technology of painted portraits. 

Early photographs were slow to take, which meant that people had to be sitting posed for long periods. Hence photographs could convey beauty, but not story or excitement. You could not, for instance, get disturbing but famous photos like this one, or this one (both redacted, since my sister told me last time she found the latter one distressing when it appeared unannounced on my blog).

But with better photographs, and certainly with movies and video, the returns to being attractive, as opposed to eloquent, skyrocketed. Hence the rise of beautiful actresses and actors. Their entertainment role was able to attract more scalable celebrity, and their beauty became a bigger part of their job description.

Meanwhile, because people are lazy, watching and listening to people talk and act had more mass appeal than reading their words, and preserved more of the drama. Actors drove out authors in the celebrity stakes.

Similarly with music, the spread of records meant that the performer could also be widely known. And the ability to amplify sound meant that you needed far fewer musicians per performance.

Hence the Beatles and James Dean, where once you had Beethoven and Samuel Johnson. Even supposing that Carlyle was right about the degeneracy of the written word, it took a lot more genuine talent than what was to come.

And so we ended up with the cult of entertainer celebrity, rather than famous deeds. The pinnacles of social status are actors and musicians. 

And I suspect, though I can't prove it, that this had a profound psychological effect.

At a certain point, especially in the age of the internet, the process degenerates even further. You don't have to have done anything. You just have to be good looking and have lots of people pay attention to you. 

It becomes enough to just be famous for being famous. Kim Kardashian is just the end point of the logic. In the age of the internet, this is often achieved seemingly at random, as things go viral. It's like the lottery of social attention, further reinforcing the perception that fame does not come from deserved deeds.

And technology has greatly refined the measure of celebrity. The modern National Portrait Gallery is instagram. It isn't required to be a portrait gallery, as opposed to a general photography gallery, since in principle people can post anything. But it ended up that way nonetheless.

A girl's instagram feed is often immensely revealing about her. Presumably a man's is too, but honestly, what kind of man is on instagram? 

The instagram feed reveals what the person loves. 

And the main categories, in ascending order of pathology, seem to be

-Cute animals

-Food

-Self-indulgent travel

and most of all

-Themselves.

The selfie is the most quintessential marker of the modern era. I am both the subject, the artist, and the consumer. A photo of me, taken by me, repeated endlessly in trivially different settings, which brings me great delight, and which I post to social media in order to get attention. Me, as the literal centre of the photographic universe.

It is the cult of celebrity, but democratised.

The results are exactly as unedifying as you would expect.

On the thorniness of historical counterfactuals

Both the economist and the historian are students of human organisations and behaviour.

The economist (at least in his empiricist manifestation) is usually interested in understanding causation - what causes drive what outcomes. This is at least one way of testing our models. The aim is to understand the structure of the world we live in, with the ultimate aims being prediction and policy improvements.

The historian has a choice to be either an economist or a journalist. The economist version wants to understand why things happened the way they did, and what can be learned about the world as a result. The journalist version scorns the grandiose conceit of trying to pin down causality, and instead sticks to the smaller question of "what happened", telling the stories of the past.

Of course, economists are also historians - they take a series of events that have happened, and assert that they're comparable along the dimensions that matter and thus worthy of being used to understand general principles.

For a genuine historian, especially of world events, the tools needed are different. One must treat historical events as case studies, to be explored in detail, rather than line items in a spreadsheet. If you're understanding World War 2, for instance, for many questions there's pretty much only one line in the spreadsheet. So running a regression isn't exactly on offer, and you probably would do better to crack open a book instead.

Even though it's generally out of fashion among historians, understanding causality and counterfactuals is very important if you want to draw actual lessons from history. The counterfactual says what could have been, if some other choice had been made. It aims to make, in a literary sense, the claim to causally identifying the effect of a single decision.

It goes without saying that this is incredibly hard to do. But for those of us not bound by the standards of academic publishing, it's among the more interesting ways of thinking about history.

Getting the counterfactual right, of course, is largely a matter of judgment and opinion, since we can't actually re-run the past and find out.

But there is one aspect of thinking about counterfactuals that is beyond dispute. If you don't have a clear sense of what the counterfactual is, then you don't have any idea what the actual impact of the decision was.

You might think that nobody could possibly be this stupid, but you'd be wrong. The surest sign is when people complain about some decision that was followed by bad consequences, but never explain exactly what the alternative was and how it was meant to work.

One case where I've come across this is in the role of the British in partitioning India in 1947 into two countries (India and Pakistan) when they left. This is part of the long list of standard recitations given as to how beastly the British were in all matters of administering the British Empire.

As everybody knows, what happened after partition was a total disaster, with widespread violence and population transfers under extreme duress. Estimates of the deaths involved range from several hundred thousand to two million, according to La Wik. The problem is the classic one in the colonial critic's playbook - that the lines drawn on the map didn't correspond to messy demographic reality. When the two came into conflict, the result was maybe a million deaths.

Which sounds pretty bad, no?

But again, bad compared to what? What other choices did they have, and what would the consequences have been?

Here, the dilemma is not so much the "what" as the "consequences". The main alternative was leaving the two places as a single country. The issue, of course, is how that would have actually played out. But for some reason, the people who denounce Britain never seem to spend much time discussing this aspect.

There are, to be fair, arguments that partition was a mistake, because a single country would have done a better job of calming ethnic tensions. To my mind, the strongest of these is the relative levels of antagonism between Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims, versus the antagonism between Indian Hindus and Indian Muslims. 

People have a tendency to forget that the last-mentioned category of Indian Muslims not only exists, but is enormous, around 172 million (almost as many, in fact, as the 193 million in Pakistan). And while there is violence and conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India, it's not on anything like the scale or seriousness as the tension between India and Pakistan. The latter could actually devolve into a nuclear missile exchange. 

By contrast, I don't even hear about serious pushes for Muslim separatism in India. I'm sure it exists in some form. But it's less prominent than, say Quebec or Belgium. Indeed, India is perhaps the only other exception (along with Switzerland) to the Holmes rule that there are no stable multilingual countries. Somehow, they mostly manage to rub along. The surest sign that the conflict with India's Muslims is probably not an existential threat to the country is that it's possible to go months without reading any newspaper stories on "Indian Muslims". Certainly, you go a lot longer than you do without reading something about the India/Pakistan tensions.

So this reads like a pretty bad indictment of the British, at least ex post. 

But there's another counterfactual which gets discussed even less.

What if Britain left them as a single country, but they had a bloody separatist war afterwards anyway?

The amazing thing about this example is that it's not even a hypothetical. It literally happened.

Where?

Bangladesh. It used to be called East Pakistan, and was part of the same country. They were divided by geography, but shared a common religion. Surely, we would reason, they should work well in a single polity!

Except they didn't. Bangladesh fought a bloody war of independence against what was (and I quote La Wik):

An academic consensus prevails that the atrocities committed by the Pakistani military were a genocide.

As coincidence would turn out (it seems in poor taste to call it "luck" in this context), the estimated number of civilian deaths ranges from 300,000 to 3 million, rather close to the deaths during partition. 

Huh! Doesn't seem quite so cut and dried now, does it?

It leaves me actually quite agnostic on the whole question, to be honest. It seems very unclear whether things would have actually turned out better or worse if the British hadn't partitioned India when they left. It may just be that when they left the place, there was a high chance there was going to be widespread ethnic conflict no matter what they did.

And yet, to slightly paraphrase the great Mr Bastiat, people have a tendency to judge actions primarily by what is seen, not what is unseen.

The people that might have died under an alternative political arrangement are not salient at all. The deaths during partition are highly salient. 

Sometimes there are just no good options, at least based on what you can reasonably know at the time. Sometimes, you have to call things as you see them, suspecting that a lot of people might die either way.

It seems depressing, but likely, that the only actual lesson of partition is the one that the Bard wrote centuries ago - uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

The Imperfect Vision of the Past

As Mencius Moldbug noted, if the past is a foreign country, then a reactionary is a patriot of that country.

But the past being past, the reactionary is necessarily a patriot from afar. No man can live in any time other than his own. He cannot actually love the country of the past because he has never been there, unless his patriotism extends only as far as his own childhood. He must necessarily love an image of it, the brochure formed from (depending on how distant it is ) photos, paintings, texts, or just translations of texts.

There's nothing wrong with this, per se. We have almost unlimited information about our own age, and how many of us can claim to really understand it? But there is always the risk that unless careful attention is paid, one will still end up filling in gaps with assumptions from modernity. The problem, even for an honest and attentive broker, is twofold.

Firstly, old sources mostly wrote about what they considered important in their own society. Some of the weirdest parts to us may be things they would have mostly taken for granted, and hence didn't discuss much.

Secondly, we interpret these sources in the light of the controversies of our own age. These tend to become the focal points on which other societies are analysed. But the areas where our society is mostly in agreement are less likely to be studied, even if our agreement is completely different from their agreement.

For instance, I am a reactionary of death. It is not for nothing that this blog has an entire subject label devoted to 'mortality'.

And yet, despite being a fully grown man, I have seen a corpse only once in my life, in circumstances where it was not made plain that the person was actually dead. This is not an accident. This is how our society operates.

Just ponder that. Death has not gotten any less common, but extraordinary lengths are taken to ensure that when death visits, it is out of the way, hidden from sight. The main times you will witness an actual corpse is if you happen upon the scene of an accident. Otherwise, it takes place in a hospital, leading to the implication that it is simply the result of failed or insufficient medical intervention, which technology will eventually overcome.

This is of course absurd. You can realise this by studying life expectancy tables, or just by contemplating the human condition.

But most people today don't even realise that they hold thoroughly modern views on the subject of death. It's because it's largely just taken for granted. There are only a few controversies that touch on it generally, like euthanasia, but that in practical terms is actually a step even further in the same direction - now we can shuffle off this mortal coil with the best of drugs, in a comfortable setting, in a time and manner that doesn't have to alarm those around us. In this way, the already thoroughly medicalised process can also become artificially predictable.

Once upon a time, mortality was considered an important thing for men to wisely ponder, and consider how they wanted to live their life. Medieval Christianity used to emphasize this through a Memento Mori. That is, they took extra steps to remind themselves of mortality, so as to not miss the importance. And even without that, death was all around them. People died in their homes, and died much sooner. Avoiding it was just not an option.

The main reason my my own thinking diverges from the mainstream on this point, and I ended up a reactionary of mortality, is from the influence of Buddhism. In Buddhism death is viewed as terrible, one of the great destroyers of the world that inevitably leads to suffering. Unlike in Christianity, it offers no chance of the ascent to a permanent heaven, though there are temporary heavens. Death is often paired with old age, among forms of suffering, to emphasise that the impermanence aspect, and that it is the inevitable outcome of the process of decay. And in Buddhism (which, when I use the term, I mean Theravada, which is my background), even rebirth is not a cause of celebration, but another form of the problem of the endless cycle of suffering and unsatisfactoriness. As a result of all this, wisely contemplating impermanence is a central concern:

“What do you think, great king? Suppose a man would come to you from the east, one who is trustworthy and reliable, and would tell you: ‘For sure, great king, you should know this: I am coming from the east, and there I saw a great mountain high as the clouds coming this way, crushing all living beings. Do whatever you think should be done, great king.’ ...

“If, venerable sir, such a great peril should arise, such a terrible destruction of human life, the human state being so difficult to obtain, what else should be done but to live by the truth (Dhamma), to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

“I inform you, great king, I announce to you, great king: aging and death are rolling in on you. When aging and death are rolling in on you, great king, what should be done?”

“As aging and death are rolling in on me, venerable sir, what else should be done but to live by the truth (Dhamma), to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

“Venerable sire, kings intoxicated with the intoxication of sovereignty, obsessed by greed for sensual pleasures, who have attained stable control in their country and rule over a great sphere of territory, conquer by means of elephant battles, cavalry battles, chariot battles, and infantry battles; but there is no hope of victory when aging and death are rolling in. In this royal court, venerable sir, there are counselors who, when the enemies arrive, are capable of dividing them by subterfuge; but there is no hope of victory by subterfuge, no chance of success, when aging and death are rolling in. In this royal court, there exists abundant bullion and gold stored in vaults, and with such wealth we are capable of mollifying the enemies when they come; but there is no hope of victory by wealth, no chance of success, when aging and death are rolling in. As aging and death are rolling in on me, venerable sir, what else should I do but live by the truth (Dhamma), live righteously, and do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

“So it is, great king! So it is, great king! As aging and death are rolling in on you, what else should you do but live by the truth (Dhamma), live righteously, and do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

Of course, nobody thinks like that anymore, if for no other reason than that people do their absolute utmost to avoid even noticing death. If mortality is contemplated at all, it's mostly to advocate for mindless hedonism. Or it's contemplated for a day or two when a relative dies, before being shuffled off into the background and beaten down with awkward insistence that the subject is "morbid" whenever the topic of death even comes up.

If I am out of step with modernity, I am quite sure that it is modernity, not I, who is strange. But I would say that, wouldn't I?

Still, there are plenty of other aspects where older societies are different that aren't so flattering to my conceit.

For instance, I've been reading John Dolan's wonderful prose translation of the Iliad. In many ways, Dolan has undertaken the task of re-telling the Iliad to preserve a set of features almost entirely orthogonal to the standard ones. Which is to say, most translations try to preserve the poetic aspect and the literal word choice, at least as much as both parts can be rendered into modern English (which, for the poetic metre, is not very well). But Dolan ditches this to instead preserve aspects which, he argues quite persuasively, would have been far more salient to listeners at the time (and they were listeners originally, not readers). Which is to say, he preserves the gore, the slapstick comedy, the cruelty, and the enjoyment of military violence.

In this respect, the Greek narrative is actually more understandable than many of us would be comfortable admitting.

But as Dolan notes explicitly, apparently echoing Nietzsche, it is a mistake to view the Greeks as being like us. For instance, take Dolan's observations on how lust was viewed:

Now Zeus has to kill even more of the Greeks. His first thought, a painful wincing one: “Hera’s not going to like this”. His wife and sister, Hera, always knows what he’s up to, and she’s soft on the Greeks. She’s permanently mad at him anyway, because he’s just an old horndog pretending to be in command when he can’t even command his own penis.

These people were very down on lust. That’s one of the ways they weren’t like us. We love lust. They didn’t. It was too dangerous, and it gave women too much power, so lust is a bad thing in this story. To these people, a real man doesn’t get led around by his dick, and if he does, he’s not a man at all. A stud, to their way of thinking, is a sissy, and above all, a sissy stud is dangerous, capable of wiping out an entire city. 

The man who started this whole war was a stud, a Trojan prince named Paris, fitting for a man with the sexual ego of Pepe Le Pew. The only reason he didn’t drive a Porsche or wear Ray Bans is because the infrastructure wasn’t there yet. He’d have defected to Malibu in a second if the airport had been ready. This princeling Paris had the chance to judge a beauty contest of three female gods, and that’s what got Troy besieged.

You've gotta say, the Greeks have a point.

And the modern tendency is also to play up another very un-Greek idea - the importance of romantic love. Amazing as it seems to me, there is a tendency of some to view the Paris and Helen story as some kind of tragically doomed but still beautiful romance, rather than the height of folly, stupidity, selfishness, and effeminate behavior which is how it would have been seen at the time.

But not all of the alienness seems flattering of the Greek world view either. In his discussion of the book in the latest Radio War Nerd, Dolan mentions another aspect that is hard to believe at first:

Above all, they were other, they enjoyed cruelty, they found cruelty hilarious, and if you don't understand that about them, you'll never get them...

The Iliad begins with this captive girl watching as her old father limps down the beach to beg Agamemnon, the vile Greek leader, to release her. And Agamemnon purposely shames him in a really over-the-top way. And that's a bad idea, not because you should be nice to people - there's no such idea in the Iliad - but because he's a priest of Apollo.

The idea that cruelty is generally entertaining, and being nice to people is not an important trait, is something so utterly alien that it's hard to even conceive of it.

Remember this next time you're exalting the glory of the ancient Greeks.

But the weirdest of all to me is something taken even more for granted - the importance of a sense of humor. Robin Hanson had a great post on this. He cites Rod Martin:

Prior to the eighteenth century, laughter was viewed by most authors almost entirely in negative terms. … All laughter was thought to arise from making fun of someone. Most references to laughter in the Bible, for example, are linked with scorn, derision, mockery, or contempt. … Aristotle … believed that [laughter] was always a response to ugliness or deformity in another person. … Thomas Hobbes saw laughter as being based on a feeling of superiority, or “sudden glory”, resulting from some perception of inferiority in another person.

 From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, popular conceptions of laughter underwent a remarkable transformation, shifting from the aggressive antipathy of superiority theory, to the neutrality of incongruity theory, to the view that laughter could sometimes by sympathetic , to the notion that sympathy was a necessary condition for laughter. 

 As recently as the 1860s, it was considered impolite to laugh in public in the United States.

 In the United States, [a sense of humor] came to be seen as a distinctly American virtue, having to do with tolerance and democracy, in contrast to those living in dictatorships, such as the Germans under Nazism, or the Russians during the Communist era, who were thought to be devoid of humor. … By the end of the twentieth century, humor and laughter were … seen as … important factors in mental and physical health  

Which actually casts the earlier Dolan quote in a different light, which I'm not sure that Dolan fully appreciated. If the Greeks found cruelty hilarious, it wasn't just because they had a different attitude to cruelty. They also had a different attitude to hilarity, and what it was meant to represent.

If you want to see what noble character without a sense of humour looks like, read Marcus Aurelius. The seriousness of purpose shines through vividly, but he is not there to entertain you. There are more important traits than a sense of humour.

The sheer range of strange alternative values and thoughts shows, if nothing else, that if there indeed is a psychic unity of mankind, it comprises a far smaller set of traits than you might believe possible.

In the end though, there is no particular virtue in trying to exactly resurrect the past wholesale, even if it were possible. We can only grapple with the world we actually live in, and importing some contemporary assumptions is almost inevitable.

The value in studying how past societies operated, rather, is to illuminate the assumptions that we take for granted, and to inspire a greater imagination as to how things might actually work.

In The Current Year, even getting people to acknowledge that much is a non-trivial victory.