The Martian Perspective

One of the useful big picture ideas I remember picking up from Moldbug is that one should strive to understand the present in the way that a historian of the future would understand our time. That is, suppose you were living on Mars in 200 years time, so not only would the events not affect you, but all the players are dead and gone, as are the countries and institutions they represent.  Maybe even 500 years. The ideal is to imagine a space sufficiently distant that you don't even feel you have an intellectual dog in the fight, rather like an atheist trying to understand the 30 Years War between Catholics and Protestants. You just want to understand the truth, having gotten to the point where none care whether it prevail or not. 

This is always an aspirational ideal, of course. You never really know what the future historian will think (in part because they have seen the end of the story, and you haven't), but also because intellectually it's very hard to fully escape the present tense. For one thing, you can never have our hypothetical atheist's indifference when you're actually on the receiving end of things (put an atheist back in time to the middle of the 30 years war, and suddenly they will have to care about religion, or at least act like they do). But there's also a sheer difficulty in perspective. It may be that nothing in the past five years even makes their list of stuff to bother about. It may be that nothing in your whole lifetime does! (You should be so lucky). 

So while this perspective is hard, if you at least aim at this, you are likely to get a better sense of the actual importance of events than if the idea never even occurs to you. And the sense of what might seem important on a 200 year time line may be vastly different to what the newspapers are covering today. It might be something the average person isn't paying any attention to at all (like developments in AI, for instance). But it also might be events from the present that take on a bigger significance than people at the time realize.

For instance, by now, most of you have probably watched the famous video of Hu Jintao being gently but firmly escorted out of the Chinese Communist Party Congress

When Americans watch this video, they have a clarity of vision as to what is going on. A former president is frogmarched out of the room, publicly, by the current president, to God knows what fate. While it may be overblown, the cynical presumption is that he'll end up like Tank Man, never seen again.

It's worth noting that there's an alternative reading of all this, that Hu Jintao is kind of senile and either was, or was threatening to, wander awkwardly off script. And, hence, that escorting him out was actually an embarrassing loss of face to everyone involved, rather than a deliberate political flex. 

But one thing is for certain. Supposing he in fact gets charged and convicted of corruption, for taking bribes back in 2005. The average American will view this as almost entirely incidental to the important facts in the video above. Did he take some kind of bribe during his presidency? Almost certainly. Is that what this is actually about? Not on your life. If he gets charged instead with tax evasion, or murder, or covid violations, would that change anyone's perspective on the matter? Not at all. What he gets charged with is irrelevant. Whether he even broke the law is basically irrelevant. They certainly will not spend much time digging into the details of the allegations. This is a naked power consolidation. This was also considered in America to be big news for what it revealed about China, and how power works there.

So far so good. 

So what does the average American make of this:

FBI searches Trump's Florida home as part of presidential records probe

PALM BEACH, Fla., Aug 8 (Reuters) - Former President Donald Trump said FBI agents raided his Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday and broke into his safe in what his son acknowledged was part of an investigation into Trump's removal of official presidential records from the White House to his Florida resort.

The unprecedented search of a former president's home would mark a significant escalation into the records investigation, which is one of several probes Trump is facing from his time in office and in private business.

Is this the same thing as what happened to Hu Jintao? Is it a related thing? Is it a totally unrelated thing?

You'll have to decide for yourself. 

And the answer that lots of Americans come to is that, well, you see, this is actually about the crucial issue of violations of the Presidential Records Act, something that they had literally not heard about until August, but now think is an essential lynch-pin of our whole form of government. It's actually part of a large legal campaign against the former president on all sorts of fronts. 

Which is to say, they look at this and see only the things he's been charged with, from which we need to have a serious debate about whether he did or did not breach said Act. They don't at all see any bigger picture here. The Hu Jintao perspective, for want of a better term, is completely and utterly absent. 

(It is worth pondering whether the average person in China, to the extent that they know about the Hu Jintao story, view it as the mirror image of the Trump story - he obviously broke some important law that the papers will no doubt tell us about soon.)

But for the Trump story, if the average American does chance to see a bigger point, such as if they're a Fox News Republican, they'll probably just see one more example of the outrages of the Democratic Party, and are apt to list the above event alongside every other regular complaint about how the country is run, from illegal immigration, to woke trans activism in schools, to black lives matter leading to defunding of the police. Or, if they're on the left, one more aspect of the corrupt contempt for the democratic process by the Republicans, like Voter ID laws and the January 6th protests. 

What might the historian of 200 years' time make of this story? Well, here's one perspective. 

The single biggest fact in favor of American democracy, and democracy in general, is not that it selects wise leaders, or leaders who are legitimate in the eyes of the public, or anything like that. The primary thing in its favor is that it allows, nominally, for smooth transitions of power. Within the current sclerotic regime, of course, which outlaws all kinds of views and actions. And if you push it too far, like the South found out in 1865, you'll be crushed militarily. But within the operating envelope that the system is meant to work in, nobody has to be playing for keeps. Because while your guy may be in today, their guy may be in tomorrow, and you're stuck in a repeated game. So you have strong incentives to play nice.

Which is to say, for 230 years, America has had an unwritten gentlemen's agreement that former presidents are allowed to live out their lives in peace. It didn't matter if they were magnanimous and disappeared from public life, like George H. W. Bush. It didn't matter if they decided to run leftist alternative foreign policy missions, like Jimmy Carter. It didn't even matter if they were impeached for potential crimes, like both Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson. Nixon is the classic here. Sure, Gerald Ford pardoned him for Watergate. But what's the chances that this was the only law he broke during his presidency? That an aggressive Carter White House couldn't have found something else to charge him with, after enough digging? No, that just wasn't how things were done. Former presidents get to live their lives in peace. Even Jefferson Davis was held only for two years, never ultimately charged, and allowed to live out the remainder of his days as a free citizen.  

That agreement is now gone. 

To which the dumb but common answer is that Trump's actions are so flagrant that they breached the agreement first. 

The nature of gentlemen's agreements is that the finer details aren't always written down, so this is hard to say for sure. But to judge this, you need an estimate of what the baseline level of past violations of the same kind might be. And there's decently strong evidence that this kind of thing is pretty common. What Trump did looks, to me, not nearly as bad as what Hillary Clinton did with her janky private email server while Secretary of State. Or, to take another example, we know that Sandy Berger, a Clinton advisor, was convicted of stealing documents from the National Archives after Clinton's term was over. What do you think the probability is that he was the only member of the Clinton White House to have breached some kind of records law, if the FBI were sent around to raid everyone else's house too?

In other words, to me, this looks more akin to Putin's charges against Boris Berezovsky  In that case at least, was he guilty of the illegal things they said he did? Absolutely. Did this distinguish him from any other oligarch? Not at all. The real crime, which everyone knows, was challenging Putin's power.

In the case of Trump, I really don't know what the sacred text of the Presidential Records Act requires, and whether Trump's actions may be in violation of it. For the purposes of the argument, I am entirely willing to believe he is in breach of it. He does not strike me as a stickler for detailed record-keeping, nor a scrupulous adherent to all kinds of process laws (he's a former New York real estate developer, for crying out loud. If you think there's a single one of them who's never broken any fiddly laws that they thought were getting in their way, buddy, I don't know what to tell you).

But my strong sense is that this is about as relevant as the question of what exactly Hu Jintao is charged with. Former presidents are simply not raided and arrested like they're some run of the mill citizen who fell afoul of a slightly too aggressive Assistant DA. Charging them is everywhere and always an explicitly political act. Especially in this case - can you imagine the Martian historian in 2222 opining about the crucial question of records storage? I can't. I think they'll say that this was part of an obvious longstanding campaign against Trump by whatever term they'll give to what we unsatisfactorily refer to as "the Deep State".

Why do I say this?

Because the FBI already was illegally wiretapping the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, before Trump was even elected! They procured the ridiculous Christopher Steele dossier, presented it to a FISA court, lied about where it came from, and used it to wiretap Trump advisor Carter Page. Nobody went to jail over that, of course. 

Is this the same thing? Is it a related thing? Is it a totally unrelated thing?

I think the argument for "totally unrelated" is absurd. So we're only left with the question of how related they are. And even if one forms the view that this time, Trump's actions really were terrible and illegal, we see the same ferocious politically targeted persecution even when there was no crime. Even when he was still just a private citizen.

This is not a "Can you believe the injustice?" post. Politics is usually ugly, nasty and stupid, and people at high levels play it seriously indeed. This is certainly not a "those disgraceful Democrats!" post. As MiddleEarthMixr savagely put it: "And how’s that working out for ya, imagining if the roles were reversed?"

Fifteen years ago, maybe even ten, I probably would have written something along these lines. But I am long past such perspectives, and no longer find them remotely useful. They are the furthest extreme from the Martian historian's creed.

Rather, this is merely to note that whether you are a fan of democracy, or whether you view it as absurd and past its use-by date, there is a serious reading that the whole campaign against Trump is a dangerous escalation and breach of prior norms, from which further counter-escalations seem likely. 

One of the advantages of living in 200 years time is that events that might be half a lifetime apart are easy to draw threads between, in a way that isn't quite as apparent at the time. It is altogether too easy to imagine future wikipedia articles that read something like this:

The Great Unravelling: 1970 - 2035

The term "the Great Unravelling" was first used by historian Michael Wallesteimer in the early 22nd century to describe the series of sequential breaches of previous unwritten political norms, in a cycle of escalation and counter-escalation that lead to an increasing distrust between the Democrats and the Republicans, and eventually the Great Breach of 2032 (Main Article). Wallesteimer defined the key events as not just those which were political advances by one party, but specifically changes that would subsequently be re-used by opponents afterwards.  Subsequent historians have disputed the original Wallesteimer list, both in terms of charting an original first course, and which events justify inclusion. But the general pattern is now broadly agreed to represent the increasingly fractious civic breakdown. The original Wallesteimer list is:

-The Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade. This not only set off a large component of the culture war, but set a new standard in deliberate misreading of constitutional texts for political aims. Robert Axelford disputed the inclusion of this, noting that the court cannot be said to be explicitly part of the political apparatus at this time. But it paved the way for the increasingly Republican Court to overturn both all racial preferences in Wichita State University v Connors, and substantive portions of the administrative state in Rothstein v Gibbons, which even if more textually defensible, were viewed by the left as extreme judicial activism. 

-The Senate refusing Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination. Up until this point, presidents had mostly gotten their Supreme Court nominations uncontested. This marked a discontinuous shift after which the vast majority of appointments became politically contentious, leading to the eventual packing of the court in 2026.

-The Kenneth Starr investigation. This set the precedent of open-ended Special Prosecutors targetting sitting presidents - "starting out investigating dodgy land deals in Arkansas, and ending up investigating blow jobs in the White House", in Anthony Reichenford's phrase. Special Prosecutors would be later used both against Scooter Libby, and by President DeSantis against speaker of the House Alexandria Occasio-Cortez.

 -The Clinton Impeachment. This set the precedent of impeaching presidents over pure process crimes, where there was no other underlying crime (in this case, perjury over testimony regarding sexual relations, when such sexual relations were not otherwise a crime). This was reciprocated when Donald Trump was charged and later convicted of violations of the Presidential Records act, something Trump described at trial as "chicken shit".

-The Trump Russiagate FBI wiretap. This set a precedent of explicit use of the permanent civil service and law enforcement to target a presidential campaign. This violation is considered more notable because of the lack of crimes uncovered by the campaign, which were significantly less than the wiretaps themselves. While the Republicans never succeeded in reciprocating via law enforcement, the subsequent politicization of the military by President Carren in 2031 is viewed as a counterescalation. 

-2020 Election Fraud. Wallesteimer described this as a "shadow breach", because its gravity was only fully appreciated after the fact during the audit of 2025. It is more viewed as part of a continuum of increasingly flagrant election fraud, eventually on both sides, that marked a further step in breakdown in belief in democracy. Relative to the other steps, this was considered more of a notional marker apparent in hindsight than a structural break, but was important additionally for its role in triggering the obvious breach of the January 6th protests. 

-The January 6th protests. While these are now viewed as chaotic and unstructured "acting out" without any serious risk against regime security, they established a precedent that the losing party in presidential elections would respond with mass protests, then with small scale violence, then ultimately with complete insurrection. 2016 is noted as the last of the "peaceful election transitions era". 

-The Arrest of Donald Trump. This ended the famous "gentlemen's agreement", as Wallesteimer described, that former opponents now out of power would be left alone. He viewed this as the most serious escalation, and an important step towards the arrest of President Carren and the Insurrection of 2034. 

You will need a little imagination to visualize what other future events might make the list. But the history of late Republican Rome offers some possible guidance. 

Or put it this way. Suppose that you were Ron DeSantis. How much would you have updated your belief that, if you got elected president, that you or your family would end up in jail if you lost power?

DeSantis is a smart guy. I'm not sure he would think the answer is yet "high". But it's certainly a fair bit higher than it was a year ago, and a lot higher than it was seven years ago.

Indeed, one might easily imagine the conclusion of the chapter above:

As Wallesteimer described the atmosphere in the mid to late 2020s, "From here on out, both parties' leaders began to suspect that if they lost power, they were liable to lose their freedom, if not their lives. After reaching this conclusion, they began to justify their own escalations as being a necessary precaution against the presumed intentions of their opponents. This in turn justified those opponents in their own beliefs, and their own escalations. Once such beliefs became widespread, democracy was not long for this world." 

On Rome and America

I recently finished listening to Mike Duncan’s excellent “History of Rome” podcast series. It left me with a confusing swirl of thoughts that I wanted to put down on paper before they gradually evaporated.

One of the themes I found myself reflecting on was the Moldbug point that a government is just a corporation. Moldbug used this argument to note that the difference between how the average westerner thinks governments should optimally be structured (with democracy and separation of powers and an independent judiciary), is radically different than how they think private corporations should be structured (with dispersed shareholders who vote for a board, who appoints and supervises an all-powerful CEO). Which either means that you need to explain what exactly it is about their different tasks that justifies the different form, or  if there's no fundamental difference in tasks, at least one of the two is suboptimal. 

When you see the various governing forms that the Roman Empire took over time, it brings to mind the more basic question – if a government is just a special case of a firm, well, what exactly is a firm, anyway? And Ronald Coase (and Jensen and Meckling) has an answer for us here. A government, like a firm, is a nexus of contracts. That is, a government is a way for various people to coordinate their behavior for some overall purpose. Some of those people are coordinated against their will, which is an odd form of contract, but not a fundamental obstacle to the idea. And secondly, most contracts are incomplete. We either can’t perfectly commit to future actions, or can’t observe other people’s information sets enough to know if they’re screwing us (is their lousy performance because got a bad draw, or because they stopped putting in effort?) or a variety of other problems in contract theory.

And in this lens, to say that contracts are always partially incomplete is another way of saying that power is always somewhat informal. The org chart can specify who answers to whom over what questions, but unless you can actually enforce action the whole way down the chain of command, there’s always a “run it up the flagpole and see” aspect to any given order. 

So in this sense, the simplest version that solves this incomplete contracts problem is the early Roman Republic – when “the Romans were like brothers, in the brave days of old”, in Macauley’s phrase. With enough mutual love and regard, the incomplete contracts problem gets largely solved, through sacrifice, shared understanding, and desire to not maximally exploit everyone else. Government as the expression of self-determination for a well-defined ethnic group with mutual fellow-feeling thus makes sense as a reliable way of solving the contracting problem. 

This is like the highly successful family business. But a firm where you only hire family members is limited in its capital and ability to expand, unless you’re having bazillions of children each generation. This creates incentives supporting the tendency to hire outsiders, but keep control and cash flow rights to the family. So now you go from the family-only operation, to a family-owned firm employing outsiders. This can be quite stable and allow for a lot of growth. But a lot of firms find out that if you really want to expand to take advantage of profitable opportunities, you may need to dilute control by selling shares in capital markets, and hiring competent external managers instead of just your eldest son, or even your most competent son. 

At each step, the challenge is figuring out how to coordinate the increasingly complex nexus of incomplete contracts that holds the whole thing together. And for the case of governments, this is an order of magnitude harder than for private firms, as there’s no larger governing apparatus or courts to appeal to in order to resolve disputes. You can get some progress due to personal loyalty, or traditions being a Schelling Point for behavior, or displays of force making things collapse to a single Nash equilibrium. But if people disagree enough on what the contract requires in a given high stakes situation, maybe the nexus itself breaks, reverting to smaller groups with less ambitious aims who can still agree on things. Assuming, that is, that those groups can actually operate independently of the broken off group. Complexity, like entropy, is easier to add than it is to get rid of again.

And this sounds a lot like the early history of the Rome. In the beginning, the Romans were literally the citizens of Rome, who were also the soldiers. And their enemies were other nearby cities – the Samnites, the Latins, and the rest. But once defeated, these become subject cities, then friendly allies, and then finally, Italians, the inner core of the expanded polity. The concept of who is “us”, at the core of the high trust solution to the incomplete contracts problem, gets expanded. And you see the genuine aspect of ethnogenesis – what exactly makes a people, anyway? This concept has been so abused by blank slate progressives advocating for open borders (where "there is some flexibility here" gets substituted for "there is thus infinite flexibility here"), that it’s easy to miss that there are genuinely multiple ways to construct identity. And the surest way you can tell this is that the old group names just stop appearing in the stories at a certain point. We stop hearing about the Samnites, then we stop hearing about Hispania, then finally we stop hearing about “the Gauls” (as a people) and just hear about “Gaul” (as a province). 

The flip side of this expansion, however, is that it becomes harder and harder to articulate an operating principle of what and whom the whole thing is for, especially in terms of the question of who gets to be in charge and who gets to enjoy the benefits. The Roman consuls first have to be Patricians, but then that gets discarded, and they can then be wealthy Plebs too, but they still have to be Roman. Then once it moves to emperors, they eventually can be Roman families from the provinces, like Trajan, but still generally of Roman stock. These expansions prove successful, then you get the series of great Ilyrian emperors, like Diocletian. But then you get peasant emperors like Maximinus Thrax, and then you get Gothic generals who wield lots of power over puppet emperors, but still do good service to the empire (like Stilicho). But then this gives way to barbarian generals like Ricimer, who notionally still serve the decaying empire successfully, but historians start to argue whether he’s actually just a King. And finally Odoacer decides to make our lives easy by actually sending the purple cloak back to the Eastern Roman Emperor and saying he’s done with the whole thing, and now is just the King. Which is lucky for us, only because it makes the whole narrative simpler for “when did they meaningfully stop being Roman Emperors”. The Senate kept meeting until the 7th century, even as it was totally useless and a joke. 

And it’s not just the leaders – by the end, when the western Roman empire is fighting off increasing barbarian invasions, the legions doing the fighting are mostly barbarian too, and there’s not always a lot in the legitimacy stakes to make you prefer the notional emperor(s) from the usurper. It’s certainly not obviously the extent to which they represent “the Roman people” in a Wilsonian sense. 

If all this sounds like it becomes a confusing mess of an org chart by the end, it is. Part of this is because when we refer to this as a nexus of contracts, there really aren’t any actual formal contracts anywhere once the simple ties of ethnic kin aren’t the main driver. The closest we get is clear rules of succession, whose importance becomes very obvious. And when these get ignored, we’re left to the coordination game version of the Melian dialogue – the strong (and their nexus of contracts) do what they will, and the weak either join the winning team, or get killed. This often happens surprisingly fast, and a lot things that seem like they’re going to turn into massive civil wars end up as a total collapse by one side without a fight, or after a small initial battle, where all the supporters of one side abandon their leader to join the opposing faction, and the losing general either gets killed by his former supporters or commits suicide. Say what you will about the late Romans, but they played politics for keeps. 

If democracy has any virtues, it’s certainly not the wisdom of the people, or even the legitimacy that elections confer, but probably just the well understood rules of succession, whereby power is transferred on schedule, and the losers generally get to live out their lives in peace without being thrown in jail or killed. Then again, this was true in Republican Rome too, until one day it wasn’t. In the early parts of the story, you hear mostly about cities and structures, with the individual Romans playing less of a central role (with occasional exceptions like Scipio Africanus). By the time you’re routinely hearing about individual personalities at high frequency, you’re well on the way to the collapse of the Republic. And at first this takes the form of utilizing factions of Romans violently against other Romans, then it becomes using foreign auxiliaries to overcome Roman legions (who are themselves mixed), then it ends with the foreigners just running the show. 

In this regard, what you’re trying to coordinate with the early Roman Republic is a form of group selection, whereby members of a group all end up benefitting in evolutionary fitness terms because of cooperative action. Like ethnogenesis, progressives love this idea, and abuse the concept mightily to argue for all sorts of nonsense. But it can exist – not only in the case of a termite mound, but also in terms of the cells in your body. They engage in all sorts of group coordination so that their DNA gets transferred on. For a while, so did the Romans, and then later on, so did the Italians (at least in our metaphorical sense, though perhaps in a literal one too). But even inside your body, defection is often locally profitable without strong enforcement mechanisms. When one section of cells starts growing uncontrollably at the expense of the rest, this is called cancer, and has a lot of parallels to a rebellion in civil society. But the metaphor is imperfect, because the cancer of rebellion doesn’t always kill the host. Rather, at some point it starts to look less like the body with cancer and more like a cancer in charge of what used to be the body. The polity, unlike your body, can theoretically absorb outsiders. 

Aside from these curious aspects about the nature of government and its change and decay, the other part I found myself wondering about were the parts of the story being left out. Not as a conspiracy or anything, but just which are the noticeably important aspects that don’t seem to get much emphasis in the Duncan retelling? 

There are two big ones. The first of these is birthrates. Obviously he’s not recounting a continuous census of fertility. But in the days of the Republic, the recurring theme is always that whenever a Roman legion gets wiped out, they just raise another one and keep fighting, refusing to give in. You can see this an indomitable spirit and resolution, but it’s worth pondering the sheer logistics too – there must have been a large excess of tough military age males sitting around at any time, ready to be brought into military service. Where those males all went by the end of the empire is not well explained. The standard view is that they were unwilling to fight, and were kept from service by rich land owners who didn't want to sacrifice their workers. But it also seems quite likely that they might just not have been around in the same numbers. Either way, it’s puzzling. 

The other piece that supports the latter interpretation is that by the time you get to the Empire (where there is much more focus on individuals, so we know their life stories better), you can’t help but notice just how few children the Roman emperors seemed to have. If you’re not constrained by resources, why not have 12 children, or 20? How on earth do you reach the stage that you don’t have enough sons to continue your dynasty, when this is the single most important aspect of succession? Or only one son who's a total muppet? Weirdly, having no children at all is more understandable than only having two, as the former might just be general unlucky infertility, but the latter suggests it's possible, just not done much. I had always viewed the overwhelming knock on Marcus Aurelius as being that he broke the tradition of the “Five Good Emperors” of appointing as successor the most competent man, rather than their blood offspring. This is true, but the part that Duncan notes (which I hadn’t known) is that none of the others actually had any blood sons! Which is bizarre, when you think about it. It’s not even like they’re Henry VIII, producing unlucky daughter after daughter. Aurelius appointed Commodus, who was a disaster, but as Duncan notes, he was rather in a bind. Either he probably had to kill him, or make him successor, since letting him just hang around was likely to lead to civil war, which is much worse. Even Augustus, the most powerful man in the empire, ran out of sons. Like, just get some mistresses! Or bang your wife more! I have a feeling something very odd was going on with Roman birthrates, which I want to understand more.

The other even less remarked on piece is Roman engineering and technology. Occasionally you get snippets of the story like Trajan building the longest bridge for the next thousand years, or Caesar shocking the Germanic tribes by building a bridge to transport his whole army across the Rhine before the barbarians knew it had happened. Or the general impressiveness of aqueducts, which managed to slope ever so gradually over miles and miles to deliver water from one place to the other. 

Nobody else was doing that. So how did Roman technology advance? How late in the story did that stop happening (surely an important question to those who judge present civilisational health by the existence of iPhones). And why couldn’t anyone else match it in the same way? You realize that you have such a tiny number of primary sources, and if it wasn’t a subject that people bothered to record the history of, you’re going to have a lot of guesswork.  

Finally, comes the applications to the present. One aspect that stands out is that the ability to forecast the lifespan of the empire is complicated by the fact that battles at that time were still largely tactical and not strategic. That is, there often might be only one or a couple of large encounters that decide who comes off the best in a war between nations. And because these often turn on small decisions on the battlefield, smaller armies can frequently rout and destroy much larger ones, or a small number of surprise defeats can threaten the entire nation (like in the Punic Wars with Carthage). This means that at a lot of places, something going differently could have ended the whole Roman experiment much sooner – the Punic Wars, for instance, or the Crisis of the Third Century. In the age of strategic warfare, you might actually have a better chance at forecasting which structural forces will prove decisive if the two sides just grind it out long enough. Then again, maybe not – there’s been no shortage of American defeats to notionally weaker foes that might not have seemed structurally obvious ahead of time. 

The last one is the surprisingly low correlation between the level of domestic misery at any given time and the actual instability of the whole project. The late Roman Republic was an utterly miserable time for its citizens compared with the previous centuries, with the advent of massive Roman civil wars, proscriptions and deaths of political opponents and their supporters, and general chaos and uncertainty. But all the protagonists at this point are still Roman. You never really get a sense that there’s an Alexander of Macedon equivalent waiting in the wings to crush all the war-weary parties. Instead, Rome still seemed pretty secure from external enemies. By contrast, there are lots of periods during the Empire where the barbarians seemed to be both stronger and more coordinated, and could tip the whole thing over. Even here, it’s not an inexorable decline. By the early 5th century, things actually seem to be looking slightly brighter for a while. Yet the striking thing at this stage is that even a competent Emperor like Aetius isn’t able to actually fully reverse the losses, only slow them. It’s not long then before things go off the rails for good, at least in the west. 

If we look at the level of America’s foreign predation, we see useless and counterproductive wars, and endless third world migration, but there is nothing like barbarian armies forcibly peeling off territory, or menacing the homeland. This calculus is made a little more difficult by the fact that we are highly dishonest about what the American empire actually is, and thus what it would mean to be losing territory if you only rule indirectly. If you defined the American empire crudely as “everywhere that had a George Floyd protest in 2020” (including places like Berlin, London and Melbourne) then maybe the calculus gets a little harder. But still – in physical fights, America loses, but it loses in other people’s backyards, when the stakes for the domestic citizens are mostly pretty low. 

And in a pinch, I find myself thinking that our recent developments seem to map more closely to the late Roman Republic than the late Roman Empire. If I had to guess who Trump most closely matches too, it’s probably the Gracchi brothers. They started using populism, and in their case threats of mob violence, to get their legislation passed. This isn’t exactly Trump, but the sense of tapping into populist anger to circumvent the normal political process seemed like a good description of his nomination and victory in 2016. And the establishment backlash to unseat him, both from dubious Russiagate investigations from the civil service and Democratic party, periodic deaths and violence in political confrontations and protests becoming more normal, unusual levels of election fraud in 2020, and Trump’s final temper tantrum protest on January 6th, all fit the same pattern. A gradual erosion of previous norms, a gradual escalation by each side. The Gracchi brothers both got killed, which I don’t think will be Trump’s fate (though blog.jim still is betting on this). But the important parallel I see is that they showed a path to a certain kind of escalation that later men like Marius, then Sulla, then finally Caesar and Augustus, would both increase and take to its logical conclusion. At some point, people just realize that the Republic is dead and not coming back. It takes a long time, and a lot of denial, before that point is reached.

Sometimes, that’s just your lot, and there’s not much you can do. To modify Brad Pitt’s character in Inglourious Basterds – you don’t gotta be Niccolo Machiavelli to know that you don’t want to live through “the Year of the Four Emperors”.

But America as the late Roman Republic is actually the optimistic scenario. Not because it won’t get worse – if the metaphor holds, it definitely will. But because it might eventually get better. 

Living History Forwards

I have recently been working my way through the excellent History of Rome podcast series. I had been meaning to do this for some time as my previous knowledge had been mostly from another excellent series, The Fall of Rome , which I've written some thoughts from before. I realized in hindsight that I was doing things in a mistaken order. Perhaps due to my own slightly pessimistic nature and preoccupation with the current political situation, the narrative of decline and why it happened was very appealing. But before you can delve into the big picture forces (which Wyman does well in the Fall of Rome), it's helpful to understand the basic sequence of what happened when. Not only that, but you can't really hope to understand the fall of Rome unless you also understand its rise, and all the times when it could have fallen, but didn't. Going through the story made me want to go back and read all sorts of things again with a better knowledge of the events, from the Asterix comics, to Horatius at the Bridge by Macauley, to The God Abandons Antony by Cavafy, to Blog.Jim's posts on normality bias.

One of the interesting challenges when listening to the narrative is to try to invert the ex post story back into the ex ante perspective at the time - what people would have or should have thought, knowing only what they knew at the time. History is told backwards, but must be lived forwards. The simplest version of history tells things as a story, describing the important events that happened. But quickly students of history want to move from what happened, to why it happened. In the language of statistics, this means fitting the right ex-post model to the data, so you can understand what variation drove what outcome. Even this is hard to do - you might overfit the model, or select the wrong variables (and you don't get to re-run things to find out if you're right.) The causes you identify are probably there, and perhaps even contributed, but are they actually the important ones? This is a lot of the challenge of historians. But from a statistical point of view, the next step is the ex-ante one. If you'd run this same model using only the data you'd observed up to that point, even if you'd thought of the same variables, what relationship would you have estimated? Price to dividend ratios predict market returns reasonably well at long horizons ex-post, if you believe Campbell and Shiller. If you run it out of sample, Goyal and Welch say they don't.

The statistician's version of this is quite easy - just run the same model on less data, and see what it produces. So why is it so hard as a historian to do the same? Because you're not really running models, you're evaluating things according to your own judgment. This isn't a knock on the field, per se. Some bits of history lend themselves to quantification, like Robert Fogel did, but others (including a number that you really care about) simply don't. When you form your own judgment of things, it's hard not to fall victim to the curse of knowledge. That is, when you know something, it is very difficult to credibly put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't know the thing. It will always seem like things that you know after the fact should have been easy to forecast at the time, but they often aren't. 

In history, we always know how the story ends, so identifying what counts as a major event, or a turning point, or a transition, is always made with the benefit of hindsight, so as to give the most informative narrative. This leads people to make a significant mistake when translating history into their own lives. They assume that when some major shift occurs, there will be lots of signs to indicate this fact. But there might not be. Maybe what's important won't be obvious until much later. Reading about the last days of the Roman republic, one of the interesting aspects is that what in hindsight seem like important turning points. When the Gracchi brothers started using mobs of plebians as threats to get their political will, it might not have seemed that shocking. But it draws a line to Marius becoming consul seven times and leading an army into Rome to institute a reign of terror, and then Sulla being declared dictator for life. Except Sulla stepped down, and attempted to restore the Republic. You can imagine that things might have seemed back to normal then. But instead, this is described as more steps towards empire. Even Caesar Augustus, who consolidated power single-handedly more than anyone since Tarquin, kept a lot of the forms of the Republic, and only changed his status quite gradually. There was still a senate, and consuls, and praetors. To someone wanting to convince themselves that things weren't actually that different, it was probably easier than you might think. Indeed, one narrative of Julius Caesar's downfall is that he attempted to shift power to himself too quickly, and got stabbed to death by the Senate for his troubles, even after all his triumphs. This seems to suggest that the prudent strategy is probably to maintain the old forms, and pretend like they're still in operation, even as they're gradually undermined.

Which perhaps should make you wonder - has this... happened in America? Almost certainly. As Moldbug describes, America has gone through at least four versions of the Republic since its founding. The main reason people don't notice this is that they all swear fealty to the same piece of paper. But look around! Does the paper actually describe the government? If it does, why is the government so radically different, even as the paper is the same? Try explaining the CIA to George Washington, or the modern interpretation of the Commerce Clause to Thomas Jefferson. (As a party joke, I enjoy asking law students to list as many hypothetical pieces of legislation as they can that they're sure would not be justified by the Commerce clause. There's, uh, gun-free school zones? And ... hmmm, did I already mention gun-free school zones?). 

Is FDR delivering his inaugural address, which basically demanded absolute authority from Congress under threat he'd just take it anyway, and threatening to pack the Supreme Court when he didn't get his desired judgments, and serving an unprecedented four consecutive terms, breaching the 150 year old norm of only two, basically equivalent to a less violent form of a Caesar? The case is at least arguable, but you can be damn sure that you won't read this argument in your high school civics class. Was Nixon a corrupt figure that was justly impeached, or was he stitched up in a deep state coup? Also at least arguable.   

Or, to take one that's not yet a fait accompli in where it will end. You can also observe a gradual breaking down of existing norms and compromises that served to keep the parties' relationships with each other civil. The Democrats breach the previous norm that presidents basically get their Supreme Court nominations, by filibustering the eminently qualified Robert Bork. Republicans targeted Clinton, first with special prosecutors empowered to go on endless fishing expeditions (like starting out looking into dodgy Arkansas land deals and ending up looking into semen-stained dresses), and impeachment over purely process crimes like perjury when the underlying events were not actually criminal. Or the FBI illegally wiretapping the Trump campaign and Carter Page. Or Trump calling mobs to the capital to protest what he (and I) saw as election fraud. I happened to think that the January 6th mob was obviously going to be useless for anything other than theater with no coherent plan. But still, it is a notable shift from previous norms. Just like the Gracchi brothers. Maybe this is one more step towards perdition. Maybe it's just rumblings that will eventually settle down, like the secession of the plebs.  

In other words, we expect changes of government to look like America and Russia turning up in Berlin in 1945 - the game is over, and everyone knows it. But even the collapse of the western Roman empire doesn't quite work like this. One might think that when Rome gets sacked, that's basically the end. But Rome got sacked by the Gauls in 390 BC and bounced back. It got sacked by the Visigoths in 410 AD which was bad, but things still limped along. It got sacked again by the Vandals in 455 AD, by which time things were looking pretty dire indeed, but Odoacer declaring himself King was still twenty years away.

The challenge, in other words, is to be able to estimate the versions of history that could have happened but didn't, and the probabilities one should have attached to them. 

And when people imagine the idealised version of what this could be like if done well, those with a sci-fi bent will immediately think of Isaac Asimov's psychohistory. Imagine a fully worked out statistical model of psychology, sociology, and economics. Asimov's idea was that the perfect version of the social sciences should operate akin to the gas laws. The behavior of any one person is random, just like the movement of any one gas molecule. But the behavior of quadrillions of gas molecules or people is highly regular, and thus can be predicted quite well.

I am a huge Asimov fan, and found his writing highly influential in my teenage years. But the more I've pondered it, the more I think the idea of psychohistory has a tendency to lead people badly astray as to what ought to be possible, even in theory.

The version of psychohistory in the first foundation novel starts out with a version that presents the science as statistical, in the sense of assigning probabilities. 

Gaal said, "Indeed? In that case, if Dr. Seldon can predict the history of Trantor three hundred years into the future -"

"He can predict it fifteen hundred years into the future."

"Let it be fifteen thousand. Why couldn’t he yesterday have predicted the events of this morning and warned me. -No, I’m sorry." Gaal sat down and rested his head in one sweating palm, "I quite understand that psychohistory is a statistical science and cannot predict the future of a single man with any accuracy. You’ll understand that I’m upset."

"But you are wrong. Dr. Seldon was of the opinion that you would be arrested this morning."

"What!"

"It is unfortunate, but true. The Commission has been more and more hostile to his activities. New members joining the group have been interfered with to an increasing extent. The graphs showed that for our purposes, matters might best be brought to a climax now. The Commission of itself was moving somewhat slowly so Dr. Seldon visited you yesterday for the purpose of forcing their hand. No other reason."

Gaal caught his breath, "I resent -"

"Please. It was necessary. You were not picked for any personal reasons. You must realize that Dr. Seldon’s plans, which are laid out with the developed mathematics of over eighteen years include all eventualities with significant probabilities. This is one of them. I’ve been sent here for no other purpose than to assure you that you need not fear. It will end well; almost certainly so for the project; and with reasonable probability for you."

"What are the figures?" demanded Gaal.

"For the project, over 99.9%."

"And for myself?"

"I am instructed that this probability is 77.2%."

In other words, psychohistory predicts a range of outcomes, and their associated probabilities. This sounds like something I can imagine in the hyper-competent social sciences. But you can already see the tension in the paragraph - how is it that the death of a major figure has a 77.2% probability (three significant figures!), but the model also predicts events in 1500 years without the error bars blowing up to infinity? Admittedly, the project itself was predicted to succeed with 99.9% probability, and that was (in the book) the more important driver, so maybe it's not totally inconsistent, but still.

As the books go on, the mention of probabilities barely rates a mention again. Instead, the recurring narrative of the book is how Hari Seldon, the father of psychohistory, has recorded hologram messages for people hundreds of years into the future, explaining to them that the dramatic events that just happened were all foreseen and were part of the plan. The initial tension between probability and horizon gets resolved into the more satisfying plot device of the perfect forecast.

Asimov understands the idea of model risk. In one of the plot twists (I won't give much in the way of spoilers), eventually there appears the character of the Mule - a random structural break that couldn't have possibly been foreseen. But the general pattern is that the model works almost perfectly well in forecasting at very long horizons, right up to the point that the world has a dramatic and one-off shift.

Asimov later said that he should have actually called his science "psychosociology", not "psychohistory". I actually think this is a very revealing admission, and gets to the heart of the matter. History, in the popular version, is about predicting the ex-post path of exactly what happened. When you conceive of the task as being to predict history, it suggests knowing the precise series of events that the historian could narrate. Sociology, even when it works at all, is much more uncertain in its predictions - the 77.2% chance of death version, not the precise predictions in 500 years time version. The wrong choice of name was not innocuous - it showed an ambivalence, if not confusion, about the scope of the task.

Because Asimov's version of psychohistory is fatally flawed for two reasons. One of them he should have known at the time, the other one he probably couldn't have. 

Where Asimov should have known better is that he reveals himself to be a great storyteller, and an excellent scientist, but a poor statistician. In his conception of the gas laws, he emphasized the importance of there being millions of planets in the galaxy, in order to get a sufficiently large number of humans that he felt his statistical concept would work. But he also saw that democracy simply won't scale at that level, so he imagined the existence of an emperor.

The problem is that Asimov misunderstood the statistics behind the gas laws. The crucial factor that enables prediction is not that you have Avogadro's number of molecules. Rather, the crucial thing is that the molecules are essentially independent. This, not sheer number, is the crucial thing that makes the individual noise cancel out. If things aren't independent, you can keep adding more and more observations, and it won't help you. If one molecule is the emperor, it doesn't matter how many subjects you add.

And human beings simply aren't independent. Indeed, his own conception reveals this. If the Emperor has any actual power at all, then they're susceptible to being laid low by a bacterial infection, or killed from falling down stairs, or having a bad night's sleep due to some weird dream on a crucial day, or a thousand other random and idiosyncratic events that no model of psychohistory will ever be able to capture. The only way it can work is if the emperor is in fact not an emperor at all, and 100% of his choices, literally every single thing that matters, are already pre-determined by impersonal forces. If he dies, he will be replaced by someone else who will then do the same.

As long as the great man theory of history has even a kernel of truth, which it surely does, your chances of making eerily accurate hologram images for 500 years' time goes roughly to zero. You knowledge will only ever be probabilistic, and its accuracy will decline with time, like almost every statistical model. In many ways, this is the big danger of inferring things from fictional evidence - if your premises are subtly incorrect, you'll still write the whole story as if they were right. 

All of which might make you wonder - why wasn't this mistake obvious to Asimov at the time? 

I think this gets to the second part, which Asimov probably couldn't have known. Specifically, he was writing in the 1940s and 50s, before the age of cheap computing power and large, easily available datasets. That is to say, Asimov almost certainly had no experience actually constructing and testing statistical models. He couldn't have! Unless he was inverting the matrixes for the OLS estimator by hand. 

And as a result, he missed out on the single most important lesson you get from actually testing quantitative models. Namely, you find out how often your intuition about the world is just completely wrong. Or the effects are kinda-sorta there but much weaker than you thought. Or you start to worry about which of the many variations on some predictor variable you should be coding up, or whether there might be data errors, or whether linear models really are the right choice here, or whether there's reverse causality going on, and a thousand other things. You learn, in other words, that predicting almost anything you actually care about is surprisingly hard. And the work of doing so doesn't look at all like psychohistory, where one mathematical genius comes along, and suddenly you've got perfect predictions. Rather, it's about the slow grind of finding one new variable to improve the R-squared, or some new estimation technique to get the mean-squared error down. Sometimes a new discovery improves things a fair bit. But you never have a sense that you'll get the R-Squared to one, until your number of predictors equals the number of observations, at which point you've played yourself, as the Beastie Boys put it. Indeed, you quickly hit the law of diminishing returns on this type of thing. Initially, you add the large, big picture effects that have the most predictive power. But then what's left over is increasingly random and noise-driven, coming from outside forces and quirks mostly orthogonal to what you're interested in studying. Like Zeno's paradox, you might get closer and closer, but there's no hope of getting to the final goal. 

Even this is in the idealized version! Often you come away just convinced of your own deep epistemic uncertainty about the universe. You'll never really even perfectly explain what happened in a dataset, let alone forecast out of sample, because the world is just a shockingly complicated place. And all the bits you leave out end up in your residual term.

Nobody who has ever run a regression could really believe in psychohistory, if they thought about it hard. But many, (like me until very recently), suspended their disbelief in the face of the wonderful story, and just didn't think about it. But when you do, you realize it's just not how prediction works. Not in practice, and without independence, not even in theory. Models don't fail just because the Mule comes along. They fail because the task itself can only be statistical and uncertain. 

But if you never actually run these tests, you'll evaluate your theories of history on a heuristic basis, and make all sorts of kludges and exceptions, and be surprised when the world doesn't work out with as much certainty as a history book. 

What does genuine, significant, high stakes predictions actually look like, in the heat of the moment? Before you actually know how it's going to go down? 

When Russia first invaded Ukraine I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what the probability was that this would turn into a nuclear exchange. Because if the probability were non-trivial, it was time to get out of America, for at least weeks, to see how it was going to pan out. The important question is not "was it going to happen". Rather, the better question was, and is, "what would be the trigger events that I could observe at the time that would indicate a significant increase in the probability of dramatic escalation?" 

My guess was that the highest probability path to large scale war between Russia and America (and thus potentially going nuclear) was the US imposing a no-fly zone. Which is to say, shooting down Russian jets. The chances that this might spiral out of control, and quite fast, seems decent. Large overt NATO troop present in Ukraine would also be in the category. Other wild-card events like Poland unilaterally sending troops might also could, but it's harder to know where that goes. 

As it turns out, thankfully none of this seems likely any more. Whether it was ever likely is a separate question, but the identification of trigger events doesn't hinge on this question hugely, except for the question of whether the mental exercise is worth your time. Fortunately, the Biden administration repeatedly said early on that it wasn't interested in a no-fly zone, something we can all be very grateful for. But even if he had declared one, I suspect you probably would have had time to get on a plane out of America within 24 hours if you acted immediately, as things probably don't go nuclear at the first downed plane. On the other hand, it seems highly likely to me that most people wouldn't act, and would just sit there. Which is lucky really - the plane capacity to leave America each day is only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population. The plan only works if nobody else acts. But this in turn means that you need to act, and quickly, exactly at the point when everyone else thinks you're weird and paranoid. How else could it work? If you wait until the air raid alerts are being sent out, you will probably just die getting incinerated in your car, stuck in the biggest traffic jam in the soon-to-be-concluded history of the city. 

This is why forecasting things usefully ex-ante is hard. People expect there to be a big glaring sign that everyone will see. But there probably won't, at least until the historians write about you in 200 years' time. 

The fate of great research

In one of the more poignant remarks to come from stand-up comedians, Conan O'Brien once wonderfully observed that, eventually, all graves go unattended. 

I was reading a while back this fantastic talk by Richard Hamming, "You and Your Research". Byrne Hobart linked to it in one of his newsletters, when describing the nature of remote work:

[Hamming]: "I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

[Hobart]: Working remote is a modern analog to Hamming’s closed-door policy: there’s an immediate productivity boost from reduced interruptions, but some of those interruptions are long-term course-corrections, and they’re valuable.

 Hamming's whole talk is fantastic, talking about how to do what he calls "great research"

And for the sake of describing great research I'll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn't have to gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon's information theory, any number of outstanding theories - that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. 

Well I now come down to the topic, ``Is the effort to be a great scientist worth it?'' To answer this, you must ask people. When you get beyond their modesty, most people will say, ``Yes, doing really first-class work, and knowing it, is as good as wine, women and song put together,'' or if it's a woman she says, ``It is as good as wine, men and song put together.'' And if you look at the bosses, they tend to come back or ask for reports, trying to participate in those moments of discovery. They're always in the way. So evidently those who have done it, want to do it again. But it is a limited survey. I have never dared to go out and ask those who didn't do great work how they felt about the matter. It's a biased sample, but I still think it is worth the struggle. I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.

So what happens when you do good research, or even great research? Does everything suffer the Conan O'Brien fate?

Let us start with a simple observation, so basic as to almost be trite.

All knowledge only exists in people's heads. 

In the limit, if great knowledge is written down in a book, and then people never read the book, in some practical sense, it may as well not have existed. Sometimes, it has to be rediscovered again and again, after being forgotten. This happened with the cure for scurvy, until vitamin C was isolated.

How does information get into people's heads? Well, they either have to read something, or get told it, or rediscover it themselves. 

So far, so obvious. 

For all the advances in technology, has our ability to read improved, or our ability to listen to conversation? Not obviously. Reading speed may have variation across people, but I've yet to come across anything indicating that it's improving. So let's assume that people's ability to read new source material is no better than in the past. 

Now, as you look out on the world, you see that ever more people are doing research, and writing books and papers. Even if some large fraction of this is junk, and some proportion is active stupidity and anti-knowledge, the amount of genuine new knowledge is surely going up every year. 

The amount of hours of life you have to read it all, even just the most important bits, in order to make advances at the frontier, is a little higher, but not much. And most of the increase happens at ages long past when you're likely to do any of Hamming's first-class work.

So how do people actually learn enough to advance knowledge? 

Well, one way is to spend longer studying and become more specialised. The number of genuine polymaths making contributions in lots of different areas seems to be a lot less than in the days of the Royal Society. This is not a coincidence. Every now and then you get a Von Neumann or a Frank Ramsey, but they are towering and rare geniuses.

The other fate of great research, which is less discussed, is that if it is not to be forgotten, it must be summarised. 

How much debate and experiment went into establishing that matter is discrete, and made of atoms, rather than continuous? Or that atoms contain protons, neutrons and electrons? These were colossal contributions, made in painstaking ways by very smart people, resolving a debate that had gone back to the ancient Greeks and before. How do we reward such great work? They become the first sentence of a chemistry class. "Matter is made up of atoms". Boom. Next. There simply isn't time. One can go back to first principles, and read the individual experiments of Dalton and others that established this - that certain combinations of gases tended to combine in fixed proportions, for instance. The Royal Society had the wonderful motto of "Nullius in verba" - take no man's word for it. This is a great aspirational attitude to have, but in practice one can't run all the experiments that make up all of human knowledge. You may well want to know what the experimental evidence actually is. But you probably will end up taking someone's word for it, somewhere, about how those experiments proceeded. How could it be otherwise? How many hours are there in a life?

For the true giants like Newton, their names stay attached to the principles they come up with. But even this is rare. Knowledge of authorship is additional bits of information that people have to carry around in their heads. Is it crucial to know who established each experiment? Or could the time spent learning this be better spent learning more actual facts or principles about the world?

In the fullness of time, if you actually do great work, the praise of posterity will sooner or later be that your work becomes a sentence or two in a summary of a textbook, a contribution to the body of research that every scientist must ingest as fast as possible in order to be able to spend the rest of their lives advancing the frontiers of knowledge. Every page you write, every concept you advance, competes for space in the heads of readers, the pages of textbook authors, and the minutes of this short life. The competition is brutal and Darwinian. Knowledge must evolve to get condensed into shorter and crisper forms, or it risks simply being forgotten. As the time increases, and the amount of new work increases too, the probability of one or other of these outcomes goes to one. 

In this respect, one of the great unappreciated works of public service are the efforts of those who do the reading and summarising. Scott Alexander is extremely high on this list - his summaries of other people's books are fantastic, often way more pithy than the original, and include important editorial judgment on strengths and weaknesses. Mencius Moldbug did a similarly great service by reading and synthesizing a huge number of old primary sources that you and I would never have come across otherwise. I have a strong suspicion that over 99% of people currently living who have read Thomas Hutchinson's Strictures Upon the Declaration of Independence are no more than one degree removed from a Moldbug reader.

I think that from this point of view, one should also not be ashamed about mostly reading the abstracts of papers. You can convert the number of hours left in your life, to a number spent reading, to a reading speed, to a total number of pages of text that you will be able to absorb before you die. What shall that text contain? Every paper and book you read in its original and entirety is taking something from the budget available to other great works. Do budget constraints not bind, even for speed readers?

The other point that is worth noting is the disparity between fiction and non-fiction. Science can be summarised. History can be summarised. But fiction and poetry largely cannot, except without stripping out all the art and beauty that made them great. The idea of all of us reading only the cliff notes version of Shakespeare is simply too tragic to bear. But the result of this love is that fiction works stand a much higher chance of being forgotten altogether. 

If a man has a genetic mutation that is reproductively advantageous, in the short run, he has more children, and all his traits get passed on. Then his children have more children, and the advantageous gene and the other tag-alongs also get passed on. But roll the tape forward 100 generations, and the only thing left of the original man is the advantageous gene itself. This gets selected on, and the rest gets forgotten.

So too it shall be with memes. You may bequeath an entire volume, but after 100 generations of re-learning, only the crispest, shortest version shall remain. And that is your final contribution to posterity.

On Ernst Jünger, from WW1 to WW2

I started reading Storm of Steel during the first weeks of the lockdown. It was strangely therapeutic to read about the sheer savage carnage of the trenches of World War I. When one is housebound for an extended period of time, there's a peculiar pleasure in reading about problems both wildly different from and much worse than one's own minor inconveniences. It brought to mind Lloyd Blankfein's riposte to a whining Goldman employee back in the 2008 financial crisis - "You're getting out of a Mercedes to go to the New York Federal Reserve. You're not getting out of a Higgins boat on Omaha Beach."

(As a side note, I guess we now officially have to start adding "2008" to the words "financial crisis" from here on out.)

Jünger is a fascinating character. It's fair to say that if you were born in 1895 in Heidelberg, and died still in Germany 1998, you were going to have seen some s*** in the interim. You will have lived as an adult through five pretty wildly different regimes - pre-war Imperial Germany through WW1, the chaos and decadence of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazi Germany and WW2, Cold War West Germany, and finally re-unified Germany.

Especially early on, successive new regimes put the citizens somewhat in the position of Poles over the course of WW2. Each new army comes marching through, and demands loyalty from you, while lashing out at those who are deemed to have supported the last army. Then the current lot gets tossed out, and the new army takes the same attitude. Repeat enough times, and you're almost guaranteed to be on the receiving end of someone's fury. Just surviving requires a lot of luck.

So if you manage to not only survive intact in each regime, but even to be broadly celebrated in most of them, you've pulled off a pretty remarkable feat. You might do it through extreme political cunning and chicanery, trimming your sails just enough in each period. Or you might do it by talent, being someone that everyone wants to have on their side. You obviously also need a lot of luck in either case. 

Jünger was one of only eleven infantry commanders in WW1 to be awarded the Pour le Mérite, the highest military honors of the German Empire, which doesn't suggest the kind of person noted for just keeping their head down and staying out of needless danger. 

His attitude to being in the trenches on the Western front seems to approximately be that death might come at any point, often quite randomly, so you may as well be brave and fight well in the meantime, since war is an ennobling, even transcendental experience. This is the kind of attitude that a lot of people probably wish they'd have if they were actually tested, but few of us ever get to really find out. Well, Jünger sure did. As he describes at the end of the book:

"During the endless hours flat on your back, you try to distract yourself to pass the time; once, I reckoned up my wounds. Leaving out trifles such as ricochets and grazes, I was hit at least fourteen times, these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand grenade splinters and two bullet splinters, which, with entry and exit wounds, left me with an even twenty scars. In the course of this war, where so much of the firing was done blindly into empty space, I still managed to get myself targeted no fewer than eleven times. I felt every justification, therefore, in donning the gold wound-stripes, which arrived for me one day."

Not only that, but almost as noteworthy is the parts left out of the story as being insufficiently interesting. Such as joining up with the French Foreign legion a year before the war, illegally, and then deserting. And then signing up to the German Army almost as soon as the war started.

Karl Marlantes' foreword gives a great summary:

"It should surprise no one that Jünger's book contains almost no political, moral, or philosophical commentary: Young men generally don't think deeply or philosophize about most things. But the lack of such commentary is not just because of the author's age; it is also because Storm of Steel was written by the type of person I call a "born warrior". Born warriors are interested in war and fighting, not philosophy or politics."

And indeed, that is how the book reads. The strongest hint of an explicitly literary bent is that Jünger manages to invent lots of colorful imagery to describe the endless aspects of shelling, bombing, and shooting. When you would otherwise have to say "and there were a buttload of terrifying shells falling at that time" roughly five hundred times during the book, managing to not repeat yourself in this regard is actually quite a feat.

But as an overall tone, Storm of Steel manages to tread a remarkable line of being very matter of fact and compelling about the scenes of carnage, but without conveying a false sense of "no big deal" type braggadocio, nor self-pitying complaint, nor adventurism for its own sake. For instance, here's one extended scene of a foray towards British lines, which I picked out at random:

"In quick time, we had crept up to the enemy barrier. Just before it, we came across a pretty stout and well-insulated wire in some long grass. I was of the opinion that information was important here, and instructed Wohlgemut to cut off a piece and take it with him. While he was sawing away at it with - for want of more appropriate tools - a cigar clipper, we heard something jingling the wire; a few British soldiers appeared and started working without noticing us, pressed as we were in the long grass.

Mindful of our hard time on the previous expedition, I breathed 'Wohlgemut, toss a hand grenade in that lot!'

'Lieutenant, shouldn't we let them work a bit more first?'

'Ensign, that was an order!'

Even here, in this wasteland, the magic words took effect. With the sinking feeling of a man embarking on an uncertain adventure, I listened to the dry crackle of the pulled fuse, and watched Wohlgemut, to offer less of a target, trundle, almost roll the grenade at the British group. It stopped in a thicket, almost in the middle of them; they seemed not to have seen anything. A flash of lightning lit up their sprawling figures. With a should of 'You are prisoners!' we launched ourselves like tigers into the dense white smoke. A desperate scene developed in fractions of seconds. I held my pistol in the middle of a face that seemed to loom out of the dark at me like a pale mask. A shadow slammed back against the barbed wire with a grunt. There was a ghastly cry, a sort of 'Wah!' - of the kind that people only produce when they've seen a ghost. On my left, Wohlgemut was banging away with his pistol, while Bartels in his excitement was throwing a hand grenade in our midst. 

After one shot, the magazine, had clicked out of my pistol grip. I stood yelling in front of a Briton who in his horror was pressing his back into the barbed wire, and kept pulling the trigger. Nothing happened - it was like a dream of impotence. Sounds came from the trench in front of us. Shouts rang out, a machine gun clattered into life. We jumped away. Once more I stopped in a crater and aimed my pistol at a shadowy form that was pursuing me. This time, it was just as well it didn't fire, because it was Birkner, whom I had supposed to be safely back long ago.

Then we raced towards our lines. Just before our wire, the bullets were coming so thick and fast that I had to leap into a water-filled, wire-laced mine crater. Dangling over the water on the swaying wire, I heard the bullets rushing past me like a huge swarm of bees, while scraps of wire and metal shards sliced into the rim of the crater. After half an hour or so, once the firing had abated, I made my way over our entanglements and leaped into our trench, to an enthusiastic reception. Wohlgemut and Bartels were already back; and another half an hour later, so was Birkner. We were all pleased at the happy outcome, and only regretted that once again our intended captive had managed to get away. It was only afterwards that I noticed that the experience had taken its toll on my nerves, when I was lying on my pallet in my dugout with teeth chattering, and quite unable to sleep. Rather, I had the sensation of a sort of supreme wakeness - as if I had a little electric bell going off somewhere in my body. The following morning, I could hardly walk, because over one knee (over other, historic injuries) I had a long scrape from the barbed wire, while the other had caught some shards from Bartels' hand grenade.

These short expeditions, where a man takes his life in his hands, were a good means of testing our mettle and interrupting the monotony of trench life. There's nothing worse for a soldier than boredom. 

There are dozens of stories like this. And by the end, one gets exactly the picture that Marlantes describes. If I were in a foxhole, I would want Ernst Jünger there beside me. 

So it was with quite some interest that I picked up Jünger's diaries from his time as a Wehrmacht officer in World War 2, primarily in Paris. What would such a man have to say about the Third Reich? Jünger was interesting in that he was a reactionary, firmly opposed to democracy during the Weimar period, but also a noted critic of the Nazis. He refused several offers to join them in the Reichstag, and quit the veteran's organization for his regiment when they expelled their Jewish members.  

Despite this, he ends up in Paris as intelligence officer. On its face, this is strange on two levels. Firstly, if he disliked the Nazis so much, how did he end up in the Wehrmacht under Hitler? This one is easy - he was conscripted. "World War 2, that sucks, if I were in Germany I would have just stayed out of it and quietly minded my own business" is the kind of pea-brained thought that seems to occur to almost every contemporary reader at some point, notwithstanding the obvious difficulty when you pause to contemplate it. 

And secondly, why an intelligence officer in a cushy gig in the Hotel Majestic in Paris? This may seem strange given how drawn he was to action as a young man, and how little he seemed to care about the side (how else do you describe joining the French Foreign Legion, and then the army fighting the French Foreign Legion a year later?). To end up as, in Gough Whitlam's memorable phrase, "a pen-pusher in Paris"? 

Reader, if you did not know in advance, you simply would not believe that the two books are written by the same person. Here's a few random samples:

Lunch at the Morands' on Avenue Charles-Floquet. There I also met Gaston Gallimard and Jean Cocteau.

Morand epitomizes a kind of worldly sybarite. In one of his books, I found a passage comparing an ocean liner with a Leviathan infused with the aroma of Chypre. His book about London is commendable; it describes the city as a great house. If the English were to build pyramids, they would include London in the decoration of their tombs.

Cocteau: amiable and at the same time, ailing, like someone who dwells in a special, but comfortable, hell. 

With intelligent women it is very difficult to overcome physical distance. It is as though they girded their alert intellects with a belt that foils desire. It is too bright within their orbit. Those who lack specific erotic orientation are more assertive. This could be one of those chess moves that ensures the continuity of our species. 

One can ask advice of a subaltern in a matter, but not regarding the ethical system fundamental to that matter.

The dignity of man must be more sacred to us than life itself.

The age of humanity is the age in which human beings have become scarce.

The true leaders of this world are at home in their graves.

In moments of inescapable disruption, individuals must proclaim their allegiance like a warship hoisting its colors.

By choosing certain circles in life, such as the Prussian General Staff, one may gain access to certain elevated spheres of inside information but exclude himself from the highest.  

To which you may wonder - how does the man who talks calmly and frankly about fiery death from above, when confronted with the Third Reich, only have the ability to talk about art, and dreams he had last night, and books, and occasional oblique references to the regime?

The answer is that in WW1, bombs might obliterate you at any point, but as long as you followed your commanding officer's orders, nobody much gave a damn what you wrote. For the Nazis, even if you were an officer, this was definitively not the case. And that's why there's so few great surviving descriptions from inside the regime (or from communist Russia, for that matter - we were very lucky to get a Solzhenitsyn, and that was decades after the crimes in question had started). As Jünger notes on October 21, 1941:

"I am keeping my personal papers and journals under lock and key in the Majestic. Because I am under orders from Spiedel to process not only the files concerning Operation Sea Lion, but also the struggle for hegemony in France between the military commander and the Party, a special steel file cabinet has been set up in my room. Naturally, armor like this only symbolizes personal invulnerability. When this is cast in doubt, even the strongest locks spring right open."

In other words, one had to play a delicate game to get enough political capital to be able to write one's own thoughts freely down on paper, and even then one must assume they will be pored over at some point. This is part of the uneasy relationship between the Nazi party itself and the German military commander in France mentioned above (and officers like Jünger ). Hitler is referred to as Kniebolo, a play on Diabolo, the devil.

Indeed, Jünger refers in a number of places to lemures. The notes describe these as "vengeful spirits in Roman mythology. E.J. uses the term to refer euphemistically to the executioners and butchers of the NS Regime. His source is Goethe's Faust where the Lemuren serve Mephistopheles as gravediggers." For instance, on March 12th, 1942:

It is said that since the sterilization and extermination of the mentally ill, the number of children born with mental illness has increased. Similarly, with the suppression of beggars, poverty has become more widespread. And the decimation of the Jews has led to the spreading of Jewish characteristics in the world, which is exhibiting an increase in Old Testament traits...

Feast Days of the lemures, including the murder of men, women and children. The gruesome spoils are hurriedly buried. Now there come other lemures to claw them out of the ground. They film the dismembered and half-decayed patch of land with macabre gusto. Then they show these films to others. What bizarre forces develop in carrion. 

Or more explicitly on the limitations on what he can say, from August 16th, 1942:

Saturday and Sunday in Vaux-de-Cernay at the house of Rambouillet, as a guest of the commander-in-chief, who is using this old monastery as his summer residence. My stay here has the advantage that I can do and say what I think is right and not be seen by any lemures.

And this category seems to include many things - Jünger's repugnance at the deportation of Jews (wikipedia mentions that "he passed on information e.g. about upcoming transports 'at an acceptable level of risk' which saved Jewish lives.), his sense that the war on the eastern front was misguided and bound to fail, and any number of other things. In the presence of a sympathetic commander-chief, you can speak freely. Otherwise, even in your journal, you had better keep your criticism measured. 

Jews were arrested here yesterday for deportation. Parents were separated from their children and wailing could be heard in the streets. Never for a moment may I forget that I am surrounded by unfortunate people who endure the greatest suffering. What kind of human being, what kind of officer, would I be otherwise? This uniform obligates me to provide protection wherever possible. One has the impression that to do that one must, like Don Quixote, confront millions. 

This shows a side of things that doesn't fit neatly into standard narratives about the Holocaust. Contra the deniers, an otherwise quite conservative Wehrmacht officer (admittedly, a well-connected intelligence officer) knew about the deportations, shootings and gassings at the time. And in his retelling, they were every bit as grotesque and cruel as we understand them today. Jünger even states that he feels that Germany's treatment of the Jews (and other targeted groups like French civilians in retaliation killings, the disabled, etc.) was so repugnant that Germany had enormous collective guilt for it.

But contra the standard narrative, he as a senior Wehrmacht officer was actively working to obstruct them in what way he felt he could. Part of the reason he felt able to do this was the fact that the German military officer in charge in Paris, Carl-Heinrich von Stulpnagel, had a similarly uneasy relationship with the Nazi Party, as evidenced by his role in the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Modernity tends to write all these people off as "Nazis", but the Wehrmacht still maintained some political independence. If the history of modern America were written by similarly uncharitable future historians, it would be like lumping all military officers in Iraq as being part of "the Republican Party" (under Bush) or even "the Democratic Party" (under Obama). 

If you're not in the presence of the commander-in-chief, you have to be more careful. On the train back from a trip to the Eastern Front in 1943, Jünger describes how one has to delicately feel out the opinions of one's audience before revealing too much:

Colonel Rathke, head of the department of military affairs, was on the train. Conversation about the situation in Rostov, which he consider reparable. Then, about the war in general. After the first three value judgments, one recognizes someone from the other camp and retreats behind polite cliches.

Of course, when one does find a fellow-thinker, one can talk much more freely. Jünger describes the conversation with General Konrad, commander of the Caucasus front. When I recalled this passage, I was sure these were Jünger's words, but looking back, no, they're him reporting someone else's sentiments, actually without comment. Prudent, as always. But when you realize the only way those sentiments could have been elicited, Jünger's feelings become clear:

The pounding suffered by the Sixth Army had shaken the entire southern flank. He was of the opinion that during the last year, our forces had been squandered by people who understood everything except how to wage war. The general continued, saying that neglect of the concentration of forces was especially dilletantish. Clausewitz would be turning in his grave. People followed their every whim, every fleeting idea: and propaganda goals trumped those of strategy. He said that we could attack the Caucasus, Egypt, Leningrad, and Stalingrad - just not all at once, especially while we were still caught up in secondary objectives.

This is a pretty damning and astute evaluation of Operation Barbarossa, especially coming from someone tasked with implementing it. If the Third Reich has an epitaph from a purely Machiavellian standpoint, it's hard to beat this one. 

Jünger also shows his skill at negotiating discussions with those more pleased with the butchery, and drawing out people's views without revealing too much. "Merline" here is Celine:

At the German Institute this afternoon. Among those there was Merline. Tall, raw-boned, strong, a bit ungainly, but lively during the discussion - or more accurately, during his monologue. He speaks with a manic, inward-directed gaze, which seems to shine from deep within a cave. He no longer looks to the right or the left. He seems to be marching towards some unknown goal. "I always have death beside me." And in saying this, he points to the spot beside his seat, as though a puppy were lying there. 

He spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging and exterminating the Jews - astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it. "If the Bolsheviks were here in Paris, they would demonstrate it, show how it's done - how to comb through a population, quarter by quarter, house by house. If I had a bayonet, I would know what to do."

It was informative to listen to him rant this way for two hours, because he radiated the amazing power of nihilism. People like this hear only a single melody, but they hear it uncommonly powerfully. They resemble machines of iron that follow a single path until they are finally dismantled.

It is remarkable when such minds speak about the sciences, such as biology. Them apply them the same way Stone Age man did, transforming them only into a means to slay others. 

They take no pleasure in having an idea. They have had many - their yearning drives them toward fortresses from which cannons fire upon the masses and spread fear. Once they have achieved this goal, they interrupt their intellectual work, regardless of what arguments have helped them climb to the top. Then they give themselves over to the pleasure of killing. It was this drive to commit mass murder that propelled them forward in such a meaningless and confused way in the first place.

People with such natures could be recognized earlier, in eras when faith could still be tested. Nowadays, they hide under the cloak of ideas. These are quite arbitrary, as seen in the fact that when certain goals are achieved, they are discarded like rags.

Contra Walter Sobchak, according to Jünger the tenets of National Socialism as utilized by its worst proponents ultimately did just amount to nihilism, and not to an ethos after all. For the people who glorified in the butchery, the butchery was the point. And remember, this is from a man most famous for glorifying war! But in Storm of Steel, he relishes the fight against worthy opponents. For the lemures, he has only contempt.

  

But strangely, most of the diary isn't about this kind of political or ethical stuff. Part of this is probably camouflage. But there's a huge amount about dreams he had, or his discussions with artists around Paris (like Picasso) and writers like Carl Schmitt and Celine. Jünger was something of a celebrity writer, having gotten uneasy attention from the regime from his novel On the Marble Cliffs in 1939, which was viewed as being critical of the Nazis. This meant he consorted a lot with various oddballs, artists, writers and freethinkers in Paris. 

Indeed, most of his Paris diary is about little else. Other than the fact of occasional air raid sirens, most of the scenes could be straight out of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris - romantic displays of life during the late Parisian Golden Age. The fact that our main protagonist is an officer of the occupying German army, but also extremely erudite and educated, just makes the whole thing even stranger. Jünger in general doesn't seem to be trying to downplay the brutal parts of the occupation, except to the extent that he can only discuss them obliquely. But if you go to his diary looking for a depiction of the widespread horrors of Vichy France for the average non-Jewish Frenchman, you won't find it here. Of course, in the famous words of Mandy Rice-Davies - he would say that, wouldn't he? Being a high ranking officer in the occupying regime in Paris, cavorting with artists and picking up women who weren't your wife, probably was a pretty good gig. If you were a poor farmer in the countryside, or a leftist artist, or a Jew? Well, that's a different matter. Still, for all that, it's hard not to be struck by how normal occupied Paris sounds, which is certainly not how people seem to imagine it. 

Part of the reason is that Jünger , for whatever reason, talks very little about his actual military work. Perhaps this is just for military secrecy. But the end result is a crazy contrast to Storm of Steel, where action was everywhere, death forever one unlucky break away, and the enormous necessity of the job always in front. Here, inaction is everywhere. It's almost like A Bohemian Wehrmacht Officer in Paris. There is no sense of any purpose at all to him being in Paris, other than getting inspiration for his writing. 

When Jünger goes to the Eastern Front, we see the old stoic acceptance of danger and risk of death briefly come back (though again, there still is no sense of what he's doing there, other than just seeing stuff). Jünger is still no coward. Indeed, when the Eastern Front post is suggested, he is concerned that he is genuinely sick and has been losing weight, but he can't just check into the infirmary right before he's meant to be shipped off to the Caucasus. When he trades a Paris hotel for a frigid railway station room in some tiny town in the Caucasus, he describes the privations, but without any sense of complaint. Indeed, he describes how much worse the situation is for soldiers actually on the front. 

One also gets the sense that combat is very much a young man's game. Because while the war in question has changed an enormous amount (Jünger memorably says that the Eastern Front seemed to more resemble the 30 Years War than WW1), it's also true that Jünger himself is different. Radically so. It's hard not to wonder what a Jünger who had been born 20 years later and ended up as a lieutenant on the Eastern Front would have thought of it all. I guess we'll never know. 

But the Jünger who actually lived through it is occasionally strident and unsparing. For Anglos, WW2 is the good war, the one Hollywood always wants to portray, whereas WW1 is the pointless butchery. For Jünger , the opposite is true:

New Year's Even party at Staff Headquarters in the evening. Here again I saw that during these years any pure joy of celebration is not possible. On that note General Muller told about the monstrous atrocities perpetrated by the Security Service after entering Kiev. Trains were again mentioned that carried Jews into poison gas tunnels. Those are rumors, and I note them as such, but extermination is certainly occurring on a huge scale. This puts me in mind of the wife of good old Potard back in Paris, who was so worried about his wife. When you have been party to such individual fates and begun to comprehend the statistics that apply to the wicked crimes carried out in the charnel houses, an enormity is exposed that makes you throw up your hands in despair. I am overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much. Ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians. Mankind has thus reached the stage described by Dostoevsky in Raskolnikov. He views people like himself as vermin. That is precisely what he must guard against if he is not to sink to the level of the insects. That terrible old saying applies to him as well as to his victims: "This is you."

Outside of the Holocaust, the rest of the Eastern front story is also still full of grotesque suffering. 

Detail: Russian prisoners Maiweg had selected from all various camps to work on the reconstruction - drilling technicians, geologists, local oil workers. A combat unit had been commandeered at a railroad station as bearers. There were five hundred men; of these three hundred and fifty died along the roads. From the rest, another hundred and twenty died from exhaustion when they returned so that only thirty survived.

...

I was a guest of the commander...He spoke of police tactics with the attitude of a gamekeeper, for example. "I consider the view quite erroneous that the thirteen and fourteen-year-old youths captured with the partisans should not be liquidated.Anyone who has grown up that way, without a father or a mother, will never turn out well. A bullet is the only right thing. By the way, that's what the Russians do with them too." Citing evidence, he told an anecdote about a sergeant who had picked up a nine-year-old and a twelve-year-old lad overnight out of pity; in the morning, he was found with his throat cut. 

Oof. Every bit of that story is grim and depressing. As Gary Brecher put it, even as a War Nerd, it is hard to get excited about the Eastern Front. 

WW1, for all its horrors, was unusually kind to civilians by world historical standards, even those caught up nearby. WW2, certainly by the end, reverted more to ancient type - butchery, extermination, and few distinctions between civilian and military targets. 

Indeed, just because Jünger agrees with modernity about the evils of the Nazis doesn't mean he agrees  on everything else. In particular, the straightforward descriptions of the effects of Allied bombing raids do not make for very edifying reading for those raised on the heroism of the American and British cause in WW2. 

Schaer also said that the last attack on Western Germany cost sixteen thousand lives in a single night. The images are becoming apocalyptic; people are seeing fire raining down from heaven. This is actually an incendiary compound of rubber and phosphorus that is inextinguishable and inescapable as it engulfs all forms of life. There are stories of mothers who have been seen flinging their children into rivers. This hideous escalation of atrocities has produced a kind of nightmare. 

... 

Krause was in Hamburg during the bombardment and reported that he saw twenty charred corpses leaning close together across the wall of a bridge there, as if they were lying on a grill. On this spot people covered in phosphorus had tried to save themselves by leaping into the water, but they were carbonized before they could do so. He told of a woman who was seen carrying an incinerated corpse of a child in each arm. Krause, who carries a bullet deep in his heart muscle, passed a house were phosphorus was dripping from the low roof. He heard screams but was unable to help - this conjures up a scene from the Inferno or some horrific dream. 

 ...

We also spoke of phosphorus as a weapon. It seems that we actually possessed this material when we enjoyed air superiority, but we waived that option. That would be to our credit, and in light of Kniebolo's character, bizarre enough. 

Or in Kirchorst near Hanover:

Was in the city in the afternoon. The ruins are new and have been hardest hit; the thrashing has been followed by the scorpion's sting. The southern part of the city was burning. Coal cellars were aglow and roofs were collapsing in showers of sparks in houses on Podbielskistrasse and on Alte Celler Heerstrasse, where I used to ride my bicycle. Nobody notices the fires anymore; they are just part of the scene. On the corners the homeless were packing up their salvaged possessions in bedsheets. I saw a woman come out the door of a house holding a chamber pot in her hand; little more than a fragment was still attached to its handle. Huge craters surrounded the railway station, where the equestrian statue of King Ernst August still stood in front of the bare, empty halls. Two entrances of the great air raid bunker where twenty-six thousand people had sought shelter, had been buried in debris. The ventilation system worked only sporadically, making the trapped crowd start to tear their clothes from their bodies and scream for air in the first stages of suffocation. God protect us from mousetraps of this sort.

What? Did you think that, because your granddad heroically risked his life to be a bomber pilot over Nazi Germany, the results would therefore be pleasing to see up close? Why should this sausage factory look any prettier from the inside than any other one? Be honest, you'd never even heard of the bombing of Hanover. In the scheme of World War 2, it just doesn't rate a mention. One way or another, nobody much cares about the suffering of German civilians in World War 2. Collective guilt for thee, but not for me. 

Jünger understood this perfectly well, and while he doesn't mince his words with the horrendous effects of Allied bombing, he doesn't shy away from German collective guilt either. In this respect, he's like Solzhenitsyn. But if you expected that his frank portrayal of German collective guilt over their atrocities would slip easily into him excusing allied collective guilt over their atrocities, you'd be quite mistaken:

We have to keep in mind that this carnage elicits satisfaction in the world. The situation of the German is now like what the Jews experienced inside Germany. Yet it is still better than seeing the Germans with their illegitimate power. Now one can share their misery.

The group that gets the most strikingly different treatment from the standard narrative, however, are the Parisians who tried to be friends with individual members of the occupying government. The stereotype of any Frenchman even vaguely supportive of the occupying German forces ranges from "repulsive Nazi sympathizer" to "regrettable go-along-to-get-along coward". Indeed, Jünger is scathing of Frenchmen like Celine/"Merline" who support the Nazis because they're sticking it to the Jews. But he describes a class of Frenchmen who had friendly association with the occupying Germans primarily out of a desire to put behind them the centuries of animosity between France and Germany, and just to take individuals as they found them and be friends with the nice ones. These people of course were treated extremely harshly in the aftermath of the German evacuation:

[Dr Gopel] reported that Drieu La Rochelle had shot himself in Paris. It seems to be a law that people who support intercultural friendship out of noble motives must fall, while the crass profiteers get away with everything. They say that Montherlant is being harassed. He was still caught up in the notion that chivalrous friendship is possible; now he is being disabused of that idea by louts.  

None of this should mean that Jünger is surprised that lots of Parisians loathe him and the government, and he describes such loathing quite honestly. This is inevitable when you're an occupying government that turned up riding tanks. But so were the Americans! How do you think they turned up? That doesn't make them moral equals, but it surely complicates the simple narrative that you should always resist foreign occupation. The main involvement of the Allies for the first several years of his time in Paris is periodically bombing and destroying bits of the city. This anecdote, however, stood out, if you're wondering why Paris is still beautiful today, whereas most of Germany is an architectural monstrosity:

Kniebolo's strict order to blow up the bridges over the Seine and leave a trail of devastation behind had not been carried out. It appears that among those courageous souls who resisted this desecration, Spiedel was in the forefront right beside Choltitz. 

And in an eerily correct prediction of 20th century architecture, Jünger saw in 1942 which way the wind was blowing:

Today, France still enjoys this advantage of traditions passed down from hand to hand, and will certainly retain these thanks to its largely rational policies. But what is important in this country at the moment is that its old haunts, the cities, will not be plowed under and on its ruins chain stores from Chicago would be built - which is what will happen to Germany. 

Chain stores from Chicago were indeed built over the ruins of Germany, and the results were every bit as aesthetically unedifying as Jünger predicted. Paris was indeed largely spared.

Jünger doesn't describe almost anything about the allied cause, either American or Russian (or the German cause very much either, for that matter). In this respect, it resembles Storm of Steel. The almost total lack of discussion of Communism is an interesting dog that didn't bark, though I'm not sure what to make of it. Admittedly, he wasn't in a position to experience this firsthand. You have to write what you know. As a reader, you have to read both sides. To understand the sides in the Eastern Front, start with Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and then follow it up with A German Officer in Occupied Paris. Jünger's criticisms of the Nazis on their own are less surprising to a modern audience. The big surprise is just hearing them coming from the author of Storm of Steel. While he doesn't dwell on it, his disgust at Hitler and his regime doesn't mean he feels that Germany as a nation had no legitimate grievances with the rest of Europe. As he describes it:

Our Fatherland is like a poor man whose just cause has been usurped by a crooked lawyer.

He never spells out what that just cause was, in his opinion, so I guess we'll never know. 

Once Paris was evacuated, Jünger had the good fortune to be dismissed from the army, partly due to him being viewed with suspicion due to being friends with, and possibly inspiring, a number of the members of the July 20 plot to kill Hitler (even though he himself was not involved). As noted in the foreword, one of his biographers claims that Jünger was scheduled to be called before the Nazi People's Court, which would have been a death sentence, but only the complete chaotic collapse of Germany saved him. 

Despite being very close to the Nazi chopping block himself, Jünger was denounced at the end of the war as being too sympathetic to the Nazis, and viewed with suspicion for a number of years. 

But how could it be otherwise, to thread such a tiny needle hole and come out the other side intact?

The journey from Storm of Steel to A German Officer in Occupied Paris is a strange and grim one. Every time I read these books, especially Storm of Steel, it's hard not to get to the end and think how many Jüngers from countries all over Europe were standing one foot in the wrong direction, and got torn to shreds with their story untold, on the battlefields of the Somme, and Stalingrad, and Ypres. 

 

It is a hugely sad and depressing thought. 

And, indeed, it is the strongest riposte to Storm of Steel itself.