In 1152, King Stephen of England very nearly killed a five-year-old boy.

He would have been far from the first child to die on Stephen’s account, because at this point England was fourteen years into a civil war so brutal that the Peterborough Chronicle recorded that men “said openly that Christ slept” (þa sæden openlice ðæt Crist slep. ⁊ his halechen),1 but this time was different. This time, the king had to order the boy’s death himself.

The medieval English royal succession was never as neat as Crusader Kings mechanics would have you believe, but even so Stephen I (and only) was an unlikely king. His mother Adela was the youngest child of William the Conqueror. She had four older brothers, three of whom survived their father, and Stephen himself was the third of her sons. But the Conqueror’s eldest son, Robert Curthose, mortgaged his duchy of Normandy to fund his participation in the First Crusade and would go on to spend the decades after his return in comfortable captivity. His second son, Richard, was killed as a teenager in a hunting accident in the New Forest in 1070, and his third son, William Rufus, succeeded him as king, never married, and was also killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest (this time in 1100). If this seems suspiciously convenient, it was: the youngest brother, Henry, was also on the fatal hunting trip. He immediately rode hard for Winchester, where he was crowned three days later.

Henry I promptly married Matilda, whose father was the king of Scotland and whose mother Margaret (later canonized by Innocent IV) was the sister of Edgar Ætheling: Henry and Matilda’s son William, born in 1103, united the blood of the Norman conquerors and the old Anglo-Saxon House of Wessex. Their daughter, another Matilda, was sent off to Germany at the age of eight to marry the twenty four-year-old Holy Roman Emperor Henry V. And that was it: Henry I also fathered at least twenty-two attested bastards, but William and Matilda were his only legitimate children. Which meant that when a drunken helmsman wrecked the ship carrying William and at least three hundred other flowers of the Anglo-Norman nobility across the Channel, Henry was in deep trouble. Luckily for him, his daughter soon returned from Germany a childless widow and once he had remarried her to Geoffrey of Anjou he was able to browbeat his barons into accepting her as his heir. Unluckily for him, they didn’t mean it: Empress Matilda was deeply unpopular even beyond the fact that she was a woman, and as soon as Henry died they were happy to crown his nephew Stephen instead.

The ensuing civil war, known to history as “the Anarchy,” was exciting and dramatic and featured such moments as a king captured on the battlefield, a queen climbing out the window of a besieged castle and escaping through a snowstorm, and a teenage boy invading England with a mercenary army he couldn’t afford to pay. For our purposes, though, all you really need to know is that in 1152 Stephen laid siege to a castle in Berkshire that John Marshal, a supporter of Matilda, had built without royal authorization. (These are apparently called “adulterine castles,” which I think is delightful.) Marshal asked for a truce to consult with his constable and organize the garrison’s surrender and offered his youngest son William as a hostage for his good behavior. Stephen accepted, took the boy into his camp, and withdrew to let Marshal enter with his men.

And then John Marshal stayed in the newly-reinforced castle instead.

Using your children as diplomatic hostages was standard practice in this era. Abandoning them to be executed as punishment for your bad faith was definitely not. But when Stephen’s men told John Marshal that his son’s life would be forfeit for his treachery, Marshal is said to have replied that he didn’t care, because he still had “the anvils and the hammers to forge even finer ones.” Stephen was not, in the end, able to bring himself to kill young William: the story has it that he lost his nerve when the boy asked on his way to the gallows whether he could play with a guard’s spear “afterwards,” and then again when William happily climbed into the catapult they planned to use to send him over the walls to his father (he thought it was a swing). He did, however, remain a hostage in Stephen’s camp until the end of the war a year later.2

Our only source for this story of William’s childhood, and for most of the truly excellent stories medievalist Thomas Asbridge recounts in The Greatest Knight, is a 19,215 line rhyming poem in medieval French. Probably composed a few years after William Marshal’s death at the behest of his friends or children, and pretty well corroborated by other sources where other sources exist, the poem is our only surviving example of a medieval biography of a “normal” person. (Relatively speaking; that little boy grew up to be an incredibly accomplished man but neither a king nor a saint, which is who usually got written about.) Moreover, it seems to have been compiled from stories told by people who actually knew him — which probably means that he was the one who told them about the child who thought the catapult was a swing. The poem exists in only one manuscript,3 discovered by Paul Meyer in the late 19th century and published with partial translations into modern French as L’histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal. (You can find Meyer’s version here or here.) More recently, Nigel Bryant published a full English translation, the text of which isn’t available online, though I’ll point out that even Claude Sonnet does a pretty decent job with screencaps of the original.4

So why read Asbridge’s book rather than the original History of William Marshal, or one of the highly-regarded biographies?5 (Sidney Painter’s 1933 volume, Georges Duby’s 1985 one, and David Crouch’s, originally published in 1990 but with a third edition in 2016, are all helpfully titled William Marshal.) Well, partly take a look at the relative prices and library availability of the various options and consider that I do most of my reading on a Kindle at the playground. But less prosaically, Asbridge’s book is a delight because it uses Marshal’s story as a lens on a far broader medieval picture. Of course any history worth its salt has to give you enough6 background material to contextualize its main narrative, but plenty of authors stop at “what can my expert broader knowledge of the period add to your understanding of the story I’m trying to tell?” without going on, as I prefer, to “…and what can the story show us about the period?” (This is more a genre issue than anything else: academic works are usually meant for audiences already familiar with the broad picture and interested in zeroing in on the brushwork down in this corner, where Asbridge is writing for the educated layman. But since I am an educated layman, this pleases me.)

Not that Asbridge slacks on the “expert broader knowledge” front. Against arguments that John Marshal’s apathy about his son’s survival was a period-typical response to an era of high child mortality, he shares a story from Gerald of Wales to argue that no, medieval people really did expect parents to care about their kids:

[…the] ruthless castellan [of the castle of Châteauroux] took one of his enemies captive and, so as to ensure that he posed no further threat, had the poor wretch blinded and castrated. … Thus emasculated, the man remained a prisoner for many years, but was given the freedom to roam the fortress, crawling and stumbling as he went. In time, however, he ‘committed to memory all [its] passageways and even the steps which led up to the towers’, and through all these long days, forgotten and ignored by those around him, the man nursed his cold hatred. …when an opportunity presented itself, the mutilated captive took sudden and terrible action. Seizing the lord of Châteauroux’s only son and heir, the prisoner dragged the boy ‘to the topmost crenellation of one of the towers’, locking all the doors behind him, and there ‘he stood outlined against the sky, threatening to throw the boy over’. The castle erupted in chaos as ‘everyone screamed in anguish’. According to Gerald:

“The boy’s father came running, and no one’s distress was greater than his. He made every offer he could think of in an attempt to obtain his son’s release. [But] the prisoner replied that he would not give the boy up until the father had first cut off his own testicles, [and though] the castellan went on with his appeals, they were all in vain.”

…the lord of Châteauroux eventually resolved to feign agreement and beckoned an onlooker to deliver ‘a mighty blow [to his] lower body, to give the impression that he had mutilated himself’, while ‘all those present groaned’ at the sight. But the blind man was not so readily fooled. He called out, asking the castellan ‘where he felt the most pain’ and when the lord ‘replied falsely that it was in his loins’, the captive stepped forward, readying himself to push the boy over. The castellan had himself struck a second time and, in answer to the same question, claimed that ‘worst pain was in his heart’, but again he was not believed. By now, the blind man had dragged his hostage ‘to the very edge of the parapet’. Finally, the lord realised he could hesitate no longer:

“The third time, to save his son, the father really did cut off his own testicles. He shouted out that it was his teeth that hurt most. ‘This time I believe you,’ said the blind man, ‘and I know what I am talking about. Now I am avenged of the wrongs done to me, in part at least… You will never beget another son, and you shall certainly have no joy in this one.’”

With that, the blind man ‘hurled himself over the battlements…taking the boy with him’, and both died, their bodies broken by the dreadful fall.

Whether or not this actually happened — Asbridge thinks it sounds fantastical and I have no personal experience of castration to compare — Gerald of Wales clearly assumed his audience would understand a father’s willingness to suffer terribly in order to save his child. John Marshal’s parenting seems to have been the outlier in his era as well as ours.7

The end of the Anarchy was good news for William, who got to go home to his family (the History reports that “his mother was overjoyed to see him” without mentioning his father), but it also dramatically reduced opportunities for social mobility. As a younger son, William stood to inherit virtually nothing he couldn’t win for himself: in a war, he would have had the opportunity to ascend by feats of arms, but in peacetime his options were fewer. Either way, though, he would need training, so he was sent off to the household of his mother’s kinsman William of Tancarville in Normandy. (I’m really sorry about all the Williams.) The History doesn’t have much to say about this period, which probably lasted six or seven years, beyond noting — in another bit that has the ring of a story later told and retold by William Marshal himself — that “people thought it a great pity that he retired to bed so early and yet slept so late” and that he acquired the nickname gasteviande or “greedy guts.” (There’s hope for your teenage son yet.)

William’s time in Tancarville would obviously have been spent acquiring the martial skills necessary for a 12th century knight — horsemanship, swordplay, and lance-work, typically while wearing forty-plus pounds of iron — but just as important was developing the relationships he’d need in order to get someone to buy all this for him. A warhorse or destrier alone was ruinously expensive: price comparisons across history are a dangerous affair, but when William was a teenager in the 1160s, the average price of a destrier could also buy you forty riding horses, two hundred packhorses, five hundred oxen, or ~4,500 sheep.8 (To calibrate: in this era, a large herd of sheep was about two thousand.) Armor and weapons weren’t as expensive, and were less likely to be killed on the battlefield, but they didn’t come cheap either. A lord with tenants and income of his own could afford to maintain himself as a knight. A younger son, not entitled to inherit anything from his father, definitely couldn’t.

And here we come to the thing that our popular image of the knight — and therefore our nigh-infinite stock of cod-medieval fantasy literature9 — ignores: the practical reality of a political and military system built around large numbers of highly-trained, expensively-equipped mounted warriors. This doesn’t just mean feudalism (although yes, it means feudalism, go read the Wikipedia article about that if you like and also manorialism while you’re at it); it also means the economics of training and supplying these men and the social systems necessary to control their behavior. In particular, right here, it means the mesnie.

Mesnie derives from the Latin mansio, house (cf. “mansion”), so you could translate it as something like “household” or “retinue.” Neither of those would really be wrong, per se, but they sound so bureaucratic and administrative that they’re a little misleading to a modern reader. You’ll get a better picture of the mesnie in practice if you think of it as a rapper’s posse, a capo’s lieutenants, or (for you Beckwith-heads out there) the warlord’s comitatus. Asbridge describes the mesnie as a “tightknit group of warriors serving as elite troops and trusted bodyguards” to a lord. They gave him their loyalty and served him in the field, and “in return a noble was expected to shelter his warriors, protecting their status and advancing their careers.” Which of course included providing arms and armor, horses, and eventually perhaps lands, titles, and advantageous marriages. In short, when young William finished his training he needed a patron — but unfortunately, he’d lost the lord of Tancarville.

William had enjoyed his first skirmish as a knight in a small border war in eastern Normandy. Then the war ended (the Normans won), which meant Tancarville’s mesnie was facing layoffs. Even in the twelfth century the newest hires were the first to go. To make matters worse, William’s warhorse had been killed in the fight, and while the History says he did well in the fighting, he hadn’t captured any enemy knights and so had no one to ransom for the money to buy a new horse. Frankly, after the skirmish he was worse off than he had been when he started: he had his sword, his armor, and the cloak he’d been given when he was knighted. Then he sold the cloak for enough money to buy a packhorse to carry everything else — another reminder of how very differently things were priced in the past, can you imagine an article of everyday clothing today that costs the same as a horse? —and he went out to seek his fortune.

At this point we confront the second major “they don’t put this in the movies” element of William Marshal’s story, which is the tournament.

“But wait!” you may well cry: obviously they do put tournament scenes in the movies, from the technicolor to the grimdark to the plain old goofy. But all that gallant jousting and ladies’ favors comes later: the tournaments of his day, Asbridge writes, “were entirely different beasts: imbued with some pageantry and awash with colour, yes, but riotous, chaotic affairs, tantamount to large-scale war games, played out by teams of mounted knights across great swathes of territory.” Hundreds or even thousands of knights gathered in whatever town was hosting the games, organized into two coalitions of allied teams distinguished by color (typically English/Norman vs. French), then battled across many square miles of countryside over the course of the day. For a modern equivalent in terms of social class, danger, and expense, you might imagine a horde of Saudi princelings descending on a succession of cities to race Formula One cars through the streets. Tournaments weren’t intended to kill — the goal was to capture an opponent and ransom him back for the price of his armor and horse, which could be astronomical — but of course men did die. (In fact, one could argue that tournament lethality is responsible for the entire Anglo-American constitutional tradition: Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, the brother between Richard the Lionheart and King John in the birth order, was accidentally trampled to death by his mesnie during a tournament in Paris a few years before their father’s death. And while counterfactuals are hard, my guess is that Geoffrey was politically competent enough that he wouldn’t have gotten stuck signing the Magna Carta. John was really very bad at being king.)

Anyway, the tournaments of the 12th century were professional sports just as much as were the later, more cinematic jousts, but because they were spread over so much territory they couldn’t support spectators outside of the participants. That didn’t really matter, though: there existed no outside social class to spectate. The knights who rode in tournaments were performing for each other. Their games were simultaneously entertainment to keep professional warriors out of trouble when there was no war on, individual and collective practice for future wars, and an opportunity to demonstrate the kind of martial prowess (on one side) and munificence (on the other) that formed the basis of lordly relationships. Performing well in a tournament could bring wealth and prestige on its own, but it could also earn a knight a place in a lord’s household. Visibly equipping your own knights well and feasting your fellows could attract more and better warriors to your banner, which let you win more tournaments and hopefully one day battles.

Asbridge argues that the knightly code of conduct called chevalerie (from cheval, horse, and therefore to be understood literally as “how a horseman acts” rather than any later romantic associations we may bring to the term) had the 12th century tournament as its “catalyst and cauldron.” The well-armed, mobile, mounted warrior was not a new military reality in Western Europe, but the advent of the Crusades — and more specifically, the creation of Christian knightly orders like the Templars and Hospitallers that fused monastic ideals onto a cultural figure that had hitherto been basically “a guy with a sword sitting on an animal that can trample you to death, please give him your stuff now” — kicked off a process of cultural accretion that quickly grew to include a literary tradition of chansons de geste (literally “songs of deeds”) focused on “daring bravery and wondrous martial prowess” as well as honor and loyalty. (Meanwhile in England, the legend of Arthur and his knights was invented in the 1130s.)10

Unlike a real battle, where honor and self-interest could come into dramatic conflict (with a castle or kingdom on the line, who wouldn’t be tempted to surrender and then, uh, strategically un-surrender when the enemy’s back was turned?), a tournament was thrilling and dangerous but still a game11 — and games are only fun if there are rules. The code of what it meant to be a guy on a horse, a chevalier, grew from the rules of a game whose audience was identical to its participants. As chevalerie went beyond what necessarily adheres to guys on horses, it came to govern the honorable behavior of knights to other knights: protecting your lord, keeping your word and staying captured once you’d been captured, engaging only armored opponents rather than sneaking into the tent where men went to rest and get a drink of water (yes, “base” in what was essentially the world’s most dangerous game of tag). A warrior class that constructed its social identity partly through these tournaments would keep those ideals on a real battlefield, too. Plenty of other societies had heavy cavalry (the Mongols did, and every empire from the Persians to the Byzantines had cataphracts): what made a knight a knight wasn’t the existence of the armored man on a horse but the specific culture that formed around him.

William entered his first tournament just after leaving Tancarville’s mesnie. At this point he was about twenty, and the History says that he was tall, “so well-fashioned that, even if he had been created by the sculptor’s chisel, his limbs would not have been so handsome,” with “fine hands and feet” and “a crotch so large…that no noble could be his peer.” (Alas, Asbridge spoils this by noting that this “almost certainly…referred to the width of his hips and natural predisposition for the horse saddle.”) He did remarkably well, “securing ‘two very valuable prisoners’: one an unnamed knight whom he battered to the ground with the stump of a lance; and the prize of the day, Philip of Valognes, taken early in the general mêlée when Marshal deftly rode in and grabbed the bridle of Philip’s mount. This neat trick — akin to snatching the steering wheel — was devilishly difficult to pull off, but gave William effective control over his adversary’s horse, enabling him to ‘drag [Philip] away from the tournament’. Thus immobilised, he submitted and promised to pay a ransom.” He spent the next few years excelling on the French tournament circuit (Henry II had banned them in England), then returned to England and took a place in the mesnie of his mother’s brother, Earl Patrick of Salisbury.

In 1168, William was part of a retinue escorting the English queen Eleanor of Aquitaine through her own territory of Poitou when they were surprised by a party of heavily-armed rebels. Earl Patrick, unarmored, was killed almost at once, but his remaining knights held the road long enough for the queen to escape. William was the last to fall, “backed up against a hedge, like ‘a boar before a pack of wolves’, desperately trying to hold back a ring of foes at sword-point. It was only when a [rebel] knight circled round to attack from behind—shoving a lance through the hedgerow that ‘went clean through [William’s] thigh and out the other side’—that he was felled.”12 The rebels dragged him with them as they fled, in conditions that made treating his wound difficult, but he survived and was even allowed enough freedom to join them in a game of “who can throw this big rock the farthest” that the History claims he won (but caused the healing wound to open again). Eventually, though, news came that Queen Eleanor was willing to pay his ransom herself, and once he was freed she gave him a place in her own military retinue.

The History reports that he now considered himself “in the gold,” and he was right: in three years, he had gone from a lordless, cloakless, warhorseless vagabond to the highest household in the realm. The true scale of his ascent became clear in 1170, when Henry II — hoping to avoid a repeat of the Anarchy and the kind of contested succession that had brought him to the throne a generation earlier — had his fifteen-year-old son (another Henry) crowned king alongside him and appointed William as the young man’s tutor-in-arms and a leading member of his mesnie.

Asbridge has some revisionist takes to offer on the Young King, who (spoiler alert) did not survive to rule independently, which is why history has not accorded him a number. I found these interesting (I imprinted hard on A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver as a child and will devour approximately anything that has to do with Eleanor of Aquitaine) but not terribly germane here, so I’ll note simply that the History describes Young Henry as “the finest of all the princes on earth, be they pagan or Christian,” and that when William established a priory much later in his life the charter named the various kings he had served but described only this first master, then long dead, with the intimate “my lord.” He later followed Young Henry, his brothers, and his mother into revolt against their king, then — once the revolt was defeated and Eleanor was imprisoned — onto the tournament field.

The Young King, perhaps realizing that his father was never going to give him meaningful power, reinvented himself as the glittering and glorious “father of chivalry.” He spent his generous allowance on recruiting and supporting a mesnie of the finest knights in Europe, and the History records that “he could never have enough of risking and giving generously” and was “incapable of refusing anything to any man.” This seems to have been the period William remembered most fondly later in life. As Asbridge describes it:

The History painted a vivid picture of the exuberant joy shared by William and the Young King at their daring exploits, evoking an unmistakeable sense of unfettered bravura and camaraderie. This was never clearer than at a ‘grand and excellent’ tournament held on the Norman-French border between Anet and Sorel. Henry’s retinue performed well in the early stages of this event, timing their charge to perfection so that they ‘drove right through’ the French ranks. With their opponents in full flight, most of the Young King’s household set off in pursuit, but Marshal remained at his lord’s side. Together they ‘rode downhill until they came out clean in the middle of the main avenue in Anet’. The town seemed deserted until they turned a corner and were suddenly confronted by the sight of the mounted French warrior, Simon of Neauphle, blocking the way ahead with a well-armed party of infantrymen. The History related that: ‘The King said, “We shall not get through, and yet there is no question of going back.” The Marshal replied, word for word: “So help me God, there’s nothing for it but to charge them.”’

Hammering headlong down the street, the throng of foot soldiers scattered before them, all desperately trying to avoid being trampled to death. A way through opened up, but William was not content merely to make a getaway. He rode in towards Simon of Neauphle, deftly snatched his horse’s bridle and, holding on with all his might, began dragging his opponent along behind him, as Henry followed. This was one of Marshal’s favourite techniques — it had earned him plenty of captures back in the 1160s — and he now rode off to the lists, with Simon in tow, intent on declaring the French knight his prisoner. Simon had other ideas. As they raced through the town, with William ‘paying no attention to what was going on behind’, the French knight leapt out of his saddle to grab an overhanging gutter, and was thereby plucked from his mount. Marshal remained oblivious, but the Young King witnessed this spectacular feat, yet said nothing.

When they reached the lists and William instructed his squire to ‘Take this knight into custody’, Henry cheerily enquired in reply: ‘What knight?’ and then revealed Simon’s ‘splendid trick’. The History presented this as a comical moment: Marshal ‘burst out laughing’ as both men savoured the joke, and the tale was heartily retold for weeks to come. The episode has the feel of a favoured, and perhaps embroidered, anecdote, but the kernel of truth — William’s intimate friendship with Young Henry — seems authentic.

The golden age of chivalric bromance didn’t last: Young Henry launched a war against his brother Richard, their father joined in on Richard’s side, and in 1183 William’s beloved lord, the great flower of chivalry, died of dysentery and deeply in debt to his mercenary captains. On his deathbed, he charged William to fulfill the crusader’s vow he had made but never honored; of course William obeyed. Unfortunately the author of the History announces only that while in the Holy Land he performed as “many feats of bravery and valour” as “if he had lived there for seven years,” but “I was not there and did not witness them, nor can I find anyone who can tell me half of them.”13 When William returned to England two years later, he was offered a place in the mesnie of the Old King, Henry II, his lord’s father.

The History’s account of the following decades can best be summarized as “William Marshal serves his lord loyally even when other people are disloyal jerks and don’t, and he’s rewarded for it.” Perhaps the centerpiece comes in 1189, when the ailing Henry II was fighting yet another war against one of his sons (this time Richard the Lionheart, his heir, who had allied with the King of France), and has two parts.

The first was in June, by which point it was already clear that the Old King was dying but would not surrender. Forced to burn his favorite city to cover his retreat, Henry’s party was riding for safety when a group of Richard’s knights came up fast behind them on the road. William and another knight (another William, they hadn’t invented very many names in the 12th century) turned to bar their way when they realized that the newcomers were led by none other than Richard himself — and that Richard had eschewed shield and armor for greater speed in pursuing his father, leaving him as terribly vulnerable as William’s uncle the Earl of Salisbury had been years earlier.

The History reports that “[William] spurred straight on to meet the advancing [Duke] Richard. When the [duke] saw him coming he shouted at the top of his voice: ‘God’s legs, Marshal! Don’t kill me. That would be a wicked thing to do, since you find me here completely unarmed’,” and William, a bastion of chevalerie, replied, “‘Indeed I won’t. Let the Devil kill you! I shall not be the one to do it’,” and drove his lance into Richard’s horse instead. This split-second decision let William fulfill both sides of his chivalric obligations: he had protected his lord, as he was honor-bound to do, by ending Richard’s pursuit, but he’d done it without breaking the accepted rules of knightly behavior. On the other hand, everyone knew that the man he had left alive was about to become King of England; an increasing number of Henry’s men were defecting to Richard’s side, and here William had just killed his horse and very nearly killed him, which doesn’t tend to endear you to a future king.

The second part of the story comes less than a month later, when Henry II died betrayed and abandoned by most of his household and (most gallingly) his final remaining son, John. The History says that after the king’s death, his servants stripped his corpse and that William and the few loyal knights who were left had to find a cloak to cover the body before it could be taken to lie in state. Then, apparently, as soon as Richard had visited the body of his father, king, and enemy, he asked for William and rode out into the countryside with him:

The History preserved a dramatic record of this tense encounter. After a long pause, Richard finally broke the silence, apparently saying: ‘Marshal, the other day you intended to kill me, and you would have, without a doubt, if I hadn’t deflected your lance with my arm.’ This was a dangerous moment. Should William accept this comment, he would allow the Lionheart to save face, yet at the same time admit to having sought his death. According to the History at least, he chose the harder path, replying: ‘It was never my intention to kill you…I am still strong enough to direct my lance [and] if I had wanted to, I could have driven it straight through your body, just as I did that horse of yours.’ Richard might have taken mortal offence at this blunt contradiction. Instead, he was said to have declared: ‘Marshal, you are forgiven, I shall never be angry with you over that matter.’

And then Richard made him a rich and powerful peer of the realm overnight by giving him a rich heiress, Isabel of Clare, as a wife. The History’s message is clear: again and again William behaved properly even when the people around him didn’t, and again and again William was rewarded for it. He was severely wounded avenging the death of Earl Patrick and received a place in the queen’s household; he followed the Young King until he died and ended up with the Old King’s favor; he was loyal to the Old King when everyone else (including and especially John, whom William would also serve after Richard’s death) betrayed him, and then he became a wealthy magnate and eventually one of the justiciars left in charge of England when Richard departed for the Third Crusade.

There is, of course, a great deal more, all of which the History and Asbridge treat at length: William Marshal helped hold the kingdom together during Richard’s absence, raise the ransom to free him from his German prison, crush John’s rebellion, and retake the Norman territory lost to the French while the king was gone. (There’s a great story from this campaign in which William, age fifty, goes up a siege ladder, fells the enemy commander with a single blow, and sits on him.) Then Richard died and William threw his support behind John, which was probably a better call for England (the only alternative was the twelve-year-old son of Richard and John’s late brother Geoffrey) but a complicated one for William, whose relationship with the king degraded steadily over the course of his reign. Nevertheless, he remained loyal to the crown through the revolt that led to the signing of the Magna Carta and the subsequent invasion of England by the French: the History says that as “a man of loyal and noble heart, [William] stayed with [John] in hard and difficult circumstances” and that “whatever the king had done to him, [William] never abandoned him for anyone.”

By the time John died of dysentery14 in 1216, more than half the kingdom was occupied by the rebellious barons and their French allies. John’s heir, yet another Henry, was nine. William Marshal, by now nearly seventy, organized the boy’s coronation, became his regent, and was so eager to personally lead a cavalry charge that he almost forgot his helmet. (That charge, once he was properly garbed, won the royalists a stunning victory in the decisive Battle of Lincoln, preserving the English throne for the family he had served for almost fifty years and five kings.)15

William Marshal died in 1219 with his family around him. The History of William Marshal was probably written about five years later under the patronage of his son (yet another William), who had joined the rebel barons but been reconciled to the royalist cause under Henry III and ridden with his father at Lincoln. Sadly, none of Marshal’s five sons left legitimate heirs; the vast estates he’d amassed were split among his daughters’ families, and the History itself seems to have been forgotten:

By the end of his long life, contemporaries recognised the scope of William’s achievements — not least his defence of the Angevin dynasty and defeat of the French. For many, he was the peerless knight; Lancelot brought to life. Marshal seems to have served as an inspiration for writers of medieval Arthurian literature. Indeed, the Comte Guillaume (Count William) to whom the elusive, but highly influential, Marie de France dedicated her translation of Aesop’s Fables may well have been William Marshal. It is little wonder that, while grounded in fact, his biography, the History of William Marshal, was fashioned in Anglo-French verse to resemble an Arthurian epic. With the fracturing of the Marshal dynasty, however, that text fell out of circulation, and the associated celebration of his exploits gradually subsided. By the end of the Middle Ages, the History had been forgotten and William became merely another name in the dusty annals of the distant past.

Asbridge’s takeaway is more or less “William Marshal was an influential historical figure and more people should know about him,” which conclusion I co-sign: William played increasingly important roles in a pivotal seventy years of English history, and the stories are great. But “William died in a different England to the one in which he had been born, but it was a country that he had been instrumental in shaping” doesn’t go far enough: he helped form politics and government, yes, but also culture.

The chevalerie that shaped William Marshal’s life, the code of honorable conduct towards other guys on horses, was partly a practical outgrowth of the rules of the tournament. But it also owed a great deal to the literary tradition that was being created at the same time, and William’s biography — both the History itself and the larger story it preserved, of a boy who was nearly killed by a king but went on, through acts of peerless daring and feudal loyalty, to serve five more — became part of that tradition. His funny stories of his own life, the things he valued and remembered and obviously retold to his children and his household, aren’t just reflections of an early stage of the ideal of chivalry; they helped make it. If William Marshal was, as the History puts it, li meillor chevalier del monde — “the greatest knight in the world” — it’s at least in part because the idea of “knight” was built with him for its model. This is how culture happens: the world changes, people work out new ways of living in the changed world, and then their stories survive as ideals that other people keep trying to copy even once the world has changed again. We’re still thinking about what it means to be a guy on a horse long after the mounted warrior class was gunned down.

If you’ve heard John Boyd’s name before, it’s probably as the father of the OODA loop. If you’ve never heard of that concept, it’s a favorite of everybody from military strategists to management consultants to the people who run schlocky third-tier corporate teambuilding retreats. The way the idea is most commonly interpreted today (not the way Boyd originally meant it, note) is that decision-making agents can’t react to changed circumstance instantaneously, but rather go through a process where they notice that the world has changed, integrate that new information into their picture of the world, decide what the new situation means for them, and then finally act on that information.

The preachers of the OODA loop think that the faster you can perform each of these steps, the better you can cope with a changing environment. But the real magic comes when you’re locked in some kind of contest with an opponent, because now you and he are changing each others’ environments via various gambits and attacks. So the theory is that if you can go through all these stages quickly enough, you can “get inside” your opponent’s OODA loop, such that by the time he’s gotten around to figuring out what’s happened and what that means he should do, you’ve already done the next thing and changed the situation again. If you do this fast enough, your opponent’s decision-making collapses entirely, leaving him paralyzed with indecision, or lashing out at random, or acting based on a very out-of-date picture of the world.

I think I learned about the OODA loop from Venkatesh Rao, and it seemed sort of cool, but also like I just explained it in two paragraphs. How much more is there to this really? So when Jane handed me a biography of the guy who invented it, I idly flicked over to the table of contents, and sat up with a start when I saw that the entire concept was covered in a single 10-page chapter…350 pages into the book. Huh? Did this guy do some other interesting things first? I do like reading about people with a lot of dynamic range. So I started skimming, and before I knew it I was hooked.

There are two kinds of men: those who shatter when life hammers them, and those who become harder. For John Boyd, the hammering started shortly after he was born and never let up, and it only ever made him tougher and meaner and less willing to concede. Born in the wrong century in Erie, Pennsylvania, the fourth child out of five, within a few short years his father was dead, his family was financially ruined, his younger sister contracted polio, and his older brother was committed to an insane asylum where he promptly and mysteriously died. All of this was made worse by a controlling mother determined to maintain the charade that the Boyd family enjoyed a respectable bourgeois domesticity. Despite her efforts, or because of them, the children were constantly humiliated at school. Boyd did the natural thing and spent all his time lifting weights and drawing pictures of airplanes. As high-school graduation approached, the Second World War was still grinding on, and if Boyd knew one thing it was that he didn’t want to be slogging through the mud, so he enlisted in what was to become the Air Force.

Boyd arrived late for his first war. By the time his training was done, the Axis had surrendered, and so he joined the American occupation forces in Japan. His service was unremarkable, apart from one bizarre and unlikely-sounding episode in which he and a group of fellow privates were forced to camp in tents in rainy and cold conditions despite there being wooden barracks housing standing empty nearby. Supposedly, Boyd led the other soldiers to go tear down the wooden buildings and use them to build campfires. For this he was scheduled to be court-martialed, but instead of apologizing he threatened to go nuclear and blow the whistle on how the troops had been treated by their incompetent commanders, at which point the army backed down. Every part of this story is plausible except the last bit, which strains credulity. The United States military does not generally give in to blackmail from privates. On the other hand, it sounds exactly like every other John Boyd story, and some of those have documentary evidence. We will never know.

John was discharged from the army and attended the University of Iowa, where he met Mary Bruce, later to be his faithful and long-suffering wife and the mother of his five children. Or as Boyd put it: “I got nothing out of it.” Mary kept waiting for John to propose, but he ignored her because he was hopelessly in love with something else: the F-86 Sabre. By his senior year, the Korean War had started, and John’s only goal in life was to fly fighter jets in Korea and hopefully to shoot down a MiG. He joined the Air Force, and despite the newly commissioned Second Lieutenant Boyd excelling all his peers at flying training aircraft, he was deemed too tall for fighters and told to prepare to be a bomber pilot. Once again, Boyd went ballistic, screaming that bomber pilots were “a bunch of truck drivers” and that he did not want to be “in a crowded bus and have a bunch of people continually telling me what to do.” Once again, he got his way, and was sent to practice in a jet so cramped that if he ever had to eject, his legs would almost surely be amputated. Boyd was delighted.

So off Boyd went to fighter school, with a brief stop to get engaged to Mary (who had still just been hanging around waiting for him to propose). The instructor at his base greeted him with the following speech: “If I had my way, we’d kill half you sons of bitches. The other half would leave here as fighter pilots… But the goddamn Congress won’t let me do that.” Nevertheless, they tried. Boyd said in his memoirs that in one year alone more than seventy pilots were killed in training accidents, and one military historian thinks that may be conservative because wing commanders doctored the numbers. Incoming students were sometimes told, “If you see the flag at full staff, take a picture.” Fighter jets had just been invented, and nobody knew exactly where their performance envelope extended. Nobody enjoyed pushing that envelope more than Boyd, who was intensely competitive and constantly “bending” the aircraft, pulling more Gs than anybody else and winning dogfights against instructors who were combat veterans from the Korean War.

Boyd arrived late for his second war too. By the time he got to Korea it was 1953, and all the good Soviet MiG pilots had gone home. So he never got to be in a real dogfight and spent all his time practicing against other Americans flying F-86s. Once again, he was a “good stick” and dominated all the competition, but this was the moment when he began to wonder if perhaps there was more to fighter tactics than he’d been taught. You see, fighter tactics at the time basically boiled down to “turn faster than the other guy, get inside, then shoot him.” It was the same thing pilots had been doing since World War II, or even earlier, just at higher altitudes and faster speeds. So Boyd sat in mess halls in Korea and closed his eyes and imagined aerial maneuvers, actual moves that one could do, and then he opened his eyes again and loudly explained them to his dining companions while poking his finger into their chests if he thought they weren’t listening carefully enough.

When Boyd returned from the war, he wanted to devote himself to studying and ultimately codifying a new set of fighter tactics that amounted to more than just “turn faster than the other guy and then shoot him.” This set him on a collision course with the Air Force in two different ways. First of all, the Air Force hated the idea of fighter tactics. The US military as a whole is gear-obsessed, but the Air Force took this attitude to an unbalanced extreme: it was an outright technocracy that cared only about how to procure faster and more expensive planes. Why waste time thinking about how to use an airplane more effectively when we could be funding development of a more advanced one? Anyway, everybody knew that air-to-air missiles were about to be invented that could be launched from ten miles away, so fighter combat would just be about pressing a button. Dogfights were a thing of the past and people who cared about them were relics.

Before we sneer too much at the Air Force here, let’s reflect that there are places on the technology learning curve where this kind of thinking makes sense. And if you want a more modern example than the transition from oxen to horses as draft animals and from water to coal as an energy source, consider the “bitter lesson” of AI research. A recurring theme of the past few decades is that cleverer algorithms get beaten by very dumb algorithms with more compute, more data, more parameters, and more electricity thrown into them. Or for an even more direct analogy, consider all the wasted effort that was spent trying to harness and direct and work around the inadequacies of last year’s AI agents, when actually you could just wait for another trillion dollars of capex to deliver you this year’s AI agents. Do you remember MCP servers? Yeah, me neither. So the Air Force’s position here was not a priori ridiculous, it just happened to be wrong.1

But beyond hating fighter tactics, the Air Force also hated fighters. The men who now ran the Air Force had all flown bombers in World War II. Bombers were bigger and more expensive than fighters, so procuring them required larger budgets, which was good for everybody’s career. Most importantly, bombers delivered nuclear weapons. They would fly so high and so fast that no fighter could intercept them. The most important man in the Air Force was Curtis LeMay, the head of the Strategic Air Command. He had the largest budget in the Air Force, and the Air Force had the largest budget in the military. He used his budget to build an enormous globe-straddling force of bombers and the nuclear weapons to put in them. “Flying fighters is fun. Flying bombers is important,” LeMay once said. Because they were so important, officers in the Strategic Air Command were promoted more quickly, ensuring that the Air Force continued to be run by bomber pilots. If a real war ever broke out, the only thing fighters would be good for was delivering tactical nuclear weapons to targets too small for the bombers to worry about. Basically, a fighter is just a smaller bomber with less range and less capacity for bombs. Why even have them, anyway?

After the Korean War ended, there were hordes of excess fighter pilots that the Air Force didn’t know what to do with (because Korea was an anomalous war with lots of air-to-air combat, but that would never happen again). Many of them were shunted off to maintenance or facilities postings, or converted into budget-rate bomber officers. This was to be Boyd’s fate as well until yup, you guessed it, he threw a giant fit and screamed and demanded special treatment. Which is how he wound up at what was then Fighter Mecca — Nellis Air Force Base, known for its unusually high rates of court-martial and sexually-transmitted disease. Here in this backwater, and especially at its Advanced Flying School, was the one place that fighter aviation was taken seriously, and it’s where Boyd would make his first of several marks on history.

Before he did that, though, life had another blow to deal him. In 1955 the US government approved the polio vaccine, and the disease was all but eliminated shortly thereafter. So America’s final polio epidemic occurred in the summer of 1954, and that was when, shortly after moving across the country to take a new job, Boyd’s infant son Stephen contracted the disease:

Stephen’s polio was especially severe. Sandbags went on his legs and braces on his back. Boyd went to a swimming-pool manufacturer and bought a small pump that he installed in the bathtub so Stephen could lie in warm swirling waters. The dining-room table was cleared and turned into an exercise table and every morning Boyd and Mary held Stephen and pulled and tugged and stretched his legs and massaged his atrophying muscles as he screamed with pain. Boyd often used his lunch break to come home and give Stephen additional exercise. Twice Stephen almost died.

Recall that Boyd’s older sister Ann also had polio, which naturally caused all of Boyd’s relatives and acquaintances to send him helpful notes explaining that it must be hereditary. Meanwhile, Mary was pregnant again and constantly ruminating as to whether the new baby would also contract the disease (either from her husband’s defective genes or from a sickly older brother). Finally, she decided that the solution to Stephen’s health problems lay in the mineral-rich waters of Warm Springs, Georgia. So Boyd sold his car, bought a station wagon (so that Stephen could lie down in the back), and began the first of many horrible trips with no purpose. The car had no air-conditioning, and as they drove for three days through the American South to their destination and back, the baby’s metal braces would get uncomfortably hot, and he would scream the entire way there and the entire way back. As the kid grew to be a toddler, Boyd had no money to buy a wheelchair, but he nailed some boards together and attached skate wheels to the bottom and taught his son to lie on the makeshift skateboard and propel himself with his hands.

Meanwhile, Boyd’s career was taking off. He was gifted with an uncanny knack for flying airplanes, and was equally good at teaching others how to fly them. The two skills were almost certainly connected; Boyd himself once said: “The only way to get a fighter pilot’s attention is to whip his ass,” a pithy encapsulation of the view frequently espoused in this substack that leaders must be great at the object-level details of what their followers do (see also here). Boyd wrecked everybody who went up against him in training exercises. He was so good at getting a feel for the physics and dynamics of airplanes that he diagnosed a dangerous adverse yaw instability in the F-100 Super Sabre that dozens of accomplished aeronautical engineers and test pilots couldn’t figure out…and then he used that dangerous adverse yaw instability to his advantage to win more simulated dogfights.2

Finally, Boyd put out a challenge to all US-aligned fighter pilots, domestic or foreign: come meet him in the air above Nellis Air Force Base, and Boyd would let them start on his tail, and within forty seconds he would have reversed their positions and “shoot them down” with simulated cannon fire. This boast was outrageous. Sure, a skilled pilot could lose a tail and turn the tables on a pursuer, but consistently doing it in forty seconds was preposterous. Countless young pilots took him up on this challenge, and Boyd defeated every single one. Often he did it with time to spare. His renown spread across America and Europe and he became known as “Forty-Second Boyd”:

Nothing in Boyd’s long and tumultuous career causes such a violent reaction among old fighter pilots as hearing about the invincible Forty-Second Boyd. It sets their teeth on edge. They say all this business about being the best is a boy’s game and that there is no “world’s greatest fighter pilot” — that even the very best pilot can have a bad day. The quote the adage “There never was a horse that couldn’t be rode and there never was a cowboy that couldn’t be throwed.” But if they went through Nellis in the mid- and late 50s, they knew there was someone better. And it still rankles.

[…]

Boyd’s standing offer struck fighter pilots at the very core. He was rubbing their noses in his superior ability. The offer was a personal affront to every man who considered himself a fighter pilot. No one could be as good as Boyd was supposed to be. Fighter pilots ached to see him beaten. Word would have swept through the Air Force in days about the pilot who defeated Forty-Second Boyd. The pilot who defeated John Boyd would have been remembered…

But nobody ever did.

As the undisputed greatest fighter pilot and instructor ever (at least in his own mind), Boyd decided it was time to write an official manual of aerial tactics and doctrine. So he asked to be relieved of his flying and teaching duties for a year to put the manual together. When his boss, the commandant of the Fighter Weapons School, told him absolutely not, Boyd leapt out of his chair, and strode over to the superior officer screaming and ranting, and began poking his fingers into the man’s chest while ashes fell from his lit cigar and cascaded down the colonel’s dress uniform. Finally, Boyd screamed: “Godammit, I’ll do it on my own.” He was as good as his word, working on the tactics manual late at night after a full day of flying, and tormenting his colleagues by calling them at 3am with whatever new idea he had gotten while writing.

When Boyd’s manual was finally completed and edited after months of grueling late night and early morning work, he received the unwelcome news that it would not be used to instruct new pilots. You see, the Air Force had put together an official manual of fighter tactics — a 15-page pamphlet that amounted to “turn faster than the other guy and then shoot him.” To rub salt in the wound, Boyd’s manual was then classified, so he couldn’t even publish it himself (ostensibly the classification was because it contained information on how a fighter jet could outmaneuver an air-to-air missile, something that the Air Force brass hated because they were big believers in missiles). But Boyd’s renegade tactics manual was eagerly devoured by pilots, who shared it around like samizdat and made photocopies of it, and mailed it to friends at other bases. Years later, the Air Force would finally delete the section on how to outrun missiles and publish an unclassified version.

At the age of thirty-four years old, having fought in two wars and spent five years screaming at younger fighter pilots, with four children and a wife pregnant with their fifth, John Boyd decided to become an undergraduate at Georgia Tech. He was a bit of an outlier on campus, and tried to hide a bit by wearing civilian clothes to class, but there was only so much he could hide when “his voice could be heard a block away and his language could peel paint off the old buildings.” One classmate of his recalled, “I’d love to have introduced him to my brother or my daddy, but not to my mamma. That was the cussingest man I ever met.”

Boyd was there as part of an Air Force program to send promising young officers back to school to get advanced degrees in engineering, but the real reason he was there was that he had picked up a little bit of thermodynamics from a textbook and had something nagging in the back of his brain, telling him that there was a deep connection to fighter tactics and aerobatics, something that the whole rest of the world had missed. And indeed, he was right. By applying fairly basic Lagrangian mechanics to the kinematics of airframes, he developed something that would come to be known as Energy-maneuverability theory. Essentially, he developed equations relating an airplane’s specific excess power (the rate at which it can gain or lose energy, normalized by aircraft mass) to its thrust, drag, velocity, and so on. And since Boyd had just established with his tactics manual that energy management was the essence of aerial combat, by producing E-M contour plots across different combinations of velocity, altitude, turning rate, etc., you could map out a fighter’s performance envelope and combat potential across all possible flight conditions.

Everybody thought he was insane. If the reception of his fighter tactics manual was chilly, then attitudes towards the E-M theory were downright frigid. But my own reaction on reading about all of this was disbelief: are you really telling me that twenty years after the development of jet aircraft, with thousands of smart people applying their minds to it, we still had no idea how to systematically analyze the performance of those aircraft? And yet as far as I can tell this is actually true. As simple and obvious in hindsight as it was, Boyd’s E-M theory broke completely new ground and changed fighter aircraft design from a vague, vibes-based activity to an actual science.

I think there’s a lesson here about technology more generally: after a major new breakthrough happens, there is often a ridiculous amount of low-hanging fruit lying around in nearby parts of the tech tree. Not to keep using AI as an example, but if all model capabilities progress stopped tomorrow, we’d probably still be spending the next 50 years figuring out how to extract economic and military value from what’s already been done. That was certainly the case with the internet, where in some sense we are even now not yet done working through the implications of technology developed in the 1960s. By the way, this is why the technology frontier is a nicer place to be. Near the frontier, small teams of amateurs and gentleman scientists still have some hope of beating the professionals. Near the frontier, not all the alpha and not all the slack has been squeezed out and devoured by Moloch. It is actually inspiring and exciting that one guy who hadn’t graduated college could figure out that everybody else was thinking about airplanes all wrong. Imagine what’s out there for you to figure out today!

Now let’s go back to that guy who’d just figured out that everybody else was thinking about airplanes all wrong. His theory was good, but for it to be useful somebody had to actually compute the E-M contour plots for a variety of friendly and hostile aircraft across a wide range of flight conditions. Fortunately, at this time Boyd was stationed at Eglin Air Force Base, where vast rooms full of military computers were calculating important things like how many nuclear bombs ought to be dropped on each city in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Boyd’s behavior had finally caught up with him and his posting was in…Maintenance. There was no way that anybody was going to let him touch those computers. This time, screaming at people didn’t work. Demoralized, Boyd’s appearance turned slovenly, and he developed a nervous tick of chewing on the flap of skin between his thumb and index finger. So now, in addition to being an acerbic weirdo, he was the acerbic weirdo who looked like a hobo and spat bloody scraps of loose skin all over you while he was yelling. This did not make it easier for him to get access to military computers.

So things might have remained, had Boyd not struck up a friendship with Tom Christie, a civilian mathematician working at Eglin and an expert bureaucratic operator. Christie came up with hilariously inventive ways to steal computer time for Boyd’s calculations, and then Boyd would go off and ruminate on the results for a few days before coming back with requests for more calculations. Gradually a picture was emerging, and the picture was not good. US aircraft designers, in thrall to the idea that a fighter was basically a bomber but worse, had built hideously underpowered and unmanouverable planes. The E-M diagrams were clear: Soviet aircraft would have an energy advantage in basically any conceivable matchup. Dogfights would be a bloodbath, and the Americans would lose every one. This was not what the Air Force wanted to hear — they liked their big, slow airplanes and the equally fat contracts that went into building them, and besides, haven’t you heard that dogfights will never happen again and victory will be determined by who has the biggest radar and the longest-ranged missiles? But Boyd kept at it, and then in 1965 the American ground war in Vietnam started, and US planes started getting consistently shot down by MiGs in exactly the way Boyd predicted. Soon thereafter, Boyd and Christie were reassigned to the Pentagon.

It was at the Pentagon that Boyd met his other great collaborator and intellectual partner, a civilian analyst named Pierre Sprey. Sprey was the opposite of Boyd in many ways, a polished and erudite European polyglot who went to Yale at the age of fifteen and graduated with degrees in French literature and mechanical engineering. Women found him gallant and rakish, men found him cold and biting, and corrupt Pentagon bureaucrats found him their worst nightmare.3 Sprey became one of McNamara’s “whiz kids” and was sent to Washington to analyze the Pentagon budget. He immediately wrote a report that imperiled two thirds of the Air Force budget. The generals were apoplectic and exerted enormous pressure to bury the report, but Sprey was a fiendish workaholic who knew everything there was to know about airplanes, had an unbending code of personal honor, and refused to revise or falsify his data. Finally, the generals decided the only way to beat a smart guy was with another smart guy: they sent in Boyd. This was the worst idea ever. Sprey and Boyd instantly became thick as thieves and spent the next few decades terrorizing the slimy creatures that infested every office and corner of the Pentagon (with Christie providing occasional bureaucratic cover).

Their first big showdown with America’s defense establishment was over the airplane that was to become the F-15. The development history of the F-15 before Boyd and Sprey got to it was a perfect illustration of Elon Musk’s theory of how requirements bloat ruins everything. Musk’s approach, which has been very successful, starts with a theme this Substack is obssessed with: in school everybody is trained to answers exercises that are treated as givens rather than to question whether the exercises are good ones, but that subtle bias has cataclysmic effects when it comes to the design of mechanical artifacts because unnecessary parts or requirements can have cascading, exponential effects on overall system complexity. For example: adding an unneeded component increases the weight of the airplane or rocket, which means it needs to carry more fuel, which means it needs bigger fuel tanks, which means it needs a stronger airframe, which further increases the weight, which means the fuel tanks need to be even bigger, which needs the engines need to be bigger, which means they need active cooling, and so on in a doom loop of rising costs and failure modes.

So Musk’s philosophy is that you need to be absolutely savage about deleting everything from your design that is not required. This philosophy is not compatible with federal defense procurement, which tends to involve a lot of design by committee and a lot of putting a hot tub in your limo to win over some crucial constituency (see, for instance, the F-35, which tries to be all things to all people and does a mediocre job at all of them).4 This tendency is exacerbated by the defense contractors themselves, who let’s just say don’t mind if the war machines they’re hired to build are astonishingly complex and expensive. The contractors were used to getting their way, and then one day they started running into John Boyd:

Defense contractors had a cozy relationship with the Pentagon… They were used to swaying these men by taking them to expensive Washington restaurants and ordering lobster and steak and wine and picking up the tab. Defense contractors are powerful men. And they thought this young major, this John Boyd, could be easily influenced.

[…] he listened, chewing on his hand, and stared unblinkingly at the contractor. When he had enough he stopped chewing, spit out pieces of skin, jabbed the contractor in the chest, and exploded. “You are the dumbest son of a bitch God ever made” or “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about” or “You stupid fuck. That will never work.”

Defense contractors are not used to being talked to in such a fashion. Often they sat there a moment in shock. Boyd moved even closer and shouted louder, “Do you get my meaning?” or “Do you hear what I’m saying to you?”

Almost every time a defense contractor left his office, Boyd turned around and said to all in hearing, sometimes before the contractor was through the door, “The one thing you can always expect from a contractor is that he will hand you a load of shit.” If he suspected a contractor was trying to deceive him, he looked for evidence. He prepared for a confrontation. When he found the evidence, he did not say he had found the proverbial smoking gun. Instead he walked into his office, threw his arms wide, and trumpeted, “I have found the dripping cock.”

Secretaries wept at Boyd’s language. Several threatened to quit. When generals complained about Boyd’s language, he said he did not mean to sound disrespectful. “I’m just a dumb fighter pilot. I don’t know any better. I had an IQ test in high school and they gave me a ninety.”

In the case of the F-15, the unnecessary requirements that Boyd and Sprey battled against were things like being able to fly above Mach 3 (most dogfights begin at subsonic cruising speed and E-M theory tells us that ability to gain and shed velocity is much more important than absolute top speed), having a massive radar dome (because this time dogfights are over and aerial combat will be one by shooting missiles from over the horizon), and having intercontinental range (because obviously a dedicated air superiority fighter needs to be able to deliver tactical nuclear weapons). They won some of these battles and lost others, then regrouped and fought them all over again in the design of the F-16, where they won a whole lot more.

Another version of all these battles happened when Sprey went off on his own and designed the A-10.5 The Air Force was predestined to loathe the A-10, because its mission is what’s called Close Air Support (CAS), that is, supporting forces on the ground. The Air Force doesn’t like being reminded that CAS is one of their jobs, because the Air Force doesn’t like thinking of itself as an adjunct or supporting pillar of the main ground effort (this is another reason why strategic bombing was so ideologically attractive to Air Force generals). Perversely, this made the A-10 a better airplane, because Sprey was obsessed with CAS and all the Air Force bureaucrats who would have ruined it wanted to stay away anyway. So Sprey got almost complete control of the design and was able to tyrannize the contractors with demands that RFPs be no more than 30 pages and that prototypes be tested by shooting at them with real Soviet weapons. The resulting plane was what you get when Pierre Sprey deletes all unnecessary requirements and optimizes an airplane for CAS, survivability, firepower, and cost, and to the Air Force the A-X (the pre-production name for the A-10) was an unholy abomination:

Rather than having flammable and vulnerable hydraulic controls, the A-X would have mechanical cables and push rods — redundant dual cables — to control the flight surfaces. Sprey insisted that the A-X must be able to maintain flight even with half the control surfaces shot away. As for armament, the A-X was built around a radical new cannon that fired banana-sized depleted uranium bullets. To protect the pilot, the cockpit was surrounded by a titanium bathtub.

The Air Force despised the A-10: they called it the “Warthog” because it was so slow and so ugly, and they spent the next 50 years trying to kill it despite the fact that it is cheap, reliable, and has exceeded expectations in every military conflict into which it’s been deployed, over half a century, without major upgrades. When I began writing this book review it looked like the Air Force might finally have convinced Congress to let it junk the A-10 in exchange for the (much worse at CAS) F-35, but just the other day I saw a news article saying that A-10s were being deployed to the Persian Gulf as part of Operation “Epic Fury,” so perhaps the Warthog will get one more solid war in before the end.

For the next couple decades, Boyd continued his lonely crusade against the defense procurement establishment from inside the Pentagon, and an account of those years forms one of the most entertaining sections of the book. He was joined in these battles by a whole host of unlikely allies, and the two most important continued to be Christie and Sprey. But the duality of Christie and Sprey extends far beyond the life of John Boyd: to me they represent the two effective approaches to managing a colleague who is highly-energetic, intelligent, disagreeable, inflexible, and maybe slightly autistic. Have you ever worked with somebody like Boyd? You know the type I mean: talented beyond measure, but also willful and self-righteous and their own worst enemy. I’ve certainly met my share of such people. Heck, I’ve been that person once or twice. If properly handled, they can be made to achieve greatness; if not properly handled, they can blow up your shared effort. Being able to shepherd the Boyds on your team can be a managerial superpower. So then, how do you do it?

Christie shows us one approach — offer them something in return that they cannot possibly get on their own: political cover. Say to them, “gosh John, I agree that this theory sounds really promising, I agree that you should be working on this instead of on dumb maintenance tasks. But in order to get the brass off your back, I am going to need you to do tasks A, B, and C by next Thursday. Make me look good, so I can stick around and help you in return. Yes, I know it’s stupid, just let me do the stupid part, all I need from you is A, B, and C…” This is related to the view which says that leadership is about clearing obstacles out of the way of high-functioning people, but it works a little differently when the person in question is high-functioning in a spiky way. You can mess this up by getting too explicitly transactional, because then you will offend the sense of honor of the Boyd in your life. Try conspiratorial instead: it’s you and him against the dumb rules, and you really wish you could break the rules, but alas… So look man, can you please just do it this way? Obviously this is easier if the organization you’re in is actually dysfunctional, but to the Boyds of the world every organization is dysfunctional, and you need to learn to see it from their point of view. It also only works if you’re actually on their side. You need to appreciate them, you need to love and respect them the way that Christie loved and respected Boyd, even when they are at their most self-defeating and exasperating. If you’re faking it just to get something out of them, the entire vibe will be off and everybody will be able to tell. And if it’s hard for you to love and respect somebody who sprays bits of skin all over you while screaming profanity, well yes, it can be hard. But the good news is that God wants you to love and respect them anyway, and fortunately for you in this case doing the right thing will also get you the result that you want.

The other option is exemplified by Sprey, and it’s even harder but works even better if you can pull it off. You need to just be better than the high-functioning weirdo at whatever it is they value. Roll up your sleeves and show them what you can accomplish at the thing that they are truly excellent at. Win their respect by being great at the thing they’re great at, and they will be more inclined to listen to you when it comes to the things that they’re bad at. Be like the Mongol leader who can beat up any of his men in single combat. When Sprey talked, Boyd listened, because Sprey had already shown that he was worth paying attention to by being as good or better than Boyd at designing airplanes. Yes, that means you may need to be better than the autistic genius on your team at Geoguessr in order to get him to stop chewing his hands in front of the general. I told you it wouldn’t be easy. But maybe you can be a little sneaky and work extra hard, so long as they don’t see you sweat. I once had a manager who, his first day on the job, did the corporate equivalent of beating up the biggest dude in the prison block. What I didn’t learn until years later was that he’d spent countless hours preparing and practicing for that moment. You don’t have to win every single time. Once might be enough to convince the Boyd in your life that you’re more than just a talker, more than just another company man, somebody worth following.

We’re 6,500 words into a review of a book about John Boyd’s life, and we haven’t actually gotten to OODA loops yet. And there’s plenty more besides: Boyd’s tour of duty running a CIA base in Southeast Asia, his time as an instructor at the Marine Corps Amphibious Warfare School (after finally offending one general too many and getting booted from the Air Force and the Pentagon), and his huge influence in reintroducing the concepts of Blitzkrieg-style maneuver warfare to a US military obsessed with firepower and attrition. But instead, I want to turn to a hermeneutical landmine that must unsettle our interpretation of this text. You see, the author of the book, Robert Coram, is clearly very taken with Boyd. Who wouldn’t be? He’s a romantic figure, idolized by the friends and collaborators who made up most of Coram’s sources for this biography. And the thing Coram is most taken by, the thing he spends the final hundred pages or so building up to, is Boyd’s magnum opus: an essay called “Destruction and Creation” which Coram thinks is so important he literally reprints it in an appendix. Coram explains to us, giddily, that “Destruction and Creation” may be one of the greatest things ever written…on any topic! You see, it reconceptualizes the entire history of military conflict in terms of Gödelian incompleteness and Sun Tzu and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and… Oh… Oh no. Are you getting a bad feeling all of a sudden? Do you also feel that sinking in your stomach? Maybe we should just…not go read that essay ourselves…

Bad news, it’s available right here and it’s absolutely horrible. Just the most pretentious midwit pseudo-philosophical dreck masquerading as profundity. Now let’s be clear: this disaster of an essay only makes me think a little bit less of Boyd, because after all which of us hasn’t written something that we later came to regret? If Boyd, after several very real and impressive intellectual breakthroughs, finally succumbed to the Curse of the Autodidact, well, he’s probably still ahead of most of us. What I’m more concerned about is Coram. If he thinks that this is the most brilliant and insightful document ever produced, then it calls into question literally everything else he has written in this book. We can’t just succumb to Gell-Mann amnesia here. Either Coram is himself a submental midwit, or he’s so blinded by adulation of Boyd that he’s prepared to overlook and even endorse an objectively very stupid essay. Either possibility is terrifying, because it means we must now go back and read the entire book esoterically, not taking Coram’s word for anything, hunting through it for clues and inadvertent scraps of evidence so we can piece together what’s really going on.

Well, I don’t have time to do that, and probably neither do you. Instead, let’s close by taking Benedict XVI’s advice for how to read the Gospels: look for “scandals.” If you’re reading a biography that you suspect was written by somebody who worships the subject, pay especially close attention to the parts where they say stuff that’s against interest, or that complicates the picture they’re painting, because those parts are probably especially important.6 Boyd was clearly a guy with many unrelated kinds of brilliance. When I first picked up a biography of the guy who invented the OODA loop, I was unprepared for him to also be one of the greatest fighter pilots ever, and an excellent (if unsophisticated) mathematician, and a spatial genius with an intuitive feel for complex aeronautics. Of course I should not have been surprised. Real life is not an RPG character creation screen, where putting points into one thing makes you bad at others. In real life, people who are extremely good at one thing are generally more likely to be extremely good at others. Contrary to stereotype, the best athletes tend to have above average intelligence, and really great mathematicians tend be really great writers, and so on. People don’t want to hear about this, because it rubs salt in the wound of how life is fundamentally unfair, but it’s true (and probably correlated with overall mutational load — another reason you should have kids when young).

But there’s one area in which, Coram tells us, Boyd was decidedly not brilliant: his relations with his own immediate family. His long-suffering wife Mary tolerated all his eccentricities and career self-sabotage while raising five children (one of them severely disabled), and in return he regularly humiliated her in front of others by calling her dumb and saying he found her in an Iowa cornfield. His kids he mostly ignored; several of them became estranged from him, and one was institutionalized. His most successful relationship was probably with the younger son who drove a motorcycle around inside Boyd’s apartment and owned a seven-foot Sri Lanka cobra, forty tarantulas, an emerald tree boa, a canebrake rattlesnake, a timber rattler, and a rare tailless whip scorpion called a “vinegarroon.”7 Boyd’s living conditions reflected the state of his home life — his entire family lived in a dingy subterranean apartment (which Mary hated) with rotting wallpaper and rooms full of detritus, until they were finally evicted by their landlord (one of several reasons his coworkers started calling him “the ghetto colonel”).

And in that light, it behooves us to turn back to all the funny, outrageous stories of Boyd in the Air Force. All the superiors he swore at and offended, all the stiff-necked refusals to play along and get along. Coram sees them as evidence of Boyd’s nobility, and perhaps in one sort of way they are, but they’re the same qualities that turned his home life into a ruin and caused him to fail in a married man’s most sacred duties, those to his wife and children. And once we’ve noticed that, we can’t help noticing that for all his brilliance, Boyd probably had a tenth the influence he might have had in a world where he could hold his tongue and play nicely with others.

Clearly Coram’s sources, Boyd’s collaborators and co-conspirators, all loved him. But to what extent was it true admiration, and to what extent the patronizing love you have for your childhood friend who was super smart but smoked too much pot and never got his life together? Boyd achieved more than most men born in Erie, Pennsylvania during the Great Depression could ever dream of, yet considering the natural capacities he was given, we must consider his life a failure. From those to whom many talents are given, many more will be expected.

Years ago, I spent a morning as the assistant teacher in my daughter’s kindergarten classroom. It was mostly a matter of handing out papers, sharpening pencils, and reminding little boys that circle time was not the moment to practice their “moves” on each other, but at the end of three hours I was exhausted and came home to gaze shell-shocked at my placid, sleeping firstborn son. Of course I knew intellectually that boys and girls are different, and my daughters weren’t exactly sedate, but I hadn’t been around five-year-old boys since I was five. I had forgotten. And I couldn’t quite believe my sessile infant was going to become one of them.

Well, obviously he did, and in the event it wasn’t more shocking than my girls’ equally profound transformation from infants into busy little people — it just involved more hitting things with sticks and running headfirst into walls, on purpose, bellowing FULL SPEED! And now I have more than one son, and…well, you’re never really prepared for whatever bright new person turns up in your family, with his or her own temperament and a novel set of strengths and flaws and idiosyncracies, but I at least have a better idea of the options. But boys are weird for moms, especially for moms who grew up without close male relatives, and the weirdest part is that they’ll one day be men. However fond we may be of men (some of my best friends…), they exist on the far side of an unbridgeable epistemic chasm — and it’s more than a little off-putting when you realize that gulf will one day yawn open between you and this tiny person who spent nine months growing inside you.

BoyMom was pitched to me as being about that weirdness, and in a sense it is. It’s not the worst book I’ve ever read. But it’s the worst book I’ve ever finished.

I almost didn’t finish it. The first time I picked it up, I hit the opening section, entitled “#MeToo Baby,” and read in growing incredulity as Whippman described her 2017: enormously pregnant and banished from her bedroom because her husband was fed up with her insomniac doom-scrolling, she spent hours obsessing over a “ticker-tape of bad outcomes” for her unborn third son —“rapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, nonwiper of kitchen counters.” It’s an undeniably incredible list, made more incredible by context — though frankly, who can blame a woman whose husband exiles his pregnant wife to an uncomfortable guest room, instead of going himself, for having a low opinion of the opposite sex? — but I figured that if I wanted to read deranged anti-male rants I could visit literally any mom forum on the entire internet and set the book aside.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the book, and talking about it: “hey sweetie, do you remember that lady who thinks we should abolish masculinity because boys don’t want to read the The Baby-Sitters Club?” I do not recommend this as a conversational gambit, however, because my husband finally told me I should just read the rest of the book and write a review, and in the Psmith household we believe in male headship, so here we are.

Ruth Whippman obviously loves her three sons the way every mother I know loves her children: powerfully, viscerally, with a healthy dose of exasperation. But she doesn’t like men very much, and she thinks it would be nice if her sons didn’t grow up to be them.

It’s hard to unpick exactly what her objection to men is, because it’s so tied up in a set of broader political commitments that are as much about tribalism as principle. She’s a liberal feminist raising children in Berkeley, California, “where…I am more comfortable buying my boys a princess dress than a Nerf gun,” and her allegiance in the culture war seeps through everywhere. Those brief journalistic touches that writers provide to give you a sense of their subject in a word or two, for instance, are all deeply and unnecessarily political: her chapter on a visit to Utah opens with standing in line for a truck-stop burger behind a “giant, mildly threatening looking man with a January 6 insurrection-style beard” who’s looking at his phone “as if he’s merely on standby, checking Reddit and awaiting orders to storm the Capital.” (The bearded man doesn’t actually do anything besides wait; he’s pure set-dressing, meant to remind us that some men are very very bad and that we can tell who they are because they display the wrong class markers.)1

Sometimes Whippman seems aware of this — in the “fevered, absolutist climate of #MeToo,” she writes, men became an enemy who “symbolized the status quo, injustice and harm,” and as a mother of sons that felt like “[m]y tribe rejecting my kids” — but she’s mostly interested in establishing her feminist bona fides for the reader. She’s jealous of her friends with daughters who can dress them as Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Halloween and buy them The Future Is Female t-shirts. Like every mother, she wants the best for her children, but she’s ashamed of wanting it because her children are future white men, and her tribe says you’re not supposed to want good things for white men:

The last thing I wanted was to align myself emotionally with the men’s rights activists, the right-wing “boys are the real victims,” #HimToo apologists. Was there a way to square this and offer real empathy to boys, give them a more expansive story about their own possibilities, without betraying any feminist principles?

BoyMom is Ruth Whippman’s answer to this question. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.

Her objection to men qua men is the familiar “baggage of inequality—of the pay gap and double standards and the distribution of household chores and mansplaining and rape culture and the fights for bodily autonomy and trans rights.” We all know this story, right? Men as a class have done bad things to women as a class. The signal accomplishment of the feminist movement over the last century has been the gradual emancipation of women, first from legal subordination and then from societal expectations that they should be kind and beautiful and nurturing (rather than brave and strong and accomplished). Now, in our enlightened Current Year, girls and women have been freed from the prison of gender roles and are finally permitted to flourish simply as human beings. Hooray!

But her objection to men as an end-point for her sons is slightly different: she wants this same emancipation for them. She wants to see them liberated from “rigid, aggressive stoicism” and permitted to access “the full range of human feeling and connection,” freed to be “empathetic and relational” just like girls are now encouraged to be fearless and powerful. She’s arguing for a feminism that emancipates men from their gender just as the earlier versions did women.

There are two problems with her plan. The first is that the “you can do anything” message aimed at girls has never really meant “anything”: it means “anything boys do.” Girls are encouraged to become engineers and computer programmers, Whippman points out, but “[e]ven in the progressive Bay Area, I couldn’t find any empowerment camps designed to teach boys how to become caregivers or nurses or fashion designers.” But as a mother of daughters, I’m here to tell you that no one has those camps for girls, either!2 The push to empower girls is based not on the idea that what girls already are is good, but on the belief that the things that are bad about girls — the things that make girls weak and silly and slightly embarrassing, prone to tear up after fights with their friends and try desperately to please the people around them — are fixable. It takes for granted that women are defective men; it just assumes that the defects are inflicted rather than inborn.

At one point, Whippman almost rejects this model. Raised by a dogmatic second-waver who taught her to say that pink is “the color of our oppression,” she later muses that her mother’s value system “certainly reinforced the idea that masculine is aspirational, feminine is lesser” and “failed to recognize what is good and important and admirable about girl socialization.” But then she tries to do the same thing to her sons — except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards and in heels.

When you get right down to it, Whippman just doesn’t think men can possibly be happy this way. After all, she argues, she grew up with and loved “people-driven” girl stories like this:

[A young girl] was invited to two birthday parties that are scheduled for the same time. Scared to disappoint either friend, she comes up with an elaborate plan to shuttle unnoticed between the parties, joining in the games at one before racing off to arrive just in time for the same games at the other, then repeating this sprint for cake at each house and so on, exhausting herself in the process. This is a tale of high-intensity emotional labor, and, as a mother of three and a woman in the world, I relate to it strongly—if not the actual scenario itself, then at least the compulsive people-pleasing impulses driving the narrative.

Her sons, by contrast, are never exposed to sagas like that because boy stories “contain[] very little emotional complexity. There is no interiority or social negotiation. No friendship dilemmas or internal conflict. None of the mess of being a real human in relationship with other humans.”

This is a wild claim to make in a world that includes Robin Hood3 and Treasure Island and Huckleberry Finn (let alone Kim and Lord of the Rings and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin novels and the Song of Roland and The Three Musketeers and I am forcibly cutting myself off at this point). There are so many “boy stories” just as full of complicated emotions and internal conflict as Little Women or Anne of Green Gables, and substantially more than whatever mass-market schlock fills the shelves at your local library! I don’t know, maybe I’m just over here womaning differently than Ruth Whippman, what with my tragic gender-nonconforming preference for conversations about topics of shared interest and fiction involving swords and/or exploding helicopters, but I would read the tragically awful late Animorphs books a dozen times before I would pick up a single volume of The Baby-Sitters Club or Sweet Valley High — and I still spend most of my time making a beautiful and nurturing home for my husband and children, and enjoying it tremendously.4

But it goes beyond books: Whippman is deeply concerned that boys and men aren’t having vulnerable, emotionally open relationships with one another, because the male relationships she sees involve “relentless conversations about baseball or rare vinyl collections or which obscure actor was in which movie, filling the spaces and ruling out the emasculating possibility of going any deeper.” Now, my extensive anthropological fieldwork5 indicates that “relentless conversations” about factoids that interest all parties is in fact the preferred mode for male friendship, in much the same way that my female friends and I tend to talk about people and feelings, and in no way precludes the occasional discussion of death, disease, divorce, and the other serious issues that arise in people’s lives. One might just as easily criticize women for friendships full of “endless rehashings of emotions that accomplish nothing, filling the spaces and ruling out the unladylike possibility of bonding over how weather conditions affected various WW2 aircraft.” But that would be obviously silly: no one seriously thinks that women secretly want to have emotional lives more like men, so it’s not clear why we’d assume it holds the other way around.

To be fair, Whippman does interview a number of teenage boys who describe a deep and abiding loneliness, and some of them think it’s because their friends are insufficiently emotionally available. (I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that they credit their female therapists for helping them figure out that this is the problem.) Lonely boys shouldn’t surprise us, though: if the modal boy prefers to go out and do things his friends, and the modal girl prefers to sit around and talk with hers, then the enclosure of the teenager would inevitably hit male friendships harder. It’s the “owned space” problem all over again, and video games are an even worse substitute for juvenile adventure than social media is for juvenile chitchat.

There’s good news, though! Whippman finds a group of men who do have deep, intimate relationships where they bare their very souls to one another.

The bad news is, it’s incels.

The deeper problem with Whippman’s answer — more foundational than any objections to the surprisingly Helen Andrews-y “Sex A is good, Sex B is bad, society would be better if Sex B acted more like Sex A” take — is that eradicating gender is a terrible idea.

It’s also impossible, assuming you think that there are some biological differences between the sexes. And even self-described intersectional feminist Ruth Whippman thinks that; she mostly talks about the differences that make boys more emotionally and physically delicate that girls, more in need of maternal nurturing, but she concedes that there are “genuine differences in self-control and behavior and executive function” in childhood, and even more in adulthood. So, if there are differences, then culture is inevitably going to reflect them: culture accretes around physical reality like an oyster building up layers of nacre around an irritant, rendering the bare facts into something nobler than they began — or into something baser.

Men’s greater physical strength is simply a fact of life everywhere, across all human societies, but it doesn’t always play out the same way. In some times and places, like among the aboriginal Tasmanians, it develops into a system where men use violence (or at least the threat thereof) to force their wives to do all the difficult or dangerous jobs while the men themselves laze around, occasionally hunting if they feels like it. In others, it becomes grounds for advocating the honorable protection of the weak. (In yet others, like the upper-middle class laptop-job enclave Whippman inhabits, it’s becoming irrelevant except as a hobby or bogeyman.) The same is true of all the other biological sex differences, from the obvious effects due to reproductive roles (I have become something of a connoisseur of stories of women who start taking testosterone for whatever reason and then go “oh, so that’s why men are like that”) to the pan-primate male fascination with wheeled vehicles.6 Exactly how culture accretes around fact, how we build gender around sex, isn’t always easy to predict — Western society went from the medieval “women are far more lustful than men” to the Victorian “women do not experience sexual desire” without anyone putting SSRIs in the water supply — but however it winds up happening, it does happen. Yeah, yeah, gender is a social construct, but so are the Gregorian calendar, private property, and the United States of America. Socially constructed doesn’t mean “not real.”

So, what happens if we take seriously the idea that we should do for our sons what feminism has already done for our daughters? What would it do for them as future men?

Another way to put this question is to ask what it’s done for girls. And here the right analogy matters tremendously, because the equivalent of man in this sense isn’t woman, it’s lady. Becoming a woman is just something that happens to you, sometimes in the middle of algebra class'; becoming a man is a social transformation as much as it is a physical one. Nobody would ever express disapproval by saying “she’s no woman,” but you can absolutely say “she’s no lady” in the same way you’d say “he’s no man.” (Not that we do, at least about ladies — the term is thoroughly deprecated in my circles — but most people would still know what we meant if we did, whereas “she’s no woman” comes off as as TERF who doesn’t want to misgender.) The various strands of the feminist movement have, for better or for worse, been pretty successful at convincing people that women shouldn’t aspire to be ladies, but they haven’t replaced it with something better. They’re either so frightened of buying into stereotypes about the gentle, nurturing “Angel of the House” — or so divorced from history that they think safe, collaborative, empathetic consensus-building will solve everything — that they’re not honest about what women are like: what we’re good at, what we’re not. Culture should form and channel the inchoate material of your self into something that plays to and dignifies what’s best about you; tearing down those walls lets the raw material surge across the landscape, following the path of least resistance. It can still work out well if you’re lucky, but all too often it doesn’t.

It would be worse for men. The inescapable physical substrate of femininity, the capacity for pregnancy and birth and breastfeeding, means there’s an obvious there there regardless of what culture layers on top. There’s no equivalent for men, leaving masculinity much more provisional than femininity, much easier to step outside. There’s no real culturally-available image of someone who’s physically adult but not really a man except for accusations of extended adolescence (not a man yet).7 And it’s not just us. In his excellent Children of Ash and Elm, Neil Price discusses the female-only8 practice of seiðr and drops this fascinating bit on Viking conceptions of gender:

Women could, on occasion, take on the social roles of men, in addition to their own specific and important power domains. However, women could not acceptably look like men or try to symbolically be them… For men, there was no such blurring of borders, and it was not condoned for a man to take on any aspect of women’s lives and duties. Interestingly, it is the man’s gender that is limited and intensive, while the gender of women was to a degree unlimited and extensive. At the same time, demonstrative masculinity was a keystone of sociopolitical foundations.

Biological maleness is so much less definitive, so much less determinative of life-course, that it needs a bulwark of cultural symbolism to give it meaning and direction. But here’s the thing Whippman never says: all that symbolic demonstrative masculinity is great. In societies that offer them inspiration and sea room, men do things like manipulate their way into positions of power in Mughal India and build an empire and wrap some duct tape around the exposed bone on their hands to finish the job — not to mention building the subsea fiberoptic cable network and walking out into a blizzard saying “I may be some time.” And I guess also some b2b SaaS.

I personally have absolutely no desire to do any of these things (and frankly most men will never find themselves in a position to do them even if they want to) but it’s these images of heroic conquest — of the self, of nature, of Asia — and self-sacrifice in extremis that lend their reflected glow to the quiet everyday building and work and struggle that make up most of our lives. I opened with a snide remark about Whippman’s husband making his pregnant wife take the lousy guest room when she was keeping him awake, but no, really, that’s exactly what these cultural ideals are there to prevent. (Or entrench, if you’re an aboriginal Tasmanian.) Whippman thinks that boys only value “competing over relating, winning over connecting, fighting over cooperating” because that’s what we’ve taught them; I’d argue rather that those preferences show up so consistently across times and places that they limn the possibility space for us.

Whippman is afraid her sons will be sad and embarrassed if they fail to reach some unattainable standard of masculine excellence. I’m afraid that my sons will be empty if they don’t try.

The following is an email exchange between the Psmiths, edited slightly for clarity.

Jane: Bad news, babe: turns out we’ve been reading philosophy wrong.

The good news is this isn’t an “us” problem: for at least the past two hundred fifty years, literally all of Western civilization has been reading philosophy wrong.

Actually, now that I think about it, that’s worse.1

You see, we’ve all been laboring under the delusion that the things philosophers say in their books — right there, on the page, in black and white — represent what the philosophers actually believe. We’ve been taking philosophy at face value. If Aristotle says some men are natural slaves, well, obviously that means Aristotle thinks some men are natural slaves. If Plato says the truly just city requires separating children from their parents, nobly lying about the origins of society, or forcing philosophers to return to the cave, he must think that’s what justice entails. You might disagree! You might even have some arguments to the contrary. But that’s what these great thinkers said, and so, obviously, it must be what they think is true. Why else would a person write something?

But as in so many other cases, this belief marks us out as temporal provincials. Until quite recently, no one expected a philosopher to explicitly state his real teaching where the vulgar, the unprepared, and the (potentially violently) offended could just read it. Everyone accepted that the true message would be hidden “between the lines,” carefully couched in terms the careless or unworthy reader wouldn’t understand, to the point that in the mid-18th century the Encyclopédie would casually explain that “[t]he ancient philosophers had a double doctrine; the one external, public or exoteric; the other internal, secret or esoteric.” Everyone agreed that philosophers in general, and some of the greats in particular, write esoterically: al-Farabi, for instance, wrote that Plato “put in writing his knowledge and wisdom according to an approach that would let them be known only to the deserving,” and Ammonius’s commentary on Aristotle likens the writing of “the Philosopher” to a temple “where curtains are used for the purpose of preventing everyone, and especially the impure, from encountering things they are not worthy of meeting.”

And they didn’t just ascribe this behavior to the past philosophers, they explicitly praised it. Aquinas writes that “[c]ertain things can be explained to the wise in private which we should keep silent about in public. … Therefore, these matters should be concealed with obscure language, so that they will benefit the wise who understand them and be hidden from the uneducated who are unable to grasp them.” Maimonides says that theology should be “hidden from the beginner, and he should be prevented from taking [it] up, just as a small baby is prevented from taking coarse foods and from lifting heavy weights.” Erasmus wrote a letter criticizing Luther for “making everything public and giving even cobblers a share in what is normally handled by scholars as mysteries reserved for the initiated.” And philosophers sometimes even admitted that they themselves wrote esoterically, as when Rousseau described how in his First Discourse, “I have often taken great pains to try to put into a sentence, a line, a word tossed off as if by chance the result of a long sequence of reflections. Often, most of my readers must have found my discourses badly connected and almost entirely rambling, for lack of perceiving the trunk of which I showed them only the branches. But that was enough for those who know how to understand, and I have never wanted to speak to the others.”

That list above is just a taste: Melzer spends twelve pages discussing the evidence for esoteric writing, with a further 110 page PDF on his website. (To compare, he turns up only one piece of evidence against the practice: a footnote from an unpublished essay by a young Adam Smith, who in 1750 mocked the the idea as something “no man in his senses” would ever do.) In short, since the unanimous testimony of the premodern philosophers is that everyone else wrote esoterically, and many of them imply (or even state outright) that they themselves wrote esoterically, I think we have to just accept that they did. Of course accepting that “some philosophy is written esoterically” isn’t the same as saying that any given passage has a hidden meaning, and still less establishing what that hidden meaning is — Melzer gives an esoteric reading of the Republic which is not the same as my own — but it’s an important step in the right direction.

Why do we care? Well, on the most basic level, we want to be right. If we’re going to read a book, we would like to know what it’s actually saying. Misunderstanding the argument because we missed the hidden meaning is just as bad as misunderstanding because we missed the word “not” halfway through the third paragraph. But it goes well beyond that. If we want to understand the history of ideas, we need to know how the philosophers read each other. Of course we ought to figure out what Plato is saying in the Republic, but we also want to know what everyone else thought he was saying. If they all read him esoterically but we accept him at face value, we might as well be reading a different text, and we’ll never be able to see what they were reacting to or against. And there’s an even greater danger to misunderstanding the history of philosophy: it may lead us to misunderstand reason itself.

In previous book reviews (especially here and here) I’ve advanced a sort of universalist, “the law is written on the hearts of men” take: there really is objective moral truth, and it really is to some degree accessible to us through reason. But one of the strongest arguments against that idea is the way writers from very different cultures seem to be deeply constrained by their own context: everywhere we look, Melzer writes, “we see the dispiriting spectacle of the human mind vanquished by the hegemonic ideas of its times.” Ah look, here’s Aristotle, dead white man from a slaveholding society, predictably defending the notion that some people are just meant to be slaves. But as soon as we admit the existence of esoteric writing, the notoriously poorly-argued “natural slavery” passage in the Politics jumps out as a promising spot for further investigation. Maybe Aristotle is doing a bad job on purpose to show you he doesn’t mean it, like the Soviet authors who repeated the party line on dialectical materialism so blandly that it was obviously just window-dressing.

An awareness of esotericism tells us that the appearance of cultural constraint may be mere appearance. “Exactly what you would expect from someone in this setting” is, of course, the only sensible thing to have as your exoteric doctrine: there’s no point in using desert camouflage in the jungle! But if you know camouflage may be involved, you can go looking for it — and when you begin to read esoterically, you will find places where reason has broken out of the assumptions of its time and place and hidden it from the world. Which is all very heartening to those of us who would like to reason about things.

I should probably mention Leo Strauss at this point, partly because he shared my concern about people thinking reason is culture-bound but mostly because it’s his name that everyone thinks of as soon as you say “esoteric writing” (for good reason — he more or less rediscovered the practice.) Melzer is not himself a Straussian, and he doesn’t talk much about Strauss until the very end of the book, but I honestly don’t know how much of Philosophy Between the Lines is warmed-over Strauss because I’ve never read Strauss. I wanted to, back in college, but when I asked an eminent Straussian where I should start he said “Plato’s Republic.”

Okay, so they wrote esoterically. Why? I’ve already hinted at two reasons, which Melzer calls the “defensive” and the “protective”: esoteric writing shields the philosopher from a hostile society, and shields society from the dangers of philosophy. (There are two others, “pedagogical” and “political,” but maybe you’ll cover them later.) But to really make sense of these we need to back up for a minute, because when we talk about a “philosopher” we usually mean someone who does things like writing papers for academic journals about whether knowing how to find coffee in New York City is a fundamentally different kind of cognitive state from knowing where to find coffee in New York City.2 Nobody’s going to make you drink hemlock for that. But in the classical understanding, philosophy isn’t a topic about which you can acquire information, like molecular biology, it’s a fundamental way of life. To become a philosopher is to become a different sort of person through what Plato terms a “turning around of the soul.”

Here’s Melzer:

The philosopher is the person who, through a long dialectical journey, has come to see through the illusory goods for which others live and die. Freed from illusion—and from the distortion of experience that illusion produces—he is able, for the first time, to know himself, to be himself, and to fully experience his deepest longing, which is to comprehend the necessities that structure the universe and human life as part of that universe.

But of course even the philosopher in this proper sense is a political creature, and this isn’t a mere concession to the physical limitations that leave us dependent on our fellow hairless apes. Melzer again:

Political society comes into being for the sake of mere life, according to Aristotle, but exists for the sake of the good life. In the beginning, we create it; after that, it creates us. It turns us from primitive hunter-gatherers into civilized human beings. Rousing us from tribal slumber, it causes the mind to develop and the heart to expand. It transforms us from bodily, economic creatures and clannish family beings into moral beings and citizens. It opens us up to a new world of realities, teaching us to seek honor, love justice, and long for noble and sacred things. The polis constitutes the lifeworld within which civilized humanity can fully unfold. We are deeply political animals, then, because only in and through the political community—this new, moralized, and sanctified world—can we truly become all that we are and experience our full human potential.

Thus intrinsic to our humanity is both the reason that gives us access to truth, and the community that gives us meaning. “We humans are strangely composite beings,” Melzer says, “combining together two different natures—like centaurs or, perhaps, schizophrenics.” Aspects of this doubled nature go by many names — Rorty’s objectivity and solidarity, Heidegger’s reason and existenz, Strauss’s philosopher and the city — but Melzer terms the whole shebang “theory and praxis.” And it’s a problem.

Actually there are several parts of the “problem of theory and praxis,” but it fundamentally boils down to one question: can these two parts of our nature fit together harmoniously, or are they necessarily in conflict? In the beginning, of course, they were both necessary, since reason needs language and social institutions in order to spread and civilization depends for its development on intellect and problem-solving, but once you reach the level of, say, the Greek city-state (just picking examples at random here, guys!), they clash:

When and where reason finally comes fully into its own, when it conceives the radical project of relying entirely on its own powers in making sense of the universe without taking anything on faith or tradition, when, in short, it rises to the level of philosophy, rationalism, or science, then this harmony finally turns to opposition. Reason, nurtured in its initial stages by society, now finds its primary obstacle in the fundamental conventions, traditions, and prejudices of society. Conversely, society, initially provisioned and counseled by reason, now finds a primary danger in philosophy’s relentless drive to question all of the dogmas upon which it is based.

Now remember that we’re not dealing here with the relatively minimalist modern liberal nation-state (yes, in historical context even the hand of Western proceduralist bureaucracy rests remarkably light) but a totalitarian ancient society with no conception of individual rights or even independent individual moral worth. Of course you need to write in a way that won’t make everyone mad at you; I mean, did you see what they did to Socrates? But this is also your city, your patria, your people, who created you and whom you love, and few of your fellow citizens have undergone the “turning around the soul” that would prepare them to handle the harsh truths about the absolute contingency of their moral and religious consensus. And so, of course, you need to write in a way that won’t hurt anyone, either. Esoteric writing is the logical outcome of the conflictual view of theory and praxis.

The Enlightenment counter-move was to reject the conflict entirely: yes, it so happens that theory and praxis were in conflict in ancient and medieval societies, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If we can just bring praxis into line with theory, abandoning prejudice and superstition and constructing our political lives in accordance with reason, we can satisfy both sides of our nature at once! And when that turned into oceans of blood, the Counter-Enlightenment — romanticism and its postmodern heirs — proposed instead to subordinate reason to our “profound political or historical imbeddedness.” All modern thought, Melzer argues, is fundamentally harmonist: now that we believe in progress, we’ve forgotten about tragedy. There couldn’t possibly be an insoluble conflict at the heart of the human experience, so why would you need to write in a way that only makes sense if there is one?

Phew! That was a wall of text, but I think I’ve set the scene for us to discuss all the interesting questions this book raises. Chief in my mind: is the conflictual view right? Even if it is, is it sustainable in a broadly egalitarian polity? How should a contemporary philosopher (in the sense of a way of life, not an academic field) write? Should he even write at all?

John: I think you may understate just how crazy Melzer’s central contention in this book is. He claims (and as you say provides heaps of evidence for his claim) that prior to the Enlightenment it was completely universal knowledge that every philosopher worth reading imbued his texts with hidden meanings. On the contrary, the vast majority of people today (including me until a few years ago) not only do not believe that philosophical texts contain hidden messages, but further do not know that until very recently everybody thought they did. When you really stop and think about it, this pair of facts is jaw-dropping. It’s civilizational forgetting on a nigh-unprecedented scale. As if an entire religion or culture that was once universal has disappeared so totally that we forgot we’d even forgotten it.

This sort of thing is catnip for me, because I’m kind of obsessed with these episodes of global epistemic regress. We know that they happened before — for example calculus was probably invented in the ancient world by Eudoxus of Cnidus and by Archimedes, and then completely forgotten. Or consider that time that the cure to scurvy was discovered and then lost again. The latter example is more interesting, because there was no collapse into barbarism as happened after the end of the Hellenistic world, people just…forgot. Well, if it happened in the past, then I’m sure it’s happening now too, but trying to spot these gaps in your own culture is like trying to take a picture of a black hole — very difficult by the very nature of the thing. So I was practically jumping up and down when Melzer delivered this one to my doorstep: people in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance knew how to read each other and the ancients, and we just…don’t.

Esoteric reading isn’t just rarely practiced these days, it sounds vaguely…unseemly. Like something a superstitious rube would do, adding up the numeric values of letters in Bible verses to find God’s hidden commandments and that sort of thing. So I think one of the greatest contributions Melzer makes is to convince us that we read esoterically all the time. I’m going to reproduce kind of a long quotation here because it’s just so good at conveying what esotericism is and how it’s the most natural thing in the world:

Imagine you have received a letter in the mail from your beloved, from whom you have been separated for many long months… You fear that her feelings toward you may have suffered some alteration. As you hold her letter in your unsteady hands, you are instantly in the place that makes one a good reader. You are responsive to her every word. You are exquisitely alive to every shade and nuance of what she has said — and not said.

“Dearest John.” You know that she always uses “dearest” in letters to you, so the word here means nothing in particular; but her “with love” ending is the weakest of the three variations that she typically uses. The letter is quite cheerful, describing in detail all the things she has been doing. One of them reminds her of something the two of you once did together. “That was a lot of fun,” she exclaims. “Fun” — a resolutely friendly word, not a romantic one. You find yourself weighing every word in a relative scale: it represents not only itself but the negation of every other word that might have been used in its place. Somewhere buried in the middle of the letter, thrown in with an offhandedness that seems too studied, she briefly answers the question you asked her: yes, as it turns out, she has run into Bill Smith — your main rival for her affection. Then it’s back to chatty and cheerful descriptions until the end.

It is clear to you what the letter means. She is letting you down easy, preparing an eventual break. The message is partly in what she has said — the Bill Smith remark, and that lukewarm ending — but primarily in what she has not said. The letter is full of her activities, but not a word of her feelings. There is no moment of intimacy. It is engaging and cheerful but cold. And her cheerfulness is the coldest thing: how could she be so happy if she were missing you? Which points to the most crucial fact: she has said not one word about missing you. That silence fairly screams in your ear.

I love this example because if you received a message from somebody you were very much in love with but you weren’t sure how they felt, not even the most autistic people on earth would fault you for trying to look beyond the plain meaning of the words on the page. It is all too real that a friendly letter could actually mean the opposite (as evidenced by entire subreddits devoted to helping people puzzle out the hidden nuances of an iMessage exchange with a potential lover). This is natural and normal, just as when you run into somebody at a party, their body language and your history with them can tell you that “hey, it’s great to see you” actually means “get the fuck away from me,” and it might even be said in a friendly tone, just one degree cooler than it would have been if they’d meant it.

In our day-to-day social interactions, we’re exquisitely sensitive to this kind of nuance. So it’s actually the most natural thing in the world to apply the same sensitivity to our reading. Every text is the result of a thousand minuscule choices, and some of them are unbelievably careful choices indeed. Speaking as a writer, if you’ve ever found yourself reading something, and gone: “wait a minute, is he implying…” or “hang on, did she deliberately not say…” or “was that word chosen on purpose because it could also mean…” I’m just gonna tell you that the answer is always yes. The only difference between reading and chatting is that when you’re chatting you have all kinds of dedicated neural circuitry that clicks into action to help you parse the thousand subtle implications and nuances of every bit of communication. When you’re reading, you have to force yourself to do it, the way some neurodivergent people train themselves to mechanically and deliberately read social cues. Or you can do what Melzer recommends, and imagine yourself talking to the author, or imagine them writing you a letter. Or imagine yourself writing the thing you’re reading! Would you have phrased it exactly that way? Isn’t that example a little weird? Why did they pick that weird example…?

So it’s actually pretty obvious that every text, of every genre, is imbued with some level of hidden or implicit meaning. The question then is how much, and we can reframe Melzer’s argument as saying that for pre-modern philosophy the answer was, “quite a lot.” If so, there had to be a reason why, because information theory teaches us that packing more bits of meaning into a channel with fixed bandwidth gets harder and harder the further you go. Reading esoterically is challenging, but writing esoterically is no walk in the park either. Some authors do it to give you, the reader, the pleasure of solving a riddle — like Gene Wolfe, probably my favorite science fiction author, whose short stories and novels are all like intricately-crafted puzzle boxes with one story on the surface and another entirely different story hidden inside. You’ve covered two other reasons — the “defensive” and “protective” motivations — sheltering the author from an intolerant reading public, or sheltering society from dangerous and destabilizing ideas. But there’s another whole class of reason, and I think for ancient philosophy it might be the most important one of all.

I’ve repeatedly used spoken conversation as an analogy for esoteric reading, but the analogy also goes the other way. Reading a multi-layered text might be the single best simulation of conversation with the author that it’s possible to create in a non-interactive medium. In a good conversation you’re constantly modeling your interlocutor, predicting what they’re going to say next, jumping in over them to agree or disagree or finish their sentence or pivot the direction, and they’re constantly doing the same to you. There’s a push and a pull, a dance, a connection. A really good conversation is one of the most intimate experiences you can have with another human being, two minds each comprehending the other and being comprehended, alive to every mental sensation and nuance. But reading and struggling with a multi-layered work involves many of the same moves. In order to write esoterically, the author had to anticipate your frame of mind, the exact way you would be thinking, and then leave something there for you to find. For you to find it, you had to do the same thing to him — imagining him imagining you — and so on in infinite regress. It’s like a still image of a single tender moment in a dance, or a snapshot of a climactic exchange in a Chess match.3 You look at this two-dimensional slice, and if you have the skill, a movie plays in your head, you see what must have come right before and right after, like a low-res looping shortform video. It isn’t much, but it’s pretty impressive for something hurled across the millennia by a person long dead.

We’re almost there. The ancients wrote esoterically because esoteric writing is the closest that writing can come to conversation, and the ancients believed that philosophy could only be taught through conversation. Does that shock you? If so, it’s because you come from a culture where philosophy is taken to be propositional knowledge, a set of facts or a list of arguments or a body of knowledge that can be learned. But the ancients considered philosophy to be a kind of process knowledge, like knowing how to dance, or how to ride a bike, or how to do B2B SaaS sales. Imagine trying to learn to play piano by reading a manual but never actually playing any music, that’s how the ancients would think about contemporary academic philosophy. For them, the only way to learn philosophy was to do philosophy with somebody who was already wise — sparring with them verbally, wrestling with them mentally, encountering problems together, solving them together. No text could possibly replace that, but to the extent that any text could, it would have to be a multilayered one. Their works are hard to read because they are fundamentally not designed to directly impart knowledge (!!!), they’re designed to make you, the reader, go through a particular set of mental transitions and moves that imitate the actions of somebody doing philosophy. They’re like the written version of a kung fu movie featuring a multi-tiered pagoda with antagonists of increasing skill on each floor.4 They aren’t training manuals, they are training.

Funnily enough, there is one kind of text that everybody still understands is deliberately written this way. I’m speaking, of course, of higher-level math textbooks. It’s a completely normal genre convention that a good math textbook will leave deliberate gaps in explanations, or huge lacunae between an example and what it’s supposed to show. The reason is identical — these books are not supposed to impart mathematical knowledge in the sense of a body of facts or propositions. Nobody cares if you’ve memorized the statement of some theorem, you can just look it up after all. The books are designed to teach you to do math and they do that long before you get to the exercises. The chapter leading up to the exercises is also a set of exercises, because you can’t understand it without struggling over every word. I am not exaggerating when I say that I once spent multiple days pondering a single sentence in Fulton and Harris’s Representation Theory. Without that struggle, we would not be able to learn, and until very recently every work of philosophy was written in the same spirit.

Reading esoterically is hard. That’s because it’s meant to be hard. That means you have to go slow. Or as Melzer puts it:

Esoteric reading, being very difficult, requires one to slow down and spend much more time with a book than one may be used to. One must read it very slowly, and as a whole, and over and over again. It will probably be necessary to adjust downward your whole idea of how many books you can expect to read in your lifetime.

The issue here is not just the amount of time devoted to going through a book but also the kind — as in the difference between driving and hiking as ways of going through the world. When you journey by foot you are no longer in that automotive state of “on-the-way.” There is a spirit of tarrying and engagement that lets you enter fully into the life of each place as you reach it. This is how you must travel through a book.

Jane: What would a philosophy text that worked like an advanced math textbook even look like? Not quite like the classical works, I think, since many of them were intended as aides memoire to consult after you’d worked through the secret teachings with your tutor.5 (There seems to have been a whole parallel oral tradition for interpreting Aristotle, for instance, which we’ve since lost.) But today I don’t know if you could get away with writing something that looked like a straightforward philosophy text but had a secret meaning, simply because in the absence of a cultural memory of esoteric writing anything that can be interpreted as an error from the author will be. You have to somehow clue your desired reader, but only your desired reader, in to the fact that you’re doing this. And while I appreciate your optimism about things one notices in the text being put there on purpose, that’s only true for careful writers — and careful readers. (It’s hard enough getting people to understand the things you explicitly wrote on the page, let alone the things you clearly implied but didn’t quite state; I can’t imagine how frustrating it would be to hide things no one ever finds.)

For esoteric writing to work today, it would have to be something difficult to understand on its very face. It either would have to be clear that the reader was missing something — a book that was vague, or aphoristic, or vibe-y — or else the kind of thing that only makes sense when you already know the things it’s saying. (Though in that case, why bother writing the book?) The latter kind is probably safer, though: my worry is always that in a regime of ubiquitous text, where we’re used to glancing at things for half a second and coming away thinking we understand them, the lazy readers will take real harm from what they think they’ve read.6 But actually I can think of another successful genre that’s meant to encode wisdom but not propositional knowledge: Orthodox Christian theology.

Here’s the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy: Catholics think the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy is the Pope and the filioque, and the Orthodox think the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy is that Catholics think the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy is the Pope and the filioque.7 It’s not that there aren’t doctrinal differences (you can read Fr. Thomas Hopko’s rundown here), but it’s mostly a question of approach: Catholic theology is an academic discipline devoted to reasoning about God, and Orthodox theology is a practical pursuit intended to communicate something that helps the reader in his metanoia, his turning-around of the soul.8 This fact is very difficult and upsetting to many Western rationalists who convert to Orthodoxy, because we keep wanting to reason about God — that’s just how we come at the world, okay? — and the answer from the Church keeps being “you’re doing it wrong.” Personally, though, I’ve needed the regular reminder that becoming Christlike can’t just be something you do with your head. Reason can turn us in the direction of Truth, but it can’t get us all the way there.

I’ve long believed that the Western love affair with reason has its roots in philosophy’s triumphant return to virgin soil: without a thousand years of cultural coevolution with Aristotle, an entire society got one-shotted by 6D dialectical analysis. But Melzer’s treatment of esotericism adds an interesting wrinkle here, because the scholastics and their early modern successors obviously do endorse protective esotericism (which depends for its logic on the conflictual view of theory and praxis). They can’t have been that into reason! So I shall add an epicycle and suggest that when their sheer exuberance about reason’s potential wove itself into the Western intellectual tradition, it inadvertently carried the seeds of its own destruction at the hands of the Enlightenment harmonists. (Of course, “sheer exuberance about reason’s potential” also led to the fact that I can expect all my children to live to adulthood, so you win some, you lose some.)

Anyway, as I think I’ve signposted pretty clearly, I think the conflictual view is the right one. We can never bring our social and political world into full harmony with reason, because at some point it must rest on on something that doesn’t actually hold up to close examination. And that’s — well, not okay, it’s a tragic flaw at the heart of the human condition, but have you heard that we live in a fallen world? Tragedy is inevitable.

It’s hard to see the conflict today, though, because we have so few shared pieties left. Marriage, family, patriotism, faith, any and all normative social roles — they’ve all foundered on the shoals of the free and open society’s “you just do you, man.” Sure, it’s fine to do those things (mostly, as long as you’re not tacky about it), but it’s also fine not to. There’s no need for esotericism to protect a people who can no longer be shocked. The ancients understood the philosopher to outside of, and subversive to, the city, but the modern city is founded on the notion of subversion. The limited liberal state is what’s left when the process of emancipation has run its course and the shared conception of a “right way” to live has been stripped away. But look — as creatures of the modern world, we have all learned to immediately think of all those excluded from the thick community of that “shared conception.” What about the women, the slaves, the metics? Turns out we have shared pieties, too.

John: The challenging thing about discussing this book’s thesis is that the very subject matter itself forces me to put my argument…a little bit elliptically. The first lesson they teach you in internet posting school is “use memorable, punchy, concrete examples with relevance to your reader,” but I cannot do this here. Because if there were certain topics so radioactive, so potentially damaging to the political order that people only ever wrote about them in an indirect fashion, then I would not be able to tell you directly. Doing so would get me doxxed, possibly lynched, and it might even horrify you, my dear. Fortunately we all know that no such topics exist in our society, because we are so remarkably rational and modern, and because nobody writes about them.

Anyway, I profoundly disagree with your characterization of contemporary American intellectual life. There are plenty of views that are considered beyond the pale in polite society and mass culture, even while they’re quietly accepted by significant chunks of the intellectual elite. The exact set of such views has shifted a little over the past few decades, and a little more over the past few years, but I don’t think the number or importance of them really has. If somebody doesn’t recognize this, it’s almost always because they’ve fallen prey to a fish-swimming-in-water effect (either in the mass culture itself, or within their particular alabaster tower). Really, it could not be otherwise.

There has never been a society that wasn’t founded on some lies, and bringing the harsh light of philosophical inquiry to bear on those lies is correctly viewed as anti-social behavior by most people. Most of these people won’t even be persecuting you in a cynical or calculating way. They have believed the lies their whole life, they swim in them and don’t even see them, so when you start doing philosophy in their presence you actually just sound like an insane person. You are babbling and asking what if they sky were blue when everybody can clearly see that it is green, and you are probably a danger to your family and also kind of annoying. It’s true that we don’t literally execute people for having heretical views (mostly), but I chalk that up to greater state capacity and a much more powerful overall system of social control that means eccentrics and other miscreants aren’t much of a threat.

One thing I must emphasize is how fractal this whole setup is and how not on my high-horse I am. In a society like ours, awash in mass communication and with supposedly liberal speech norms, a key goal of esotericism is doing what the military calls IFF and what salespeople call “qualification.” To put it more bluntly: the purpose of public writing is to get yourself invited to the correct group chats. But once you’re in there, the whole dance begins again. Your supposedly elite group of dissident truth-seekers has its own norms, its own shibboleths, and inevitably its own set of foundational and unquestionable lies. Are you stuck now, or are you prepared to lose your cool new friends and ascend to Level 2? This is what separates the men from the boys, the merely disagreeable from the true lovers of wisdom. It’s a hard road to walk: finding those whom you thought were your people only to lose them again. I’m not quite strong enough or autistic enough to do it, which means I would’ve been one of the juvenile delinquents hanging out with Socrates, not an actual hemlock-drinker. I have tremendous respect for those who can go all the way.

So is that the distinction then? Is the whole “conflict” between theory and praxis, between philosophy and society, all about protecting an elite of high-functioning truth-seekers who are trying to find and communicate with each other amidst an ocean of unreflective philistines? Melzer claims that this is how the ancients thought, and that much of the decline of esotericism is explained by moderns no longer feeling this way. What is he smoking? Has he never been around a group of people talking about how to preserve NPR funding? People love this framing because it flatters them, makes them feel like they are part of a special group of wise sages pondering the secrets of the universe, as opposed to those rubes who just want to watch football and grill (and persecute heretics). People have always thought this way, from Plato’s “bronze souls” to Hillary’s “deplorables,” and people probably always will think this way. But it isn’t why we need esotericism.

The reality is much darker. Mobs don’t form spontaneously, they are whipped up by agitators. Within the circle of people who think and talk a lot about ideas, there are some who are motivated by truth, and some who are motivated by something else. The ivory towers of academia teem with witchhunters, and I’m afraid your totally based Signal chat does as well. They are not ignorant, they are not unreflective, they are as wise as snakes and as merciful as Great White Sharks. They understand exactly what you are saying, they may even agree that it is true, and they will use it to hang you anyway, because they are just playing a different game from you. The conflict isn’t between the enlightened and the many, it’s between two different camps within the enlightened. The natural enemy of the man who hungers for truth is not the rube who hungers for football and burgers, it’s the equally impressive man who hungers for glory (or for what he thinks is glory).

It took me embarrassingly long to understand that this is how the world works, because while like most people I’m a blend of the two types, by nature I incline more toward loving truth, and it’s hard for each side to comprehend the other. If you’ve ever complained about “entryism” in your academic department or seen an intellectual community turn into a group of frothing ideologues, it usually isn’t because everybody just lost their minds at once. There are people who knew better and who did it on purpose, because the manipulation of social reality (and its concomitant rewards) is more interesting to them than your research project. The ancients knew this too — political excellence and philosophical excellence are like oil and water: they can be held for a time in an uneasy emulsion, but their natural tendency is to shrink with loathing from each other. And the nature of political excellence means that they will always win, so the philosophers need to hide. That’s why you need esoteric writing.

The moment the scales fell from my eyes, actually, was the SARS-2 pandemic that we all lived through, but which now feels like a weird dream. One of the most dreamlike parts for me was the first few weeks, when the plucky right-wing dissidents were loading up on N95 masks and sharing graphs of doubling times with each other, whilst the center-left loudly made fun of them and declared that anyone worried about the virus was a racist. A few weeks later, everybody had exactly switched sides with zero acknowledgement or discussion, and I began wondering if I was a crazy person. A few months after that, mass outdoor gatherings suddenly switched from being subversive to patriotic, and that was when I realized that my entire life the social reality in which I had swam was actively shaped by powers with no regard for truth or reality. It wasn’t that they were against the truth, or trying to cover things up on principle, it was even weirder than that. It was just orthogonal to what they cared about. They were genuinely indifferent. They existed in a world of arguments and reason just like I did, but in their world these were tools for winning rather than tools for discovering the nature of things.

I remember one guy in particular, an acquaintance who lived near me. One day in June he posted an angry tweet about the wicked people who went outside and breathed on each other. The very next day he posted a video of him screaming within a mob of thousands of people, with a message denouncing the wicked people who were not joining them. This guy wasn’t dumb, wasn’t a brainwashed normie, his job was to convince people of things, and with a start I realized that he just didn’t care and that the world was full of people like him, and that that kind of explained everything. But guys like that aren’t just on Twitter, they’re everywhere, including your super secret philosophers’ club. And this, I think, is the true meaning of the “conflictual view” — it isn’t that you need to write esoterically to avoid transgressing the pieties of the normies, it isn’t even that there’s a bunch of lawful neutral Inspector Javerts out there acting like Plato’s guardians and hunting down dissidents for the good of the many. The wolves are right here, and they’re dressed up like philosophers. They’re your colleagues, your teachers, your students. To let your guard down and write plainly is to make yourself very vulnerable to these people, as countless poor quokkas throughout history have learnt.

Jane: Okay, let’s grant that you’re right and — despite the fact that there are people out there putting their real government names to takes like “the Holocaust is a lie invented by the Jews” and “an evil scientist created white people in a lab” — there are things you just can’t say.9 There’s obviously a level on which that’s true: you’re never going to get tenure or make partner or be elected dogcatcher if you’re on the record with some of these crazy opinions. On the other hand, you’re also not at risk of prison, execution, or complete social death the way a premodern heretic would have been. But fine, maybe these days we’re just better at keeping the velvet glove over the enforcement of pieties. Maybe we’ve figured out how to put the policeman in everyone’s head instead of on the street corner, with tremendous savings on real estate.

What then is the truth-seeking philosopher to do?

I’m going to offer two examples here, carefully calibrated (I hope!) to evoke some visceral reaction in our readers without actually prompting anyone to show up at our house with torches and pitchforks. So let’s take the Constitution.

As is the tradition of my people (overeducated dilettantes), I once considered going to law school — not because I wanted to actually practice law but because I enjoy arguing about ideas. Luckily I came to my senses and got my MRS instead, but I did spend a lot of time reading about constitutional theory and interpretation and realized to my horror that none of it makes any sense. In theory the law binds us because “we,” the vast diachronic entity called the American people, have agreed to be bound by it. That’s why the originalists say we need to know what the people who signed up thought they were agreeing to, since that’s the extent of the law’s legitimate authority today. But push even a little bit and the originalists will admit that no, it really boils down to the fact that we all think we’re bound by it. Political legitimacy derives from…the belief in political legitimacy. It’s turtles all the way down. Any attempt to delineate neutral interpretive principles is just an elaborate attempt to meme society at large into tying its rulers’ hands, a willingness to limit the options available to Our Guys if it means political pressure will force Their Guys to operate under the same constraints. It is, in short, a lie.

But you can’t say that; you can’t point it out; the trick doesn’t work if you tell the marks it’s happening. We’ve all agreed that the Constitution is binding, which limits the potential range of our fights to “things the Constitution might plausibly be interpreted to say” — a range that can be stretched, certainly, but not infinitely far. Which is good! I am in favor of the kind of stability that comes from political disagreement happening between men in suits filing briefs instead of men in camo firing guns. But that doesn’t make any of it actually true. It just makes pointing out the lie worse than living with it.

But here’s a counter-example: say your society believes something truly wacky, like that we all live on the inside of the Hollow Earth. This seems like a fairly harmless delusion right up until people start, I don’t know, spending measurable percentages of GDP building rockets that are going to crash horribly because their fundamental beliefs about the nature of reality are wrong.10 At what point is it your moral duty to point at the burning, tangled wreckage that was once a city and suggest that perhaps some assumptions up the line were incorrect? How much does that depend on whether you think anyone will listen?

And more importantly, how do you tell which kind of these situations you’re in? Logically, you can believe in the fundamental incommensurability of theory and praxis, the necessity of some lies, and still try to bring our doubled selves closer to one another. The esoteric philosophers of the past were hardly political quietists: Plato tried to mold the tyrant of Syracuse into a philosopher-king, Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, and Machiavelli was a Florentine official and diplomat who endured torture and exile over his political career. The “turning around of the soul” that enables a man to live for truth can (I’d argue probably should) drive him to live in truth, too, as much as he’s able. But you have to know what you can affect, so you’ll know when to keep your mouth shut — and, I suppose, when to write between the lines.

Before we close, I want to address one final question: does this book about esoteric writing have an esoteric message? Melzer says no, but then he would — putting a big “this book contains a secret message” stamp on your book sort of defeats the purpose of making the message secret. I’m inclined to believe him, though, because he is essentially an Enlightenment lib, a genuine believer in science and reason and democracy. He’s married to anti-Trump thinkfluencer Shikha Dalmia. His acknowledgements thank Bill Kristol and Damon Linker (as well as Harvey Mansfield and dozens of other names I don’t recognize). And he seems perfectly sincere when he describes religious conservatism and political populism as unscientific “assaults on reason.”

In fact, my favorite part of this book is that it isn’t esoteric. It’s fascinating, suggestive, and clearly-argued, but nowhere is Melzer trying to convince us that esotericism is good. He doesn’t even like it; at the very opening of the book he writes that “[t]here are people who have a real love for esoteric interpretation and a real gift for it. I am not one of them. My natural taste is for writers who say exactly what they mean and mean exactly what they say. I can barely tolerate subtlety. If I could have my wish, the whole phenomenon of esoteric writing would simply disappear.” His project is deeper and purer than that, and I find this unutterably charming: imagine spending years of your life writing hundreds of pages about something you don’t even like, because people are wrong and you want them to be right. That’s my kind of philosopher.

Would you like to be smarter? Apparently many people would. There are people who spend much of their waking lives grinding at something called “dual n-back” to try to make themselves smarter. There are people who dose themselves with Chinese research chemicals to try to make themselves smarter. There are even some losers who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on something called “college” to try to make themselves smarter. Meta-analyses have not shown any of these methods to work, but I am a lib and believe that people have a right to experiment on themselves (except for that “college” thing — that’s too socially destructive for me to condone).

More interesting are the numerous venture-backed startups aiming to help you have smarter kids by throwing away your dumb kids for you. These are fascinating because they’re like a laser-guided bomb aimed at one of the central contradictions of our state ideology. On the one hand, we are (officially) an egalitarian society. On the other hand, we (unofficially) treat intelligence as a proxy for moral worth, especially in educated upper-middle class circles. We square this circle by (officially) proclaiming that everybody is really about equally smart, it’s just that some of us (lib version) were privileged with more opportunities to do dual n-back during preschool or (con version) had the grit and fortitude and bootstrappiness to grind dual n-back instead of smoking dope. Nobody actually believes these stories, but we all pretend to, and then here come the embryo selection startups crashing through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man yelling: “LMAO, IT’S ALL JUST RANDOMNESS PLUS WHO YOUR PARENTS ARE.”

And there it is, the poisoned splinter buried deep in the wound, surrounded by inflamed and necrotizing flesh: some people are just smarter than others. It offends every notion of fairness we have, fills the privileged with guilt and the overlooked with rage: some people are just smarter than others. We fear that admitting it would open the door to countless horrors: revolution or genocide or a new caste system maybe, so we bury it beneath a thousand educational interventions: some people are just smarter than others. And as with every other case where the official doctrine and the unofficial rules diverge, it’s a tax on those unable to read the social cues. The chumps chase mirages like dual n-back or educational equity, while the savvy prosper because they hold the secret knowledge: some people are just smarter than others.

I was raised outside of the United States, in a society much less anguished about the fact that some people are just smarter than others, so I was a bit shocked when I came here and encountered the taboo, and then the reaction to the taboo. On this topic, Americans are like the kids with sheltered upbringings who go totally berserk in college. One small taste of liquor and suddenly they’re doing utterly freakish things like taking IQ tests or posting about “elite human capital.” If there’s anything worse than officialdom’s blindness to one of the fundamental dimensions of human variation, it’s the smugness of those who’ve figured out the truth and now act like they belong to a secret society and like it explains everything. They tend to treat intelligence as a kind of mystical gift, both vastly overstating its importance and assuming that if it’s innate then it can never be improved.

Fortunately they’re wrong about that last part. You can totally make yourself smarter. You don’t even have to do dual n-back.

But before we get to that, what does it even mean to be smarter? This is not a flippant question, I think we have no idea what we mean, because we don’t understand what intelligence is. Sure, we know it when we see it. Chimpanzees use tools in the sense of poking sticks into anthills, whereas human beings use tools in the sense of extreme ultra-violet lithography, and presumably intelligence is the thing that makes the difference. But what is that thing, and how can you have more or less of it? We’ve quantified things like working memory and the speed with which you can carry out reasoning steps, once you can reason at all. But is that really the whole difference between you and Einstein, or for that matter between you and the chimpanzee? It sure seems like between a human genius and a dumb human, and again between a dumb human and a chimpanzee, there is something qualitatively different, some fire from the gods that enables the smarter one to think in a new kind of way and to leap across chasms that the dumber could not traverse even if given aeons to do it.1

Let me do something very unusual for me, and recommend that we adopt a kind of methodological positivism. Let’s shift our point of view from the internal subjective experience of intelligence (“what does it feel like to have received the fire of genius from the gods?”) to the external objectively verifiable effects of intelligence. This immediately suggests a nice concise definition: intelligence is the ability of an agent to achieve its goals. I like this definition because it lets us sidestep all the boring arguments about book-smarts vs. street-smarts, etc. Intelligence is the thing that enables you to act upon the world and get your way, whether that’s via social manipulation (like convincing a posse to come with you into a spooky alley), formal reasoning (like inventing a new kind of physics that lets you build a plasma rifle to carry into the spooky alley), intuition (like having a funny hunch that there’s a mugger hiding behind that dumpster), empathetic reasoning (like putting yourself in the mugger’s shoes and realizing that he’d probably have a friend covering you from the second-story window), or all of the above tied together with a crafty plan.

I like this methodological move, because it lets us stop wondering what’s happening inside the sealed alien artifact, and start just measuring its power output. It also shows us how to increase that power output. Imagine instead of brains we have armies. If your army is overwhelmingly huge, you can win with a frontal assault. But you can make even a small army many times more effective by giving it a strategy. It’s the same way with big brains and small brains. Richard Feynman was famously able to solve problems with the “Feynman algorithm” (write down the problem, think about it a bit, write down the solution). But the Feynman algorithm is a handicap, we don’t need to use the Feynman algorithm! You’re allowed to come at the problem with a roadmap and a battle plan, and by doing so you are boosting your effective intelligence many times. You will solve problems that you could not have solved before, act upon the world and get your way in situations that you could not have won before. Perhaps you don’t have any more of the inner fire from the gods, perhaps you still won’t feel like Richard Feynman, but our external measuring device can’t tell the difference. Your power level is still over 9,000. You’re still winning.

Actually, I tricked you in that last paragraph. The “Feynman algorithm” was a story told by one of Feynman’s peers. Here’s how Feynman himself once described his secret:

I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.

This is a book about assembling your box of tools.

As with many classic works, you have read this book a thousand times even if you’ve never read it, like how Shakespeare and the Bible are full of clichés. It’s a sign of Pólya’s total cultural victory that his method has just sunk into the background of twentieth-century mathematical and scientific culture. I kept bumping into the mental tricks I use at work or the techniques I use when teaching my kids and going: “wait that’s where that came from?” So what follows might already be familiar to you if you come from that culture. But if like me you were raised as a “Christmas and Easter” mathematician/scientist and have only encountered these ideas in fragmentary and sublimated form, it’s still quite useful to see them laid out systematically and unapologetically.

Pólya’s book is about what to do when you encounter a problem. Not an exercise, mind you, but a problem, and if you have no idea what distinction I’m trying to make, I lay it out at some length here:2

Pólya is a mathematician (I first encountered him via his wonderful enumeration theorem in combinatorics), and his examples are largely drawn from the world of mathematical proof. But the thing about Pólya’s method is it applies far outside of mathematics, and I will try to motivate it with a wider set of examples. He divides problem-solving into four essential stages:

1. Understanding what it is you’re trying to do.

2. Coming up with a plan.

3. Carrying out the plan.

4. Reflecting on how it went.

Each of these stages deserves an entire essay, or perhaps an entire book, but let’s breeze through them so we can get to the fun part. The first step is understanding what you’re trying to do, and we can consider this at several different levels of abstraction. At its most basic, this is just understanding the ingredients you have to work with and the result you’re trying to achieve. Pólya analogizes mathematical problem-solving to building a bridge over a river. You have a starting point, and you have somewhere you’re trying to get to, and you cannot begin to build the bridge until you clearly see them both. What is the ground like in both places? Are the elevations different? Is there an obstruction in the middle? You wouldn’t think of building a bridge before you had surveyed the site.

Mathematics is a funny domain for studying the theory of problem-solving. One unusual thing about math is that if you understand your starting point and your ending point sufficiently well, then you’re already done.3 And in fact, a lot of very good mathematical work happens in this initial site-surveying phase. Sometimes something as seemingly-superficial as the introduction of notation is enough to get the entire job done (I keep waffling back and forth on whether this says something incredibly deep about the nature of reality or not). The farther up the stack you go — towards physics, or engineering, or military strategy, or B2B SaaS — the less likely it is that the entire problem will dissolve when you reframe the question, but… sometimes that still happens. Even when it doesn’t, looking at the problem from another angle may yield shocking insights, but to do that you need to rotate it, and to rotate it you need a good grasp on it.

The best possible grasp comes from inventing the problem yourself. But if you were assigned the problem by somebody else that’s okay, you can achieve most of the same benefit by reconstructing or reframing the problem in your own mental language. You have a better shot at noticing that a problem can be rewritten or transformed into a much simpler representation if you really inhabit it. You need to live and breathe the problem, and let it drive you a little bit crazy, only then can you be sure that you really understand what it’s asking (and once you start dreaming about the problem, good news! That means your subconscious is now working on it too, we will come back to this.)

If your site survey stops with a thorough understanding of the problem, you are still missing out. In real life, as opposed to artificial school environments, problems do not come neatly packaged up and delivered to us. A yet more profound question you should be asking yourself is: “do I need to be solving this problem?” Remember that intelligence is the ability of an agent to achieve its goals. If the goal in question is instrumental, do you really need to do it? And if the goal is terminal, is there some other way to achieve it? Do you really need to build this bridge? Can you walk a mile upstream and use somebody else’s bridge? Can you take a boat? Do you even want to be on the other side of this river anyway?

Some problems come to us demanding to be solved, like an invading army or a looming bankruptcy. But others we go hunting for because they are economically or intellectually valuable. Or for sport. An entrepreneur and an academic are both a kind of truffle-pig for good problems, and it pays to develop a nose for them. Eventually you learn to notice its spoor, the rank taste in the air, “a problem has passed by this way, moving downwind, two days ago.” One of the many ways school fails us is by actively harming this capacity, it lies and lies to us for decades, teaching us that good problems will be delivered on a silver platter. This is why so many people who do well in school never amount to anything. They never develop a taste for the hunt, never learn that this, actually, is the most important part of the entire site survey: “is this problem worth solving by anybody?”, “am I uniquely well-positioned to solve it?”, “can I amass the resources to solve it?”, “do I have any chance of success?”, “is there some other problem that it is more valuable for me to solve?” The greatest lie that textbooks teach is that the hard part is coming up with an answer. No, the hard part is usually coming up with a worthwhile question.

I’m temperamentally very bad at completing a proper site survey. My inclination when faced with a problem is to charge in screaming and waving a sword naked with my body painted blue.4 That means I’m bad at the second step as well, which is: forming a plan. Going back to our bridge analogy, this is the part where we build the bridge in our minds, first hazily and intuitively perhaps, a mere idea of a bridge, then proceeding through several stages of reification and concretization into something as crisp as blueprints or as real as scaffolding.

Once again, mathematics is a weird domain for analyzing the nature of problem solving. This time, because step 2 and step 3 can blur together at the edges. Anyone can see that planning a military campaign and actually conducting a military campaign are very different things, but when you’re attacking an algebraic expression rather than a city, sometimes once you’ve come up with the plan the rest is practically a formality. This particular idiosyncrasy, however, is more true of the “math” you do in high school, and a lot less true of “real math.” When proving a big scary theorem, planning and execution are very different kinds of activities.

For starters, you’re allowed to be sloppy when planning. Guessing at a solution is totally permitted, as is reasoning via vague or conceptual analogies from other areas.5 Generally speaking, the more painstaking and precise we are when executing the plan, the more wild and unprincipled we’re allowed to be when conceiving it. There’s an analogy here to the thing where the easier it is to verify the output of an AI system, the more economical it is to use an AI method that produces lots of wrong answers.6 Math is an extreme example of this: when you come back to flesh out your argument and give it bones, clearing away all the scaffolding and letting the bridge stand on its own, your methods have absolute certainty. That means you can be as hare-brained in your idea generation as you want. (The same is not true of planning a military campaign, where the cost of validating your plan is much higher.)

Non-mathematicians often confuse the planning and execution stages of mathematical (or other very theoretical) work. The great Jacques Hadamard, in his fun little essay “The psychology of invention in the mathematical field,” mocks the normies who think that mathematicians do their work by manipulating algebraic symbols according to logical rules. No, he explains, mathematicians check their work by performing calculations. The actual solution came another way: a sudden insight connecting two disparate ideas, or an intuitive leap, or a visual depiction of the problem, or just a weird hunch. Those are the sources of inspiration, but they’re often wrong, so then we break out the x and the y to check that our hunch was correct. This is more akin to step 3: executing the plan, making it real in all its gory detail. But we can’t start there, we would never have been able to solve the problem just by staring at x and y on the page and willing them to dance.7

Some of you may be furious at how apophatic this description is: “okay, figuring out how to solve something isn’t about moving around x and y, so what is it???” But I’m not just being cute, stage 2 is by far the most mysterious phase of the process, the part where we are most likely to start babbling about genius and the divine spark, the part where even history’s greatest problem-solvers fail to introspect and give a coherent account of what happened. Hadamard, having finished mocking others, is just a trifle embarrassed when it’s time for him to advance his own theory. “I dunno, you just need to think really hard about it,8 and then go off on vacation and let your subconscious work on it.” There’s probably something to that advice. You could also go sailing instead. But can we do any better than that?

This is where your mental toolbox comes in.

Pólya’s great contribution to the art of problem-solving is a list of completely general problem-solving heuristics combined with a completely general heuristic approach. Putting the two together, you can solve any problem. You just employ the tools according to the approach. Let’s talk about the completely general heuristic approach first, because it’s shorter. Are you ready? Here it is:

“Take a tool out of your toolbox, and spend a few days whacking it against your problem. If you don’t get anywhere, put it back and repeat with the next tool. If you run through all your tools, start again from the beginning.”

Now, the only remaining work is to enumerate all the tools (mathematicians love talking this way, and yes it’s aggravating). Pólya uses the word “heuristics,” I’ve been using “tools,” but some of you may prefer to think in terms of “moves” — like the actions your character can take in a computer game. Some moves are domain specific. If you’re a martial artist and your opponent has you pinned to the mat, there is a set of literal moves you can do, one of which may solve your problem. If you’re flying a fighter jet and the enemy is on your six, there are some moves to consider: like shedding altitude to gain speed, doing a barrel roll, or ejecting. Computer programmers and corporate managers have their own moves: would adding a layer of indirection or reorganizing the department help here? And yes, mathematicians have moves as well.

If he were a lesser man, Pólya might be content to teach a few of those mathematical moves, but the curious thing about math is that it’s so close to the stuff of pure thought itself, that by putting in just a bit more effort Pólya is able to refine these mathematical moves into completely general problem-solving heuristics. That is moves that work not in one domain, but in all domains. Moves that spawn new moves. Meta-moves. The bulk of his book is a vast list of them. Once again, an entire essay (or an entire book) could be written about each of them. But I’ll confine myself to a few sentences about a small number, so you get the flavor.

Does this problem remind you of another one? The easiest problem to solve is one that you’ve solved before. Maybe it isn’t exactly a problem you know, but it could be related, or it could be cleverly disguised. A lot of “crystallized intelligence” is really just having a large corpus of related problems in your history, and being good at relating or transforming new problems into old ones that you’ve already conquered. This is one reason I think some human triumphalism over AIs memorizing their training distribution is misplaced — if that distribution is sufficiently large and general, and if you’re sufficiently good at pattern matching against it, then this is a wickedly powerful tool. One way to view it is that this is the meta-technique that lets AIs be very effective even without much “intelligence,” but another way is that more of human intelligence than we want to admit is actually just this. Either way, if you want to boost your effective intelligence you should probably get good at this.

Example: You and your men are outnumbered and trapped at the bottom of a valley, with a forest to your left, and a marsh to your right, the enemy holding the high ground ahead of you. The situation looks grim, but wait a minute, that sounds a lot like one of Napoleon’s battles which he was able to win with a really innovative approach. Hmm… but it’s not exactly the same, because on that day Napoleon’s opponent didn’t have artillery superiority, but your opponent does. But if there were a way to neutralize that artillery superiority or make it not matter…

What would make it easy to solve this problem? There’s an old joke used to make fun of an academic discipline that you want to mock as being overly theoretical: a mathematician/philosopher/economist/whatever is trapped on a desert island with a bunch of canned food that they need to open, so they say to themselves: “assume we had a can opener…”. This joke is stupid, because “assume we had a can opener” is exactly the right problem-solving step if YOU HAVE A WAY OF GETTING A CAN OPENER. In real life, as opposed to desert islands, there is usually a way to make or borrow or buy or steal or invent whatever thing it is you might need. “What tool, if I had it, would make this easy” is an incredibly productive thought most times, because it allows you to break the problem down into two easier subproblems. You can also generalize this to “what is an alternate situation where I would be one step away from victory?” Then you see what it would take to get yourself into that situation, and recurse as necessary. (This is a very familiar line of thinking for people who like Chess puzzles, but it applies to much of life.)

Example: You can’t get a date, because none of the women at this club will talk to you. This would be a lot easier if you were more charismatic and in better shape. Are there ways for you to become more charismatic and get in better shape?

How do you know this isn’t impossible? If you’re trapped by a problem, in your research, or in business, or on a military campaign, and you can’t figure out any way to free yourself, try turning the tables on yourself and prove that it’s impossible for you to win. Note that this is not the same as avoiding impossible problems in stage 1 (the site survey), we are assuming here that we’ve chosen a solvable problem, but we’re going to pretend it’s impossible anyway. Why? Because we might learn something from how and where our impossibility proof eventually fails. There will be some crux. Some moment it can’t connect and all turns to ash. Study that moment, it may be the key to your original problem. The adversarial equivalent of this is putting yourself in the enemy general’s shoes. What is the move you can make that there’s no way for him to plan for or respond to? That’s your move.

Example: It’s your move in a chess game and you’re in a horrible position. You can feel the net tightening around you, and you don’t know how to escape. So you turn the situation around, and think about how your opponent can force a checkmate. All of the paths to checkmate hinge on attacking one particular square. You return to your side of the board and see that there’s a method of defending that square which blocks every checkmate and lets you escape the trap.

Can you restate the problem without using any of the same words? This is a classic way to unstick yourself when in a rut. It originates in mathematics, where in some sense having a suitably deep understanding of a problem means you’re already done. By replacing terms in the problem statement with their definitions, and then swapping them out for other equivalent definitions, and so on, you often jog something loose and give yourself the perspective you need. Often, changing all the words is what makes you realize that the problem is something you’ve already seen in disguise (see above). But the same technique works sneakily well outside of math as well.

Example: You are a tech founder experiencing self-pity. “My problem is that this venture capitalist won’t give me money.” Well, what is a venture capitalist? A venture capitalist is a professional money manager who expects a certain return profile on a certain timeline. So you can restate the problem: “My problem is that this professional money manager who expects a certain return profile on a certain timeline won’t give me money.” Notice how the second formulation is more pregnant than the first, it is already suggesting courses of action and angles of attack. Now you should try it again with several other definitions of venture capitalist, and suddenly instead of self-pity you have potential plans.

Can you solve an easier problem? You feel that this problem is too hard for you. That’s okay, try making it easier. Can you solve the easy version? Okay, now see if you can adapt that solution so it still works for the original problem. This approach works best when the easier problem either strips away distracting details and chaff while preserving the crux (now exposed and open to your attack), or when the reduction to an easier problem preserves some essential structure of the grander case as with mathematical induction. Yes, this is closely related to “assuming a can opener,” since giving yourself a tool or putting yourself in a better position is one way to make a problem easier. Even if this doesn’t directly help you solve your problem, Pólya says you should do it anyway because it may steel your spine and renew your courage.

Example: “Find for me the length of the diagonal of a rectangular prism with known side lengths.”

“I can’t do it, I’m not good at math.”

“Okay, well can you find the length of the diagonal of a rectangle with known side lengths?”

“Yeah, I’d use the Pythagorean Theorem!”

“Amazing, so you can do this for a 2D box, now see if you can figure it out for a 3D box.”

“Hmm…”

Can you solve a harder problem? This one surprises people, but sometimes making a problem “harder” in the sense of more general or more all-encompassing can make it easier to solve. The absolute master of this technique was Alexander Grothendieck who specialized in solving problems by zooming out and out and out and out until the original question was barely visible and then proving some massively more profound theorem that incidentally settled the starting problem as a consequence. This happens so often in mathematics that Pólya calls it the “inventor’s paradox” and gives many examples of it, but there are examples outside math as well. Anytime it’s easier to step outside or entirely replace a system than to work within it, you are making a problem easier by making it “harder.” And there are countless businesses that would have a better shot at surviving if they were 10x larger, or also did the jobs of all of their suppliers. It’s a sad truth that a great many plans fail because they were insufficiently ambitious.

Example: You want to achieve some political change that’s opposed by powerful interests. If you win a narrow electoral majority, progress will be slow and your opponents will constantly be trying to peel off the least committed members of your coalition. It may be impossible to achieve your goal this way, but possible if you win a landslide majority that allows you to act without restraint.

The bulk of the book is a glossary of dozens and dozens of such heuristics or tools or moves, with examples (mostly from math, but also a few crossword puzzles and word-related brainteasers) of how to employ them. Pólya doesn’t list each heuristic as a question like I have, but I think he’d approve of this choice, because he thinks that while you’re grinding on a problem you should have questions like this running on a loop in the back of your head. Questions like these are also how he thinks problem-solving should be taught to the next generation — when a student is stuck, the teacher shouldn’t give any hints, but just keep asking things like: “have you seen another problem like this before? could you try solving an easier version? what would make it easier to solve this problem?”, etc. The goal of his technique is that after a while, the student stops requiring the teacher to ask these questions out loud, because they have become part of their own internal monologue. This is the part where I laughed, because I instantly recognized that this was what my best teachers had done to me, and what I have automatically and without reflection done when teaching my own kids math. Like I said, total cultural victory.9

So we’ve made it through step two, and our bridge now has a blueprint, or perhaps even some scaffolding. Now it’s time to execute on the plan, and you might ask what this possibly has to do with intelligence. Sure, coming up with a plan takes brains, but putting it into action is more likely to tax our backs than our creativity, right? Oh sure, there are some restricted domains (like math, writing, computer programming, maybe a few others) where the execution itself just looks like further thinking, but surely those are weird exceptions, right?

Wrong. It would be so, but for the fact that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The moment you start building the bridge for real, carrying bricks, things will start to go wrong. The ground on one of the banks of the river is squishier than you thought, or you can’t properly sink the foundation for the main pier holding up the span, or the materials you thought you had are actually something else. No plan is ever good enough, it happens in every domain, in math and in programming and in business and in writing and in strategy games and in actual wars. You’re following the plan, and suddenly it dawns on you with a chill: “oh crap, this isn’t going to work.” And so you’re thrown back into stage 2 or even stage 1, but with a crucial difference: your bridge is half-built, it’s teetering out there in the wind, and you’re exposed, bullets zipping over your head. It’s time to solve the problem again, but this time while panicked and rattled and under pressure.

There are some very foolish people, mostly in the tech industry, who have taken the observation that no plan ever works without modification, and drawn the conclusion that therefore planning itself is pointless. Better, they say, not to plan at all and just do your best. But that’s just going back to the Feynman Method which if it works for you, great, congratulations, I’m very happy for you. For those of us who need to boost our intelligence by unnatural means, however, planning remains essential, we just need to slightly complicate Pólya’s four stage schema. The truth is that execution and planning aren’t really distinct, rather they feed off each other in a loop. You get halfway down the path and discover why your plan isn’t so good, and gather new data that informs your attempt to re-plan. It goes the other way too — sometimes in your planning phase, you do little scouting expeditions to inform the plan, and sometimes one of those forays catches fire and starts to work and you’re executing without realizing it.

Another way of conceptualizing this is that the difference between the planning phase and the execution phase is not actually the activity, because in both phases you’re engaged in a mixture of both planning and execution! The difference, rather, is the tempo. The planning phase happens before the die is cast or the ships are burnt, whereas the execution phase is more dynamic. There is the kind of thinking where you can take another week to come up with a marginally better solution, and the kind of thinking where a solution in a week is no solution at all. Many of the same heuristics and mental tools we discussed before will still work here, but you need to apply them quickly, on your feet, maybe while your opponent is making countermoves or the world threatens to leave you behind. And if the moves don’t work, or don’t work on the schedule you need, then too bad you still need to do something.

I was embarrassingly old when I figured out that endurance is an intellectual virtue. I’ve written at some length about this before, but for the longest time I believed that the way to tell you were good at solving problems was that you figured out all the answers right away. The truth is that when faced with a real problem, so much of what determines your success is not raw mental horsepower, but your ability to grit your teeth and hang in there. When you’ve failed to solve it a dozen ways and promising leads have turned into nothing and you’ve landed back at square one again, it takes a very particular quality to pick yourself back up and charge at the problem with as much energy and excitement as you had the first time.10 As Pólya puts it:

Lukewarm determination… may be enough to solve a routine problem in the classroom. But, to solve a serious scientific problem, willpower is needed that can outlast years of toil and bitter disappointments.

…

Teaching to solve problems is education of the will. Solving problems which are not too easy for him, the student learns to persevere through unsuccess, to appreciate small advances, to wait for the essential idea, to concentrate with all his might when it appears. If the student had no opportunity in school to familiarize himself with the varying emotions of the struggle for the solution his mathematical education failed in the most vital point.

He calls it willpower, but I think it can be more akin to physical pain tolerance, or the capacity for asceticism. The startup people call it “grit” these days, an ability to absorb setbacks and persevere.11 But when you’re into the execution phase and the bullets are whizzing past you, your ability to bounce back from setbacks doesn’t just depend on endurance, it also requires courage. Picking yourself back up when your plans have all crashed to the ground for the tenth time has a different feel to it when your enemies are closing in, which is why we have more respect for Napoleon than we do for a long-distance runner. Mere endurance is different from doing whatever it takes to find the move that lets you survive one more day. This distinction is why some people who are very good at phase two of solving a problem struggle with stage three, and vice versa.

Let’s suppose you survive the execution phase. Your bridge is built. (There was a dicey moment in the middle when you had to battle a shark, but it turned out okay.) Are you done? No. If you stop here you will merely have a bridge, but you will have squandered the far greater prize of reflecting on all that you learned while building it. This is where the real leveling-up happens, and it’s why every high-functioning organization conducts after-action reports of some sort. Are you a high-functioning organization? I hope so!

Once again it’s illuminating to see how mathematicians approach this. A very common piece of mathematical advice is “when you’ve finally proven a theorem, go back and prove it again differently.” How can that be? Wasn’t the proof the point? Sort of, but with the knowledge and insight you’ve gained from proving the result, you can often now go back and write a much better proof: cleaner, simpler, more direct, shedding more light on the true nature of the problem. Not to do this is an insane missed opportunity for consolidating and crystallizing your knowledge. Here’s Pólya:

When the solution that we have finally obtained is long and involved, we naturally suspect that there is some clearer and less roundabout solution… Yet even if we have succeeded in finding a satisfactory solution we may still be interested in finding another solution. We desire to convince ourselves of the validity of a theoretical result by two different derivations as we desire to perceive a material object through two different senses. Having found a proof, we wish to find another proof as we wish to touch an object after having seen it.

Two proof are better than one. “It is safe riding at two anchors.”

By solving a problem and meditating on it, we move that solution into our database of tricks to call on when confronted with the next problem. By solving it twice, or by looking back and with hindsight seeing how else we could have solved it, we get to contribute to our database twice for a small amount of additional effort. But we don’t just want to reflect on the solution. All the blind alleys, the false starts, and the setbacks start to pay rent here — each one of them is a chance to retrospect: “what didn’t I see?” “Why didn’t I see it?” What could I have done differently that would have made me see that sooner?” Each of our scars gets added to the database too, as well as the fact that we overcame them. If you’re a believer in growth mindset, this is your chance to do a little self-hypnosis: “look, I am the kind of person who overcomes difficult things.” Finally this phase feeds back into problem selection: “now that I have solved this problem, what new goals will be easy for me?”

I was being facetious when I described Pólya’s method as a completely general heuristic approach that lets you solve any problem in any domain.12 But I sincerely believe that following these steps or other steps like them, and painstakingly amassing a set of “moves” for your mental toolbox, and cultivating the virtues of endurance and courage, will massively increase your measurable intelligence in the sense of your ability to accomplish your goals and impose your will upon the world. I also think that this perspective could help answer two very profound and very important questions about intelligence: one about its past, and one about its future.

First, the past. Some ancient people were unbelievably smart. When you’ve finished watching the video Dwarkesh linked, read Pólya’s description of how Aristotle deduced with nothing but naked eye observation and logic that the Moon must be a sphere rather than a flat disc, and must shine by reflecting the light of the sun. So the question, put very bluntly, is why didn’t these intellectual beasts get any further? Before you say it, no, it isn’t because they lacked lab equipment. I once had a very stimulating conversation with a top physicist on the question: “could a sufficiently smart caveman have deduced general relativity from observation alone?” He maintained that the answer was yes. Even if you wouldn’t go that far, surely you concede that the caveman could have deduced Newtonian mechanics. And yet they didn’t. Even Aristotle, who was surely much smarter than the average AP Physics student, didn’t. Why is that?

The most sensible answer I’ve heard is sort of an intellectual version of the slow process of accumulating economic surplus in agrarian societies. Why do we read? It’s because we don’t have time to rethink every thought that was ever thunk. If Newton had to invent algebra himself, he might have died before inventing calculus. But he got to stand on the shoulders of giants, and we get to stand on his shoulders and many others besides. This argument sounds pretty reasonable in some ways, but I am not entirely satisfied with it. For starters, I think the ancient world’s rate of progress is still much slower than you would expect if this were the only problem. Okay, so you need somebody else to invent algebra and for those ideas to diffuse… why wasn’t calculus invented in 1400 then? Or in 1200?13 And it isn’t just calculus, there are so many ideas that were discovered centuries after they could have been.

Well, maybe the problem is just that they didn’t have Pólya’s method. Yes I’m being flippant here, but only a little bit. An overwhelming advantage that we moderns have is not just the finished intellectual products of earlier ages, but the numerous examples of exceptionally high-quality reasoning that produced them. In other words, the training data of a modern thinker is filled with a huge number of “moves,” heuristics, stories of how people figured things out. In Newton’s phrasing it’s not just that we stand on the shoulders of giants, it’s that we get to see how they got so tall in the first place. And I have a very strong hunch that it’s much slower to overcome a paucity of quality intellectual efforts to model your own on than to overcome a mere absence of knowledge. In complexity-theoretic terms, I think it should be asymptotically quadratic rather than linear (can you see why? Can you make my hunch precise?).

To that big barrier, we can add the further barrier that “moves” are harder and less rewarding to translate across languages and cultures than the final results. It’s easy for a Greek to explain Pythagoras’ theorem to a Chinese person, but much harder to convey the full spectrum of intellectual history and culture and arguments and inside jokes that got Pythagoras there. So until very recently, the slow accumulation of excellent training data for thinkers was being done by very small effective populations, further slowing this critical precursor to conceptual breakthroughs.

I’ve said “training data” a few times, so yes I think the other big question that Pólya’s method sheds light on has to do with AI. There’s an argument about the capabilities of language models, which I myself have made several times, which goes something like this:

Far be it from me to tell Terrence Tao (an actual, real-life supergenius) about the workings of his own mind. But if you’ve made it to the end of this book review, I’ve hopefully convinced you that a lot of human intelligence is also just “cleverness” of this sort. The saucy way of putting it is that human beings are not actually general intelligences, we’re apes with access to linguistic recursion (which means that the sticks we bang together can be arbitrarily complex), plus cultural evolution that has allowed us to amass an ever-growing pile of complex sticks that we can bang together… one at a time… No really, you have just read over 7,000 words about how an important problem-solving hack is relating the problem to something you’ve seen before.

It’s an interesting fact about language models that the more training examples you feed them, the smarter they are as measured by various benchmarks. People call this a “scaling law,” and claim that it holds true over many orders of magnitude. The haters and skeptics, of which I have at times been one, claim that this is just because as the training data set grows, the odds that it contains something very similar to the question you’re asking also grow. A very good skill at pattern recognition (I think we all agree that neural nets have that), plus a near-infinite memory, can probably get you exceptionally far at pretending to be intelligent. Maybe that’s all that’s going on?

Ah, but we who have been Pólya-pilled know that that training data contains something else as well. It’s the thing that Aristotle and the other ancients were missing. Reams and reams of examples, not of solutions to particular problems, but of exceptional problem-solving itself. Vast hordes of “moves,” a shimmering toolbox filled with high-quality heuristics. All that an agent needs to vastly boost its externally-measured intelligence in furtherance of its goals. Pattern recognition plus a good memory might help you “cheat” on a particular problem, but when conducted at the meta level it is the core of Pólya’s entire methodology: learning to recognize not solutions you’ve already seen, but approaches you’ve already seen.

I don’t know whether training on the distilled, high-quality reasoning behavior of millions of the brightest human beings will “really” make an AI smart. After all, I opened the essay by saying that I don’t know if it will “really” make you or me smart. What does it feel like to be a genius? To be Richard Feynman or Terrence Tao? To have the ineffable fire from the gods? I don’t know, but I’m also not sure it matters. Intelligence is the ability of an agent to achieve its goals. Let’s hope that theirs are in line with ours.

As regular readers know, this is the post where we navel-gaze about Our Process and crow about our stats, but although we more than doubled our subscribers this year there’s really only one thing that matters: that little white “bestseller” checkmark next to our names. Yes, more than a hundred people decided they like what we do enough to give us money (despite the fact that all our posts are unlocked and we never ask for it), which makes me feel much less guilty about things like paying for that library book. See what sort of irresponsible profligacy you’re enabling, paid subscribers?

This year was more productive than last: I wrote seven reviews (nine if you count the joint ones) but read only 82 books. (Honesty compels me to admit than seven of those were WH40K novels.) I’m rapidly running out of time to pump up those numbers! But frankly, people sometimes ask when we have time to do all this reading and writing, and my answer is always “naptime.” I get about 90 minutes per weekday to do all the things that cannot be done in the presence of a toddler with zero chill, so you can always tell if I’m working on a book review by the number of shirts waiting to be ironed and the intricacy of our dinners. Sorry kids, we’re having meatloaf and roast broccoli again, because Mommy spent naptime riffing on imaginative aesthetic identification. Please empty the dishwasher, too.

But goodness, this is fun. I mean, the reading is fun, and the writing is fun, but the really fun part is the thinking that gets you from one to the other, and for me that’s inextricably linked to writing. Putting my ideas on the page is the last part of thinking them in the first place. I don’t always know where I’m going until I get there, and then I look back at what I’ve written and go “ohhh, so that’s what I took away from that book.” Sometimes I even go looking for a book on a particular topic I know I have ideas about, because I’d like to know what those ideas are. (This is one reason to write book reviews rather than original essays: it’s much easier to bounce off someone else than it is to start going in the first place!)

And it’s extra fun to write with you. Our joint review of Class was a blast! So I promise, this is the year: I will really really read that book on esoteric writing so we can review it together.

John: Speaking of pumping up numbers, in an effort to secure a $375 billion valuation for our Substack I have begun a project to convert it to 100% AI slop. Investors initially loved my “slopstack” pitch, but turned sour when they discovered that we weren’t losing money fast enough. I scrambled to fix this by vibecoding an “agent” (i.e. a for-loop) that generates each essay 1,000 times and dispatches them to another AI trained to identify Scissor Statements, then use those as superhumanly-annoying synthetic tokens for the original model in a closed-loop human AI centipede of slop. Alas, a16z passed on the slopstack and the whole thing blew up, but not before Nvidia loaned me a billion dollars to buy more Nvidia GPUs. So that’s why the attic’s been warm lately, honey.

Anyway, while I was in the process of doing this, I asked ChatGPT to analyze our writing. Do you want to know the real reason that people like AI chatbots? It actually isn’t their “sycophantic” nature, it’s just that people love talking about themselves, and AI is willing to talk to you about yourself endlessly (see also: therapy). Even better, AI isn’t a person, it’s like an oracle or a god. A disembodied voice that confirms what you’ve always known: you are the most fascinating topic in the universe. No wonder those guys are printing money...err...I mean, no wonder they’re getting such incredible usage numbers.

Well, it got a lot of things wrong, but it did correctly diagnose that you are Bert and I am Ernie, you are autistic and I am schizo:

I also asked it several different ways to try to doxx us, and got some fun answers:

But most importantly:

Guilty as charged!

Jane: Oh great, that means I’ve — I mean, we’ve — managed to convince ChatGPT that this Substack is written by two distinct individuals rather than a single overeducated, underemployed, basement-dwelling wannabe-Pessoa. Incredible that despite the obvious underlying similarities in worldview and the mysteriously consistent punctuation across the “John” and “Jane” reviews, people still buy the whole “this is a married couple” schtick! Like anyone actually believes someone’s wife has time to go through his writing and rectify semicolon abuse. Please.

The next step is obviously to expand the Substack to include the adorably precocious Psmithlings. Luckily it’s never been clarified how old the children are — the naive reader might have interpreted that as opsec, but in retrospect it was clearly just leaving room to develop the voice of whichever heteronym seemed most entertaining. Of course, this has to be done with care: these notional offspring need to be reading books of actual interest to the subscribers (none of that Wings of Fire or Keeper of the Lost Cities nonsense) and it needs to be plausible that “their” writing is good enough to feature it prominently…

But all this ignores the obvious question: why would a person go the trouble of constructing an elaborate fiction about two authors, married couple, etc. etc.? It can’t be just the intellectual challenge of seeing if you can get away with it, because after a year or two of success that would get pretty boring. No, there has to be something more behind it, and we’ve already seen the key: that yearly, out-of-the-blue reference to Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. I mean, sure, maybe there really is a woman somewhere in American suburbia who listened to half the book on Audible while hanging Christmas decorations, realized she needed to read it on paper to take notes, and then never went back to it, but…really? The Psmiths subscribers are smarter than that. What can this line be but a signal to the reader that there’s something hidden here?

And what about the repeated references to the dichotomies between the two personas? All this metacommentary might just be navel-gazing…or it might be pointing somewhere. After all, the “Jane” persona focuses on the cozy and human-scale while “John” writes about leadership and greatness, but they’re both obsessed with tensions and tradeoffs and what we lose when we gain. The unknown Psmiths author is clearly personifying his own contradictory thoughts to illustrate both sides of an incommensurable conflict without ever collapsing the waveform. It’s the alchemical marriage of reason and emotion, theory and praxis, abstract and concrete, thumos and eros, fictionalized as a literal marriage. Look, the author practically gives it away in this very post with that link in the “Jane” voice, above:

If we’re talking about aesthetic attraction and imaginative identification, you’re allowed to contradict yourself. Two visions can be logically incompatible and yet both contain true and beautiful things.

But for real, I’m going to finish that book.

Other books I’m planning to read in 2026:

• After Virtue (this is one of those books, like Seeing like a State, that everyone I know has read so I never actually bothered; I even read Jane Austen for the first time specifically so I would know what he was talking about and then I had a baby instead)

• The Household and the War for the Cosmos

• Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down

• The Transformation of Virginia, 1750-1790 (purchased after reading and reviewing American Nations and then never read because again, baby)

• Always With Honor

• The Beginnings of Rome

How about you?

John: Ooh, yes, books I am looking forward to reading soon:

• Xenophon’s Anabasis

• Inge Clenndinen’s book on the Aztecs

• That book on Russian cosmism I have lying around somewhere [??? - Jane]

• Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur

• Skarbek’s book on prison gangs

• Some of the roughly 7,000 books on my Amazon wishlist

Looking back on the past year, what strikes me actually is how few of the books I read are ones I’d planned to read. Instead I did the thing where I would read something great and that would trigger a fountain of ideas for what else to go seek out, or a scavenger hunt through the footnotes for tempting prospects. That’s how I found Manucci, I think, buried in the footnotes of one of William Dalrymple’s travelogues. So I said to myself “oh what the heck,” and as a result my life was changed forever. But this process leads to a combinatorial explosion because, for instance, I now need to go track down and read the book by Manucci’s arch-rival Francois Bernier, and maybe that will lead to something else, or two more things... This is why reading lists only ever get longer, never shorter.

The other approach that has really worked for me lately is reading something I like and then chasing down all the more obscure stuff by the same person. For instance the same guy who wrote The Golden Peaches of Samarkand has a whole book on Tang conceptions of the South and you better believe I’m excited for it. Or I’ve read almost everything ever written by James C. Scott, but I now have one of the very deepest cuts (actually an adaptation of his dissertation I think) in my sights. For some reason, this approach is more consistent with non-fiction than with fiction. Why is it that stories sometimes come out as pure lightning in a bottle that the author can never recapture *cough* Lies of Locke Lamora *cough*, but if a non-fiction work is really good, the other stuff by that author is also usually really good?

The other thing I’m really excited for is actually an idea suggested by one of our readers. I’ve complained a few times now about how my aging and decaying brain is making it harder for me to learn more math and physics, and the brilliant suggestion somebody gave me was to hire a tutor! Yes, the academic job market really is that bad. I’m going to go and look for a post-doc at a nearby research university, and pay them to sit and explain algebraic geometry to me like the retard I am. I hear that GPT-5 is actually surprisingly good for math, and that would be a whole lot cheaper, but one thing an AI can never recapture is the disappointed expression a human tutor gives you when you haven’t done the homework. So hopefully reviews of math textbooks will be back on the menu in 2026, baby!

Jane: It’s weird, now that we have 90+ reviews under our belts (also, holy crap, we have 90+ reviews under our belts) I feel like there’s an identifiable Psmithism — some kind of approach or lens or angle, if not a fully-fledged philosophy — that unites them all. Certainly there’s a tone, and an emphasis on storytelling, and they’re long (published book reviews are typically, what, 750 words? by that point we’ve uuuuuuusually finish clearing our throats), but I think there’s something deeper. When a longtime (and then-anonymous) subscriber asked if we wanted to see his take on a book about the Hellenistic era, we both realized it was obviously a Psmith-y review. But I still can’t put my finger on quite what that means. So I burned hundreds of dollars worth of compute that would better have been spent vibe-coding insecure gossip apps (or your bank’s new backend!) getting Claude to tell me.

So in conclusion, the Psmiths are a land of contrasts with the helpful assistance of LLM psychosis, I have now actually memed myself into believing the point I made in my Straussian joke: our two-voice structure really does mimic something important about the content of what we’re saying. Is it Hegelian dialectic? Is it nudging ourselves towards the Aristotelian mean? Have I gone completely off the rails? And most importantly, am I now going to start referring to our children as “the tensions”? (Yes.)

You wrote your “Briefly Noted” post earlier this year, but here are a couple more books I read and liked but didn’t have a full review worth of things to say about:

• Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History: This is the intellectual memoir of Peter Brown, which I mostly enjoyed for the extended explanations of what pre-Internet 20th century academia — and especially Oxbridge — was like. As an American who’s read a lot by and about the English, I thought I had a fairly decent grasp of tutors, lectures, exams, etc., but it turned out to be a classic case of not knowing what I didn’t know. Later in the year I read a group biography of the Inklings, and when I hit the section where Lewis and Tolkien went to war to change the Oxford English syllabus I knew exactly what it meant in a way I definitely wouldn’t have without Brown.

• Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires: Given my interests in history, the constraints imposed by material reality, how people actually lived, etc. etc. etc., the most off-brand thing about me is that I just don’t care about horses. I mean, I think they’re interesting, but it’s intellectual. I am not actually moved by the idea of horses, and still less by the actual living breathing smelly animals. Sorry. However, in an attempt to correct this I read three books about horses this year, and this was the best of them. (The other two were Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, which I found depressingly noncommittal about anything interesting, and The Horse: A Galloping History of Humanity, which drove me completely insane because the author used a different verb each time he quoted someone. In the eight pages of the introduction, readable in the Amazon preview, people explain, state, declare, lament, assert, and emphasize. I yawn.) This one, though, I bought a copy to keep on our shelves in case a kid wants to read it. Unfortunately I still don’t really care about horses.

• Cahokia Jazz: Every decade or so, a really good writer does alt-history. This was it for the 2020s. (Sorry, Harry.) Spufford clearly took to heart my argument that murder mysteries are the best way to explore your invented world, and he does it very well. By the way, this also works for other genres of speculative fiction, though noir proper is hard to pull off with fantasy — the default early modern Europe-inspired fantasy setting just doesn’t have enough vast impersonal wheels for the lives of little people to be crushed between.

• The Devils: Okay, yes, fine, grimdark is cringe, but I admit it: I like Joe Abercrombie. Set in a magical very-thinly-disguised high medieval Europe, with the role of the Muslims played by elves who want to eat everyone (how on Earth did he get away with that?!), this was funny, energetic, and extremely well-paced. Usually saying “it felt like reading about someone’s RPG” is a knock on a fantasy novel, but here it’s a compliment: the iconic ensemble cast works incredibly well and scratches the same itch a compelling adventuring party can. I’m still torn between telling my husband to read it and forbidding it so I can steal borrow freely if we ever have the time to play D&D again.

• The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto: I would have to mention this regardless of content simply because both Psmiths are quoted, in print!, but I did in fact like it. The tl;dr version of the book’s argument: none of us will spend our whole lives as independent, autonomous agents, since we all begin as babies and hopefully end up elderly enough to be frail. However, women spend much less of their lives being basically autonomous than men do (see above re: babies), so a society that hold that as the standard of what it means to be human inevitably denigrates women (as well as babies, the elderly, the infirm, and so on). This is more or less what I described here as the social model of disability applied to feminism, and while I don’t actually disagree with the thrust of the book I know I draw very different conclusions from it than Sargeant does. I also think she reduces what’s special about men to their ability to protect the weak, and so ignores a very particular kind of work aimed at world-bestriding greatness that’s just never going to be available to anyone who’s presently dependent (even with dignity) — no matter how much maternity leave you offer.

Want to close us out?

John: I don’t know whether this is evidence for or against your theory that we’re actually just two different voices inside the head of one schizophrenic, but it’s interesting how just this once we’ve switched roles. Now you’re the one offering grand, sweeping theories on scant evidence (aided, no doubt, by your LLM-psychosis), whereas I’m the one plodding through the concept mines in 4/4 time. So let me offer an alternative theory for what this Substack is about: we read books, and then we write about them and about what they make us think about. That’s it. The “themes” are wholly accidental, and emerge naturally from the fact that you and I are people (or are we?) and people have intellectual interests and also soapboxes that they can’t help climbing up onto again and again.

I resolved in our 2024 end of year post to get back to reviewing weird stuff, and look I tried this year, I really did! I kicked things off with a book about weightlifting, only reviewed two books about China, and spent 10,000+ words on an out-of-print 17th century travelogue. And yet… I still couldn’t avoid my hobbyhorses. Part of the problem is that your hobbyhorses are your hobbyhorses for a reason: you like them, and you want to ride them. But I’ve long thought that audience feedback was actually the bulk of the issue, and this is just one way that it ruins most writers. You get popular for doing your schtick, and the people now following you liked it and want you to do it again, so there’s constant gentle pressure to do it more and more, and suddenly you never say anything interesting again. I could name a dozen well-known writers off the top of my head whom this has happened to, but I won’t because there’s a good chance they’d see it, and I really don’t want to make them feel bad. This is so natural, so insidious, so difficult to avoid in the age of the internet, I’m really not judging or looking down on them in the slightest.

I’ve been paranoid about this dynamic ever since this place unexpectedly began getting popular, and I tried instituting protective countermeasures. One of them was not doing the parasocial online writer thing. I try to avoid engaging with our readers in any remotely interactive way. It’s not because I don’t like you guys, I like some of you very much, but I know that talking to you is the first step down a path that leads to becoming a self-parody. This is also why I barely read the comments, and even more rarely reply to them. Some of your comments are very interesting, but I am a fallible human and cannot cultivate the level of apathy required to avoid having them oh-so-gently nudge me into always writing the same thing… This determination to keep writing about what I like rather than what you like was the genesis of my reviews of math textbooks, but it turns out you weirdos actually like those too. Fortunately, this year I stumbled upon a new tactic: writing about math apparently isn’t spiky enough, but writing about my religious beliefs produces the disapproval/lack of interest that I personally require to avoid audience capture. So I will see if I can read and review some classic spiritual and theological works next year.

Anyway, I asked Claude what it thought of all this and it told me I was absolutely right. So there. I was so blown away by the brilliance of its analysis that I then had it read through our archives and point out what our best work was. It produced a very insightful report, including a bunch of recommendations on how to subtly change our authorial tone to be more inclusive of AIs and other disembodied intelligences. I’m going to spend the next few weeks delving ⛏️ into those tips 📝 and making some changes ✨ that it told me would make the models 🤴 think more highly 📈 of us in the future. I need some time to implement 😈 those suggestions, but we’ll be back after Christmas 🎄 (Julian Calendar) ⏪ see you then!

Sometime in the 1970s, modernity finally came for the Amish. It didn’t arrive in cars, which they still don’t drive, or through the schools, which they still leave after 8th grade, or even over the telephone. Instead, it came the same way it’s come for everyone else since the Industrial Revolution: through grinding, inexorable economic logic. In this case, the proximate culprit was high Amish birthrates. If your population roughly doubles every generation, and you think it’s important to stay put and live near people like you, land gets scarce fast. (Meanwhile, your neighbors who haven’t built their lives around unmechanized agriculture are urbanizing and industrializing, which drives prices up still farther.) Soon Amish parents found they couldn’t afford to do what their parents had done and establish their children on farms of their own. It seemed like an existential threat: in a 1980 article in Rural Sociology, Amish scholar1 John Hostetler warned that those who “cannot obtain a farm may find it hard to remain Amish.”

But he was wrong. Yes, a few of the most conservative Amish did pick up stakes and move to cheaper areas so they could keep farming, abandoning the “living around mostly other Amish” part of their lifestyle rather than the agriculture. In the densest parts of “Amish Country,” however — in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and particularly in the settlement which centers on Holmes County, Ohio — an enormous number of Amish found other ways of making a living. Over the last few decades they’ve gone to work at local shops and factories, doing everything from welding and powder-coating to making garage doors and harnesses, or started their own businesses selling handmade goods like quilts, fences, baskets, and especially furniture. If you’ve ever gone looking for affordable solid-wood furniture, you’ve certainly found websites selling Amish-crafted computer desks and media centers, and those e-commerce platforms may well have been installed and maintained by the Amish carpenter himself (or his wife or one of his children). And they’ve stayed Amish! Nearly ninety percent of Amish children eventually join the church,2 and a 2002 study suggested that retention rates may actually be higher in non-farming families than among those who maintained their traditional lifestyle.

All of which seems counterintuitive to us “English” (the Amish term for all non-Amish, regardless of actual ethnic origin). Aside from people who grew up near Amish country, we generally have a vague sense of the Amish as a people frozen in time, with picturesque bonnets and straw hats and horse-drawn buggies and communal barn-raisings, whose most notable cultural feature is their total aversion to modern technology. An Amish person riding in a car, or using a CNC machine, or making a website, strikes many English as hypocritical: don’t the Amish think those things are bad? Don’t they think we shouldn’t use them, either? (And sometimes, around the edges, for the more Prophet-minded of us: gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t?)

But like everything it’s more complicated than that, and so this book, a guided tour from a sociologist and an anthropologist at the College of Wooster (just a short drive north of the Holmes County Settlement), gives a fascinating look at how different groups of Amish have adapted to these new economic conditions — and how it’s turning out for them.

The Amish have their historical roots in the Swiss Anabaptists, a Radical Reformation movement who believed in adult baptism, pacifism, and total separation of church and state. (Unsurprisingly, the Anabaptists were bloodily persecuted by both Catholic and Protestant rulers for their refusal to accept conscription, swear oaths, or pay taxes.) And then in 1693 the Anabaptists had a schism, as Protestant sects are wont to do, over the question of how to deal with excommunicated members: one side of the argument, led by Jakob Ammann, advocated not just for exclusion from communion but for total shunning in everyday life. When he lost, he and his followers split off, and their branch was known after him as the Amish. Many of these early Amish joined the broader wave of German immigration to the United States, with five hundred settling in Pennsylvania in the 1700s and a larger group arriving in the early 1800s. Those who remained in Europe were eventually absorbed into other Anabaptist and Protestant denominations, but on the American frontier the Amish maintained their cultural identity: alone among the German immigrant groups, they still speak Pennsilfaanisch-Deitsch, or “Pennsylvania Dutch,” a dialect derived from Palatine German. (They mostly also speak English, and their church services are conducted in standard High German.)

The basic organizational unit of Amish society — after the extended family, which is vital and often includes three generations under one roof — is the “church district,” a community of twenty-five to forty families who live within a short buggy-ride of one another. The leaders of the district are chosen by lot from among the married men, and each is governed by an Ordnung, an unwritten set of rules laying down expectations for behavior. It’s this Ordnung that contains the restrictions on technology and lifestyle that we typically associate with the Amish, covering everything from what color you can paint your barn (one group insists on red because white would be too worldly) to whether you can use mechanical milking machines. The church revisits their Ordnung every six months or so to see if it needs updating — one group had originally approved walkie-talkies for communication while hunting, but then discovered boys were using them to flirt with girls and decided to ban them. Church districts with similar Ordnungs are “in fellowship,” and a cluster of districts in full fellowship with one another are an “affiliation.” (A “settlement,” like the Holmes County Settlement, is a cluster of geographically contiguous districts regardless of affiliation.)

Importantly, few of these restrictions are based on the idea that the banned technology or behavior is wrong in and of itself: for instance, every Ordnung forbids a baptized Amish adult to own a car, but boys from some Amish families have cars for a while in their teens and all but the most conservative affiliations will pay someone else to drive them if they need to go farther than their buggy can take them. Or to put it another way, nobody thinks the English are bad people for driving cars — they just think we’re not Amish.

So if an Ordnung mostly isn’t meant to keep you from doing intrinsically evil things, like murder and adultery and blasphemy, what is it for? How do you decide what to allow? What are you optimizing for when you design it?

Two things, mainly, though they’re not neatly separated. The first and most important role of the Ordnung is engendering the virtue the Amish call Gelassenheit. There’s not a perfect English translation for the German,3 but Hurst and McConnell describe it as a spirit of “selflessness, humility, or meekness,” a subordination of self to community. Amish scholar4 Donald Kraybill wrote that Gelassenheit is meant to develop a “yielded self” that “stands in contrast to the bold, aggressive individualism of modern [English] culture.” Thinking too highly of yourself, or trying to outdo others, are failures of Gelassenheit, but they’re hard to avoid when you have to market your personal #brand or compete in the marketplace. Unmechanized agriculture, on the other hand, was very good at nurturing Gelassenheit: a farmer is necessarily aware of his dependence on natural forces beyond his control, which keeps him humble. Nowadays the Amish worry that shifts way from their traditional lifestyle will “foster the notion that the worker controls his or her work and life,” which might “breed an attitude of self-sufficiency, even arrogance” that is antithetical to their values.

The concern for Gelassenheit shows up particularly in Amish approaches to childrearing. Where English society values self-expression, intellectual curiosity, and individual accomplishment, Amish parents rank obedience and self-control as the most desirable qualities in children. (More than half of the parents the authors surveyed put “being interested in how and why things happen” at the bottom of their list.) They also report that teachers at Amish schools tend to be “preoccupied (to our eyes) with minor aspects of misbehavior that signaled nonparticipation in the group or lack of obedience to authority.” All of this carries through into the workplace, too: the Amish generally think white collar workers are “out to make the big bucks” and that their jobs are be difficult or impossible to undertake with a “meek spirit.” So if you can’t farm (and increasingly you can’t), the Amish think your work should be something near home that uses your hands, allows your family to participate, and contributes directly to your community. No arguments here that building dashboards to give executives deeper insight into critical business functions leads to the more efficient allocation of global capital and lifts all boats; they want you to make food or furniture or something.

The Ordnung’s second goal is to separate believers from the broader world. This is partly a legacy of the Anabaptist experience of persecution, partly a response to Biblical passages like Romans 12:2’s warning not to “be conformed to this world,” and partly a protective measure against a world that isn’t interested in Gelassenheit, but the dualism between Amish and “English” is a vital part of what it means to be Amish. Of course, it’s impossible to clearly differentiate between things that promote a particular mindset/virtue and things that mark you out as different: the distinctive Amish “plain dress,” for instance, both limits opportunities for vanity and marks out the wearer as, well, kind of a weirdo. (There’s sometimes also a sub-goal of separation from other Amish affiliations — one Amish man is quoted saying, “The only reason the Old Order doesn’t have rubber wheels [on their buggies] is because the New Order did it first.”)

The Holmes County Settlement contains four main affiliations (with a few smaller ones splintering off at the edges).5 In 2009, about two thirds of the 221 church districts were Old Order, what you might consider mainstream or “vanilla” Amish. (Smaller settlements tend to be even more heavily Old Order, because it’s hard to perpetuate your schismatic group without critical mass.) The Old Order Ordnung is surprisingly lenient in some areas, though: their farmers use tractors to plow, their dairymen use milking machines and mechanized coolers, and Old Order businessmen run electric tools off diesel generators in their workshops and factories. “I have 15 Old Order customers,” a lumberman told the authors, “and I can call every one of them by cell phone.”

The Amish use the terms “low” or “high” to rank affiliations by their worldliness, with “the world” at the metaphorical top, and one step down the ladder from the Old Order are the Andy Weavers. Their split from the Old Order, back in the 1950s, was over a disagreement about an Amish man who stopped going to church and bought a pickup truck: the traditional consequence would have been complete social ostracism from Amish society, but a good half of his district argued that exclusion from communion was sufficient. Those who disagreed with this lax interpretation of shunning followed a young church leader named Andy Weaver into schism and their own affiliation, and in 2009 there they had about thirty church districts in Holmes County. Until the 1980s the main difference between them and the Old Order was their hard line on shunning, but more recently they’ve imposed more restrictions on technology — or, in some cases, haven’t loosened restrictions the way the Old Order has: Andy Weaver dairy farmers got out of the business entirely when it became impossible to compete without milking machines, and they’ve banned parents from allowing their unbaptized children to own cars while living at home. (Some Old Order families, by contrast, do most of their travel in the car of whichever teenage son is currently old enough to drive but not old enough to join the church, only breaking out the horse and buggy to go to church on Sunday.) Still, although the technological differences loom largest to the English, the Amish consider the approach to shunning a much more important and fundamental disagreement: the Holmes County Andy Weavers are still in fellowship with the Old Order of Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, who may be technologically progressive but who are still stricter shunners than the Old Order in Ohio.

The very “lowest” Amish affiliation is the Swartzentrubers, who had nineteen Holmes County Settlement church districts in 2009.6 Unlike the other affiliations, who mostly chose to stop farming so they could stay put, the Swartzentrubers tend to move in order to keep their lifestyle, so they now have at least sixty-five church districts spread over twelve states and Ontario. (They’re hard to count, though, because they refuse to participate in any of the Amish directories.) Though they also originated in frustration with Old Order laxity on shunning (this time in 1918, and a rather less lax laxity), today they’re most notable for their stubborn rejection of virtually all modern conveniences. They refuse to use “fast time,” remove the indoor plumbing from any house they buy (everyone else just drywalls over the electrical outlets to maintain resale value), won’t put linoleum on their floors, and accept rides in other people’s cars only in the direst emergency. They even refuse to put reflective orange “Slow Moving Vehicle” triangles on the backs of their simple, windowless buggies, which has led to more than one fatal accident when trotting along the highway at night.

The final major affiliation is the New Order, which — as you can probably guess from the name — is one step “up” from the Old Order. They do, of course, have practical differences from the Old Order (their buggies tend to be a little flashier, their men groom their beards more neatly, they sometimes have telephones in their homes but they won’t own cell phones) but again, the real difference is one of religious practice. Unlike the more conservative affiliations, however, the New Order split with the Old over the question of the believer’s personal relationship with God. Where the lower Amish emphasize “submission to the corporate community of believers,” the New Order take an approach more reminiscent of evangelical Protestantism. Their religious practice, full of Bible studies and personal testimony of salvation, is foreign to the rest of the Amish: “You couldn’t get the average Old Order man out on the street to give you a strong faith story,” one Old Order man explains.

But the most dramatic difference between the New Order and everyone else is their approach to their young people. So far I’ve described something that sounds like a conservative/progressive spectrum, from the lowest affiliations’ highly restrictive rules about technology and intense shunning practices to the highest affiliations’ more permissive Ordnungs. And that’s not entirely wrong, but “conservative” doesn’t always mean what you’d assume. The more conservative the affiliation, for instance, the more likely the teenagers are to smoke, drink, listen to music, and even engage in the traditional practice of bed courtship or “bundling”:

In bundling the youth retire to the girl’s bedroom, where they lie on the bed—the girl in a special, more colorful “night dress” and the boy clothed, but sometimes with his shirt off—until just before the family awakes. An ex-Swartzentruber woman describes the scene: “After the parents are in bed, the guy shows up, and he sneaks in. Even though they know he’s there, facing them is supposed to be embarrassing—you know, like when you first date, you’re kind of shy meeting the parents the first time—so somehow you’re supposed to do this in secret.” Sometimes the couples will be joined by friends and will eat snacks and talk until the boys “escape” just before dawn. Hugging and kissing sometimes occur, but sexual involvement is supposed to be off-limits.

The New Order, with their emphasis on personal rather than corporate holiness, rejects all of this, and expects even their unbaptized young people to behave in accordance with the Ordnung. They also tend to homeschool their children if they can’t find a private Amish school they like, arguing that this allows for what the authors describe as “a more self-conscious articulation and deeper understanding of the values on which Amish community rests.” (The other affiliations regard this with great suspicion, considering homeschoolers arrogant “know-it-alls” who are “a little extreme on family” and disregard the lived experience of community; if they don’t choose a parochial Amish school, other Amish will send their children to public schools as an exercise in Gelassenheit.) “Conservatism,” when it comes to Amish affiliations, has more to do with continuing to do things the way the Amish have always done them than it does with anything the English world would recognize as “right-wing” — where else would you talk about how your neighbor is more conservative, so he sends his kids to public school and lets his teenager schlep beer to the kegger in his hot-rod?7

But the real question is, does the New Order approach work? In one sense yes: everyone agrees that most New Order teens don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs, and thanks to the emphasis on “clean” courtship their rate of premarital sex (as measured by the elapsed time between a couple’s marriage and the birth of their first child) is only a third of the Old Order’s. But in another sense, we might consider an Amish affiliation’s “success” to be the rate at which their young people choose to be baptized and join the church, and here the New Order struggles. In 2005, a whopping 97% of twentysomethings from Andy Weaver families had joined the church, trailed by 86% for the Old Order and a mere 60% for the New. (Since the Swartzentrubers don’t participate in the Amish directory their numbers had to be estimated by insiders, but it was probably around 90%.)

The lower affiliations attribute their high retention numbers to their children’s period of rumspringa, or running around: a few years of driving, drinking, and dancing to the radio — or even flying off for a snowboarding vacation, depending on how wealthy and accommodating the parents are — lets them get it “out of their system” before they settle down. Otherwise, they argue, their children might be too busy wondering what they’re missing to be satisfied with the Amish lifestyle. Of course, these worldly entertainments are almost always pursued in the company of other Amish youths on rumspringa, with the widespread general understanding that most if not all of them will eventually “put the car away” and be baptized. The young people may not be subject to the full weight of the Ordnung’s restrictions on technology, but they are still living in a community-minded society of “yielded selves.” And perhaps that’s the real reason the New Order are less likely to stay: their approach to personal spirituality and family identity aren’t so different from non-Amish conservative Protestant homeschoolers. As Hurst and McConnell put it, “[New Order] young people who move up a step have only to acquire a car and electronics rather than a whole new mindset.”

As economic pressures pushed the Amish off their farms, they found themselves in the same situation as the rest of the modern world: the whole-day, whole-family enterprise of unmechanized agriculture gave way to the familiar dichotomies of wage labor and leisure, public work and private home. But those thick extended families and deeply-held values of Gelassenheit and communal identity, not yet eaten away by liquid modernity, gave them a push to seek out or create work that preserved the parts of farming that were particularly conducive to living an Amish life. Some of the most successful Amish enterprises, like furniture workshops and landscaping nurseries, involve both spouses (and the older children!) in various roles, and in Amish country even English employers tend to recognize that they need to give to their workers the flexibility to nip home if something needs to be done. Still, those who are less lucky or less high-agency (especially Amish wives now pushed into a housewife role and husbands separated from their formerly tight-knit families all day) have suffered from the new separation of their worlds. By and large, though, they’ve held onto the deep core of what it means to be Amish despite changing lifestyles — and since they mostly ban smartphones, this is the rare book about social and technological trends in 2010 that’s still applicable today.

I originally picked it up because I was interested in the ways our technological choices shape who we are and how we live, and I thought the Amish might be a good case study of how to pick and choose among them (or even opt out of some things entirely). As I read, though, I had the sinking realization that it doesn’t work that way. Consider, for example, the Andy Weavers, who have opted out of not just milking machines but tractors, portable generators, hydraulic power, balers, bicycles, power lawnmowers, garden tillers, freezers, and computers. Aside from a few who can make a living selling organic produce at a premium, they’ve almost all left the land to work in factories and shops. The Old Order, on the other hand, are much willing to use those when it makes economic sense, so they’re much more likely to still be farming. (Ironically, a harder line on technology means a less obviously traditional lifestyle.) And yet the Andy Weavers and the Old Order, while not in formal fellowship in Holmes County, are happy to socialize and share schools because they see themselves as having much more in common than either does with the Swartzentrubers (who have refused to compromise at all with the modern world) or the New Order (who embrace a more individualistic approach to their faith), even though from a technological and lifestyle perspective the Old Order and the New Order are much closer. The real issue isn’t what you choose to do, it’s why you choose to do it.

Sure, you can decide that using a dating app (or watching short form videos, or having ChatGPT do your homework) is bad, and you don’t want to do it any more. You can absolutely get rid of your phone (or your car), and you can refrain from giving one to your kids. But if you want to build a sustainable life without the thing you’re against, you need a strong understanding of what you’re for. It’s not enough to read The Anxious Generation and decide that Science (which you Fucking Love) says kids shouldn’t have phones — you also need to know what kids should do, and why. And then you need to find a bunch of other people who agree so your kids can all do it together. A social world built around eschewing a particular technology just won’t hang together unless you have a shared vision of the good thing you’re trying to preserve or create by not using it, and your own personal use or non-use becomes far more sustainable when it’s part of your community membership. My local mom list features regular posts by nice secular Haidt-pilled ladies looking for low- or zero-tech schools for their kids, but they always go away dejected and wondering why all the schools are Christian. Well, that’s why.

But maybe you don’t even need to share the “no” if you share enough of the “yes.” After all, the Amish who have succeeded at keeping what matters to them in a changing world — their children chief among them — have done it because they have a strong shared commitment to something both communal and profoundly countercultural. Even when they’ve employed wildly different means in pursuit of their shared telos, they’re still united in a fundamentally recognizable project of Gelassenheit and corporate spiritual submission. It’s not a project I envy — I obviously think “being interested in how and why things happen” is important, and I don’t particularly want my kids to have a “yielded self” (except when I tell them to do something) — but it’s an important reminder that people can pursue a joint why even if they disagree on the specifics of how. My friends may be more or less evenly split between people who want their kids to diagram sentences in cursive on blackboards (because dry-erase markers are spiritually empty) and people who want to send their kids to Alpha School (but only until the book from The Diamond Age becomes available), but we all share a conviction that education is soul-molding more than it is box-checking.

Is that enough? Well, it depends on what you’re trying to mold the soul into, because some practices are just not compatible with some teloses.8 Still, I’d rather be in a community with people who have made different prudential choices in pursuit of the same good I’m chasing than with people who don’t want their kids to use ChatGPT to do their homework…but only because of data center water consumption.

Your hosts have been occupied with their numerous and belligerent progeny, so please enjoy this guest review from Gabriel Rossman. Gabriel previously collaborated with John on a joint review about nightclubs, and now he is back to tell you about the origins of Wicca.

You may recall some disturbing events in 2020, but perhaps the most ominous of all was revealed in a viral Twitter thread that treated with deadly seriousness and a Vox-style explainer the horrifying fact that some witches had been so reckless as to hex the moon.

More mature witches were aghast at the recklessness of these baby witches who cursed the moon (as well as fairies and the sun) willy-nilly and thereby risked severe consequences. It turns out, though, that the idea of witches cursing the moon has an ancient pedigree, dating all the way back to Greco-Roman antiquity and the literary trope of Thessalian witches who could pull the moon out of the heavens and down to earth. These ancient texts were part of the inspiration for Gerald Gardner’s mid-20th century creation of the “drawing down the moon” ritual, but where sources from the classical world implied that a witch could actually pluck the moon from the sky, in Gardner’s version a coven summons the divine personification of the moon to possess a priestess. Moreover, his creation of Wicca also drew extensively from freemasonry, the western ceremonial magic tradition, Crowleyian magic, Gardner’s own ethnographic observations in Southeast Asia — and, most important of all, the theories of James Frazer and Margaret Murray.

One thing that we can be confident that Wicca does not draw upon, however, is a goddess religion that survived the introduction of first the Indo-European *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr in the Bronze Age, and then the Semitic Jesus Christ in late antiquity, before being mostly suppressed in the “burning times” of the early modern era.1 Neo-pagans are not the (great-great-great …) granddaughters of the witches you didn’t burn in the 16th and 17th centuries; rather, they are the granddaughters of upper class romantics whose religious innovations in the early to mid-20th century are best characterized as “creative synthesis.”

Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon tells the story of the precursors, invention, and development of Wicca. Much of that history can be encapsulated in the mythic genealogy of “Black Annis,” an occasional pagan deity. There was a real medieval anchoress named Agnes Scott who served the church near Leicester and is buried at Swithland Church. She was venerated locally as a Christian saint, but following the Protestant Reformation was reconceptualized as an ogress. Then the 20th century crank archaeologist T.C. Lethbridge interpreted Black Annis as pagan survivalism of the “crone” aspect of the great mother goddess and a corruption of the Celtic goddess Anu. Finally, some modern neo-pagan communities were inspired by Lethbridge’s work to adopt veneration of Black Annis into their liturgy. As Hutton notes, “The gentle and pious Agnes seems therefore to have been turned first into a local saint, then into a local demon, next into a Celtic goddess, and finally into a witch goddess; and all the while her bones have rested in apparent peace at Swithland.”

The changing reputation of Agnes/Annis/Anu reflects a few processes that are common throughout much of the intellectual roots of neo-paganism. You start with the idiosyncratic cruftiness of medieval Catholicism, then Protestants derogate the cult of the saints, feast days, etc. as idolatrous — indeed, practically pagan. Fast forward to 1900, give or take a few decades, and an intellectual with dubious expertise projects pagan survivalism onto historical or ethnographic data. And then finally neo-pagans use the folklorist’s imagined version of the past as inspiration for a “revived” myth and liturgy.

Although Hutton is a historian and does not use the term in the book, Triumph of the Moon is one of the best studies I have ever read of what sociologists of knowledge call performativity.2 In this usage, a scientific theory is performative if the theory did not necessarily describe reality when it was articulated, but has since shaped reality to work in ways predicted by the theory. That is, sometimes a theory can be wrong, but people believe it is true and act on that basis, so a performative theory causes itself to become true — just as Laius and Jocasta probably would have been just fine if they hadn’t gotten around to asking the oracle at Delphi, “So, what’s gonna happen with baby Oedipus?” A slightly weaker version of performativity comes when a theory describes pre-theoretical reality accurately, but in a noisy and approximate way, but then people who are aware of the theory actively conform to its predictions so the random noise goes down and a theory that had been only weakly true becomes strongly predictive. For instance, economics is pretty good at predicting the behavior of students in lab experiments, but it is especially good at predicting the behavior of econ majors, and the hero’s journey described some stories before Joseph Campbell wrote about it in 1949 but many more since his book provided a template (and especially since George Lucas credited the success of Star Wars to following Campbell!).

One of the main applications of performativity in sociology has been to explain the success of economics, a discipline that many sociologists talk about like Jan Brady kvetching “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.” A nice example is the Black-Scholes-Merton (BSM) equation in financial economics: in theory, BSM described how bond traders already priced options, but in practice traders adopted the equation and used it to guide their estimates of option value. The increase in cognitive tractability this provided allowed Wall Street to dramatically increase the size of the financial derivatives market. (Donald MacKenzie’s book on BSM is called “an engine, not a camera” since BSM powered the options market rather than just documenting it.)3 Similarly, Triumph of the Moon argues that the theory of pagan survivalism does not tell us how religion, folklore, folk medicine, etc. actually worked in Britain prior to the theory’s articulation, but rather that people who were familiar with pagan survivalism theory “revived” paganism along the model posited by the theory.

One of the performative theories is James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which argued that many myths involve a king or god whose death and rebirth represent winter and spring. Following the popularity of this book, a wave of folklorists rose and began to scan the English countryside for folk customs they could tuck into the Procrustean bed of the dying god archetype. Hutton notes that “unfettered by either history or sociology, the imaginations of folklorists could roam over the material more or less at will,”4 and relates several examples of folklorists imposing farcical readings on the data, such as a 1937 presidential address to the Folk-Lore Society that suggested “pancake-tossing had been a magical rite to make crops grow, that Shrove Tuesday football matches had begun as ritual struggles representing the forces of dark and light, and that Mother’s Day was a relic of the worship of the ancient Corn Mother.”

Perhaps most ridiculous came in 1932, when Violet Alford revived the Marshfield Mummers’ Play, but argued with the locals old enough to remember the play’s previous incarnation because she demanded that the village present the “authentic” version of the play — which is to say the fertility rite that someone steeped in Frazer expected to see. (As of this writing, the Wikipedia article on Marshfield mentions the play and Alford’s role in shaping it, but not the theory-driven nature of her demands and the article straightforwardly describes the play as a “fertility rite.”) Based on such examples, Hutton writes, “by the mid-twentieth century the bossy lady scholar, obsessed with pagan survivals, had become a minor stock character in English fiction.” However, over time, the locals came to accept the theory-driven model. So even if almost nobody in rural England circa 1930 would have told you their customs originated as fertility rites, today a fair number would, which reflects the performative influence of the theory itself.

Hutton notes that by the 1980s, folklorists had come to reject Frazer, but by this point he had entered popular culture. Even if elderly villagers in the 1930s scoffed at the idea that their customs were survivals of pagan fertility rites, by the 1960s and 1970s youth counter-culture embraced folk dancing, crafts, etc., and young rural Boomers often accepted what they learned from early 20th century books and at local folklore clubs about the origins of their practices. (There are other cases of an academic theory having its popular influence grow even as it is discredited within academia: for instance, Hillary Clinton promoted implicit association training as a solution to racial inequality during the 2016 election, a couple years after academic psychologists came to see implicit association tests as one of many casualties of the replication crisis.)

The other major theorist to shape Gardnerian practice was Margaret Murray. Although Hutton reviews Murray’s influences, she stands above them all as the scholar who most thoroughly and influentially articulated the theory now associated with her: not only that substantial aspects of European paganism survived the introduction of Christianity and centuries of inadequate catechism, but that the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries were a major effort to suppress this surviving pagan religion. Her 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe lays out the model, and Murray includes distinctly Frazerian elements about ritual kings who were sacrificed or self-sacrificed (though now with the added element that these corn kings were allegedly syncretized with the Horned God, an aspect that reflects Pan, as a motif popular with literary figures associated with Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn).

Her terser but equally influential version of the theory was in the entry for “Witchcraft” that she wrote for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which published it from 1929 to 1968.5 For generations, if you heard about Salem and wanted to get more information about witches, you would go to the library and find the Encyclopedia Britannica, (or if you were fancy, the installment plan-financed set on your own bookshelf), reach for the “W” volume, and a few paragraphs in go, “Wow, real witches, amazing!” Murray’s theory has thus been extremely influential. Whenever a Wiccan refers to their religion as “the Old Religion” or a feminist refers to “the Burning Times,” they are alluding to Murray’s theory.

Murray had a big influence on Gardner (and wrote the foreword to his short book Witchcraft Today). Gardner claimed he did not invent Wicca but had been inducted into a coven with centuries of historical continuity, and while this claim was implausible it reflects Murray’s emphasis on an underground witch cult. Among the places Gardner describes this liturgy was his novel, High Magic’s Aid, which he would circulate to potential initiates to gauge their reaction to the rituals described therein.6 “The witch religion portrayed [there],” Hutton writes, “is that of Margaret Murray’s God of the Witches, in virtually every detail, including its dedication to a single male deity of fertility, whose name is given here (again taken from Murray) as Janicot.” The practitioner implementing the ideas of the theorist is classic performativity: there was no pagan witch religion in early modern Europe, but Murray’s claim that there had been was among the most important raw material from which Gardner created an actual pagan witch religion in mid-20th century Britain.

Through all this, there is the question of how so many 20th century scholars got it so wrong — especially given that in the 19th century, both scholars and popular culture understood that witch hunts were moral panics and mass hysteria.7 Black-Scholes-Merton may not have been a perfect description of options prices, but it got much closer to the truth than the idea of pagan survivalism, which is almost completely wrong. Hutton repeatedly notes the importance of relevant expertise, and how often the proponents of pagan survivalism lacked it. Many folklorists influenced by Frazer were simply amateurs, but Murray had legitimate scholarly expertise: she was a respected Egyptologist. This background left her equipped to see a pagan society saturated with magic, but led to a false positive when applying that gaze to Christian medieval and early modern Europe. Nonetheless, in the mid-20th century, Murray’s ideas became accepted in British academia and were integrated into K-12 history textbooks.

However, Hutton notes that such acceptance was mostly from people who did not actively research the witch trials. In contrast, witch trials were an active research area in the United States, and so American scholars remained skeptical even as the Murray thesis became taken for granted in the UK. And while it might be tempting to congratulate America for our pragmatic empiricism, Hutton notes that there was also a subtext of Americans favoring the “persecution of innocents” model for witches because it had become a popular metaphor for the Second Red Scare, as in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible. American scholars of the 1950s and 1960s may have gotten the history of witch accusations in the 16th and 17th centuries right because they saw it as metaphor for the history of the 1930s through 1950s… which the Venona cables show they got wrong. I rate this 3.41 kiloAlanises.

If performativity is one word starting with a “p” and ending with a “y” that characterizes the themes of Triumph of the Moon, then the other is “polysemy.” This is when the same empirical premise can have different (even wildly different!) meanings for different audiences. In this case, the empirical premise is “at least a thousand years of official Christianity was insufficient to extinguish pre-Christian European paganism, which prominently included a goddess, and so it persisted among rural commoners until the early modern witch hunts and in vestigial form until the Victorian era.” Let us bracket the fact that this empirical premise is wrong and note that people who believed it had wildly different interpretations of its meaning in at least four different respects.

The most basic distinction is whether we ought to sneer at the atavism of pagan survivalism or see it as a laudable tradition worthy of revival. The progenitors of the theory of pagan survivalism, Edward Tylor and James Frazer, were both raised as low church Protestant “dissenters,” people who have traditionally been suspicious that there was something a bit idolatrous or even pagan about the smells and bells of “high church” Christianity.8 Tylor and Frazer both subsequently rejected Christianity, as a matter of private belief if not public practice, in favor of the explicitly rationalistic theologies of deism and atheism respectively. And both saw the civilized and rational as better than the rural and superstitious. Hutton summarizes: “If the general purpose of both Tylor and Frazer was to debunk spirituality and to elevate reason, they also shared a moral disgust for the practices of the ancient and tribal peoples whom they considered. Tylor’s Primitive Culture is littered with expressions such as ‘hideous’, ‘atrocious’, ‘pernicious’, ‘contemptible’, ‘savage’, and ‘barbaric.’” Similarly, Frazer wrote that “the peasant remains a pagan and a savage at heart” whose “ignorance and superstition” would be diminished by urbanization. Depending on the edition, either the explicit text or the 144pt boldface subtext of Frazer’s Golden Bough is that Jesus Christ was just one of many gods to embody the myth and ritual of a king representing the sky, associated with a maiden representing earth, whose sacrificial death and subsequent rebirth promised a good harvest to the kind of living fossil country bumpkins who go in for that sort of thing.

A generation later, we continue to see a rejection of Christianity but also a rejection of rationality with figures like Margaret Murray (who articulated the “early modern witches were actually pagans” thesis and herself cast curses on academic rivals), and Aleister Crowley (who was not only the most influential occultist of the 20th century but also a world-class dirtbag notwithstanding Hutton’s apologetic for him). The notion of not just magic but pagan religion as aspirational came with Gerald Gardner. Gardner was a romantic, in the sense both of exulting nature and being what the kids today call “sex positive,” and he synthesized various occult practice into Wicca to reflect this. Thus, in the roughly 50 years between the peaks of Frazer’s career and Gardner’s, the idea of persistent European paganism went from meaning “I, a rationalist, am better than you Christians, since you are only half a step removed from self-evidently barbaric paganism” to meaning “I, a pagan, am better than you Christians, since you are uptight about sex and don’t appreciate nature.”

This leads to the next issue of different understandings, which is sexuality. Gardner’s conception of Wicca was thoroughly, even primarily, oriented to heterosexuality and sexual complementarity. Gardner followed much of western occultism and semi-scholarly folklore research from the preceding decades in emphasizing a divine pair of a god and a goddess. He embodied this in liturgy, requiring mixed-sex worship with heterosexual initiation. (This mostly meant men initiated women, and vice versa, but could also mean that initiation, especially to the third degree, was via real or symbolic heterosexual intercourse.) Gardner claimed that by ancient tradition, initiation must be either heterosexual or parental, and that the witches who had initiated him told him, “The Templars broke this age-old rule and passed the power from man to man: this led to sin and in so doing it brought about their downfall.”9 Moreover, Gardner’s liturgy developed the “fivefold kiss,” which is gendered to honor the recipient’s penis or uterus as an organ of generation.

The Wicca liturgy seems not just to honor fertility as a theoretical matter but to have more than a little horniness. Several of the “working tools” have BDSM overtones, notably the cord and the scourge, as well as the “athame” (dagger), which was explicitly a phallic symbol, especially when dipped in wine. Likewise, several rites involved nudity.10 Then in the United States in the 1970s, Wicca became an explicitly feminist religion. While current practices demonstrate that feminist Wicca, like many other feminist ideologies and communities, can welcome men so long as relations are egalitarian, the earliest versions of feminist Wicca advocated radical separatist feminism. “Dianic” Wicca was influenced by Gardner, but entirely excluded men and pared the divine couple of horned god and earth maiden down to a henotheistic focus on a single goddess. Hutton describes the 1980 Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries, which argued that “[t]he essence of female spiritual liberation, according to [founder of this school Zsuzsanna] Budapest, was ‘to abide in an all-female energy environment, to read no male writers, to listen to no male voices, to pray to no male gods.’”

Another point of diverging meaning is whether neo-paganism is politically left or right wing. Many of us now think of Wicca as the omnicause protester class assembled at prayer, but this now important strain of Wicca was not seen for the religion’s first few decades. Instead, it was developed in the late 1970s by Starhawk (née Miriam Simos), a California hippy and environmentalist, who took Dianic Wicca, removed the misandry, and developed a highly influential version of Wicca that emphasizes fairies, feminism, and concern for the natural world and all who feel marginalized. The favorite sort of working for Starhawk’s Wicca seems to be things like protesting nuclear weapons. Hutton quotes Starhawk’s Dreaming in the Dark, where she writes that, “Magic had now become ‘the art of evoking power from-within and using it to transform ourselves, our community, our culture, using it to resist the destruction that those who wield power are bringing upon the world.’”

American progressive Wicca has now crossed back over the pond, but Hutton reports that Gardner was likely a conservative, and a writer who studied a British Wicca coven in the 1960s reported its members were all Tories. To get an image of British Wicca prior to American progressive influence, you could do worse than to watch the 1973 film The Wicker Man. In the film, the neo-pagan rural community emphasizes sexuality but is fundamentally conservative. The villagers defer to the local country gentleman, who openly admits he invented their pagan religion based on various influences. (The major deviation from actual Wicca practice is the part where they immolate a priggish but decent cop).11 The immediate precursors to Wicca in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn tended to also be on the right: Hutton describes Aleister Crowley as a high Tory, Dion Fortune as having similar sympathies, and W.B. Yeats as dabbling in fascism. He doesn’t discuss it in the book, but there is also now a resurgent far-right neo-paganism, variously called Wotansvolk, Asatrú, or Odinist and associated with white supremacist prison gangs. (As implied by the names, they practice reconstructed Norse religion rather than a syncretic/comparative reconstruction like Wicca.)

As you might guess from some of the more extreme variation in the political meaning of pagan survivalism and neo-paganism, another split is over attitudes towards Jews. Almost by definition, neo-paganism means rejecting ethical monotheism, which originated with Judaism, but there’s one group of neo-pagans that took it a lot further… As Hutton describes in The Witch, the Nazis were big fans of the Murray thesis that the early modern witch hunts suppressed pagan survivalism — or, as they conceived of it, the invasive oriental/Semitic religion of Christianity never completely took root until the early modern witch hunts suppressed the pagan aspect of the Germanic folk spirit. Himmler tasked SS officer Rudolf Levin with collecting the Hexenkartothek (“witch card index”) which attempted to catalog every witch execution and thereby prove that the early modern witch hunt was a sustained Semitic attack on Aryan women.12

Contrast this to the late 20th century, where you have the thoroughly progressive Starhawk conceptualizing the witch hunts not as Germanic vs. Semitic, or even pagan vs. monotheist, but as oppressed vs. oppressor — and since Jews were historically oppressed, this implies a philosemitic moral to the Burning Times myth. Hutton writes: “By Truth or Dare, Starhawk was explicitly equating the social experiences of Jews and witches, and whereas other Pagan writers had excoriated the whole Judaeo–Christian tradition as the source of the earth’s problems, she was now inclined to regard criticism of Judaism as anti-Semitism while retaining the animosity towards Christian Churches. She held Jewry up for admiration as an example of the capacity of the dispossessed to survive because of spiritual bonds, and her view of politics as a struggle carried on by small groups of right-thinking people amid hostile and ignorant masses drew at least partly upon this example.”

The polysemy of the alleged fact that European paganism survived the introduction of Christianity boils down to: whom do you see as your enemy in the present? If you resent Christianity as irrational theism, you’ll join Frazer in mocking Christianity as rhyming with pagan fertility rites. If you’re opposed to pre-sexual revolution prudery and soot-choked industrial towns, you embrace Gardner’s liturgy and mythology of heterosexually horny nature worship. If you hate men, you’ll practice Dianic Wicca, but if you hate The Man you’ll practice Starhawk’s variety. And if you see Christianity as a Semitic threat to der deutschen Volksgeist, you spend nine years collecting die Hexenkartothek.

During the previous round of US-China diplomatic tensions, a friend who works in public policy sent me a Signal message: “John, I don’t mean this in a racist way, but can you explain to me why there are so many Chinese people?”

Stated like that the question does sound a bit mysterious, but let’s see if we can reframe it. Prior to the demographic transition, each chunk of the earth’s surface had a certain biological carrying capacity. If we act like Vaclav Smil-style autistic alien robots, we can work out that number from first principles (assuming a given technology level). The region we call “China” is big, and much of it is arable, so it can support a lot of people.

Places like Europe and Africa can also support a lot of people, but the people in those places don’t have a homogeneous political and ethnic identity. So then the real question is why the region we know as China came under the control of a single nation and ethnos — and why, moreover, that nation’s occasional political fragmentation never led to an enduring cultural fragmentation (as happened after the fall of Rome).

All of the standard answers to this question seem to revolve around geography. I’m told the accepted one in academia is that most civilizations arose around one major river valley but China arose around two, which somehow changes everything for some reason. Jared Diamond’s theory is slightly less dumb: he argues that the wide-open geography of the North China Plain and the excellent transport afforded by inland waterways made it inevitable that one political entity would always dominate the region, while Europe’s natural barriers made it possible for small nations to maintain their independence.

Well I hate to pile on since Jane has just written a whole thing about how Jared Diamond is always wrong, but seriously bro? Have you ever been to Southern China? It’s a thousand tiny sheltered valleys and coastal refuges, so criss-crossed by mountain ranges that even today their spoken languages are mutually unintelligible. And yet, they’re Chinese. Or how about the Sichuan Basin? Look at Sichuan on a topographic map and it looks like Mordor, or if you prefer, like the Pannonian Basin in Central Europe, which got settled by the Magyars and developed into the ethnically distinct nation of Hungary. And yet, the residents of Sichuan are Chinese. And about those great rivers… Rivers are great for trade and transit of goods, but they’re also obstacles for armies. Sure enough China was divided into Northern and Southern kingdoms numerous times by the Yangtze River or by the Huai River, both of which served as massive defensible barriers. And yet, the division never lasted, the empire reunited, and both Northern and Southern Chinese, while they have real cultural differences, are Chinese.

Anyway, this is the question that Yuri Pines is here to answer, and he approaches it the way Bernard Yack would. That is to say, he ignores geography, ignores genetics, ignores climate, and ignores every other sort of material condition that could explain China’s unusual endurance as a cohesive political and ethnic entity. What if, he says, it’s actually entirely about ideas? Memes turn the wheel of history, so could it be memes that hold China together? To answer this question we need to go back, way back, to the time that all the Chinese memes come from. Yes, I am speaking of the Warring States Period.

The other reason to look at the Warring States Period for clues is that it was the first major occasion on which China violently flung itself to pieces. This is important — there’s a stereotype which says that China has existed in placid stagnation for the past few thousand years, but nothing could be further from the truth. Chinese history is just one apocalypse after another: foreign invasions, civil wars, ultraviolent peasant rebellions, or just the slow unraveling of the kingdom into chaos under a succession of weak rulers. So the incredible longevity of “China” as an entity has nothing to do with its stability, and everything to do with its ability to magically regenerate itself again and again. It’s what Nassim Taleb would call antifragile: every time the nation is torn to pieces by civil strife, it somehow knits itself back together, and every time the nation is conquered by barbarians, the barbarians get swallowed up and become Chinese. China has experienced at least six or seven events comparable in magnitude to the fall of Rome. The difference is that, unlike Rome, it always bounced back.

So the first of these occasions was the Warring States Period, which came on the tail-end of the Zhou Dynasty. The Zhou Dynasty was the earliest Chinese dynasty that’s well-attested historically,1 and it reigned for about 800 years, starting around the time of the Bronze Age Collapse in the Mediterranean, and ending around the time of the Punic Wars. What’s striking about the Zhou is how unlike later China it appears. There was no imperial bureaucracy, no Confucian literati class, no civil service exam. Instead, the Zhou emperors ruled over a patchwork of feudal nobles, European-style warrior-aristocrats bound by ties of kinship or marriage and constantly squabbling over titles and land. To a European, one of the most jarring things about later Chinese history is the lack of such nobles, but during the Zhou Dynasty they were there in force. In fact, over the course of those 800 years, the crown got weaker and weaker and the nobles got stronger and stronger, until the emperor was basically a figurehead and the most powerful dukes were effectively rival kings in their own right.

The warfare between these rival kingdoms got steadily more brutal, evolving from courtly chariot duels to massed infantry combat to wars of deliberate attrition and annihilation. Under this pressure, the duchies themselves evolved into highly centralized despotic nation-states. Actually, it all sounds a lot like late medieval Europe, only it happened two thousand years earlier. And also like late medieval Europe, this was a time of profound intellectual ferment. The warring states all craved legitimacy, and believed that they could get it by patronizing scholars and philosophers in the hopes that they would function as court propagandists.

But something went wrong. There were too many rival kingdoms, and it was too easy for a scholar to decamp from one to another if he was in demand. If a king didn’t treat his scholars with the proper deference, or if he established one particular school or philosophy as official orthodoxy and persecuted the others, then the offended intellectuals would all head over to his rival’s court instead. The meta-political system created a highly liquid market for sages, and horror of horrors: it was a sellers’ market. The result is known as the “諸子百家” or “the one hundred schools of thought.” You’ve definitely heard of the most famous of these schools: this is the scene in which Confucius made his mark, storming across the bombed-out landscape with his band of followers, hunting for rulers on whom he could try out his political and social theories.2 He even bumped into Laozi, the founder of Daoism, who was active at the same time and who preached a very different sort of philosophical reaction to an age of violence and dissolution.

But those are two schools, and I promised you a hundred. And indeed there were dozens and dozens more, some of them as weird as anything that ever slithered out of the internet. Actually, let me horrify every historian of Chinese thought with some internet-addled analogies. The early Confucians were the effective altruists of their time: earnest, utopian, full of energy, convinced the world was going to end if they didn’t do something. The Daoists were a bit like the post-rationalists: too cool for school, cultivating detachment, occupying a third position that transcended cynicism and idealism. But then you’ve got the Mohists: dogmatic utilitarian ascetic logicians who decided to master siege warfare to improve their bargaining power (don’t tell me the thought hasn’t crossed Yudkowsky’s mind). And let’s not omit the Agriculturalists (proto-communists who believed the world’s problems would be solved if people touched grass), who are not to be confused with the Naturalists (hippies dedicated to the study of woo). But perhaps the most fun are the Legalists, who are what you’d get if you turned the Lawful Evil D&D alignment into a fully worked-out philosophical system.3 No wait! I forgot about the Yangists. Yangism espoused the most extreme form of philosophical solipsism and egoism. It was said of their founder (who you’ll be shocked to learn was named Yang) that “if by plucking one hair he might benefit the whole world, he would not do it.”

And then, despite this astonishing intellectual diversity, the schools suddenly all hit on the same idea, which came to be represented by these words scratched out in the sand with a sword:

The words are: “天下” which literally translate as “under heaven” but mean something more like oikoumenē, the civilized, inhabited world. And the idea that they represented was: “The world is a chaotic, dismal, violent place in which innocents are constantly starved or massacred for no reason. The only solution is for one, single, universal empire to rule all.” Confucius was one of the first to hit on this idea, and for him it implied a glorious rebirth of the Zhou empire brought about by the restoration of its sacred rites and music. But soon his rivals the Daoists were writing that “just as the universe is ruled by the uniform and all-penetrating force of the Dao, so should society be unified under a single omnipotent leader.” And then the Mohists discovered that the perfect utilitarian outcome was actually for the most perfect and utilitarian logician/siege engineer to establish a centralized universal state. And so on for all the others. (Obviously the Legalists didn’t need any convincing.)

Pines argues that this remarkable intellectual convergence among such disparate philosophies happened because…it was incredibly obvious to everyone that the Warring States were destroying the entire known world. One of the most important disciples of Confucius, Mencius, coined the phrase “stability is in unity,” and it practically became the catchphrase of the entire intellectual elite. But notice how this instantly delegitimized all of the rival kingdoms! Or as Pines puts it: “Not a single individual is known ever to have endorsed a goal of a regional state’s independence… Denied ideological legitimacy, separate polities became intrinsically unsustainable in the long term. Having been associated with turmoil, bloodshed, and general disorder, these states were doomed intellectually long before they were destroyed militarily.”

It actually went further than that. Several of the competing philosophies justified their demands for a single empire on the grounds that mankind was once unified in the distant past, or (as with the Daoists) that the universe itself was an expression of unity. So, for the whole course of the rest of Chinese history, political fragmentation was treated as a grotesque aberration, with some crazy consequences. For example, centuries later, during the decline of the Tang Dynasty, rebellious governors couldn’t actually “secede” from the empire because definitionally there was only one empire. Since they weren’t quite willing to declare themselves the founders of a new dynasty, they had to acknowledge the ritual superiority of the Tang emperor even while defying his orders! Even the apocalyptic An Lushan rebellion maintained diplomatic relations with the Tang court and acted as if it were a foreign tributary seeking the emperor’s recognition. This ultimately allowed the Tang to keep the wheels on for centuries longer than they otherwise might have.

And when order did break down, “stability in unity” became a self-fulfilling prophecy for game-theoretic reasons that Pines puts beautifully:

Given the common conviction that reunification is the only viable outcome of an age of division, leaders of regional regimes had two possible modes of action. The first was to proclaim themselves dukes, princes, or kings, while recognizing the nominal suzerainty of one of the self-proclaimed emperors… insofar as the “king” acquiesced in his inferior status vis-à-vis an “emperor” elsewhere, his regional state was doomed. It was all too clear to every political actor that the existence of autonomous kingdoms was but a temporary aberration… Sooner or later, a truly powerful emperor would emerge, and it would be his duty to abolish deviant kingdoms and turn them back into prefectures and counties. Thus recognition of one’s ritual inferiority implied recognition of the provisional character of one’s dynastic rule.

An alternative to submission… would be to proclaim oneself an emperor, a new “Son of Heaven,” second to no one. This, however, implied… that he could neither coexist with other self-proclaimed emperors nor tolerate autonomous kingdoms, at least in the long term… Therefore, an aspiring “universal” emperor had to adopt an aggressive stance toward other regional potentates… it was well understood by all that the competition was a zero-sum game. A saying attributed to Confucius, “There are neither two suns in Heaven nor two Monarchs on earth,” required a life-and-death struggle from which only one legitimate winner could emerge.

Ironically, therefore, the idea of the singularity of imperial rule as the guarantee for peace ruled out the peaceful coexistence of two or more “emperors,” dooming the fragmented world to a bitter struggle, which allowed no real compromises, no territorial adjustments, and no sustainable peace agreements. Predictably, the strife between aspiring emperors turned into a nightmare of bloodshed and cruelty, which, in turn, enhanced expectations of renewed unification as the only feasible way out of mutual extermination. The notion that “stability is in unity” acted therefore as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But what counted as part of “天下”? Did it only include the traditional Chinese heartland (as roughly denoted by the frontiers of the Qin empire)? Or did it also include the “barbaric” peoples who lived in the desert, or on the steppe, or in the jungles of present-day Yunnan, or in the hilly massif of “Zomia”? Opinions on this fluctuated over the centuries, but the general view was something like this: the independence of the barbarians did not ipso facto pose an ideological threat or unsettle the universe in the same way that multiple Chinese nations might. But if the aliens did perform at least symbolic or ritual submission to the emperor, or took faltering steps along the transformation from “raw” to “cooked,” then that was a good sign that the emperor in question was a true sage who had heaven’s favor. Unfortunately, sometimes the barbarians had other ideas.

Much of the dramatic tension in post-unification Chinese history is provided by the steppe nomads who lived to her north and west. In the imperial histories they serve as a foil and antagonist for the civilized peoples of the river valleys, sometimes acting as allies and subjects, other times as raiders and reavers, and still other times as all-subjugating conquerors. Regardless, in official Chinese eyes they were the ultimate “other.” Somebody like James Scott or Christopher Beckwith might insist that no actually, the barbarians are the true heroes of the story, while implicitly agreeing that they represent a diametrically opposed form of life. The reality is that over the thousands of years of their encounter, the Chinese and the nomads rubbed off on each other.4 It’s pretty obvious on those occasions when the nomads conquered the Chinese and brought with them nomadic fashions and hairstyles and foods, but it also happened more slowly and subtly as the two groups just existed next to one another. And one of the most striking ways in which it happened was that the nomads developed their own notion of universal empire.

Once again, memes turn the wheel of history. By a certain point in history, every steppe nomad seems to have believed, deep down inside, that every so often the high god of the steppe, Tengri, would bestow his blessing upon a certain clan and a certain individual within that clan. Such a person could be identified by his charisma and daring and victory in every battle. That’s right, the nomads had an official belief in player characters. And like the Chinese belief in “stability in unity,” this also tended to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Whenever a young clan leader went on a winning streak, people would begin to whisper. A few true believers would defect to his banner. His army would grow, more battles would be won. Cynics seeing the way the wind was blowing would join up in the hopes that rewards would come to those who got in early. Then things would snowball, with nearby clans getting absorbed entirely, then larger groupings, then eventually entire nations. A few times in history the process got so out of control that the entire steppe unified itself behind one man, and the simultaneous thunder of a million hooves proclaimed woe to the whole continent. The “barbarian” cultural inclination towards orality and mutable identity greatly assisted this process because the tribes rallying behind a Genghis Khan, for instance, could actually become Mongols. At least…as long as he continued winning.

The barbarian belief in universal empire under a single man was like the Chinese belief in many ways. Indeed, the Chinese remember the exceptionally violent Mongol conquest in a more favorable light than anybody else on the Eurasian landmass. (Don’t get me wrong, Chinese literature is full of anti-Mongol diatribes, but the Yuan have always been considered a legitimate imperial dynasty, which is more than you can say for the Mongols most other places.) The reason is simple: they put an end to confusion and division, and restored unity to all under heaven. Even very soon after the conquest, you can find Chinese elites writing about how the advantages of unification outweigh the disadvantages of alien rule. Pause to think about how odd this is: a ruthless invader and occupier is considered more legitimate than the countless native dynasties which didn’t quite manage to unify the realm. This would be unthinkable most places, but it makes complete sense according to the logic of Chinese political culture.

But there was one very big difference between the steppe nomads and the Chinese when it came to universal empire: the barbarians believed that the favor of Tengri descended only upon exceptional heroes. An Abaoji, or a Genghis Khan, or a Tamerlane, or a Nurhaci might emerge and unite the tribes under exceptional circumstances, but if there was no man of sufficient bravery and daring on offer, then a period of disunity was normal and natural. In other words, universal empire only dawned for the nomads when a certain meritocratic bar was cleared, while for the Chinese the emperor was the Emperor no matter his personal foibles.

Some have considered this a paradox, because premodern China was relentlessly meritocratic in so many ways. Rather than being ruled by a hereditary military aristocracy, Chinese government was run by a scholarly elite selected via high-stakes written examinations. And yet at the apex of this hyper-selective intellectual pyramid sat a man with absolute unquestioned authority who (apart from dynastic founders) was there because of who his father was. And if you put it that way, it does seem a little bit odd. To resolve the puzzle, we need to look carefully at who the emperor was and what he meant to the Chinese.

For starters, the Emperor was not really an “emperor” at all according to the dictionary definition of the word. In fact, I have long been puzzled by this translation choice, and wondered about its history. The European idea of emperorship as invented by the Persians and perfected by the Romans has always connoted rule over a heterogeneous realm comprised of many nations or peoples. The Chinese emperor might incidentally do so, but the sine qua non of his office was that he ruled over all of the Chinese, full stop. If we were to invent words to describe the office, “ethnarch” might be a better one: the leader of a nation and culture and race. The actual word the Chinese use is “皇帝”, which is hard to translate but I definitely wouldn’t have picked “emperor”: in archaic Chinese, the first character “皇” meant something like “supreme” or “magnificent” or “august,” and the second character “帝” meant “god.” The ideogram itself probably evolved from a picture of an altar, or of a bundle of firewood used for a sacrifice. Emperorship was primarily a religious and ritual office. If you’re reaching for a European analogy it’s not the King of France, it’s the Pope. But now imagine that the Papacy was hereditary, and also ruled all of Europe.

The most important task of the emperor was the performance of certain rites that were necessary to keep the universe in balance. He was a semidivine entity, hallowed and set apart from the rest of humanity. His diet was carefully regulated to include only foods with the correct ritual meanings for different times of year.5 Upon his accession to the throne, it became illegal to speak or write the emperor’s name. Unlike a Greek or Roman ruler, the Chinese emperor’s image was not reproduced on coins because he was aloof, inscrutable, invisible, and omnipresent. He resided in a walled city within a city, and communication with him was almost impossible even for high officials. His body, clothing, and ritual implements were considered holy relics. If an edict was written in vermillion ink upon yellow silk, this signified that it came from the emperor personally, and upon receiving it even the mightiest general would “prostrate oneself and accept death” by lying face down on the floor until an emissary finished reading aloud the emperor’s words.

All of which goes to show why there always had to be an emperor, as opposed to the occasional and intermittent nature of universal rule among the nomads.6 Without an emperor, who would ensure that the sun and stars followed their courses correctly? We can also see why it was such an abomination for two emperors to exist at once, how it must have inexorably led to bad harvests, unnatural animal behavior, and the seasons arriving out of order. The ancient Chinese were famously pluralistic in matters of religion, accepting and integrating strange gods from foreign lands. Perhaps that’s because the only jealous god in their pantheon lived on earth. It was an exact conceptual inversion of medieval Europe: there could be many gods, but only one emperor.

All very well, and yet the theorists of this religious-political system had to deal with the fact that sometimes the emperor was a very bad man, or worse, an ineffectual nonentity. Here, the thinkers of the Warring States period hit upon essentially the same solution as the Catholic Church: an incredibly fine set of distinctions between the office itself and the man who happened to hold it. The emperor was worshipped not because of his virtues as a man, but because he was the emperor, and while a bad emperor might bring the wrath of the gods and calamity to the realm,7 he could not tarnish the divine nature of the office itself. Also like the Catholic Church, the Chinese engineered a subtle set of “checks and balances” that minimized the damage that could be done by an unworthy officeholder, while maintaining the theoretical omnipotence and supremacy of the office.

The first step in “deactivating” the theoretically supreme authority of the emperor was to drown him in ceremonial tasks. This worked well because the rites really were one of the core functions of his job. But over time, the official ritualists just kept multiplying the number and complexity of ceremonies the emperor had to perform, until it was impossible for him to fulfill them all even if he spent his entire waking life on them.8 This naturally left him with even less time for commanding the army, allocating the state budget, or important personnel matters — all of which conveniently got left to various bureaucrats who were from the same social class as the ritualists.

That same class of bureaucrats was in charge of raising the emperor’s children and heirs. Is it any wonder that their education heavily emphasized the importance of deferring to high officials of the state on all important matters of administration and policy? There’s a tendency in Chinese history for dynastic founders to be powerful and vigorous men, and for their descendants to be more and more worthless with each passing generation. This wasn’t biological degradation due to inbreeding or to heavy metals in the water supply, it was that their tutors and guardians exerted constant pressure to make the princes pliable and obedient, and with each generation there was less of a countervailing influence from an impressive and domineering father.9

Not only were they raised to be easy to control, they were also cut off from all direct sources of feedback or information about their realm. Remember how the emperor lived in a city within a city, removed and inaccessible to the populace? That cut both ways. The sovereigns were congenitally context-starved, fed a diet of information as carefully controlled as that used to train any AI. How could they possibly govern a nation that they had never seen or visited? Sometimes they got wise to what was happening and demanded to make an inspection tour of the realm, but there were always reasons this was impossible — security concerns, or budgetary considerations, or astrological and ritual restrictions. Only the most forceful and persistent emperors were ever able to see the land that they ruled.

While early dynastic leaders often personally led or accompanied their armies to the battlefield and crisscrossed the country on tours of inspection… their successors were more often than not confined during most of their career to the precinct of the Forbidden City or to other palaces, emerging only under duress, as when rebellions of invasions impended. This pattern is observable in any major dynasty, including even those established by the nomadic conquerors

Yes, including the nomadic conquerors. The conquest dynasties represent an extreme case of this recurring pattern of energetic founder followed by “deactivated” heirs. Remember that the nomad’s vision of universal rule was subtly different, in that they believed heaven’s favor did not descend upon every generation. Only the most worthy khagan or khan had a right to rule,10 and that cultural assumption was usually retained for the first few generations after the transition to emperorship on the Chinese model. Eventually, however, the inexorable Sinicization would win out — in fact Pines suggests that we should actually measure Sinicization by how much of a pushover the monarch had become.11

That brings us to the Imperial Chinese deep state: the scholars, officials, bureaucrats, and eunuchs who actually kept the empire running. Again, if you are coming from a European frame of reference, you are likely imagining a rural aristocracy, “men of quality,” burghers, merchants who managed to ennoble themselves, and so on. These groups, whom we may collectively term “local elites,” all existed in ancient China as well. Indeed, it’s probably a law of human organization that they must exist in all societies. And for a supposedly centralized absolute despotism, an extraordinary amount of the actual on-the-ground running things was outsourced to these elites.12 But they are not who anybody thinks of when you say “Imperial Chinese deep state.”

No, that would have to be the Confucian scholar-gentlemen, or literati. These were the direct intellectual descendants of the peripatetic scholars of the Warring States era. Following the Qin unification, they had made a devil’s bargain with the universal empire they’d memed into existence: they would be tamed and disciplined and serve the interests of the state, and in return they would receive an exalted role as moral guardians of the people and be given a guild stranglehold over all intellectual activity. The literati are called “Confucian,” and indeed venerated Confucius, but some of that is just branding. There were robust and fundamental debates within their ranks, all hidden within a very, very big tent called “Confucianism.” And they were the true glue that held China together.

The literati had an odd relationship with the state. While effectively all high officials were members of the literati (enforced via mandatory high-stakes examinations about the Confucian classics), and were expected to spend a bunch of their time writing and reflecting on philosophy and literature, not all literati worked for the state. Some of their most celebrated members went into seclusion, or returned to ancestral villages to properly perform the rites, or sought out mountain fastnesses where they could perfect their moral integrity. In effect they had a completely parallel status hierarchy from the rest of Chinese high society with its own awards and pecking-order and sacred values — a bit like academia today.

This in turn gave them tremendous power, even over the emperor. Chinese history is full of stories of “Confucian martyrdom,” where a gentleman scholar reproved the emperor in full awareness of the gruesome consequences that were likely to ensue.13 They did this because they cared more about the judgement of their peers than life or limb. And not just their contemporaries: the literati were the ones who wrote the histories, and whenever one of them acted fearlessly in defense of the prerogatives of his guild, he knew he would be commemorated as a virtuous man for centuries after. That power to shape history often meant that the martyrdom wasn’t actually carried out, because the emperors were well aware that punishing the dissenter could mean being condemned as a vicious and stupid ruler for the rest of history.

Every time this happened, it strengthened the position of the literati vis-a-vis the emperor (and naturally, such episodes were heavily emphasized in the educations of future emperors, further contributing to their “deactivation”). But it also strengthened the overall monarchic system as a whole, because these criticisms were always couched in the language of loyalty to the regime and disappointment in the fallible man currently in office. That is to say, none of the criticisms were “radical,” they were always “conservative” correctives to a deviation from an idealized past. This really shines through in the other way the literati cemented the hegemony of the imperial system: by shaping and guiding and ideologically neutering the many rebellions and civil wars.

China, as we’ve already covered, has had an explosively volatile political history. But there’s something a bit odd about it, too. The nineteenth century Sinologist Thomas Meadows put it this way: “Of all the nations that attained a certain degree of civilization, the Chinese are the least revolutionary and the most rebellious.” Rebellions happened constantly in China,14 and the literati often wrote about the sacred right of the people to rebel. Pines interprets the rebellions as a kind of “bloody popular election,” a mirror image of the theory of democracy as sublimated civil war that I wrote about here. These rebellions tended to start out hyper-violent, with a lot of very gratuitous and very sadistic killing, but they were hardly ever “revolutionary” in the sense of imagining a different regime. When the rebellion had gone on long enough, it would invariably converge back on the traditional model of an absolute monarch surrounded by meritorious officials, with commands effectuated by local elites.

It went like that all the way up until the creation of the Republic of China in 1912. And Pines argues this was because the literati never, ever defected. There simply wasn’t intellectual space for an alternative political and ideological system. Alternatives are proposed by intellectuals, and in ancient China the intellectuals had already decided where their loyalties lay. Well, it’s actually a little more subtle than that: the literati never defected ideologically, but they would often join the rebellion if it looked promising.15 But that sort of defection actually strengthened the imperial system — the traitor literati could confer ritual legitimacy on the rebellion, but in return they coopted it and could guide it in a non-threatening ideological direction.

Or as Pines puts it:

The intellectuals were the empire’s architects and custodians, and it was they who provided it with unparalleled cultural legitimacy. Even at times of crisis and disorder, when it seemed that the very foundations of the imperial polity had been irreversibly smashed, no alternatives to imperial rule were ever offered. Insofar as the stratum that determined right and wrong for the bulk of the population remained unwaveringly committed to the imperial political system, this system could withstand any domestic or foreign challenge, and could be resurrected after ages of the most woeful disorder and disintegration. It may not be a coincidence, then, that the end of the empire in the early twentieth century came shortly after the erstwhile intellectual consensus in its favor was shattered. Abandoned by its natural protectors, the empire fell with unbelievable ease, proving by the rapidity of its demise that throughout its history it had been primarily an intellectual rather than merely a sociopolitical construct, and that it owed its longevity overwhelmingly to the intellectuals, who designed it and ran it throughout the twenty-one centuries of its existence.

Yes, all things come to an end, even China’s eternal empire. A very different sort of regime now rules over the Chinese people, but in some ways it has to act just like its precursor. One of the themes of this Substack is that the sources of our present day identities, attitudes, and possibilities often lie in deep time. We may think we’ve figured things out for ourselves and are acting in our own interests, but actually we move in well-worn grooves carved out millennia ago by genetics, and by culture, and by the environment, and by the way those all influence each other. Like a long-running Broadway show, the actors age out and retire, but the roles stay the same.

So consider for a moment the issue of Taiwan: why is it such a flashpoint? In one sense it’s obvious: an unfinished civil war, a matter of national pride, and an island base from which the American Empire maintains a chokehold over Chinese shipping lanes. Who wouldn’t be touchy in such a situation? But dig a little deeper, talk to some mainland Chinese people, and you begin to hear echoes of a much older sentiment: “stability is in unity.” There cannot be two emperors, and to fail to unite the realm is to be ipso facto illegitimate.

The Taiwanese face the same tricky decision faced that independent duchies faced during premodern China’s periods of dissolution: acknowledge the temporary and provisional nature of your regime and doom yourself to ritual inferiority and eventual absorption, or declare yourself the true emperor and Son of Heaven and set up a zero-sum fight to the death. Perhaps the deep roots of political culture also explain the curious endurance of pro-mainland sentiment among the Taiwanese (and in Hong Kong), which has long confounded Western observers. After all, “分久必合,” the realm, long divided, must unite again.16

Many people believed that when Marxist-Leninist political fervor waned, China would embrace American-style liberalism to fill its ideological void. A lot of very big bets were made on that assumption, including the deliberate decision to tie China into the heart of global supply chains (and the concomitant loss of process knowledge and destruction of industrial capacity in Europe and America). Old people like me remember the triumphant articles in The Economist prematurely gloating about the impending democratization of China, and everyone assumed that the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 would act as a Trojan horse, infecting the mainland with Western ideas and attitudes.

It didn’t go quite the way they expected, did it? A lot of ink has been spilt as to why, but I think one under-discussed factor is that the Chinese are very aware from their history of the way that ritual inferiority inexorably leads to loss of sovereignty and political submission. They knew that if their elites were absorbed into the global elite monoculture blob, if they began listening to the same music and venerating the same holy symbols and adopting the same discursive conventions, then the inevitable result would be absorption into an alien empire. And unlike, say, many of the states in Central and Eastern Europe,17 they refuse to accept such a fate, because they believe that it is incompatible with the power and prestige that China deserves.

But disillusionment with communism (itself an alien ideology) has in fact left an ideological void at the heart of Chinese society. And if Western political theory is off-limits, then the only option is to reach back into China’s past, which is exactly what they’ve been doing. Fortunately for them, China has a rich intellectual history with plenty of solutions to offer. For the rest of us, it means the study of China’s past may be the key to understanding China’s future. Memes turn the wheel of history.

• Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, Kyle Harper (Princeton University Press, 2021).

Fun fact: the division between wealthy, industrialized northern Italy and low human capital, fast life history, amoral familist southern Italy lines up almost perfectly with the natural range of Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoan that causes the most virulent and deadly form of malaria.

In retrospect, reading this book while visiting a particularly wet part of the country during a particularly wet summer may not have been the best call I’ve ever made. Yes, I am rationally aware that, thanks to the sterling efforts of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Malaria Control in War Areas program among others, American mosquitoes have been a nuisance rather than a danger for seventy-five years. Yes, I know that even if I positively identify the mosquito that’s currently sucking my blood as Aedes aegypti, the “yellow fever mosquito,” I’m not actually going to get yellow fever. And yet I spent a solid week having a knee-jerk oh no we’re all going to die every time I heard the telltale whine in my ear.

But weirdly, it was only the mosquitoes. There I was, immersed in a history of infectious disease and therefore poised to overreact to any reminder of the myriad ailments that have plagued humanity for the last several million years, and only the insect vector of a few mostly-eradicated diseases was even around to prompt a case of second year syndrome. I didn’t run into dirty water, or suspicious meat, or visible sores, or coughing or sneezing or fever — not even a rat or a louse or a fly.1 That’s pretty incredible! Here are all these things that used to leave our ancestors weak or sick or dead, and we’ve learned to control them so well that a few years ago societies worldwide shut down over a virus whose fatality rate is a rounding error compared to the fevers and fluxes of the past. In fact we’re so good at controlling infectious disease that it’s often not even on our radar, and that makes it very hard to really wrap our heads around what life was like in the past — which is surely one of the goals of studying history. So thank goodness for Kyle Harper.

Harper is an eminent ancient historian and the author of several books on the late Roman Empire. In the most recent of them,2 the excellent The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, he argues that exogenous shocks like the end of the Roman Climate Optimum and three dramatic plagues (Antonine, Cyprianic, and Justinianic) played major roles in destabilizing the Western Empire — if they hadn’t, we might well talk about the “Crisis of the Fifth Century” instead of the Fall of Rome. Here, probably inspired by his research on the role of infectious disease, he widens his scope to take in the vast sweep of humanity’s interactions with the many, many, many organisms that can make us sick. How many? Well, it depends who you ask and how you count:

One standard and often cited catalog of human pathogens includes 1,415 species. A more recent and systematic survey identified 1,611. Oddly enough, there is only about 60 percent overlap between these lists, so the number of unique pathogens identified between them is 2,107. Yet the Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Online Network (GIDEON), a standard database of infectious diseases created for clinicians, lists 1,988 bacteria alone that have been found to infect humans. More than one thousand of these are not in either of the other lists…

This isn’t (mostly) the triumphal tale of mankind’s glorious victory over disease, though the final chapters do have something of that flavor; rather, it’s a thoughtful and richly detailed analysis of all the ways infectious disease has shaped human history. And yes, the second half gives you all the familiar beats, the charismatic megafauna (microfauna?) of epidemiology (bubonic plague, smallpox, HIV) though the stories are told well and updated with aDNA evidence since the last time I read a big “here’s all the stuff that used to kill people” book,3 but to my mind the really good stuff comes in the first half.

When we think about disease, we tend to think about the plagues of civilization, the kind of big, headline-making diseases that do things like burn through an unexposed population in the space of weeks or months, or empty out cities as people flee to the countryside (and bring their germs with them). Even the slower-acting of the “famous” diseases get short shrift, despite the fact that over the course of human history tuberculosis has killed more people than smallpox. On one level this makes sense: these are big dramatic events, a whole ton of people dying all at once has a visible and enormous impact on your society, and if we’re looking to disease for an explanation of How The World Got This Way then epidemics are obvious inflection points. (Also, these diseases played an outsized role in the success of European colonialism in the New World, with which guilty white liberals are fascinated — but you could tell an equally compelling story about the role of tropical diseases in stymying colonial expansion into Africa, as indeed Harper does.)

But they are, as I said, the plagues of civilization — all those exciting, dramatic diseases can only sustain themselves among dense human populations enabled by the spread of agriculture and the state. If we focus on them too much, in other words, we’ll ignore the disease burden of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, which the standard narrative wildly understates.

We know that many contemporary hunter-gatherers are riddled with parasites and bacterial infections, and that while their disease burden seems to be lower than that of agricultural societies, it’s still way higher than for our closest relatives. (One metastudy estimated that infectious disease accounts for 54% of chimpanzee deaths but 72% of hunter-gatherer deaths.) And many of these pathogens go way back. The clade of schistosomiasis that infects humans, for example, branched off in Africa several hundred thousand years ago and may actually predate our species. Whipworms and hookworms migrated with us in the Pleistocene. Vector-borne diseases — especially those transmitted by mosquitoes — can sustain a chain of transmission even among widely-dispersed populations, especially when they can establish chronic infection: P. vivax, the relatively less deadly form of malaria, dates back at least 70,000 years and possible as much as 250,000, and the nematode that causes lymphatic filariasis emerged in Southeast Asia about 50,000 years ago. Forget the popular image of “primal communities” living in harmony with nature only to be interrupted by agriculture’s zoonotic “crowd diseases”: our hunter-gatherer ancestors were plagued with hideous afflictions we modern Westerners can hardly imagine.

Oh, and it also turns out that rather than bovine tuberculosis spreading to humans after we domesticated cows, we actually gave it to them. Twice.4 Also to chimps and dolphins. In fact, the human-adapted strain seems to be ancestral to all the animal strains of TB.5 Whoops.

After the rise of agriculture nothing in this book really upends the broad strokes of the traditional story, but Harper does interestingly complicate everything and suggests plenty of ecological factors that might shed light on the differing courses of human societies. Read it this winter, before the mosquitoes come back.

Argument Against Jared Diamond Factor: 3/10

• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending (Basic Books, 2009).

Yes, this book is old enough to drive, in a field where the science changes so fast that something only a few years old can be hopelessly dated. Yes, it is full of things like “we think Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans probably interbred but we don’t know for sure…” (Now we do know, and they were right.) And yes, many of its other suggestions are far from proven one way or the other. But as a theoretical argument for what we might plausibly expect to find as we investigate the human genome, and as one useful interpretive lens for human history, it sure holds up.

The core of Cochran and Harpending’s argument is simple: the Neolithic Revolution profoundly changed our environment, which introduced novel selective pressures. Under these new conditions, even small mutations could provide the bearer enough of an advantage that they spread quickly through a population — and even small mutations can have enough of an impact on behavior to explain some (or even much) of the observed diversity of human cultures and societal outcomes.

The first part of this is uncontroversially true. We know that there was rapid and strong selection for pale skin in northern Europe after 6000 BC, probably because the new agricultural diet was so much lower in vitamin D that it became very important to absorb it from sunlight. We also know that several unrelated lactase persistence mutations began to pop up among different populations when they began to domesticate dairy animals, and that genetic variants that protect against diabetes and alcoholism spread after the adoption of high-carb, easily-fermentable Neolithic foods. A recent preprint6 analyzing the genomes of 15,000 West Eurasians over the last 14,000 years suggests equally strong selection in hundreds of different places, including genes related to the immune system and blood types — but also in polygenic traits like height and IQ/income/educational attainment (all of which are pretty closely correlated in modern societies for obvious reasons).

The real question, then, is the second half of their argument: is it plausible that the kinds of small mutations that have had time to accumulate in the last ten thousand years could have changed their bearers’ behavior enough to have meaningful influence on the ways societies developed? After all, the genetic variants that have swept through populations since the Neolithic Revolution all involve tiny changes to the genome, sometimes just swapping one base pair for another. Are any of those enough to explain the stunning cargo disparity? And the answer is…well, maybe.

Cochran and Harpending suggest a few sweeping neurological genes that may have played a role, most notably ones that affect neurotransmitters and brain development, but the problem is that we don’t actually know what those genes do. Instead, they focus on describing the sorts of novel selective pressures that people suddenly began to face when they entered (or were forced into) state societies: following the rules and submitting to authority isn’t a particularly valuable trait if you’re a hunter-gatherer, because there’s no one who’s going to cut off your head, but it’s really important if you’re routinely subject to corvée labor and would like to live long enough to have kids. Similarly, being good at delayed gratification is a much more useful trait for people whose daily lives involve seed corn and breeding stock that should remain uneaten than it is for people who can just go find another stand of grain or herd of animals. And it certainly seems, from our experience of animal husbandry and Belyayev’s famous experiment in silver fox domestication, that human-driven artificial selection can produce dramatic behavior differences in remarkably few generations; natural selection is slower, but the principle stands.

So yes, it’s very plausible that agricultural state societies created novel selective pressures that produced cognitive and behavioral changes in their populations. In fact, it would be very surprising if they didn’t. But at the moment we don’t know exactly what they were — and even if we did it would be difficult to say how much specifically genetic changes explain, because as the authors point out, genes and culture evolve together in a flywheel effect.

Say you have a society that thinks the most high-status, badass, and manly thing you can do is excel at Call of Duty. Among these people, women go looking for gamer husbands and cheat on their jock boyfriends with guys higher on the league rankings, and fathers who are good at quickscoping have more resources to invest in their children — all of which obviously creates strong selection for hand-eye coordination and quick reflexes. Soon Call of Duty doesn’t cut it any more: the newly acute senses demand increasingly challenging games of skill, children are drilled from an early age to minimize their response times, and culture centers ever more on activities that benefit from speed and precision. Selection intensifies, people get even better, institutions and values grow up around reflexes and coordination…and eventually you’ve got a population that’s meaningfully better at this stuff than their ancestors. Now say a solar flare fries all the electronics and plunges the earth back into the Stone Age. When the descendants of the Call of Duty players hunt deer a lot more effectively than their neighbors (whose fathers’ fathers played Factorio), is that genes or culture?

Of course, the flywheel could get started the other way, too: preexisting genetic variation might make some populations more susceptible to a new memeplex than others. (I would not be shocked if it turned out that societies that are more WEIRD had a higher frequency of some particular neurological gene variant than other, equally complex and sophisticated, societies, though Lord only knows what it is.) Culturally-contingent selective pressures play out in ways that are more complicated than “be resistant to malaria”: if being the smartest person in your village makes you more likely to head to a big city where you get tuberculosis and die at thirty, how much selection for intelligence is actually happening here? In fact, on a population level, the last three generations of American life seem to be selecting for ADHD and against cognitive performance and educational attainment. (Thanks to for the summary and reproducing the below chart, because the paper in question is not available from my totally reputable, legitimate, and patriotic sources.)

Cochran and Harpending open their first chapter with a quote from Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote: “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.” The rest of the book is spent demolishing his claim and arguing (quite convincingly) that the flywheel of genetic and cultural coevolution has been one of the key driving forces of human history and needs more attention from social scientists of all stripes. (Also historians and frankly philosophers too.)

But however convincing it may be, their case becomes wildly unpopular as soon as they move from traits like height or blood type or Duffy negativity, which we think are morally neutral, to things like intelligence, conscientiousness, rule-following, and ability to delay gratification. The people who don’t like this conversation fear — frankly, with some reason — that it’s a mere hop, skip, and a jump from “population X has a higher frequency of gene Y, which makes its bearers worse at planning for the future and leads them to make sub-optimal choices” to “population X are bad, irresponsible people and you should never trust them.” And yet, if population X actually does have a higher frequency of poor-planner genes, that would be useful information if you were trying to figure out why they tend to have more credit-card debt, just like knowing that some groups are really short helps explain why they don’t show up in the NBA. If you don’t confront the world as it really is, nothing you do will produce the effects you want.

But the people who don’t like this conversation have another fear, too. They’re afraid that the world in which they personally excel (because, come on, it’s not the downtrodden dregs of society who are getting mad about human genetics research) is fundamentally unfair, that the way things turned out isn’t because some people worked harder or deserved it more, or because some bad guys went and did bad things, but just…because.

Argument Against Jared Diamond Factor: 10/10

• Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, Daniel Everett (Vintage, 2008).

I was promised an ethnographic study of a particularly dysfunctional “small-scale society” and instead I got this weird mélange of academic linguistics paper and personal memoir, half counter-example to Chomskyan universal grammar and half Protestant missionary losing his faith. But the raw material for both, Daniel Everett’s time spent with a hunter-gatherer tribe in northwestern Brazil, is fascinating, and the book I thought I was going to be reading turns out to be in there after all. It’s just hidden between the lines.

In 1977, Everett and his wife Keren took their three children (then seven, four, and one) and moved to the Amazonian jungle. They had been sent by SIL, an evangelical Christian nonprofit that trains missionaries in linguistic fieldwork, and their job was to study and document Pirahã, a notoriously difficult language isolate spoken by a few hundred Indians along the Maici River in Brazil’s Amazonas state. Once they had learned enough of the language, they were supposed to use it to produce a new translation of the New Testament. (SIL forbids its missionaries from preaching or baptizing: their role is one of translation and language preservation, on the theory that the Word of God will speak for itself.) Of course we’ve seen one of the problems with this: translating a whole complex of ideas to a radically different cultural context is extraordinarily difficult. (And even more fundamentally, the Bible is not self-interpreting. Don’t at me, Protestants.) But Everett faced even more basic difficulties in his project, even aside from the intrinsic dangers of the Amazonian rainforest. One, the Pirahã language is profoundly strange. And two, the Pirahã people had zero interest in becoming Christian.

First, the language. I should note here that everything Everett says about Pirahã (which speakers call Apáitisí, “straight head,” as opposed to foreign languages which are “crooked head”) is incredibly controversial, and that some linguists who have analyzed his recordings and other records disagree with his conclusions (see this, for example). Still, he’s the acknowledged expert on the topic and the source of basically everything professional linguistics knows about it, and frankly I’m reviewing his book and not Noam Chomsky’s, so…I report, you decide.

Anyway, according to Everett, Pirahã is a really weird language. It has only ten phonemes, but it’s so tonal and reliant on accent and emphasis that it can be whistled with no phonemes at all. More importantly, though, it doesn’t have many of the features that linguists have long assumed are universal. There’s no phatic communication, expressions that don’t convey information but are meant to establish or maintain social relationships (“how’s it going?” is usually not an actual question). There are no comparatives. There are no words for color: if you want to say something is red, you can say “this is like blood.” There are no numbers or counting words, and there are no quantifiers (each, every, all). And the big one: there is no grammatical recursion. Pirahã can’t embed one phrase inside another, like “the man who is tall came into the house,” though it can express the idea by saying something like, “The man is tall. The man came into the house. They are the same.” This last one was an absolute bombshell to the linguistics world, because Chomsky had made recursion the centerpiece of his theory of universal grammar, and Everett has quite a lot to say about their arguments. If you’re interested in the details you should read the book because I’m not.

But Everett had noticed something else: the Pirahãs were also culturally weird. Their material culture is incredibly simple. They have virtually no sense of aesthetics: their adornments are asymmetric and utilitarian, intended to scare away spirits in the forest. If they need baskets, they make them on the spot out of wet leaves which will dry and crumble after a day or two rather than using the more durable materials that are equally available. They know how to salt or smoke meat, but they don’t. They have no myths and no rituals for marriage or death. Once the Pirahãs asked Everett to buy them one of the sturdy dugout canoes made by their Brazilian neighbors, which they preferred to the bark canoes they built themselves. Instead, he hired a Brazilian to teach them to do it:

After about five days of intense effort, they made a beautiful dugout canoe and showed it off proudly to me. I bought the tools for them to make more. Then a few days after Simprício left, the Pirahãs asked me for another canoe. I told them they could make their own now. They said, “Pirahãs don’t make canoes” and walked away. No Pirahã has ever made another [dugout canoe] to my knowledge.

It goes beyond that: the Pirahãs rely on imported steel tools, especially machetes, for much of their work, trading for them whenever possible. And yet, Everett writes, “The Pirahãs do not take good care of them. Children throw new tools in the river; people leave the tools in the fields; and often they trade tools away for manioc meal when outside traders make their way in.”

After some consideration, Everett concludes it’s a cultural value among the Pirahãs not to think or talk about anything beyond immediate experience. The Pirahãs do not plan for the future or talk about the past. They have no words for numbers or colors because those are abstractions, and they don’t say things like “who is tall” because it isn’t anchored to the moment in which they’re speaking. They’re happy to work at the dugout canoe under their teacher’s supervision, but they have no interest in further hard work even if it would benefit them in the future. And of course they have no interest in becoming Christians: they aren’t concerned with truth, or transcendent reality, or the afterlife, and they would prefer to continue drinking alcohol and having sex with whomever they like.

Everett clearly loves the Pirahãs and their little corner of the rainforest. (In the 1980’s he was involved in getting the Brazilian government to legally recognize it as a reservation.) He paints a beautiful picture of the land and the people even as he tells harrowing stories about things like his awful trek to get medical care for a wife and daughter dying of malaria. But the book is a truly bizarre document, with Everett repeatedly telling us how wonderful the Pirahãs are, how happy and peaceful their lives, and later undercutting it with details. He writes that they respond to each other with “patience, love, and understanding” and see themselves as “a family in which every member feels obligated to protect and care for every other member,” and also recounts a story of a father murdering his own premature baby. He tells us that “violence against anyone, children or adults, is unacceptable to the Pirahãs” and then mentions in passing an encounter with an old man, Hoaaípi, who “had a fresh arrow wound from another Pirahã, Tíigíi” or drops a parenthetical like “(Keren witnessed a gang rape of a young unmarried girl by most of the village men.)” He says the Pirahãs “won’t let another Pirahã starve to death or suffer if they can help” but tells this story from a previous missionary:

Steve Sheldon told me about a woman giving birth alone on a beach. Something went wrong. A breech birth. The woman was in agony. “Help me, please! The baby will not come,” she cried out. The Pirahãs sat passively, some looking tense, some talking normally. “I’m dying! This hurts. The baby will not come!” she screamed. No one answered. It was late afternoon. Steve started toward her. “No! She doesn’t want you. She wants her parents,” he was told, the implication clearly being that he was not to go to her. But her parents were not around and no one else was going to her aid. The evening came and her cries came regularly, but ever more weakly. Finally, they stopped. In the morning, Steve learned that she and the baby had died on the beach, unassisted.

Of course, anyone who spends enough time among another people will become fond of them. It doesn’t even need to be in person — histories of the Aztecs or the Carthaginians demonstrate exactly the same kind of “sweeping positive statement / truly horrific details” phenomenon. So it should be no surprise that after spending thirty-odd years among the Pirahãs, Everett comes to like and respect them and to want us to do the same. The surprising part is that he decides they’re right.

He questions, he wonders, and he ultimately decides to reject not only his faith in God but the “delusion of truth”:

God and truth are two sides of the same coin. Life and mental well-being are hindered by both, at least if the Pirahãs are right. And their quality of inner life, their happiness and contentment, strongly support their values.

It took Everett decades to finally come out as an atheist, and when he did his wife divorced him. Two of his three children cut off all contact.7 (It’s not clear to me how much of this was over him no longer being Christian as opposed to him lying for years about his most fundamental beliefs; I could buy it either way.)

Like all conversion stories, Everett’s is wildly unsatisfying from the outside. He never really shows us why, perhaps because he can’t. And yes, the Pirahãs’ relentless cultural and linguistic focus on the present seems very strange to us (even as it goes a long way to explaining why they live in a few tiny villages in the jungle), but the strangest is Everett’s embrace of it. Ultimately it’s the man from my own society who proves the most foreign.

Argument Against Jared Diamond Factor: 7/10

In the 4th century BC, the Greeks conquered the world. And that is where their problems began.

When I was a child first getting interested in ancient history, the books I read followed a smooth narrative process. The story of the Greeks began with Athenian democracy and the victories at Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea that saved Western civilization from Persian conquest. Then there was the Athenian maritime empire, and its tremendous cultural achievements: the Parthenon, Socratic philosophy, the plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. There was the Peloponnesian War and Thucydides’s chronicling of it. And then, in a tremendous climax, there were the awesome conquests of Alexander the Great, who destroyed the most powerful empire on Earth and conquered the known world by the age of 33, only to die young and have his empire swiftly broken up after his death.

…And then the story would promptly lurch 700 miles to the northwest and start over. Greeks? What Greeks? Now I was reading about the rise of a different city, Rome, and the achievements of its great republic. Instead of the Assembly and the ostracism, there was the Senate and the consuls. I would read about the Samnite Wars, the Punic Wars, the Gallic Wars, and finally the great civil wars that transformed Rome from a republic into the empire that men still think about a few times a week. In this story, the Greeks appear again, but only as enemies for Rome first to easily defeat, then be culturally influenced by. This fusion of Greek and Roman culture leads to European Christianity, the Renaissance, the cultural canon — in a word, the West itself.

Kid me didn’t think too much about it at the time. But as I grew, I and many others finally had a thought intrude: Wait a minute, what the heck was going on in Alexander’s old empire before the Romans got there?

And if you’re like me, asking that question is how you wind up reading Alexander to Actium.

Alexander to Actium is classicist Peter Green’s gargantuan tome covering the period historians now call the Hellenistic era, the 293-year span following the death of Alexander the Great during which his vast but short-lived empire was divided up and ruled by ethnically Macedonian and Greek elites who left the stamp of Hellenic culture all across the eastern Mediterranean. The era begins with Alexander’s generals (the Diadochi, “Successors”) waging an epic forty years of war as funeral games for their dead master before finally settling into a more stable system with three great kingdoms centered on Macedon, Egypt, and Syria (plus lesser monarchies like Pergamon and Bactria). These kingdoms battled one another and Rome for another quarter-millennium, gradually losing land and power before they were extinguished, one by one. The last Hellenistic kingdom, Ptolemaic Egypt, made it until 30 B.C., when the legendary Cleopatra1 committed suicide and her realm became the personal possession of Octavian, the future Caesar Augustus. Long after their destruction, the Hellenistic legacy lingers most in religion: the Christian New Testament was written not in the Hebrew or Aramaic of Judea or the Latin of the Roman Empire, but in the koine Greek that had become the lingua franca of the educated eastern Mediterranean.

The ebb and flow of this 300-year historical epic is one that really deserves a trashy big-budget TV adaptation or three. The sordid acts of the Successors and their successors are so spectacular they could easily be made into a hybrid of HBO’s Rome and a popular show about dragons that shall remain nameless. I’m a little shocked one hasn’t been made already. To give just a small set of anecdotes from Green’s work:

• After an attempted army revolt following Alexander’s death, the general Perdiccas holds a “purification” ceremony for the army, which consists of rebel leaders being publicly trampled to death by elephants.

• Antigonus One-Eye, the man who came closest to reuniting Alexander’s empire, was very tall, very wide, very old, and had a very good nickname. Huge in size and huge in ambition, he dies fighting in battle at over 80 years old at Ipsus, a battle featuring 25,000 cavalry, 120 scythed chariots, and almost 600 elephants.

• Olympias, Alexander the Great’s mother, is so vindictive that when Philip II dies, she has a rival wife and her infant daughter roasted to death on a charcoal brazier even though they pose zero dynastic threat. When her own end comes during Macedon’s multiple civil wars, the soldiers of Cassander refuse to kill Alexander’s mother – so she is instead stoned to death by the families of those she had killed during past purges.

• Seleucus I, founder of the Syria-based Seleucid Empire, is happily married to his second wife Stratonice when he notices his son, Antiochus, is deeply enamored with her. No worry: Seleucus simply divorces Stratonice and has her marry Antiochus. This is actually a happy ending and works out for everyone, surprisingly.

• Lysimachus, king of Thrace, is happily married to his third wife, Arsinoe, when she tricks him into having his son by a first marriage executed so her own son can succeed. This sparks a war that kills Lysimachus and destroys his kingdom, somewhat botching the whole succession thing. But no worries: Arsinoe escapes to Egypt and makes out just fine by marrying its pharaoh – her brother.

• Cassander, king of Macedon, gets so irate at clever jabs from the wily Athenian politician Demades that he finally snaps and personally chops both Demades and his son to pieces while screaming insults at them.

• For about a decade during the various successor wars, Athens is ruled by a literal philosopher-king, the thirty-something Macedonian puppet Demetrius of Phaleron. One of his agenda items is building a gigantic mechanical snail to crawl through the streets of Athens leaving a realistic trail of slime behind; this is apparently some artful way of shaming the Athenians for being sluggish in standing up for Greek freedom.

• After Demetrius the Philosopher King is overthrown (by a different Demetrius, long story) the new tyrant takes advantage of divine honors granted to him to house his hoes in apartments at the back of the Parthenon. He tries to seduce a teenaged boy who instead commits suicide by jumping into a tub of boiling-hot water, and another time waives a fine against a prominent Athenian citizen in return for taking his son as a catamite. When you are legally a god, they let you do it.

• Aratus is a quite successful Greek general with the unfortunate problem of getting uncontrollable diarrhea before every battle.

• Escaped slave and rebel Drimakos defies authorities on Chios so successfully they simply reach a treaty with him: As long as he doesn’t steal too much and only accepts new slaves into his army who were severely abused by their masters (while sending the rest back), they’ll leave him alone. Drimakos lives to a ripe old age, then has his boy lover kill him and take his head in to claim a reward. Later, Drimakos’s spirit would supposedly appear to Chians in their dreams to warn of plots by their slaves.

• To show off their power, the Ptolemies commission a grand procession through Alexandria whose centerpiece is “a gaudily painted gold phallus, almost two hundred feet long … and tied up, like some exotic Christmas present, with gold ribbons and bows.” Green reasonably wonders how this mighty phallus was able to negotiate corners.

• The later Ptolemies could win some kind of ghastly award for their spectacular decadence. Ptolemy VIII Physcon (“the Obese”), who resembles a 2nd century BC Baron Harkonnen, seizes power after the death of his brother (also named Ptolemy) by marrying Cleopatra, who is also their sister. He then has her son, his nephew (also named Ptolemy), murdered during the wedding feast, then proceeds to seduce and marry his pubescent niece (also named Cleopatra). A decade later, riots forced Physcon and his niece-wife into exile, and his sister-wife proclaims her son by Physcon (another Ptolemy) as pharaoh, but the heir is apparently in Cyrene at the time, allowing Physcon to capture his unsuspecting son and send his dismembered corpse to the sister-wife as a birthday present. Meanwhile, the sister-wife’s daughter by her first brother (named Cleopatra, of course) gets married off to a Seleucid king and uses her sons as a series of puppets. The first puppet, Seleucus V, proves troublesome, so his mother murders him by using him for archery practice. The second puppet, Antiochus VIII, is more canny, and when his mother tries to murder him with a cup of poisoned wine, he notices something is up and forces her to drink the fatal cup herself. Antiochus VIII then fights a long civil war against his half-brother and cousin Antiochus IX, who is not a puppet but instead has the private hobby of playing with literal giant puppets. Got all that?

If learning the above is your idea of fun, then Alexander to Actium is a rich feast, enlivened throughout with Green’s flare for delicious details and legends that are possibly fanciful but too remarkable to leave out.

But telling the actual narrative of the Hellenistic world, however bizarre and entertaining it gets, is really only the superficial purpose of Alexander to Actium. No, the real point of the book, and the real reason to stick around for all 700 pages, is to witness Peter Green’s incredible, almost maniacal act of vengeance against an era he despises.

Whether it’s playwrights…

The poet-playwright Menander … has always struck me as a classic example of a growth industry created by papyrological accident.

…poets…

Callimachus, like Ben Jonson, has always had a rather better press than he deserves, and for much the same reason: his academic ideals and credentials can hardly fail to appeal to those other academics … I cannot help finding him at once pretentious and faintly distasteful, a literary exhibitionist with an unpleasant groveling streak about him, a sycophant implacable in his attacks on rival sycophants[.]

…philosophy…

Popular philosophies — and Stoicism must be accounted one of the most popular ever — almost always tend to have an intellectually suspect quality about them.

…coin portraits…

Prusias I of Bithynia is porcine, crass, and self-satisfied. The early kings of Pontus resemble nothing so much as a family of escaped convicts: Pharnaces I has the profile of a Neanderthaler, and Mithridates IV that of a skid-row alcoholic.

…or academia itself…

Museum faculty developed a reputation for symposia, frivolous research topics, and alcoholism: to anyone in the same profession there cannot fail to be a certain sense of deja vu.

…Green knows how to write a burn. It’s not simply that he’s a hater: his book about the Battle of Salamis overflows with love and admiration for the golden age Greeks who defeated the Persians. No, Green specifically has a bone to pick with the Hellenistic era and its rulers, its people, its art, and its ideas. For those who read for entertainment, the best part of Alexander to Actium isn’t the battles, the George R.R. Martin-esque politics, or the even more Martin-esque incest — it’s tagging along as Peter Green gets revenge on the Hellenistic Age by writing a definitive textbook about it, so that all students of history who come after him will read of his scorn and contempt.

Green’s harsh attitude is clear right from the preface, when he sets the book’s scope.

[I will not] devote specific sections either to law or to school education, on the grounds that during our period the first … was little more than an elaborate sham masking the realities of power, while the second offered nothing, in essence, but literary rote learning, elementary mathematics, music, athletics, and—most important—a rhetorical grab bag that would enable men at the top to talk their way into, or out of, anything.

Hellenistic historiography fares just as badly:

Polybius remains the only worthwhile historian of the Hellenistic period whose work substantially survives. Diodorus, as we are too often reminded, is a third-rate compiler … I have no wish to burden an already overlong book with yet another imaginative analysis of his chronological inconsistencies and synthetic rhetoric. Like Plutarch, he believed that one virtue of history lay in “recording the nobility of distinguished men, publicizing the vileness of the wicked, and in general promoting the good of mankind.” Successful statesmen, he thought, were righteous, while evil ones met with frustration: nothing, in short, succeeds like success. None of this inspires confidence.

From there the savagery continues almost non-stop, right down to the last page when Green ridicules imperial Roman literature for “guttering out” by the mid-2nd century. Virtually nothing escapes.2

Take philosophy, that most noble of ancient endeavors. The Hellenistic world’s biggest philosophical contribution was Stoicism. Today, Stoicism enjoys a good reputation for encouraging adherents to be stolid and uncomplaining in the face of difficulties. Green, though, puts the spotlight on Stoicism’s lesser-known traits like its determinism and pantheism, then singles it out as a shallow ideology perfect for helping elites rationalize their own hypocrisies.

Sandbach correctly notes that “the belief that the world was entirely ruled by Providence would have an appeal to the ruling class of a ruling people.” What Stoicism offered, in fact, was a built-in justification—moral, theological, semantic—for the social and political fixed order: it was the most powerful and subtle instrument of self-perpetuation that the Hellenistic ruling class ever conceived. The mere fact of anything happening meant that it had been fated to happen; and since nature was providentially disposed toward mankind, what was fated could not fail to be all for the best. This interesting version of determinism is most often presented as a source of comfort when things seemingly went wrong; but of course, as I have suggested, it would be of even greater benefit to those who were anxious to have some moral principles to offer the world in justification of ruthless self-interest. If it was bound to happen, it had to be right.

People have always wanted to learn the future, but Stoicism’s belief in a deterministic yet providential cosmos drove a tremendous increase in the popularity of astrology, divination, and other woowoo, often egged on by the philosophers themselves.3 Green even hypothesizes that Stoicism’s popularity directly sabotaged whatever nascent scientific progress there was in the late Hellenistic age.

But if Stoicism was the shallow George W. Bush evangelicalism of its day, it at least fares better than Epicureanism, the other popular and enduring school of Hellenistic thought. The traditional Christian attack on Epicurus was that he was an atheist and hedonist. More modern scholars emphasize that Epicurus’s belief in pleasure as the highest good actually encourages moderation and avoiding pain or fear so as to achieve tranquility.

Green picks neither of these interpretations, instead arguing that Epicureanism was totally a cult. Epicureans joined communes after swearing oaths to obey “the Leader,” whom they “flattered like a god.” “Act always,” they were told, “as though Epicurus is watching.” The Leader “seems to have enjoyed droit de seigneur with several of his followers’ wives and mistresses.” In Epicurus’s famous Garden outside Athens, nobody actually worked, with the commune instead sustained in “endowed leisure” by donations extracted from supporters across the Mediterranean. “Send us, for the care of our holy body, first fruits on behalf of yourself and your children,” Epicurus writes to one of his disciples. In Green’s telling, “Epicureanism was, in the last resort, the brainchild of an antisocial and anti-intellectual dogmatist, with a bee in his bonnet about providential gods, and more than a passing urge…to replace the deity himself.”

Quite the cynical attitude…except that Green is just as harsh on the literal Cynics. Being an ascetic who lives on the street in ostentatious poverty while engaging in public defecation and masturbation doesn’t make you a rebel, it just makes you a loser:

The lifestyle is strictly self-promoting; it has no real ulterior end in view. We adopt the lifestyle to be happy. Happiness is defined through the lifestyle, which becomes an end in itself. The manipulation of these social concepts, the “natural” and the “shameless,” simply gives the Cynic an excuse to thumb his nose at the society he is busy rejecting. … Worst of all, the so-called self-sufficiency is a patent sham. The Cynic, in the last resort, exists as a tolerated parasite on the society that he condemns. … The situation is not unfamiliar today.

Hellenistic art fares a bit better than philosophy, but only a bit.

If you’re at all online (condolences if so), you may have seen this meme once in your life.

The man in the image is Hiyao Miyazaki, director of some of the most famous anime films of all time (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and more). The quote is fake, but inspired by real comments a jaded Miyazaki once made in an interview:

Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!

In short, anime has been ruined because it is now made by people whose sole life experience is being die-hard anime fans. And so, far too often, anime has simply become a mixture of fanservice, self-referential masturbatory impenetrability, and crass wish fulfillment. It has minimal artistic merit because the creators are pure consumers, with nothing real or interesting to say.

Fortunately, Green is here to tell you that this exact same wretched pattern was already around in Alexandria, Athens, and Antioch during the 3rd century BC. The greatest poetic innovation of the Hellenistic Age is pastoral poetry. And what is pastoral poetry? That’s right, low-effort wish fulfillment:

Pastoral poetry … is invariably produced by urban intellectuals who have never themselves handled a spade, much less herded sheep, goats, or cattle, in their lives. … It grafts a kind of yearning idealism onto a reality that was, in fact, peculiarly harsh and unrewarding. … That this should be an exclusively urban phenomenon is no accident. The real shepherd or farmer knows, too well, that his life is poor, dangerous, backbreaking, and without respite.The pastoral dream, then, is the special property of the gentleman poet, living on patronage from a Ptolemy or an Augustus: when Marie-Antoinette played at being a milkmaid, the charade did not require her to get up at four in the morning and milk obdurate cows in freezing weather with chilblained hands.

The pastoral genre peaks in silliness with the ancient romance Daphnis and Chloe, where two young shepherds are too innocent to know about sex — an absurdity once you remember they live around livestock. Yet as silly as it is, the pastoral endlessly recurs in history, always there to satisfy the craving for cheap nostalgia or easy escapism. It could be the most enduring art form pioneered by the Hellenistic age.

…Or it would be, if not for the slop they were churning out in the theater. There, the Hellenistic growth industry is the New Comedy. Just as with pastoralism, the defining feature of New Comedy is escapism. The satire of Aristophanes (so biting it got Socrates killed) gives way to stock characters and flimsy plots totally detached from real-world concerns. New Comedy is a landscape of “comfortable cliché and romantic fantasy.” Every story has a happy ending. Twenty-three hundred years before television, the Hellenistic Greeks invented the stale network sitcom. In one of the funniest digressions I’ve ever read in a serious history book, Green dedicates half a chapter to a detailed, scene-by-scene thrashing of the most popular Hellenistic playwright, Menander (he of the “papyrological accident”):

[Menander’s corpus] abounds in situational idiocies. Take the Arbitrators (Epitrepontes) … a young stud, Charisios (“Charmer”), having raped one Pamphile (“Darling”) during the inevitable night festival, gets married, only to discover, first, that the girl he married has a baby five months later, and then, as a dénouement, that she was also the girl he raped, and that the child is therefore presumptively his. … Disbelief, though suspended, keeps breaking in. Why, we may legitimately ask, did Charisios not have the problem of her five-months’ child out face-to-face with his wife instead of listening to the servants? Why, instead, does he simply walk out on her in a huff and take up with Habrotonon, a guitar-strumming floozy with the usual heart of gold? No play otherwise, the cynic might answer; rational plots are not exactly Menander’s forte.

… [W]e are being asked to accept as fact that the soap-opera plots, the popular aphorisms, the commonplace moral values, stock characters, stereo-typed opinions, and cliché-ridden dialogue were all concessions made by this intellectual and creative paragon to the Aunt Ednas of the Athenian bourgeoisie, whereas any flashes of brilliance that can be detected in his work are ascribed to the genius he was forced to restrain while pursuing the bitch-goddess success. In that case, quite apart from the innate immorality of such a proceeding (once a whore, always a whore, as Orwell remarked in a very similar modern context), one can only point out that Menander’s essay in self-prostitution did him singularly little good. Eight victories in over a hundred attempts is hardly the record of a clever crowd-pleaser.

Not all art was mass-market schlock. Some of it fell on the other end of the scale: Works so dense and learned they were nearly unreadable. To cite merely one line from Lycophron of Chalcis’s poem Alexandra:

“The centipede lovely-faced stork-colored daughters of the Bald Lady struck maiden-slaying Thetis with their blades” (22–24) simply means that Paris’s hundred-oared ships, built of timber from Bald Mountain (Phalakra) in the Troad, painted with the apotropaic eye on their bows, hulls pitch-black, like storks (more plausible than white, the other prevalent color of European storks), dipped their oars in the sea, more particularly the Hellespont (since this claimed the life of the maiden Helle), Thetis qua sea nymph being used by synecdoche to represent the sea itself. Every line requires this kind of exegesis.

Who wanted this? In truth, almost nobody, but that was the point. “[B]eginning in the fourth century, literature moved away from the public arena, to become the property of a private, very often subsidized, intellectual minority.”

Normally all this negativity would get grating, but Alexander to Actium would be a lesser book if Green admired his subject more. The fact he doesn’t, and why he doesn’t, is what elevates this book from merely informative to exceptional.

Because, besides being fun, all of Green’s jabs and bitter humor serve a purpose. They answer a central question about the book itself and the era it describes. Superficially, the Hellenistic era seems like the Ancient Greeks at their apex. They were culturally and politically dominant over half the Mediterranean. They had spectacular wealth, plundered from Persian treasuries or extracted from Egyptian fellaheen. Their cities were larger and their patronage more lavish than any prior era. So why does the average well-educated Westerner know almost nothing about them, while knowing a lot about the comparatively tiny city-state of Athens?

Simple: because beneath the mighty empires, so impressive on a map and so rich when seen as museum exhibits, the world of a Hellenistic Greek was miserable. His governments were tyrannical, exploitative, decadent, and distant. His economy was one of ever-fewer masters and ever-more slaves. His religion no longer satisfied and was abandoned en masse by the elites who once safeguarded it. And then, looming over the horizon, there was the ever-rising Roman superpower, culturally backward yet militarily unstoppable, chipping away at Greek power so steadily that the Greeks accepted they were doomed decades before actually being conquered.

This was more than just tough times. It was a great civilization going into eclipse. It was an age defined by “…loss of self-confidence and idealism, displacement of public values, the erosion of religious beliefs, self-absorption ousting involvement, hedonism masking impotent resentment, the violence of despair, the ugliness of reality formalized as realism, the empty urban soul starving on pastoral whimsy, sex, and Machtpolitik.”

Why were the Greeks in a psychological funk? The word that comes to mind again and again is autonomy.

Golden age Greece was a Greece of countless poleis, individual city-states constantly in competition with one another: Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, Argos, and so on. Citizens were part-time magistrates, jurors, lawmakers, and soldiers. A man seeking status almost always sought it by becoming a great man in his own city, but even if he was a person of no consequence he had a direct stake in his city’s success and a role to play in achieving it. A man’s gods were the gods of his city, worshipped since time immemorial, with few people asking awkward questions about where they came from or whether they were, strictly speaking, actually real. In the Greece of city-states, the squabbles were petty, but never meaningless. In a land without kings, every man was a player character.

It was this quarrelsome, decentralized patchwork that produced the Greek miracle: the birth, in a remarkably short period, of the Western world’s foundational works of philosophy, history, science, and drama.

With Alexander’s godlike achievements, though, that old Greek world crumbled. Suddenly, Greek civilization was dominated by massive kingdoms, ruled by kings whose only claim to legitimacy was that they or their fathers had won their lands at the tip of a spear. These kings quickly took a liking to the trappings of Oriental rulership, styling themselves first as “saviors” and then simply as “gods,” spectacularly above and apart from the people they ruled. Their kingdoms were essentially for-profit estates run for the benefit of the mighty god-kings. Alexandria, the crown jewel of the Hellenistic world, home to the Great Lighthouse and Great Library, was effectively a giant consumer good for the Ptolemaic royal family, where all the surplus of Egypt’s countryside had to be shipped, on pain of death. In a city of perhaps half a million, royal palaces occupied as much as one-third of the land.

In the decades of war that followed Alexander’s death, the Greek cities soon learned that their future was to be in a constant state of servility to one overlord or another. The “freedom of the Greeks” changed from a point of pride to a pathetic sham:

The cities went through the motions of freedom, but in the last resort they did so on sufferance. What they really felt about their de facto subjection can be inferred from the carefully euphemistic terminology employed … [Officials] had “spent time with” the king, or had “gone abroad” with him, or had “enjoyed his friendship”: anything to circumvent the notion of paid service, and perhaps a residual unwillingness to face the grim fact of political impotence. It is significant that later this objection fades: by 200 the honorand’s court title is being expressed openly, without circumlocution.

This is where my boyish enthusiasm to learn more about the great Hellenistic empires led me astray, because while vast empires look so impressive on a map and are so fun to play in a 21st-century video game, they gradually destroyed what had made the Greeks such a dynamic civilization. Instead of reflecting civic pride, great temples and festivals simply displayed the profligacy of rulers. Patronage emanating from a tiny handful of elites led to sycophancy and parasitism. The desire of ruling dynasts to preserve power at all costs, coupled with ignorance of economics, led to a suffocating stagnation like that seen in many an Oriental despotism.

Fittingly, one of the only Hellenistic entities Green has clear enthusiasm for is the small trading republic of Rhodes. Everything that the great eastern kingdoms were, Rhodes was not. Thanks to its victory against Demetrius the Besieger (the same guy with the Parthenon harem) in 304 BC, the city kept its independence and was “the last bastion of genuine freedom” in the Aegean Sea, a reservoir of “the old classical Greek pride and civic intransigence.” When famine struck, Rhodian policy was to supply emergency grain at cheap prices rather than to price gouge, and a similar welfare program provided for the city’s own indigent. To keep the seas free for trade, Rhodian ships waged war against pirates to the benefit of all. While other states used mercenaries to do their fighting, Rhodian galleys were crewed entirely by Rhodian citizens, like the Athenian triremes at Salamis centuries before (and unlike Athenians triremes in Hellenistic times). So popular was Rhodes that when the city was leveled by an earthquake in 228 (knocking down its famed Colossus), the great powers of the Mediterranean competed with each other at donating funds for its reconstruction.

But few Greeks had the privilege of being Rhodians. And when they lost their independence and autonomy, it was as though everything else was lost with them. For the Greek colonists of the new great Eastern metropoli, the Olympian twelve were no longer enough, and earnest belief in them among the urban and educated precipitously declined. Notably, in the 4th and 5th centuries BC governments would petition the Oracle at Delphi for prophecies, but by Hellenistic times only individuals still bothered.

In the place of the old gods came new ones: syncretic deities like Serapis (a composite of Zeus, Osiris, and the Apis bull), radically altered ones like Isis, and flourishing mystery cults that promised adherents that, however unpleasant this world was, secret rituals could lead to a better one in the afterlife. But the most distinctive new religious trend was the cults honoring the new dynastic rulers themselves, acclaimed not merely as kings but as gods on earth. When Demetrius the Besieger arrived in Athens in 291 B.C., he was greeted with a paean that went:

The other gods are far away,
Or cannot hear,
Or are nonexistent, or care nothing for us;
But you are here, and visible to us,
Not carved in wood or stone, but real,
So to you we pray.

Was this belief literally real? Almost certainly not. But when nascent atheism is becoming a more and more common assumption, it is easy for sycophancy towards the powerful to take the place of religion.

At some point while reading Alexander to Actium, a thought will break in. Maybe it’s when Green lists the chief virtues of Hellenistic philosophy, all of them negative: “aponia, absence of pain; alypia, avoidance of grief; akataplēxia, absence of upset; ataraxia, undisturbedness; apragmosynē, detachment from mundane matters; apathia, non-suffering.” Maybe it’s when he narrates the doomed effort of Cleomenes III to Make Sparta Great Again. Whatever it is, eventually one realizes Green isn’t just describing long-dead Greeks. He is also describing us, another civilization in an existential funk, going through an abrupt decline from a dizzying peak.

We too live in the wake of a great conquest like Alexander’s. In fact, we live in the wake of two: first, the great-but-vanished European empires of the 19th century, and second, the Pax Americana, the economic and cultural domination of most of the world by America, its values, its way of looking at the world.

Like a Greek in Alexandria or Antioch, we live amid great superficial abundance. Set aside whatever angst you have about housing prices and you know it’s true: your access to food, entertainment, and creature comforts would be a marvel not just to the distant past but even a person from the 1980s.

What has gone missing? The same things that were vanishing for those Greeks 2300 years ago. The faith the West held when it swept the world before it has been abandoned en masse, yet even as irreligion has surged enthusiasm for superstitious woowoo has remained untouched (or even grown). Art is plentiful, yet stagnant, and many people are apparently content with lowest-common-denominator AI slop.4 And then, looming in the background, there is the unease that whatever material prosperity we have is borrowed from the future, passing the time until foreign peoples and nations surpass us…or simply replace us.

The more of Green one reads, the more unsettling the parallels. As Greece headed for its final disintegration and conquest in the 2nd century B.C., birthrates collapsed. Polybius claims the well-off preferred to live lives of pleasure without marrying, or to have one or two children at most, “so that they could leave them in affluence and bring them up to be spendthrifts.”5 Foodie culture thrived: “Infatuation with haute cuisine became, at least among the propertied classes, a kind of substitute religion.”

Perhaps the single most important thread tethering Green’s world to our own, though, is the loss of sociopolitical agency. Like 5th-century BC Greece, 19th-century America was a paradise of self-government. Americans settled the frontier, founded towns and colleges, set up governments, formed associations, launched business enterprises, expanded and invented and built, all with shockingly little central government control.

On the other hand, today’s America is a lot more like 2nd century BC Greece. What changed? America didn’t get conquered or become a monarchy. We are still an “Our Democracy,” as the BlueSky pundits never tire of saying. But, much like with the fraudulently autonomous poleis of Hellenistic Greece, the ghost has (mostly) gone out of American self-government. A combination of atomization, urbanization, and political nationalization mean the average American’s control over their own government is lower than ever. Americans see bad laws, bad ideas, bad policies, and bad social trends all over the place, but when any change of course requires taking control of a country of 340 million, what hope is there? A large country where everything that matters is centralized will inevitably create an apathetic populace. Most people will simply check out and give up, or look for an easier way out. The Hellenistic Greeks put their faith in god-kings; today, millions of Americans put theirs in God-Emperors.

There are no happy endings in the fall of a great civilization. Like Hemingway’s bankruptcy, the Greek implosion happens gradually and then suddenly. In Greece proper the Achaean League of southern cities repeatedly allies with Rome to help it destroy Macedon, only to abruptly realize in 146 BC that it is next:

When Critolaus marched north to discipline the apostate city of Heracleia he found himself, to his horror, confronted by a Roman army under the redoubtable Metellus. At Scarphaea, near Thermopylae, he was crushingly defeated, and may have committed suicide. …A kind of passionate last-ditch determination swept the country. Boeotia and Euboea, Phocis and Ozolian Locris joined the League’s forces. The mood resembled that of the American Old South in 1860, and the military preparations were no less inadequate. Nor, clearly, had a vigorous Roman offensive been foreseen. Through the fiery rhetoric we glimpse disorder, civilian panic, flight. Yet once committed, the cities of the League reveal an unshakeable determination to fight on, whatever the cost. A few prominent citizens, predictably, argued for capitulation: they were imprisoned or executed. …Polybius paints a scene of panic and confusion sweeping the cities of Greece. …Despite the fact that he had executed at least two subordinates who urged surrender on terms, Diaeus, instead of holding out, fled by night [for] Megalopolis, where—like the Gaul commemorated by Attalus I’s Pergamene sculptors —he first slew his wife to prevent her falling into Roman hands, then committed suicide. The Achaean War was over, almost before it had begun. Mummius gave his troops carte blanche to loot and destroy Corinth. … Women and children were sold into slavery; any men still in the city when it fell were slaughtered without mercy..

A few years later, the kingdom of Pergamon doesn’t even bother to fight a doomed war. Instead, its final king simply wills his kingdom to Rome rather than let it inevitably be violently devoured.6 The Seleucid kingdom is rendered so pathetic by repeated civil wars that its final destruction is a borderline afterthought, a mere item of business as Pompey the Great reorders the East. When the last Hellenistic state in Egypt finally falls, it is a conquest long overdue — and while Christian apologists know to point out that the Great Library was probably destroyed by Caesar rather than angry Christians, the truth is even that is probably untrue. By 30 B.C., Alexandria’s best artists and scholars were long-gone and the library was a relic.

But amid the despair of civilizational destruction, Alexander to Actium offers a peculiar sort of hope.

Even as the Greeks collapsed, their cultural legacy would live on thanks to the fortunate biases of their conquerors. As Rome thrashed the Greeks in one war after another, it only grew more and more philhellenic in its attitudes, no matter how much the Greeks themselves saw the Romans as uncultured boors. Most of our surviving Greek art actually comes from the huge number of copies made for a Roman mass market — or sent west by other means:

After the sack of Corinth, with priceless art treasures being piled up on the quayside for removal to Rome (Polybius says he saw soldiers playing draughts on stacks of classical paintings), Mummius—who, as Strabo says with demure wit, was a generous patron rather than an art lover—apparently insisted on retaining one regular clause in his contract with the shipping agency: if any of these objets-d’art were lost or destroyed in transit, they were to be replaced by others of equal value.

The Romans didn’t have much appreciation for artistic innovation or novelty. They liked “conservative, academic, classicizing” art, an “eclectic, sterile (and often mechanical) re-creation of the past.” And for cash, the Greeks were happy to supply it…but there are worse fates than mass-producing the greatest art of yesteryear.

It wasn’t just artifacts. By the first century B.C., the mightiest cities of classical Greece had been reduced to tourist attractions, their populations mere curators for a museum of past greatness. The Spartan agoge, used to train the hoplites who fell at Thermopylae, became a brutally violent spectator event put on for wealthy visitors. Roman elites would do a stint of study in Athens like a British lordling making his Grand Tour to Italy (or like a Chinese scion studying at Harvard?).

For the cities that had once defined civilization itself, it was profoundly humiliating. Yet thanks to the Romans’ new money enthusiasm, the classics endured. They were copied, remembered, and eventually, rediscovered. If the Greeks were no longer relevant, they were at least revered.

I can’t help but think of today. While Western popular culture sinks to lower and lower common denominators, the Chinese are founding dozens of professional symphony orchestras. While we struggle to build anything at all, let alone anything beautiful, Huawei’s vast corporate campus imitates a dozen great European cities.

So majestic was the Greek achievement that, even millennia after their fall, “the extraordinary aura [of Athens] survived, and still survives, all time’s vicissitudes.” Will our own civilization be so fortunate?

• The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons From a Five-Time CRO, John McMahon (Self-published, 2021).

It’s interesting to consider which professions obsess over “lineages.” For instance an academic philosopher and a Brazilian Ju-Jitsu fighter may not have much in common, but they can both tell you not just who their teacher/mentor was, but who that guy’s teacher/mentor was, and so on, sometimes going back centuries.1 This is not true in most fields, but you may be surprised to learn that it is true in B2B enterprise software sales. Talk to a successful sales guy, and he will find a way to slip into the conversation that he came up under so-and-so, and that so-and-so worked for the legendary Mark Cranney (Ben Horowitz’s head of sales). But talk to enough of them, and you will start to notice that a huge proportion of their lineages all converge back on a single guy named John McMahon.

You may never have heard of John McMahon, but he’s one of the most influential people alive today (there are many such people, because the world is fractally interesting). American economic growth is increasingly dominated by a handful of companies that sell software subscriptions at eye-watering margins to other large companies, and most such companies are run by John McMahon’s disciples. All enterprise software sellers today speak a common vocabulary, and that vocabulary was invented by John McMahon. Enterprise software sellers, like all professions, have weird feuds and religious disputes about what exactly the letters in various acronyms should stand for, but the acronyms were invented by John McMahon. The rival factions and schools in enterprise software sales mostly argue about the correct way to interpret John McMahon’s thought, because he is the great teacher and systematizer who laid down the laws of their world.

The reason certain fields care about lineages is that they are dominated by process knowledge that cannot be written down, so the best signal of quality is not some credential, but rather which master you trained under. Imagine how silly it would be to think that you could read a book about martial arts, and then you would know as much as the person who had written it. Some things can only be learned through grueling practice, preferably grueling practice under the observation of somebody who notices all the tiny little indescribable things you get wrong, and shows you how to do them right instead. For my favorite allegory on this topic, go to this post and Ctrl+F “wheelwright pian”.

Selling software (really, selling anything) is another such activity. And while John McMahon is the guy who has done the most to change it from an art into a science, he is acutely aware that nothing he writes down in a book can help you unless you already understand the thing that he is trying to say. So like all good religious teachers, he speaks mostly in koans and riddles and parables. It worked for the Zen masters, it worked for Nietzsche, it worked for Jesus Christ, so why wouldn’t it work for John McMahon? The whole book is an extended allegory in which John McMahon is called in to advise a failing software sales team, notices the defects in their technique, and says or does something, at which point they are enlightened. No really, all of these stories are structurally identical to the koan of Gutei’s finger:

Gutei raised his finger whenever he was asked a question about Zen. A boy attendant began to imitate him in this way. When a visitor asked the boy what his master had preached about, the boy raised his finger. Gutei heard about the boy's mischief, seized him and cut off his finger with a knife. As the boy screamed and ran out of the room, Gutei called to him. When the boy turned his head to Gutei, Gutei raised up his own finger. In that instant the boy was enlightened.

Further enhancing the book’s surreal and dreamlike qualities are the fact that it is entirely written in the first person, and includes countless seemingly irrelevant asides like: “I knocked back my styrofoam cup of stale Acela coffee and slapped Andy on the shoulder.” John McMahon is constantly invading the personal space of these imaginary people — poking them in the chest, or clapping them on the shoulders or pointing at them and saying: “Exactly.” His capitalization choices are bewildering, until the realization dawns that he is capitalizing terms that he, John McMahon, has coined. Here is a sample of the prose:

There is urgency for the customer to buy now. Urgency was formulated in Scoping through the implication of pain. You created additional urgency to implement the solution within a specific timeframe during your meeting with the Economic Buyer, and timeframes in your Implementation Plan…

“We also anchored our price to the cost justification,” Jim said. “The Champion verified the numbers, and the Economic Buyer confirmed approval to move forward based on our justification. There is verified strength in our pricing.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The customer’s value realization is in your Business Case. Stay grounded in the tangible business value of your solution.”

John McMahon is expounding a technique, a process, a science of selling that starts with the discovery of a concrete pain that the prospect is experiencing and ends with a signed deal. Each of the steps is simple and obvious, but that’s his whole point. Fields dominated by process knowledge tend to be fields that take five minutes to learn and a lifetime to master. He repeats over and over again that there is no magic shortcut, there is no golden key, there is only perfection of the basic techniques, perfection won through endless practice. His bumbling imaginary people use his vocabulary and follow his sales methodology, but they do it wrong, they know the words but they fail to grasp their true meaning. Some of them eventually are enlightened, at which point John McMahon points his finger at them and says: “Exactly.”

He doesn’t just talk about sales. There are some very good reflections on leadership in a chapter titled “Caring is competence.” John McMahon’s lip curls in disgust as he describes a company that tries to show that it cares for its employees by having group hugs. No, he says, you show that you care for people by making them great and by making yourself great and by leading them to victory. Read this, and marvel at how similar it is to Cambyses’ advice to Cyrus:

Pride is what people really want.

They want to be proud of the job they do. Proud of their increasing competence. Proud of the people they work with. Proud of the product they sell and proud of their company.

The only way to achieve an environment of pride starts with the leader doing whatever possible to help people win.

Pride is what people want.

Winning is the precursor to pride.

Competence is the precursor to winning.

Caring means making people competent.

I read this book right after Jane and I read Paul Fussell’s Class, so I could not help notice that most of the imaginary people John McMahon is pointing his finger at come from high prole backgrounds. This makes sense — sales is a field that demands a lot of aggression and agency, which the middle classes generally lack. But John McMahon himself is selling a very middle-class “power of positive thinking,” self-improvement view of the world. At the end of the book, subtext becomes text. One of the sales managers whom John McMahon has enlightened finally moves out of Boston’s working-class Irish neighborhood of Southie and into a nice house in the suburbs. And then, with a start, you realize that this entire book has been an example of the John McMahon sales methodology on the meta level. He started by discovering your pain, he created urgency, he gave you a vision of a better world, he made a business case, and now he has closed the deal.

“Exactly.”

• p-adic Numbers: An Introduction, Fernando Q. Gouvêa (Springer, 1997).

The p-adic numbers are strange beasts, and the easiest way I can think of explaining them is sort of roundabout. Let’s take a normal, finite number: could be an integer, a fraction, a non-repeating decimal, whatever. What is its size? How do we define its “bigness”? No, don’t look at me like that, it isn’t a trick question. We generally think of its size as just being the number itself. Like the number 3 is “3 big.” Unless, y’know, it’s negative. In that case, it intuitively feels, at least to me, like a number is “bigger” if it’s more negative. So we can define its bigness as how negative it is, and declare that -5.67 is “5.67 big.” Now if you remember grade school, the phrase “absolute value” might be popping into your head. You may even recall your 7th grade teacher defining the absolute value as “distance from zero,” which is a nice geometric way to think about it, and even nicer since it still works when you move to the complex plane.

Is that the only way to define the bigness of a number?

Mathematicians love questions like that. Take a familiar concept, relax one of its assumptions, and then torture it until it squeals. You may end up discovering the true essence of your friendly old concept, or you may discover a new plane of reality populated by strange beings. So is it possible to have an alternative notion of size? To answer that, we have to answer a stranger question: “What even is a size?” It would take me too long to explain why this is the answer, but generally mathematicians say something counts as a size if it meets three rules:

(1) The size of the number 0 is 0, and no other number has size 0.

(2) If you multiply two numbers together, the size of their product is the product of their sizes.

(3) If you add them together, the size of their sum is less than or equal to the sum of their sizes.

Take a moment to think about how the familiar old absolute value follows these rules. Make sure you toss in some weird examples, like zeroes and negative numbers. That’s the only way to stress test a definition! It works? Great, that’s comforting. But is there any other concept of size that would work?

Here’s a dumb one: we could declare that the size of 0 is 0, and that the size of every other number is 1. Check it against our three rules, it totally works. But it’s boring. Here’s a zanier one: pick a prime number, p. Now declare by fiat that the “size” of a number is the highest power of p that cleanly divides that number. So for example if p were 3, then the “size” of 18 is 2, because 18 is divisible by 9, which is 3 squared, but it is not divisible by 27, which is 3 cubed. This doesn’t quite follow our three rules, because for instance the size of a product is the sum of the sizes (just because of how exponents work). But we can paper over that by throwing some logarithms into our definition in various places. We can also extend this to fractions in a sensible way, and the result is a new definition of “size,” or rather an infinite array of such definitions, one for each prime. It turns out that when it comes to the familiar numbers these are the only other possible ways to define “size” besides the usual one and the dumb one.

So far so good? Once you have a notion of “size,” you can move on to the idea of “distance.” Just define the “distance” between two numbers as the “size” of their difference.2 That totally works with the size you know and love, but when you pull out one of these other sizes, things get pretty weird. In our wacky new world, numbers are closer together if they are separated by higher powers of p, so 1 and 10 are closer than 1 and 4. If we now act like demented topologists and try to visualize this as an actual space, it’s a disturbing and confusing one where, for instance, all triangles are isoceles. My own way of visualizing this is that we’ve ripped the numbers out of their usual locations and placed them in a vast tree, like the tree of life or a family tree, organized by powers of p, and the “distances” in this tree are measured how many levels of branches you need to traverse to get from one number to another.

Basically, you get the p-adics by taking this vast tree, and “filling in” all the gaps where the irrational numbers would have been. We can go much, much further. But at this point, my powers of visualization fail me, and I have to start scratching this out on paper with symbols, shuffling them around in accordance with truth-preserving logical rules like some peon. My nose is buried in the symbols, and I am clinging to them like a man in stormy seas clings to a bit of flotsam. I play with the symbols, but not their referents. I see them, but I don’t really see them, because I don’t see through them to the thing that they stand for. I am not used to this experience when I am doing math. I think it’s happening because I’m getting old.

Gouvêa is not helping this feeling, because he has written this book in exactly the spirit with which I wish I could read it. He’s breezy and informal, like your cool uncle. “Let’s not get hung up on technicalities, maaaaaan, just relax and ponder the sublimely infinite forest of numbers.” He does the thing I love where he introduces the subject through the twists and turns of its history. He literally has a chapter called “Fun With Your New Head.” This is a book meant to be candy for a mathematician, a fun romp that whets your appetite and makes you hungry for a harder book so you can really dig in. But it all turns to ash in my mouth, because I can’t see the vista he’s painting for more than an occasional glimpse. It’s there, and then it’s gone again, the fog rolls in, and my head hurts. I’m getting old.

Is this what it was always like for my classmates who didn’t love math? If so I would like to formally apologize to all of you for getting impatient when you couldn’t just see the answer. When you look right through the symbols to the things they represent, you grasp things all at once. When you shuffle the symbols around you can still get there, but slowly… painfully… You’re fording a river by leaping from rock to slippery rock, instead of by flying. And when you’re at ground level, sometimes you can’t see your destination, and then you run the risk of getting turned around and all your painful, halting progress heading in the wrong direction. Douglas Hofstadter once described hitting an abstraction ceiling, but this is less abstract than things I’ve successfully learned in the past. I’m getting old.

I’m not even mad, I’m just sad. G.H. Hardy has a famous quotation about mathematics being a young man’s game, but I didn’t think it applied to me because I’m not a mathematician, just a guy who reads math textbooks for fun. It’s not like I’m trying to prove Goldbach’s conjecture or something, I have zero ambitions of producing an original contribution to mankind’s store of knowledge. I thought the rule about very few people doing good math after fifty was about creating new math, I didn’t think it applied to people who just want to enjoy it like literature. Also I’m not yet fifty. But I’m getting old.

• Can We Trust the Gospels?, Peter Williams (Crossway, 2018).

The Haskell programming language has the inspiring motto, “Avoid success at all costs.” That is also my motto when it comes to this Substack, but despite reviewing some incredibly niche books over the years, people unfortunately keep subscribing. In desperation I reviewed math textbooks, but it wasn’t enough. I got closer to driving you all away with my review of Ross Douthat’s Believe, but that still didn’t quite do the trick. Let’s see if this one can complete the job.

A philosophy professor friend of mine once told me how his undergraduates got “one-shotted by Neoplatonism.” He had an introductory course full of freshmen, and decided to see what would happen if he tried to convince them that Plotinus and Iamblichus were right about everything. To his shock, they all totally caved, and whatever their backgrounds by the end of it they were firm believers in the Emanations. His theory about this was simple: they were an immunologically naive population. Neoplatonism was one of the most powerful memes around for centuries and centuries, and had duked it out with countless other philosophies. But by the time his students came around, it had been dead for millennia. So the ideologies they were raised with did not provide them with antibodies against Neoplatonist arguments, and it swept through them like smallpox through the Indians.

I think something like this explains the strange revival of Christianity in some of the elite corners of the Anglosphere. The waves of disenchantment that started in the 18th century (or, if you want to be really based, in the 15th century) had finally swamped society to the point that many of us were raised in almost total ignorance of Christian arguments. So when we encountered those arguments for the first time, they felt exciting, fresh, exotic even. Chesterton once said that in order to really feel the power of Christianity, we have to step outside ourselves and look at it as the pagans did. But those of my generation and social background didn’t even need to step outside ourselves to do that.

For those of us raised with no religion or close to it, there’s a lot of remedial work to be done after we convert. When you’re raised in a miasma of secularist assumptions about the universe, some of them stick around subconsciously even after you take the plunge. For me, one of these was Biblical source criticism. If you were raised in the modern West, and haven’t ever thought much about the topic, you probably have a background belief that the Gospels are not reliable historical sources and were assembled centuries after the life of Christ by pious scribes far removed from the events they describe. You believe this because in the 19th century there was a lot of very low-quality scholarship by people with an axe to grind, and people haven’t yet gotten the memo that it was all incorrect. Fortunately, Peter Williams is here to solve your problem.

Like the Gospels themselves, Williams’ book is simple, short, and direct. It makes its case in plain and unadorned language. He is not here to bowl you over with rhetoric, but to make the reality so obvious that even a child could recognize it. Take the issue of geography: the ancient Mediterranean was not full of atlases or travel guides, and yet the Gospels teem with geographic detail. They name villages, and lakes, and particular roads, and include travel directions and durations in their account — and these details are all, invariably, correct. Sometimes the places they describe were obliterated just a few decades later, but have been rediscovered by archeological investigation, which causes a real problem for the theory that somebody wrote them long after the fact.

What if they were written much later based on stories that had been circulating for a while? This is a favorite move of those who want to deny the divinity of Christ — just say that he was a great teacher, and the stories about him got more and more exaggerated over time until they were finally written down in their current form sometime after Constantine made it the state religion. But are we really to believe that the core point of the stories got totally corrupted in transmission, while all these hundreds and thousands of irrelevant geographic details made it through unscathed? That’s not how it usually works! Moreover, Christianity spread outlandishly quickly in the early centuries, across vast distances without modern telecommunications, and with no central authority trying to keep it all consistent. But it did stay consistent — the stories were the same in Spain and in Egypt, and in Southern India, and in Arabia. Consistent down to the minor geographic details of a place that none of the hearers had ever been. This historical reality only makes sense if the things that were spreading were not stories, but texts.

This is the part where the avid reader of the New Yorker gets a very superior smirk and says, “Ahhh…but which Gospels?” Yes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and Elaine Pagels has a lot to answer for. It’s true that there are apocryphal gospels, attributed to St. Thomas, or to St. Phillip (Dan Brown really likes that one), or even to Judas. But it is also true that from the earliest centuries of recorded Christian scholarship, nobody took these very seriously as eyewitness accounts and… oh, would you look at that! They don’t contain any geographic details. The “Gospel of Thomas” mentions Judaea once and no other locations. The “Gospel of Judas” literally mentions zero place names. The “Gospel of Phillip” mentions Jerusalem, Nazareth, and the river Jordan, and that’s it. It’s almost like these fake gospels are actually the thing that people accuse the real ones of being: texts written centuries after the fact by people with no real familiarity with the events that happened.

The geographic details are just one tiny example of Williams’ method. The man is very learned (not that you would be able to tell that from his simple and humble writing style), which means you get occasional treats like this note:

Earlier Hebrew had a longer and shorter form of the imperative of some verbs in the masculine singular. Hoshia is the longer form, and hosha the shorter form. The final nna is made up of a separate particle na preceded by a reinforcing n. Over time, the longer form of the imperative was entirely dropped. See also the short form hoshana, used in a sense quite different from the original in a fourth-century quotation in the Babylonian Talmud Sukkah 37b.

That’s part of an extended discussion of the word “hosanna,” which is a very old and common Hebrew word, but which appears in the Gospels with an unusual spelling that was only commonplace during — you guessed it! — the first century A.D. The book is full of nuggets like this, none of them a slamdunk case in itself, but all of them adding up to a preponderance of evidence pointing in one direction. And by far my favorite of them is the names.

Let’s suppose that the Gospels really are a historical account of real people and events, and not some later invention. Well the Gospels are full of named individuals, so we should expect the statistical distribution of their names to match that of the society from which they were taken. Sure enough, the fit is very good: if you go and tabulate the names found in first century Judaean ossuaries, the most popular ones by far are Simon and Joseph, and there are 8 distinct Simons and 6 different Josephs mentioned in the New Testament. The most popular female name at the time was Miriam (Mary). None of this is something that somebody making up a story centuries later would have known, and once again we find that the various apocryphal and gnostic gospels are full of weird names and names that were popular in other times and places.

Because you see, the thing about names is they wax and wane in popularity very fast! The most popular names in first century Judaea were not the most popular names in third century Judaea. They weren’t even the most popular names in first century Alexandria! Most of the wealthy and assimilated Jews of the later Roman Empire, the ones that somebody trying to fake the Gospels would have known, were Alexandrine. But the name distribution in the New Testament fits the name rankings of cosmopolitan Alexandria very poorly (common Jewish names in Alexandria included Sabbatius and Dositheus), and that of backward and isolated Palestine very well.

You can push the onomastics angle even further. Imagine that you have ten friends named Simon and one friend named Thaddeus. When you’re writing to somebody about Thaddeus, you might just call him Thaddeus, and when you’re writing about one of the Simons, you’d include extra information to disambiguate him. Every bit of the Gospels, down to the random side conversations, fits this principle perfectly. Here’s the list of disciples given in Matthew’s Gospel, with a number in brackets after each one designating the rank of that name among Palestinian Jews, and the disambiguating phrases in bold:

The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon [1], who is called Peter, and Andrew [>99] his brother; James [11] the son of Zebedee, and John [5] his brother; Philip [61] and Bartholomew [50]; Thomas [>99] and Matthew [9] the tax collector; James [11] the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus [39]; Simon [1] the Zealot, and Judas [4] Iscariot, who betrayed him. (Matthew 10:2-4)

Note how the common names (Simon, James, Matthew, Judas) are disambiguated in some fashion, while the unusual names (Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas) are not, presumably because people knew who they were talking about. Or as Williams puts it, “not only are the names authentically Palestinian, but the disambiguation patterns are such as would be necessary in Palestine, but not elsewhere.” The crazier thing is that this pattern also happens in speech, that is in quoted statements or recorded conversations within the Gospels. It seems unlikely that somebody making up those conversations centuries later would take care to have their characters specifically disambiguate the names that were most common back then, and not the others.

There’s a lot more in this book besides names and places. I especially enjoyed the section on “undesigned coincidences,” where a story appearing in only one of the Gospels subtly or indirectly explains an occurrence mentioned in a different one. But perhaps we should turn to arguments against the historicity of the Gospels. What is the strongest argument that they must have been written much later? As far as I can tell, there’s only one: Jesus clearly prophecies the destruction of the Second Temple and the accompanying sack of Jerusalem, and those events happened in 70 A.D. In other words, if you start from the assumption that the Lord could not have known of future events then you are stuck with a timeline that strains credulity in every other way. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

The following is an email exchange between the Psmiths, edited slightly for clarity.

Jane: People are always saying that Americans don’t like to talk about social class. In some sense this is true: we’ve never had a legible and clearly-articulated class system along English lines, and we pride ourselves on our society’s mobility. (Well, we pride ourselves in the ease with which people can move up. The corresponding and inevitable movement down, which is logically required lest everyone should be above average, is sometimes a matter for schadenfreude but never pride. “Ah, America, land of failsons,” said no one ever.) Still, we do have a system of social status — and attempting to limn its details makes people just as uncomfortable today as it did forty years ago, when Paul Fussell opened this book by saying that people reacted to the project as if he had said “I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.”

But in another sense “Americans don’t like talking about social class” is dead wrong. We love talking about class. We just don’t realize we’re doing it.

Classes are just cultures, and like all cultures they are rich in ideas about how one behaves and what one values. Traditionally they run in parallel, fairly siloed from one another — if you’re the sort of person who reads The New York Review of Books you can be pretty sure that the things you read there are addressed to people like you, and ditto People Magazine for quite a different sort of person. With social media, though, we’re suddenly talking across those parallel lines far more than we did before, to great confusion all ‘round. Perennial topics of stupid online debate like “who should go to college and what should they study there?” or “should mothers have paid employment?” or “what should you look for in a spouse and how should you make yourself appealing to your prospects?” all rest so thoroughly on the unstated assumptions of the speaker’s social class that the two sides can’t even settle on the terms of the disagreement.

Our difficulty in seeing this isn’t helped by the fact that we don’t even agree on what “class” means. Something like ninety percent of Americans describe themselves as middle class, but what does that mean? Is someone who makes $100,000 a year middle class? Well, that depends — is that the guy who owns a roofing company and tows his powerboat to the lake on the weekends? The actuary who’s carefully aerating the lawn of the brick colonial he bought in a good school district? Or the orchestra tympanist who spends his summer off at his high school buddy’s house on the Vineyard? Class, properly considered, is all the things that separate these men. Two women may have similar salaries — they may even have gone to the same school and work at the same job — but their class background is immediately apparent in how they dress, eat, decorate their homes, and name their children. (Quick, tell me what Brooklynn’s mother’s fingernails look like compared to Eloise’s mom.) After all, making or losing money doesn’t magically make you switch cultures.

Of course, defining class as culture is itself a potent class indicator. Here’s Fussell:

At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have. In the middle, people grant that money has something to do with it, but think education and the kind of work you do almost equally important. Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style, and behavior are indispensable criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.

But I’m right, and so is Paul Fussell: social class, as a hierarchical status system, is necessarily defined by the people at the top. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re high — what matters if the people who actually are high think you’re one of them, and they make those determinations based on innumerable tiny indicators that don’t consciously register unless you train yourself to see and analyze them (as, for example, by reading this book). It’s not a guide to changing your class, which is as hard to do as stepping outside any other aspect of your worldview, but just noticing what there is around you will help you to understand the world.

Fussell divides American society into nine classes: top out-of-sight, upper, and upper middle classes all constituting relatively high, then middle class and three degrees of proletarian in the middle, with destitute and bottom out-of-sight at, well, the bottom. The top out-of-sight and the very lowest classes concern him very little, being mostly invisible, but he spends some time distinguishing the others, so let’s give a brief outline so we’re all on the same page.

The upper class is generally wealthy (although class signifiers can outlast a fortune and shabby gentility is certainly a thing), but it typically works in addition to inheriting. Fussell: “It’s likely to make money by controlling banks and the more historic corporations, think tanks, and foundations, and to busy itself with things like the older universities, the Council on Foreign Relations,” and so forth. In most American subcultures it’s considered polite to compliment your hosts, but not so the upper class: praising the food or decor implies you ever doubted it would be anything but beautiful, delicious, expensive, or otherwise impressive. (Besides, they probably didn’t do it themselves.) Bizarre eccentricities are common, either because they’re so secure in their class position that they can afford to indulge personal preferences or as intentional counter-signaling. RFK, Jr. is a perfect example: only someone of the very highest or very lowest classes would put a roadkill bear in the back seat of his car, intending to take it home to eat. (The fact that he didn’t because he was, as the NPR story charmingly puts it, “waylaid by a busy day of falconry,” puts him firmly in the upper, if the fact that he’s a Kennedy wasn’t a giveaway. The Bushes are also upper class. The Pritzkers are too fat.) And although the upper class may occasionally produce a thinker, they are generally profoundly anti-intellectual; academic or literary achievement is regarded as a personal idiosyncracy akin to collecting beetles, not a load-bearing part of class identity.

The upper-middle class, by contrast, considers education — or at least the appearance of education — integral. This is the class of doctors, lawyers, and architects, financiers and shipping magnates, but also (at the poorer end) university professors, journalists, and those who work in “the arts.” Anyone who voted for Elizabeth Warren is upper-middle class, as is anyone who is delighted to tell you they don’t own a television. (The television itself is perhaps a less reliable indicator than once it was, because we now have so many more glowing rectangles in our lives; it was the telling people about it that was upper-middle.) Upper-middles do things like name their dogs “Phaedo.” Upper-middle class mothers usually work, and they regard their jobs as contributing as much meaning and purpose to their lives as do their children (even if their husband’s salary dwarfs their own income). Upper-middle class teenagers go to college, and typically major in things with no obvious commercial application like English, art history, or computer science. The upper-middle is the class that people mean when they talk about “elites,” and it may be the class whose specific visible cultural markers have changed most since 1983, but the ethos remains: a pride in their own sophistication, mixed with a certain bourgeois sense of shame. Like the upper class, the upper-middles may have trust funds; unlike the upper class, they are embarrassed to admit it.

The middle class, per Fussell, is “distinguishable more by its earnestness and psychic insecurity than by its middle income.” It is desperate to be correct and respectable, whatever that means in its particular context: one can become very wealthy indeed without ever leaving the middle class at all. The Koch brothers are middle class, and not just because they come from Wichita. Impressive displays of Christmas lights or a perfectly manicured lawn are telltale signs of a middle class house, which the middles will invariably refer to as a “home.” Anyone who has opinions about their neighbors’ garbage bins is middle class, as is anyone who goes around publicly opining on whether things are trashy. (I once enjoyed spectating at a fourteen-page internet argument over whether it was trashy to serve potato salad at a 4th of July barbecue.) The middle class loves euphemism and commercial jargon, which it thinks denotes sophistication — where uppers die, have sex, or buy shoes, middles “pass away,” “make love,” and purchase “footwear.” (Middles also purchase “flatware,” but uppers inherited their silver and would not discuss it anyway.) A mother who packs her child a lunch of sliced dry salami, water crackers, and manchego might be upper-middle class, but if she makes a point of calling it “charcuterie” she’s middle. Premium mediocre is middle class. And if this all sounds rather snippy — Fussell really has very little nice to say about the middle class, whom he blames for (among other things) “the euphemism, jargon, gentility, and verbal slop that wash over us” — there’s still something to be said for the middle class’s deep desire to fit in. They are the class of Mrs. Grundy (whose first name, in our more informal age, has been revealed to be “Karen”), and they are either the absolute mainstay of our culture or the final boss of someone else’s. Nothing can survive without a group of people anxiously devoted to maintaining it.

Below the middle class are the proles. Fussell divides them into three tiers: high proles are skilled craftsmen afraid of losing status, mid-proles are simple operators like factory workers or bus drivers afraid of losing their jobs, and low proles are in precarious or uncertain employment afraid of never moving up or earning their freedom. High proles are proud of their independence and their ability to earn a living with their hands, and they share the upper class’s scorn for the way the middle class worries about convention. Nursing, policing, and the skilled trades are the quintessential high prole occupations, which is why telling an upper-middle class father that his son should become a plumber is perceived as such an insult. Proles love wearing shirts or hats that bear messages or even just a brand name: Fussell writes that brand names “possess a totemistic power to confer distinction on those who wear them. By donning legible clothing you fuse your private identity with external commercial success, redeeming your insignificance and becoming, for the moment, somebody.” This goes double for bumper stickers, which are used to convey important facts about the driver on the machine that is an extension of himself. (The middle class also enjoys legible clothing, but they’re more restrained about it: a Coach bag is middle class, but that print with all the C’s is very prole. And only stickers for mainstream presidential candidates and children’s schools or activities are permitted on the middle class automobile.) Camping and hunting are prole; fly-fishing is upper or upper-middle but bait (“regular”) fishing is extremely prole. (Okay, fine, in the few parts of the country where there’s still mounted fox hunting, that’s upper class.) Wealthy proles (or “kulaks”), of whom there are many, indulge in motorboats and ATVs. They prefer new-builds on lots without old trees that might drop leaves in their gutters or fall on the house. They are blessedly free of middle class status anxiety, and feel free to do what they like and buy what they please. Unfortunately they have absolutely no taste. Donald Trump is a prole.

Many of the specific class indicators of 1983 have fallen by the wayside (the Official Preppy Handbook is no longer a good description of the upper-middle class), but the broad strokes remain: things are higher class if they are natural as opposed to artificial, if they are labor-intensive to use or maintain, if they are old, and if they are understated. A grass lawn is classier than Astroturf. A wool sweater is classier than a cotton sweatshirt, which is classier than a nylon jacket with a Nike logo. A creaky Victorian is classier than a newly built house, even if they’re in the same neighborhood. A sailboat is much classier than a powerboat. However, “classy” as a laudative is prole. The middle class says “tasteful,” and the upper-middle and upper classes just say “nice.”

John: It can be painful to have what Edmund Burke called the “decent drapery of life” torn away from you. For example, legend has it that playing too many FPS games can result in a kind of reverse pareidolia where the people you see in real life begin to seem like inanimate objects: lifeless marionettes or sacks of flesh. In one sense, this is a true way of seeing — after all, there is a level of description at which people really are just big salty bags of chemical reactions feverishly maintaining homeostasis. But being stuck in that mode of perception sounds like Hell. So you need to be careful what media you permit into the castle of your mind, because some of it might change the way you view people or society for the worse, might tear away pleasing illusions, might infect you with memes from which there is no going back.

A benign version of this is that ever since I read that book on clouds, I’ve been unable to just lie in my hammock and look at a pretty white cloud without thinking to myself, “Interesting, a cumulus congestus already and it’s only 1pm, somebody east of us is gonna have a stormy night.” But when the subject is people or culture rather than clouds, you may come to regret your new way of seeing. James Scott made it impossible for me to read ancient history without thinking of the barbarians as the victims, and Edward Luttwak made it impossible for me to read the headlines without thinking of Canadian and European sovereignty as a cruel joke. Whenever this happens, you’ve gained something but also lost something. Sometimes it’s nice to live in a world of fluffy clouds and pretend countries, without having your face rubbed in the disturbing reality beneath.

Fussell’s book is dangerous in just this way, and should be plastered with biohazard symbols and only sold in brown paper bags by surly clerks who give you a judgmental glare. Before reading it, you can drift serenely through society, unencumbered by analysis. You do the things you do because that’s just how you are, and others do the things they do, and some of them annoy you, and others seem familiar, and yet others make you feel small, but it’s all just random and uncorrelated, right? After reading this book that world is dead, that option is gone. You can now sense the currents of power and mimesis that churn around every social encounter, like those weirdos with the magnets in their fingers who can sense the location of your wifi router. Your innocence is lost, your delusions are gone. The other day when I suddenly had to spend too much money taking our children to a concert featuring works by a composer I don’t even like, for no reason other than that I felt it was important for children to experience the arts, I suddenly felt a dreadful chill and knew why I was doing it.

This book has even ruined Reddit for me. Yes, plain, simple, innocent, retarded Reddit. Fussell quotes an advertisement 40 years ago: “Create a rich, warm, sensual allusion to your own good taste that will demand respect and consideration in every setting you care to imagine.” It's hard to imagine a more pathetic striver appeal to status anxiety, but then I crashed into a Reddit ad for a firepit from this company.

What’s so striking about this is that it says nothing about the qualities of the product at all. The entire ad is about how this firepit will cause the other people in your life to stop regarding you as “basic.” Of course, “basic” is contemporary code for “middle-class,” making this an unusually blatant status pitch. And of course, like all status pitches, it's a lie. A product claiming to move you from Class N to Class N + 1 is almost invariably just cementing your place in Class N,1 and sure enough a gas firepit with faux-modernist styling is roughly the most middle-class thing ever.2

What makes the firepit so heartbreaking is that it’s almost an example of attempting upward mobility the correct way, since — as you note — in the upper echelons of the American class system, taste and style and behavior are what really stratify people. The problem is that the purchaser lacks the class background to understand the shibboleths and so gets led terribly astray. It’s like some poor fool trying to seem very educated and cultured by reading The New Yorker (if you want to impress, try the New York Review of Books, or better the London Review of Books).3 This information asymmetry is what defeats so many attempts at direct social climbing. You can’t make a frontal assault on the class above you. They will see you coming.

What can you do then? There is a technique, which I like to call “laybacking,” after a particularly strenuous way of climbing a crack in a rock wall by simultaneously pushing and pulling. It’s analogous to the observation that only losers try to climb a corporate hierarchy directly. The real trick is to ascend via a zig-zag motion, bouncing between a number of different companies, because getting poached away for a job one level above your current one is perversely easier than getting promoted where you are. Well it’s the same with status hierarchies, social class chief among them — if you want to improve your position, the trick is to find multiple incommensurate status hierarchies and use your position in one to slightly improve your position in the other, and then switch directions and use your newly improved position in the second to boost you in the first.

It’s like Andreessen’s advice that you become a double threat,4 but for a much cattier and more zero-sum form of progression. If you want (say) both rich people and academics to think you’re a big deal, you should tell the rich people about your academic achievements and the academics about how rich you are. But for this to work, it’s vital that the parallel ladders be truly incommensurate. If people in hierarchy A and hierarchy B know each other, or understand each other, or have dealings with each other too often, then your whole scheme will collapse. The key ingredient is the ambiguity. If they aren’t sure what your position on the other totem pole means, they will err on the side of caution and treat you like a bigger deal than you are. Foreign countries are great for this purpose (one reason ambassadorships are a hot commodity for the dedicated social climber), as are religious or artistic movements. If you show up to a cocktail party wearing a songkok and bearing a certificate declaring you to be the Grand Poobah of Brunei, nobody will know what it means, and they will enter an infinite loop while trying to compute your relative status before finally shorting out.

Anyways, back to taste, the striking thing to me is that these distinctions are all collapsing, as increasingly large numbers of Americans all listen to the same music, watch the same YouTube shorts, and read the same tweets. Fussell was already tuned into this back in his era, and called it “prole drift”: the tendency in the United States for all classes to drift downwards over time. Perhaps we can explain it via the barber-pole theory of fashionability spinning in reverse, with the highest classes emulating prole tastes to shock the middles, who eventually can’t help themselves in aping what they now perceive to be high. I think you see something like that process in many places, here’s a concrete example: underclass guys like NWA invent gangster rap → very posh kids shouting rap lyrics ironically → midwits embracing rap-inflected cultural products like Hamilton and Beyoncé completely sincerely. The middles and the uppers are doing very different things here, but at the end of the day everybody is listening to rap.

But it isn’t just the proletarianization of all media (obviously supercharged by the internet and by porn), simultaneously there's a loss of dynamic range on the high end. A couple paragraphs ago I jokingly parsed out the differences between the NYRB and the LRB, and once there would have been a lot of people laughing along. Today there are many fewer such people. Classical music once provided countless opportunities for snobbery and meta-snobbery, but these days when I attend a concert the average age is about 85. It’s even worse in the universities: say what you like about the boomer professors, they may have hated their civilization and wanted to destroy it, but they at least understood what they were trying to destroy. In contrast, the new generation are, as Helen Andrews once memorably put it, “pretty dumb”:

I mean that the majority of meritocrats are, on their own chosen scale of intelligence, pretty dumb. Grade inflation first hit the Ivies in the late 1960s for a reason. Yale professor David Gelernter has noticed it in his students: “They are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. It’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, conversable, interested, doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Looking back at the history of the twentieth century, just sees a fog.” Camille Paglia once assigned the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” to an English seminar, only to discover to her horror that “of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’.… They did not know who he was.”

“Dumb” is the wrong word here, what she really means is "ignorant." But ignorant of what exactly? Why does it matter that you know who Beethoven is (and that you be able to recognize even his lesser-known works from audio alone)? Well, even if you think the information has no objective value, it once marked you as a member of a particular culture. So what do we make of all this flattening? Does it mean that that former culture is dying? Or have its secret code words just changed? And if it is gone, does that make America more egalitarian than it used to be? Or has a different, alien culture just seized the top spot?

Jane: The former top culture has certainly failed to perpetuate its specific markers, but that’s nothing new. Once upon a time it used to be really important to be able to dance, bow, and even walk “correctly” — who cares about that stuff now? A hundred years ago, incredibly baggy pants briefly bespoke class and sophistication. And when Fussell was writing, a mere forty years ago, catching a glimpse of Burberry check was a clear sign that you were dealing with the upper (or at least the upper-middle) class. That’s definitely not true today.5 And yet the top culture remains the top culture: it’s just the visible manifestations that have changed. (Incidentally, and this is counter-intuitive, the “top culture” — the people who are producing and patronizing the culture-makers like artists, philosophers, novelists — is that of the upper-middle class. The true uppers, whom Matthew Arnold famously called the Barbarians, are marked by what Fussell terms an “imperviousness to ideas and [a] total lack of interest in them.”)

The real question is why the culture changed, and what it changed to. Because yes, there’s obviously some element of prole drift and we’ve undergone a great flattening: American culture has in general become less formal, the desire for upward mobility means that any marker of high status will be aped by those on the lower rungs until it loses its cachet, and the Internet has eaten everything. (Fussell laments that “there used to be different audiences for different things.” Oh, if only he knew.) But in fact I think the answer is hidden in the final chapter of Fussell’s book, which he titles “The X Way Out.”

Way out of what? Well, of class, of course. Becoming an X person, joining Category X, is your only way to escape! X people, Fussell tells us, are talented bohemians, independent-minded, an unmonied aristocracy drawn from all classes but rejecting all their conventions. X people just do what they like, regardless of what their class script says they “should” do. They “adopt towards cultural objects the attitude of makers, and of course critics.” They are “independent-minded, free of anxious regard for popular shibboleths, loose in carriage and demeanor.” They are self-directed, so they pursue “remote and un-commonplace knowledge—they may be fanatical about Serbo-Croatian prosody, geodes, or Northern French church vestments of the eleventh century.” So far, so good — you can probably add “weirdly into hill people” to that list.

But then Fussell starts to get into the details and my eyebrows start to rise. X people, he writes, reject bourgeois convention about things like dressing properly for the occasion: an X person’s outfit always “conveys the message ‘I am freer and less terrified than you are,’ or—in extreme circumstances—‘I am more intelligent and interesting than you are: please do not bore me.’” X people wear their babies, decorate their homes with exotic textiles, and cook Turkish or vegetarian or Thai food — preferably organic. And they prefer to cook at home, because they “go in for a lot of things you can’t readily get out, like herbal teas, lemon-flavored vodka, and baked goods made of stone-ground flour.”

For some reason, at this point I suddenly remembered that I had not yet unpacked my groceries from my Whole Foods run, so I had to put the book down for a minute.

It’s pretty obvious what happened here: sometime after Class was written, the upper-middle class adopted the trappings of Fussell’s category X. In fact, we can roughly pin down the date — when the book was published in 1983, the upper-middles had just been lovingly lampooned by The Official Preppy Handbook. When Metropolitan came out in 1990, the UHBs were manifestly still the same people doing the same thing in the same way (though they were beginning to worry about “the death of the preppy class”).6 But by 2001, when David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise described the new “bourgeois bohemians,” behavior that had once been a counter-cultural thumb in the eye of polite American society had become polite American society. Suddenly everyone was doing yoga and buying organic groceries and having gay friends. Women whose own mothers would have disowned them for premarital cohabitation were hoping their daughters would move in with a boyfriend because it might be the first step to grandchildren. The defunct blog Stuff White People Like is the bobo Official Preppy Handbook (though it isn’t as funny, which is why its book version didn’t do the same numbers). Forget about boat shoes and country club memberships: now it’s all about artisanal coffee, hummus, and riding your bicycle to work.

Or at least it was. Now everything that was hip in the ‘90s and the ‘00s has moved inexorably down the status hierarchy, which means you need innovation at the top — once people get the idea that eating ethnic food is a cool thing to do, you have to move on from the now-prosaic Thai and Indian to the still-exotic, like Bhutanese or Uzbek. (Other examples of this phenomenon are left as an exercise for the reader.)

But in a weird way this gives me hope, because it’s proof positive that sometimes you can change the top culture just by doing your own thing and being visibly cool. And yes, part of the shift is a change in the actual makeup of the upper-middle class — Brooks ascribes a lot of it to changes in Ivy League admissions policies in the second half of the 20th century — but many of today’s upper-middle are the children and grandchildren of the preppies. (Class position has a remarkable way of persisting across apparent cultural changes: if the entire Cultural Revolution wasn’t enough to dislodge China’s elites, I don’t know why anyone would expect the move from Greenwich, Connecticut to Williamsburg to do the trick here.) It’s just the signifiers that have changed, so being on top doesn’t look the same. Which is great news for the people who like those signifiers for their own sake! If you think that recycling and buying fair-trade coffee and going to therapy are actually good, then you’re delighted when they become markers of cultural sophistication. Now everyone wants to do the good thing! Does it even matter if they’re doing it for social signaling rather than out of moral conviction?

All of which sheds interesting light on the idea that we can solve America’s birth dearth by making motherhood “high status.” I hope the preceding five thousand words of this book review have made it clear why that’s nonsensical (at least if you take it in the baldest terms), but in case it hasn’t I’ll spell it out: status in the American class system comes not just from what you do, but how you do it. Even things like “going to college” or “being rich” aren’t enough to make you high class, and those at least tend to bring with them status-enhancers like spending your time in independent and autonomous pursuits, or freedom from physical toil. Motherhood emphatically does not do that. In fact, it does more or less the opposite. The parts of the maternal experience that are most universal across time, space, and class lines are the ones that involve the most interruption, limitation, and wiping of butts and noses, none of which is the kind of thing that’s ever going to imbue status.

And yet women of all social classes still have kids (…for now), and like everything else different classes have different ways of raising them. The current trend, which everyone feels like they ought to emulate because it’s practiced by the upper-middles, is for an approach that’s so high intensity and high investment (in both time and money) that it’s hard for even the wealthy to manage it with more than two — and borderline impossible for anyone farther down the hierarchy to do at all. But even if we’re never going to make motherhood qua motherhood high status, history suggests that we might be able to change the way women who are already high status raise their kids and it’ll eventually bubble down to everyone else. (This is what you suggested last time we wrote about this; I was unconvinced then, but I’ve come around.) Those changes almost definitionally can’t make actual high-status motherhood “more accessible,” because anything that everyone can do won’t work as a status marker, but if upper-middle class parenting borrowed a bit from the category X vibe of “I am freer and less terrified than you are,” the way upper-middle class clothing already has — if there were a little less intensity and a little more sprezzatura — if the flex became not how many instruments, extracurricular activities, and European trips your children experienced but how full and joyful life was with your vigorous brood — there might be a few more babies.

Do I think this is likely to happen? Not really: the structural forces pushing for ever-greater parental investment are powerful, and small children make it hard to do many of the things that do convey status. But even a few more women deciding they don’t care about the standard script and becoming “X moms” in an act of glorious self-barbarization would be good for us.

The trouble with becoming a X person of any sort is that you need to know exactly what the rules are — and at the same time, you have to not care about them at all. This more or less means you have to be either a disaffected member of one of the higher classes (or someone who’s spent enough time with them to understand their ways); after all, proles don’t mimic the status displays of the upper-middles either, but that’s because they’re following their own scripts, not writing a new one.7 Doing exactly as you please, thumbing your nose at silly conventions, flaunting your freedom from the standard American ways of displaying status, is only cool if you’re obviously doing it on purpose, and the best way to do that is subtlety. If you show up at a fancy party in jeans it might simply be because you didn’t know what to expect, which is neither classy nor cool. Better to wear a suit when most men are in black tie, or a sportcoat if they’re in suits — something that makes it clear you’ve understood the brief but chosen to ignore it.

Clothes aren’t a good example any more, though, precisely because the widespread adoption of what were then category X markers means our shared norms of dress have all but disappeared. (The guy who shows up at the fancy party in jeans might be trying to imitate X/bobo nonchalance and not hitting the notes quite right, or he might be brashly signalling his distaste for this effete nonsense, both of which are even more cringe than not knowing the rules in the first place.) But my point remains even if you have to interpret it metaphorically! Today’s X people show that they are X people by quietly breaking social rules about things people actually still care about, like college admissions or the correct political opinion. Putting an “I bought this before I knew he was a Nazi” bumper sticker on your Tesla is middle class, indicating your deep concern with social respectability. The upper-middle thing is to put it on your Ford, a cleverly ironic gesture that simultaneously displays your historical knowledge and mocks middle class status anxiety. To be category X today, you’d have to put it on a Volkswagen.

John: Ah, we’ve finally gotten to politics. The curious thing about American politics is that it’s the exact opposite of media and the arts: political class-coding and class segregation have gotten vastly stronger over time. Only 20 or 30 years ago, both major parties had prominent representatives from every social class, and most classes were split pretty evenly across the parties. Do you remember the “New England Republican”? That was actually just euphemistic code for “upper-middle class Republican,” much as “Reagan Democrat” secretly meant “middle class Democrat” and “Southern Democrat” meant “high-prole Democrat.” Watch either party’s convention, watch their congressional delegation, or their rallies, and there was a pleasing diversity in accent, dress code, and implied social position.

Today that’s all gone: the only classes that are still split anywhere close to evenly are the most ethereal reaches of the upper class (Matthew Arnold's Barbarians) whose imperviousness to ideas means their political stances are essentially random and often held as an ironic affectation; and the very most downtrodden of the low-proles, who are terrified or nihilistic, and either way happy to be wielded as a weapon by one of the major factions. In between, the various classes now tend to break heavily for one side or the other, and this explains a lot about why our politics have gotten nastier and more dysfunctional.

The ideological and activist core of the American left resides in the upper middle class. The American left’s greatest strength (its dominance of culture) and its greatest weakness (its inability to resist capture by totalizing intellectual movements) both flow directly from the strengths and weaknesses of this group. Upper middles are artists, intellectuals, and tastemakers, so the American left dominates the arts and the academy, and it has good taste. Upper middles (as heirs of category X) are also constantly seeking to one-up each other by adopting ever more fringe fashions, which is why the American left is constantly antagonizing 90% of the country with bizarre or destructive luxury beliefs like prison abolition, or like sending male rapists into women’s bathrooms if they say they’re transgender.

Next on the totem pole we have the “true” middle class. Pop quiz: where are they at politically? If your answer is that they’re Republicans, you’re about half a century out of date. That equilibrium was only sustainable back when the upper middles split between the parties, because remember, the fundamental psychic drive of middles is to become upper middles. Now that the upper middles have closed ranks, the middle-middles have eagerly adopted their political beliefs in the quixotic hope that they might be mistaken for them. But as we’ve explained, pretending to be a class you’re not is very hard. The middle-middles always get it a little bit wrong. They espouse the beliefs and shibboleths of the upper-middles in ways that are zany, or off-kilter, or trying too hard, and the result is often disturbing or uncanny. This is closely related to the “hicklib” phenomenon. Most TikTok videos of leftist women saying something utterly deranged are just the contemporary version of the very old story of provincial women trying to imitate their betters and doing it wrong.

But the second main drive of the middle-middles is the desire for conformity and security. Otto von Bismarck famously discovered that the middle class was the most powerful bulwark for small-c conservative politics, and it’s the same over here. So the fact that the American left is an upper-middle/middle-middle alliance is what gives it one of its most paradoxical qualities: its simultaneous embrace of radical transgression and smothering safetyism. The public health and regulatory bureaucracies are major strongholds of the middle class, and since that class now skews left, so do those organizations. In return, they have infected the left with the constricting and suffocating vibe that in Bismarck’s time we would have called reactionary. This partly comes out as zero tolerance for ideological (as opposed to lifestyle) deviance, but it also explains the zeal for minute regulation of everything from showerhead flow rates to workplace conduct. The inventors of Current Thing fads and discoverers of new oppressed identities are upper-middle class, but the people who force you to go along with it or be debanked are solidly middle.

Below the middles, we have the proles, and these days the proles are increasingly right-wing. Donald Trump is an avatar of this transformation, and an accelerant of it, but the ingredients were all there before he came on the scene. High proles are skilled artisans and tradesmen who cherish their autonomy. Mid proles are employees paid hourly, with little control over working conditions and forced to bear the brunt of the smothering bureaucracies (both government and private sector) that control and direct their lives and behavior. As that bureaucracy has gotten ever more onerous and shambolic and demented, the proles have developed a distinctly anti-establishment bent. And as the classes that direct the establishment have gotten polarized to the left, the proles have moved right. This explains many things about the contemporary American right: its populist and revolutionary flavor, but also its wild conspiracizing and its embrace of charismatic showmen and quack remedies. And most of all, it explains its dreadful, dreadful taste.

Consider the MAGA cap: could there be a more prole item of clothing? Number one: it is a baseball cap. Number two: it is in simple primary colors. Number three: it has words on it. Number four: the words are completely, utterly literal. Zero subtext, zero ambiguity. It’s no wonder these things drive upper-middles completely apoplectic with rage. The left-wing equivalents tend to be more passive-aggressive: like those “In this house we believe” signs (a middle-class demand for conformity) or like a Pride_flag-v2-final-FINAL.jpg with colors you didn’t even know existed (an upper-middle flex if there ever were one). The right’s prole-ward drift has happened very fast: Trump rallies are way more prole-coded than the Tea Party rallies of fifteen years ago. I even recall seeing a powerboat rally for Trump,8 which would have been inconceivable in the party of George H. W. Bush.

And the prole character of the contemporary right explains other things, like why they have trouble holding onto their wins. Some people may find that claim controversial, but it’s just true if you zoom out from the day-to-day political fray and look at the trend over the past few decades. A class-based analysis makes the reason obvious: modern right-wing politics in America are basically a peasant revolt, and the one constant throughout history is that peasant revolts never win. This also explains why the American right is so uniquely bad at building institutions (upper-middles build institutions and middle-middles maintain them), and bad — until recently — at seeming exciting and sexy. But that “until recently” is important! Remember how upper middles love to transgress common mores and shock each other with fringe fashions? In the last decade or so, a small coterie of them have discovered that the ultimate transgression is to become right wing. That group has had disproportionate influence on the recent direction of the American right, so disproportionate that it may destabilize the entire frozen conflict that defines American politics. This is the group that Curtis Yarvin has been calling “Dark Elves,” and he’s correct that they have something to offer the right that it cannot achieve on its own.

Anyway, how should we feel about the newly class-based nature of American political conflict? The answer is: very, very bad. Class conflict is so much messier and worse than sectional or ideological or other conflicts. The various social classes of a country are supposed to act together in harmony, and that depends on them seeing each other as part of the same nation. There are a lot of no-good things that happen when that breaks down. To take one example, the upper classes lose all feeling of noblesse oblige, and come to despise the proles. Because they despise them, they seek to replace them, and use mass immigration to weaken their bargaining power. Europe, which has a much older and more entrenched system of class conflict than ours, is farther down this path, and clearly heading towards some kind of social dissolution and serious civil unrest.

And on that optimistic note, anything you want to add before we wrap this up?

Jane: Oh man, there are so many things I couldn’t fit in here. Like the dynamics of baby names (the “reddest” names on this list, like Kyson and Oaklynn, are identifiably prole, though the blue ones read more “ethnic” than any specific class). There’s probably also something interesting to say about class-linked behavior on social media, starting with platform and frequency and extending right on up to the nature of one’s #content. Or consider the fact that all of the forgoing discussion is true of Anglo-Americans and the various immigrant groups who assimilated to America-2, but less universally accurate in 2025 than it was in the whiter America of the 1980s: “wealth whispers” is not just not a thing among, say, Persians, Armenians, or Indians. Or in Dubai. And how does it all relate to America’s regional cultures?

I was also going to have a long digression about one of those “here’s what I’m making my family” cooking TikTok videos that periodically make Twitter convulse with rage, but I couldn’t find it again.9 The woman in the video was fat, her kitchen was dated and cluttered, and the cheese she was dumping into her family’s dinner was pre-shredded in a store-brand plastic bag, all of which immediately codes prole, so of course everyone was furious about how unhealthy and awful her meal was. And often the meals in this genre are genuinely dreadful, but this one stuck out to me because the recipe itself was totally fine: pasta, sausage, some kind of creamy dairy something, cheese, bake at 350. With a little something green (spinach, maybe?) it could easily have appeared in the New York Times cooking section. And if she had been visibly higher-class — if her stove and pans had been nicer, or her cheese in a bowl on a tidy counter, and especially if she had looked different — the reaction would have been very different.

But let us paralipsize all that. Fussell closes his book with an appendix that scores your class based on your home decor — hardwood floor, add four points; any work of art depicting cowboys, subtract three; each bookcase full of books, add seven — and I had ambitions to compose my own scale, but I ran out of time. (Each piece of unironic word art: minus five. But what do we do with the American flag? It generally detracts from class signaling, but rich and classy coastal New England is festooned with them in the summers, flying over porches swathed in hydrangeas.)

All kidding aside, though, the best way to know where you fall in America’s class system is to pay attention to which part of Fussell’s book make you feel uncomfortably seen. When you cringe and say, “Oh gosh, how did he know?!” that’s when you’ve found your your people.

There are people who say “you can just do things,” and then there are people who at the age of fourteen stow away on an ocean-going vessel heading who-knows-where. Niccolao Manucci was the latter sort, and he held out down in that ship’s hold as long as he could, until hunger got the best of him. In fact, he lasted so long that when he finally gave in and presented himself to the captain it would have been inconvenient and uneconomical to return him to his parents in Venice. As the sailors debated whether to toss him overboard, press him into service, or maroon him on the closest bit of coastline, young Niccolao went and chatted up the other passengers. One of them, Lord Henry Bellomont, had recently escaped death at the hands of Oliver Cromwell, and invited Manucci to accompany him on an important mission to Persia.

That sounded pretty good to the teenager, so he disembarked with Bellomont at Smyrna, made the hazardous journey across Ottoman Anatolia, thence through Armenia, and finally to the Safavid Empire, where Bellomont declared himself an ambassador from the rightful king of England and sought Persian intervention in the English Civil War (!). The Shah was horrified by the regicide and amazed that the other Christian kings of Europe had not come to the aid of Charles I,1 but gently rebuffed Bellomont’s request by pointing out that it would be quite impractical to send a large army from Persia to England.

Frustrated, Bellomont set off once again with his young charge, this time to the Mughal Empire. He got as far as the port of Surat, where he suddenly died, leaving the teenage Manucci completely on his own, thousands of miles from his home, in the middle of a civil war.

I sometimes wonder how often this sort of thing happens without us ever finding out. Perhaps history is full of ridiculous people having ridiculous adventures, it’s just that most of them aren’t Zhu Yuanzhang, or they don’t write detailed memoirs, or those memoirs are lost or destroyed before they reach us. Something like this very nearly happened to Manucci. The Venetian teenager left all alone in India not only survived, but flourished socially and financially, lived to a ripe old age, and wrote thousands of pages of penetrating social observations. His account is both the most entertaining and the most reliable history of the Mughal Empire at its zenith. Manucci had the singular talent of moving through every social circle, from the royal court to the lowest of peasants. He interacted with generals and statesmen, harem attendants, Islamic jurists, Hindu sages, elephant drivers,2 Portuguese mercenaries, eunuchs, merchants, prostitutes, common soldiers, missionaries, beggars, and even the emperor himself. There are very few cases where we get to see a premodern society laid out in all its intimate detail and from every angle, and we only missed losing this one by the barest of lucky strokes.

The story of Manucci’s manuscript is a twisting one. The original copies of his tale fell into the hands of a French Jesuit who mutilated the text — excising all the fun parts, all the personal observations, the adventure stories, and of course anything remotely critical of the Catholic Church. The resulting “edition” found its way back to India and into Manucci’s hands before his death. Naturally, he freaked out and tried to reproduce his original text from memory, sending it along with a letter of protest by sealed courier directly to the Venetian Senate. But this second copy is the work of a much older man, much farther from the stories and events described, and has numerous omissions and differences from the original.3 In 1763, the Jesuit order was expelled from France and their Paris library, including Manucci’s first manuscript, was seized by the state. It was then lost during the Revolution and believed destroyed, before turning up in damaged and partial form at an auction-house in Berlin a century later.

Countless European intellectuals have tried their hand at stitching the mishmash of fragments we have back into a cohesive whole, including a “J. Bernoulli” (yes, one of those Bernoullis, but I can’t figure out which brother it was). But everybody agrees the most successful of these efforts was that by William Irvine, a British colonial administrator and fellow of both the Royal Asiatic Society and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, who also helpfully translated the whole thing into English. Irvine’s edition has been republished many times, most recently by the wonderful people at Forgotten Books, which is how it found its way into my hands.4

Irvine is not the sort of editor who confines his remarks to a preface and some footnotes. Instead, he directly injects his own commentary inline, into the body of the text. These asides range from bracketed remarks like “[here I have deleted a coarse and obscene description]” all the way up to essays dozens of pages long containing his reflections and opinions on the text. And this is layered on top of the various modifications and emendations made by French Jesuits and Venetian scribes. All of this gives the book a meta-textual, almost postmodern feeling. It’s a bit like House of Leaves. Sometimes you’re reading Manucci, and sometimes you’re reading three nested layers of people commenting on people commenting on people commenting on Manucci. And the effect is heightened when you suddenly realize that Manucci, like the protagonist of a Gene Wolfe story, is not telling you all that he knows.

How do I know that? Well let’s return to the teenage Venetian, suddenly orphaned of his foster father: “I was left alone, sad and anxious, having nothing to console me, nor anywhere to turn in order to recover my things.” Then things go from bad to worse: two other Europeans show up and steal the rest of Manucci’s stuff and coerce him into traveling with them to Delhi. But then somehow the young man scores an interview with the king’s vizier and, using the bits of Persian he picked up along the journey, convinces him to arrest the men who’d tried to abduct him. He parlays the vizier’s friendship into a royal audience, and thence into an offer of employment from the crown prince. In a short while, Manucci is a courtier hanging around the palace in fine clothes paid for by the state, getting tutored in Indian languages and Mughal history and correct deportment. He tells us that the only difficulty in his life was the need to constantly scheme in order to avoid being forcibly converted to Islam, and then interrupts his own narration to give us a few hundred pages of ancient Mughal history.

Are you rolling your eyes yet? Every bit of this story so far, starting from the moment he snuck onto that ship, is literally unbelievable. Irvine certainly seemed to feel that way, if his footnotes and interjections are anything to go by. He evidently flung himself into a centuries-later posthumous cross-examination, looking for any detail in Manucci’s narrative that’s out of place. He doesn’t find any. Worse, he finds numerous corroborating accounts in other contemporaneous sources. But if this story actually happened, then we are left with a nasty trichotomy. One of three things must be true: (1) Manucci is the luckiest sonofabitch alive. (2) Manucci has superhuman powers of persuasion. (3) Manucci is leaving out something important. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s a little bit of all three, because Manucci is a player character.

They walk among us. Lately the preferred jargon term has been “agency.” Before that people called them “live players.” In the old days they were referred to as “great men,” but that one’s my least favorite of the descriptors because it implies that they have to be like Cyrus the Great or Napoleon, when in reality they’re often much harder to spot. That’s because, as Samo Burja notes, player characters often deliberately cloak themselves in order to avoid detection by other player characters. These ones you may only notice by their aftereffects, like the lingering gravitational distortion after a singularity has whizzed by, reality warping as they knife through to their destination and then reconstituting itself behind them.

Humanity’s great sages have long known that every so often the planets are in a particular configuration, and a Child of Destiny is born. The real question is why. The fun-ruiners will note that in a world of billions of people, some of them are just going to be 6σ lucky. It is difficult for us even to conceive what it means to be 6σ lucky, and yet, like some bizarre object conjured by a non-constructive mathematical proof, we know such people are out there, somewhere in the wave function. But let’s not be fun-ruiners for a moment and consider the other possibilities. Maybe these individuals are chosen by God, or the gods. Or maybe they are the ones paying for the simulation, and therefore have access to the root login. Whatever their source, they exist. Often they spend part of their lives unaware of their true nature. And then…they awaken.

There was a little while when “NPC” was getting thrown around as a term of abuse, but as I have explained at some length,5 there’s nothing wrong with being an NPC. We come by it honestly. At some point, in the Springtime of your life, you bumped up against the universe, you pushed the boundaries, you pushed your limits. On that day, the universe pushed back. Hard. You learned your lesson, like a little kid who touched a hot stove. NPCs are formed from scar tissue, a fibrous mass of tough lessons about the nature of the world. But, as we have just deduced, there must exist people who, whether by divine ordinance or fluke of probability, had a very different experience on that fateful day. They pushed against the universe, and the universe gave in and gave them everything they wanted. And what lesson does that impart? Something like: “Rules are for the sheep, but you can hack the matrix and get what you want.” Now they are awakened. And the crazy thing is that if you keep getting lucky, not 6σ lucky, but just on-a-roll lucky, the awakened state can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some parts of the world really can be hacked with a little luck and a lot of determination. So there’s a feedback loop that can rapidly amplify mere one-in-a-billion luck into miraculous, reality-altering luck. That’s my attempt at a purely naturalistic explanation of player characters. Or maybe they’re just chosen by God.

Manucci is a slippery one. I only caught him because I read the first part of this book twice: once when I was reading it through casually, and then again as I sat down to write this review and tried to figure out how the hell to convey all this. Again, as with a Gene Wolfe novel, to understand the beginning you must have read the ending. In all the thousands of pages of narration, the one subject Manucci barely touches on is himself. That’s because Manucci is a player character practicing very high-level obfuscation techniques. This sort of misdirection is also the hallmark of a con-man, and what do you know: there is one brief, brief moment when Manucci gets a little too sure of himself and lets slip that he actually was functioning as a super-effective con-man back there in 17th century India. He wove his web of shadows around the Mughal aristocracy, and then he nearly got it around us the readers as well.

So we finally have Manucci pinned down: he is the subtype of player character known as a “guile hero.” You know them from stories: Odysseus, or Locke Lamora, or almost every character played by Kevin Spacey. Manucci is like them, his character class is either rogue or bard.6 At what age was he awakened? Was he already aware of his powers when he crept down that Venetian dock? And what really happened between him and Bellomont? Did he seduce the English gentleman? Or did he suss out his mission and blackmail him with a threat to make it public? Or did he just turn the full force of his personality on the hopeless cavalier and get 6σ lucky on his CHA roll? We shall never know. But if you are asking questions like these, then you now have the correct interpretive lens for what follows.7

Anyway, this is the point in the book where Manucci avoids our questions by launching into a scholarly disquisition about Mughal history (when he restarts the story it will be in medias res, and ten or twenty years will have passed).8 Irvine hates this section, describing it as “nothing more than a farrago of the wildest and most improbable legend,”9 and his footnotes and interjections only escalate in violence from there. But it’s fun. Manucci starts with Tamerlane, the last and most brutal of the great steppe conquerors, and gives abbreviated and fantastical biographies of all his nasty descendants through Babur, the invader of India and founder of the Mughal kingdom.

At this point, the biographies start getting much lengthier and filled with stories which, if not true in the sense of “actually happened,” are probably true in the sense that they convey import context and setting material about the world he’s about to plunge you into. They are also fun. Like the king who accidentally sends his best counsellor into hiding, and in order to locate him proclaims a ridiculous and self-contradictory law, and then sends troops to the only podunk village that wrote back with a reasoned and cogent objection.10 Or the queen who — when her royal city was about to fall to the Mughal king Akbar — ordered all of the gold to be melted down and formed into cannonballs that were fired in all directions to deny him loot.11 Or the king who ordered that an entire palace be built out of copper, but abandoned the plan when they ran out of metal (and when they discovered that in the summer it would literally be a giant oven).12 Or the king who lined his roads with vast pillars of rebel heads, and would swap in fresh ones as they decomposed.13 Or the European artilleryman who won the right for other European mercenaries to distill and drink their own liquor by deliberately missing all his shots when sober.14 But my favorite is the king who was obsessed with the question of what language a child would innately speak if never taught a language by another:

[The king] ordered the erection of a house with many rooms at a distance of six leagues from the city of Agrah, and directed them to place in it twelve children, who should be retained there to the age of twelve years. An injunction was laid on everyone that, under pain of death, no one should speak a word to them or allow them to communicate with each other. This was done, because one set of men asserted that they would speak the natural language, that which was the language of our first parents. Others held that they would speak the Hebrew language; others that they would not speak anything but Chaldean; while the Hindu philosophers and mathematicians asserted that they must infallibly speak the Sanskrit language… However, the twelve years having passed, they produced the twelve children before the king. Interpreters for the various languages were called in to help.15 Each one put questions to the children, and they answered nothing at all. On the contrary, they were timid, frightened, and fearful, and such they continued to be for the rest of their lives.

This brings us to the first of the kings that Manucci knew personally, the father of that crown prince into whose employment he so improbably entered. This king was Shah Jahan, whom you may know as the founder of the city of Delhi and builder of the Taj Mahal. Here, Manucci’s tone unmistakably shifts. We have left the realm of history and legend, and are now dealing with people that he knew personally and intimately. But even when Manucci is describing the most loathsome people, he can’t help enjoying their company. His portraits sometimes get judgy or catty, but always in a sort of bemused way. He can’t help liking these people, and that comes across so clearly that I in turn can’t help liking him.16

Shah Jahan famously built the Taj Mahal in a romantic gesture to honor his dead wife, but what’s less well known is that he went on to have one heck of a rebound. As the Sultan of Hindustan and King of the Kings of India, he had a harem full of thousands of eager women, yet he gradually destroyed his kingdom by repeatedly seducing or raping the wives of his most faithful advisors. Even this was not enough to satisfy his libidinity, and he established an annual fair where, for eight consecutive days, all men besides the king were expelled from the palace and tens of thousands of women of all races and nationalities were locked inside, while he toured them with his female attendants like a vast meat market.17 The most attractive women might be admitted to the royal goon cave:

For the greater satisfaction of his lusts Shahjahan ordered the erection of a large hall, twenty cubits long and eight cubits wide, adorned throughout with great mirrors. The gold alone cost fifteen millions of rupees, not including the enamel work and precious stones, of which no account was kept. On the ceiling of the said hall, between one mirror and another, were strips of gold richly ornamented with jewels. At the corners of the mirrors hung great clusters of pearls, and the walls were of jasper stone. All this expenditure was made so that he might obscenely observe himself and his favourite women.

Shah Jahan had other qualities (for instance, he kept a basket of poisonous snakes by his throne and would have them bite people as a form of execution, and he liked to punish his officials by placing rats down their daughters’ pants), but his total slavery to his lusts seems like the most important one, since he eventually blew up his kingdom over it. But the crazy thing is that while Shah Jahan may be the most extreme representative of “harem culture,” he was far from an outlier. Unlike pretty much any other European traveler, Manucci got to visit the insides of harems often, initially just because of player character energy and later on because he was pretending to be a doctor (oh yes, we will get to this). His reports are grim.

You have to understand that Manucci is very far from a 21st century feminist. I dare say, he is not even a 17th century feminist. And yet even he is totally disgusted and horrified by the reality of the harem once all the orientalism and fantasy is stripped away. A Mughal gentleman would have, depending on his rank and wealth, between a few and a few thousand18 young women locked up and guarded in a special compound. No other man was permitted to enter, so the women on the inside were guarded and waited upon by a combination of eunuchs and elderly matrons. If you were low-ranking, your harem might just consist of foreign slaves and daughters of farmers and peasants. If you were the king, you’d have some of those (if they were exceptionally beautiful), but also princesses and noblewomen from rival kingdoms, or the relatives of your own courtiers.

What shocks Manucci the most, I think, is how this completely destroyed trust between the sexes. The women are property. But they’re treated as fundamentally untrustworthy property that’s looking for any opportunity to “dishonor” the master of the harem by sleeping with anyone or anything else.19 Likewise, every Mughal man assumes that every other Mughal man is constantly attempting to break into his harem and ravish his nubile toys (granted, when Shah Jahan is around this might not be an inaccurate assumption). Yes, the harem is fundamentally about easy sex on demand, but it also weirdly rhymes with prepper fantasies about home invasions. The harems all have elaborate and over-the-top security procedures (not least the thousands of men who are castrated to be able to serve as guards). One gets the sense that the owners have almost as fun dreaming up and foiling ways of breaking in or out as they do with the ladies.

Meanwhile the women on the inside just sort of waste away mentally. Some of them drink a lot or do a lot of drugs, others try to outcompete each other in sluttiness when the master visits in the hopes that they will bear his children. Still others spend all their time scheming against the other women, or playing abusive tricks, or plotting how to sneak out or sneak their boyfriends in. Manucci has a few “regulars” who pretend to be sick so that the famed European doctor (no, he is not actually a doctor!) will be called in and they can…feel the touch of his manly hand when he takes their pulse. Is that all that happened? I rather doubt it, but Manucci doesn’t kiss and tell.

Most of the previous paragraph applies to Shah Jahan’s daughters too. Unlike the other women in the harem they did not belong to any man, but like them they were kept confined without family or purpose. Shah Jahan did not permit his daughters to marry, in keeping with ancient Mughal policy that the king ought to avoid having sons-in-law. The eldest, Begam Sahib, was her father’s favorite and had her own palace outside the royal court. She was a factional ally of the prince who was Manucci’s employer, and as an unmarried woman she was technically supposed to live in her father’s harem, so she maintained a large staff there that fed her palace intelligence. A lot of that intelligence then made its way to Manucci, who was close friends with her chief eunuch and a number of her maids. Begam Sahib led a scandalous life, and flaunted her many lovers and her use of various drugs. She was also fond of booze (which was illegal in the Mughal empire):

But the best liquor she drank was distilled in her own house. It was a most delicious spirit, made from wine and rosewater, flavoured with many costly spices and aromatic drugs. Many a time she did me the favour of ordering some bottles of it to be sent to my house… This liquor profited me greatly. The lady’s drinking was at night, when various delightful pranks, music, dancing, and acting were going on around her. Things arrived at such a pass that sometimes she was unable to stand, and they had to carry her to bed. I say this because I was admitted on familiar terms to this house, and I was deep in the confidence of the principal ladies and eunuchs in her service. I have no wish to state all that went on.

The next oldest child was Manucci’s patron, the crown prince Dara, “a man of dignified manners, a comely countenance, joyous and polite in conversation, ready and gracious of speech, of most extraordinary liberality, kindly and compassionate.” Prince Dara was also something of a xenophile: he loved Europeans, proclaimed himself agnostic on all religious questions, and enjoyed hosting and debating Christian, Jewish, and Hindu scholars.20 But his most important trait was a fondness for absurd practical jokes that made everybody at his father’s court hate him. Prince Dara was constantly ridiculing and humiliating all of his father’s generals and councilors (who, remember, were already reeling from the need to protect their wives and daughters from Shah Jahan). Manucci ends his description of Dara’s character with: “He might have been King of Hindustan if he had known how to control himself.”

We will breeze over the next five kids: two sons, who commanded armies in the field and nursed a festering resentment against their father and older brothers; three daughters, who lurked in the harem with smuggled-in boy-toys, and each allied with a different brother and fed them intelligence. But then… there was also one more son.

In 1653, a most curious omen was reported from the city of Rajmahal in Bengal:

At eight o’clock in the day there appeared near the said city, in a plain a league and a half broad, a great number of cobras, large and small. They covered the field and moved from West to East until four o’clock in the afternoon; they looked like ripples in the ocean. In the greatest fright, the inhabitants of the villages climbed upon the tops of their houses and upon trees. They beheld moving in the midst of the said cobras one of great size, which carried on its head another smaller one, entirely white.

Everybody consulted astrologers, and they got a lot of different, bad answers. They agreed that the small cobra riding on top of the giant one must be the King of All Cobras, but gave conflicting interpretations as to what that meant. Probably they just wanted to avoid the obvious one: there was already somebody in Hindustan nicknamed “the White Snake.” It was Prince Aurangzeb, Shah Jahan’s middle son, so named because he was pale of skin and slight of build and made everybody around him uncomfortable. Shah Jahan hated him because he was weird looking and because when he was a child a holy man had prophesied that the White Snake would destroy his family’s legacy.

When you’re born with the deck stacked against you like that, you have to get creative if you want to survive. Aurangzeb was a survivor. The first order of business was obviously to remove himself as a contender for the succession before he got arrested or poisoned. He accomplished this by becoming a wandering mendicant and ascetic, renouncing all earthly status, traveling to Mecca, and becoming so learned in Islamic law that people acclaimed him as mullah. The second order of business was to begin building his power base in the provinces, because the whole first order of business was a sham. So he did favors for the most important of the Mughals’ vassals and client states, led some successful military campaigns, and captured a large number of cannon which he stockpiled in his home base of Aurangabad.21

What does not seem to have been a sham was his asceticism or his religious conviction. I need to harp on this, because he initially pattern-matches our modern stereotype of a bad guy who cynically uses religion to his advantage. No, it’s more complicated than that. He was a bad guy who cynically used religion to his advantage, but his Islamic fanaticism was simultaneously 100% sincere. He also hated alcohol. As a young man Aurangzeb had a dalliance with a dancing girl who liked to drink. She died suddenly, which the prince interpreted as a sign from Allah pointing him towards a new and glorious path. Perhaps it was just that simple. Or perhaps, as Dr. Freud might suggest, the black sheep of a family permeated by harems and drugs and booze would naturally incline the other way.

So there you have the Mughal Empire under Shah Jahan and his four sons and four daughters, sitting around like an enormous pile of dry tinder perched on top of a powder keg. The crisis when it came was precipitated in a very Shah Jahan way. You see, he was sixty-one years old, and when a man gets older sometimes his sexual performance with his two thousand harem girls begins to falter. He sought potions and tonics from every corner of his kingdom, and one of them solved the problem a bit too well. The resulting erection lasted for three days, during which time he was unable to urinate effectively, which led to a bladder infection that soon had him on death’s door.

In fact, Shah Jahan recovered from his illness very quickly. But in those days, news traveled slowly, and everybody was already on a hair trigger for the inevitable succession war when the old man died. So while Shah Jahan’s fever raged, Dara began mustering an army, and when news of that (and exaggerated rumors of Shah Jahan’s condition) reached his brothers, they one by one declared themselves in rebellion on the flimsiest of pretexts. A few days later, when a new messenger arrived announcing that the king had recovered and demanded their submission, it was too late to walk things back. Everybody saw where they and the others stood. It was time for war.

If you’re genre savvy, you know how this ends. The civil war was an absolute curb stomp in which Aurangzeb annihilated the combined forces of his father and brothers. First he used his reputation as a humble Islamic scholar who’d renounced all claim on the throne to worm his way into the confidence of his brother Murad Baksh. He then magnanimously offered to lead his army for him, which turned out about as well as you can imagine for Murad Baksh.22 He consistently out-strategized, out-planned, and out-fought the others. He used poison and assassination to remove their closest confidantes. He bought off their top generals and advisors (who, remember, already hated this family because of Shah Jahan’s predatory behavior), and if he couldn’t buy them off then he played weird mind games to make his opponents think that he’d bought them off. In the case of one brother, literally every honest subordinate got exiled or executed for conspiring with Aurangzeb, and every remaining subordinate was actually conspiring with Aurangzeb. He went into battles outnumbered, and emerged with barely a scratch as the opposing army evaporated on contact due to backstabbing amongst its leaders and panic amongst its common soldiers. And the more he won, the more others were scared to face him.

This is the moment at which Manucci suddenly reenters the story, as a leader in Dara’s army in charge of a band of European mercenaries. All of the brothers employ huge numbers of white mercenaries, mostly Portuguese,23 mostly either as artillery specialists or as elite shock troops. The Europeans are valued for being more violent and more disciplined than the Mughal troops or their Indian allies, and also for being much less likely to run away. The Mughal armies are huge, but they’re mostly mobs of untrained peasants who treat war as a fun outing and refuse to attack without overwhelming numbers.24 The Mughal commanders are warrior aristocrats who love to display their martial prowess and act chivalricly. The Europeans, by contrast, are just professional killing machines who neither run away nor get overly hung up on niceties.25

The first battle that Manucci describes from ground level was lost by Dara because of a dumb decision and some bad luck. The prince was personally leading his vanguard from atop a great war elephant, and the initial shock of their charge caused part of Aurangzeb’s army to falter and retreat. To mop them up, Dara got down off his elephant’s back and onto a horse to run them down, but as soon as he did a rumor began to be spread that he was dead, and nobody could refute it by looking up and seeing him on the elephant. A weird mirror version of this happens in a later battle when one of Aurangzeb’s elephant-riding generals is killed by arrow fire, but a loyal servant prevents the army from panicking by crouching behind the corpse still in its howdah, and turning its head and moving its arms like some grotesque human puppet show. Since I apparently cannot resist drawing glib leadership lessons from these book reviews, let me just say that an important one is “always stay on your elephant” (ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω).

Dara gets beaten in battle after battle, but Manucci’s star just keeps rising and rising. Say it with me now: he’s a player character. Manucci keeps recounting meetings where the prince says something like, “well, we got totally destroyed out there and I don’t know how much longer we can hold on, but you’re just so awesome, Niccolao, so I’m doubling your salary and giving you an extra-cool turban.” It’s a good example of how you can’t let Manucci cast his glamor over you, but need to maintain a suspicious and hostile mind while reading (this is one thing Irvine gets right). So while it’s objectively true that Manucci’s rank in the Mughal civil service26 was rising at this time, I interpret these episodes as being 50% real and 50% fluff. The funny thing is that Manucci was trying to make himself look good to his readers, but he accidentally makes himself look good…at manipulating Dara.

I am glossing over a tremendous amount. Manucci spends hundreds and hundreds of pages on this civil war. There are crazy hijinks along the way. A lot of it is Manucci engaging in deranged player character behavior, of course, but not all of it. Dara’s wife is a colorful character who is constantly threatening suicide, then does things like feed tribal chiefs the water she used to wash her breasts to emasculate them and symbolically turn them into her children. As his odds grow longer, Dara turns to supernatural assistance and recruits holy men to petition Muhammed in paradise and request his intervention. The holy men go away and give it a try, then come back and dejectedly report that Muhammad is busy. Busy? Yes, busy, Aurangzeb is talking to him nonstop, and as a result their messages cannot get through.27

As the war draws to an end, Aurangzeb captures the capital and Shah Jahan, then in a bit of ironic contrapasso imprisons his father together with his harem in a palace that overlooks the Taj Mahal — the monument to his dead wife. He likes to humiliate his defeated enemies and make them suffer, especially if they’re his family members. At one point he doubts the loyalty of one of his own sons, and has him confined to a dungeon, and orders the jailers not to allow him to have or even overhear any human communication, and “to ply him continually with the water of opium until his mind was destroyed.” When he has Dara cornered, he announces his intention to make Dara’s wife into his concubine, which drives her to such despair that she finally does kill herself. On finding her corpse, Dara is a broken man, and barely resists as Aurangzeb’s soldiers put him in manacles and drag his children away.

Aurangzeb, who has now occupied the royal palace in Delhi, orders that Dara be forced to process through the main streets of the city as a prisoner. At one point a homeless beggar calls to him: “O Dara! When you were master you always gave me your alms; today I know well thou hast naught to give me.” Dara tries to give the homeless man his cloak, but is punished because he is lower than the beggar and has no right to give anything. A short while later, Dara is beheaded, and a gloating Aurangzeb stabs the head through the face, then orders that a feast be prepared, and that the head be cleaned up and sent to Shah Jahan’s prison.

[He] waited until the hour when Shahjahan had sat down to dinner. When he had begun to eat, I’tibar Khan entered with the box and laid it before the unhappy father, saying: “King Aurangzeb, your son, sends this plate to your majesty, to let him see that he does not forget him.” The old emperor said: “Blessed be God that my son still remembers me.” The box having been placed upon the table, he ordered it with great eagerness to be opened. Suddenly, on withdrawing the lid, he discovered the face of Prince Dara. Horrified, he uttered one cry and fell on his hands and face upon the table, and striking against the golden vessels, broke some of his teeth and lay there apparently lifeless… Then I’tibar Khan removed the head. When the old man recovered consciousness he began to pluck out his beard till it was all bleeding, and to beat his face; then, dissolving into a flood of tears, he raised both hands to heaven and said these words… “My God, Thy will be done.”

As a final insult, Aurangzeb dug up the sepulcher of the Taj Mahal and dumped Dara’s headless corpse into it, so that every time Shah Jahan looked out the window at the memorial of his dead wife, he would remember his murdered son, and so that the one sight out of his prison would never bring him peace or joy again.

But this was still just a warmup. Next Aurangzeb took Dara’s surviving wives and forced them to become his concubines, then had all of Dara’s children secretly murdered, and then launched a wide-ranging and ruthless purge of all Dara’s associates and allies. Manucci barely escapes with his life, but is eventually captured and presented to Aurangzeb who (naturally) offers him employment because he is a player character. Game recognize game, after all. But here Manucci does something most out of character, and politely declines. He has had enough of politics, and wants to go see the world. So he heads for the Indian coast and leaves Aurangzeb to quietly complete the slaughter of his entire extended family.

This section of the manuscript is one of my favorites, because we finally get to spend some time with Manucci, and he’s the one character I kept wanting to get to know better. When he’s writing about history and war and grand affairs of state, it’s very easy for him to fade into the background. But when he’s writing about his own travels and mundane events, even though he’s practicing the arts of obfuscation, he necessarily stands out a bit, and occasionally lets important things slip. For example, that he has agents placed in every major palace and royal apartment… How odd! Could it be that he was more than an adventurer and mercenary and former companion of the former prince? And then, almost five hundred pages into this book, he mentions that he was short on money and so went to collect payment from the Viceroy of Goa who owed him for “certain articles that he had asked me to send him when I was in the Mogul country.”

Yes, we finally got there: Manucci was a spy. Suddenly a number of mysteries are cleared up, like why he’s so well-informed, and why he collects favors from seemingly every dancing girl and scullery maid in Delhi, and why he’s so good at disguises,28 and why mysterious assailants keep randomly attacking him. Presumably somebody found it very useful to have him in the Mughal court, until things got a little too hot with Aurangzeb’s accession, and he decided to bail out. But how long had he been a spy for? And who was he spying on behalf of? Were the colonial authorities in Goa his main employers, or was that just a bit of freelancing? None of these mysteries have obvious answers, just like he never comes out and says, “I was a spy.” But if you interrogate the book, if you read it critically, I bet the answers are there.29 Manucci never covers his tracks perfectly, and besides I think on some level he wanted to be caught by his readers.

So we get to travel around 17th century Southeast Asia with him, while Manucci hitches rides on boats, battles crocodiles and pirates, makes careful sketches of port facilities… He even almost gets married a couple of times. And I know as I write this that I am merely falling under his spell like all those others did centuries ago, but gosh darn it I really like him. He’s friendly, and intellectually curious, and brave, and has a wonderful deadpan sense of humor. He is very smart, as evidenced by his command of almost a dozen languages, and he is also streetwise and rarely caught flat-footed. He assumes the best of everybody he meets, while always being prepared to unleash savage violence on them. And he has moments of real moral seriousness that you don’t quite expect from a sellsword and a charlatan and a rogue.

This is also the section where Manucci lets slip that he is a Catholic, and not just in the sense that everybody in 17th century Venice was a Catholic. The first clue is when he mentions offhand taking an extremely inconvenient detour on one of his voyages so that he can spend Lent in a town that has a church.30 Another hint comes via omission: this man is a spy, his morals are highly flexible, and he pretends to be many things he isn’t. But in all his escapades, he never denies Christ and never pretends to be a Muslim or a Hindu, even when that would make his life far more convenient.31 In one episode, we even get a foreshadowing of a modern Irish joke (which makes me wonder just how old that joke is!):

I fastened my gown or qaba on the right side, as is the fashion of Mahomedans. The Hindus fasten theirs on the left. I also went with my beard shaven, wearing only moustaches like the Rajputs, but without pearls hanging from ears as they have. The Rajput officers wondered at this get-up, neither Rajput nor Mahomedan. They asked me what religion I belong to; I replied that I was of the Christian religion. Once more they asked me whether I was a Mahomedan Christian or a Hindu Christian.

But the dead giveaway that he really believes in this stuff is his absolutely incandescent anger at priests and missionaries who by their conduct give the faith a bad reputation. There are a lot of these, and Manucci does not hold back in laying out their crimes (these are some of the most heavily censored sections of the French edition, and had to be patched up with the Venetian codices). Why would it be that this guy who has spent decades observing every sort of depravity only really loses his mind when he sees a corrupt priest? He is a mercenary who has waded through lakes of blood, and jaded to the point where he can describe even the most senseless massacre in a wry manner. But a hypocrite priest is betraying the One Good Thing that Manucci still believes in, something pure and perfect and beyond the grasp of this world, something that can never be pillaged or butchered or raped or despoiled.

All of this makes Manucci an even more perfect foil for Aurangzeb. Just as we are not used to the idea that a bloodthirsty dictator who lies and cheats his way into power might be a sincere believer, so we are also not used to the idea that a roguish, cunning, deceitful anti-hero might be dutifully saying his prayers every night. Neither one computes, but that’s because we expect people to be easy and simple. In reality, people are complicated. Manucci’s writing practically aches with religious longing. At one point he describes the martyrdom of a friar who apostasized, converted to Islam, and then returned to Christianity despite knowing that it would lead to his torture and death:

God avails Himself many times of men’s sins to exalt them, and to show that, although to some it may appear that He has forsaken them, He may yet save us as long as we are still alive.

I don’t think he’s just talking about the friar.

Speaking of Aurangzeb, how is the new King of Hindustan settling in?32 Pretty well, in fact! In a few short months, Aurangzeb launched sweeping crackdowns on alcohol, hashish, and musical instruments. Then he forced all dancing girls and prostitutes to marry. After that he kicked off a pogrom against his Hindu subjects by poisoning or arresting most of his Hindu courtiers, then banning their religious festivals, and then sending out an army to smash and desecrate every famous temple or religious idol within reach.

You might wonder how popular this all made him. The answer is “very popular.” He still sometimes wore the garb of a wandering ascetic, and many of his subjects were sincerely convinced that he received prophetic visions. Aurangzeb encouraged this belief by installing an all-seeing network of spies and informers, who told him all kinds of random facts about random people, which he then used in public demonstrations to appear omniscient. Even the people who didn’t like him believed that he was a great and powerful sorcerer, and he became known as “the miraculous king.”

A sign of how total his grip on the empire was is the reaction when Aurangzeb got very sick. As you will recall, an illness was the trigger for the rebellion against Shah Jahan’s rule. But in Aurangzeb’s case, all his children and vassals and courtiers sat terrified and well-behaved while he ailed, because they all assumed it was just a trick to smoke out traitors. Nobody dared to plot against the guy who was so fiendishly good at plotting. He had creative solutions to domestic problems too, like forcing disobedient daughters to marry their imprisoned brothers, so that they couldn’t legally run off and marry somebody else and produce a legitimate claimant against him. Of course Shah Jahan was still locked in his harem, but that was only a problem for a little while longer:

One day Shahjahan was in front of a mirror adjusting his moustaches, and these two women were standing behind him. One made a sign to the other, as if mocking the old man who wanted to get himself up as a youth. Shahjahan saw the gesture, and, touched in his reputation, had recourse to drugs to maintain his strength in his accustomed vices. By these his bladder was so weakened that a retention of urine came on. For this no remedy could be found, he being now an old man and much enfeebled.

And so Shah Jahan died as he lived.

As the new king was settling in, the old scholar who had been his childhood tutor heard about his accession and about the propitious start to his reign. The teacher made the long journey to court to present himself and to receive the gratitude (and surely also a financial reward) from his former student. Instead, Aurangzeb publicly humiliates the old man and accuses him of only teaching useless and impractical lessons. He rages at him, “You should have told me how to gain friends, to take or besiege fortresses, and fight pitched battles.”

And he has a point. While some more fortunate princes are taught these lessons systematically, Aurangzeb is truly a self-made man. His royal upbringing was as much an obstacle to the throne as a stepping-stone, insofar as it made him a prime target for assassination his entire childhood. He doesn’t even look like his father and brothers, are we even sure he’s really his father’s son? Everything that got him here — his craftiness, charisma, knowledge of poison, skill in battle, his talent for instilling fear and commanding obedience — it’s all self-taught, all learned on the job during an adolescence that was one protracted struggle for survival and then supremacy. And if, as we might suspect, the “white snake” is not actually of the blood of Tamerlane, but a bastard sired by a commoner who snuck into Shah Jahan’s harem, then he is truly one of the all-time great rags to riches stories. Dare we even say…a player character?

Could it be? What are the odds that there were not one, but two player characters running around the Mughal Empire in the 1650s, and that one of them became the king? But on the other hand, if we examine Aurangzeb’s career less historically and more novelistically, he is clearly the sort of dark and edgy villain protagonist that you love to hate.33 So is Manucci actually the main character of this story? Or is it Aurangzeb, and Manucci is just the unreliable narrator who crosses paths with him? Some may resist the idea of this psychopathic monster as the main character of 17th century India, but Manucci has no time for that:

Those are kings whom God appoints, but as they know not His secret purposes, men decline to acknowledge those who unjustly seize some kingdom. All the same, the saying in the Proverbs of Solomon, chapter viii., is incontrovertible: Per me reges regnant. God alone raises men to the throne to be either a scourge or a solace to their subjects.

And it clears some things up, like his insane runs of luck, and like the fact that he played the game on a completely different level from all the other contenders. There are people who sort of sleepwalk through life, and there are people who treat every situation they’re in as a scenario in a game and then work out from first principles what the optimal actions are for winning the scenario. Manucci and Aurangzeb are strange mirrors for each other in one more way: at times they seem like the only guys who are really trying.

If we can’t admire Aurangzeb morally, we can at least admire him aesthetically. There is something darkly beautiful about watching somebody so lethally ambitious and unprincipled at work. He may be a bastard (in both senses), but he is a magnificent one. He is the villain whom we can’t help chuckle with as he stays one step ahead of the hero. He’s something dangerous and powerful, like a shark on the hunt, which we enjoy watching so long as we can stay out of its way. No doubt Manucci sensed it too, which is why he turned down that generous offer of employment. Player characters usually try to avoid each other after all. We can only conclude that for all his powers of observation, Aurangzeb didn’t notice Manucci’s true nature. A good thing too, since if he had, Manucci probably would not have survived to write this book.

Deprived of his royal subsidies and no longer working as a soldier-for-hire, Manucci needed to find a new source of income. Fortunately he soon discovers that he is exceptionally skilled at medicine and declares himself to be a great and wise doctor. This makes perfect sense because, in 17th century India, doctors cannot meaningfully treat the vast majority of their patients. So the most important qualifications for a doctor are a jocular manner and ability to fill conversational gaps, panache and dramatic flair sufficient to awe a patient and their family, and a preternatural instinct that lets them take credit for recoveries and preemptively distance themselves from hopeless cases.34 Here is an example of his medical technique, practiced on his first patient, an Uzbek ambassador:

To induce him to believe that I was a great physician, I asked the patient’s age, and then for a time I assumed a pensive attitude, as if I were seeking for the cause of the illness. Next, as is the fashion with doctors, I said some words making out the attack to be very grave. This was done in order not to lose my reputation and credit if he came to die.

But soon, he gets more ambitious than mere talk therapy. The case that makes his reputation is an old woman who is so sick and weak she barely has a pulse. Manucci builds an improvised enema out of a hookah pipe and a cow’s udder, and violently administers cleansing potions made up of ingredients selected from “certain books” for their geomantic significance. Then he nervously waits. He knows how risky this is, for “a happy cure at the start suffices to give the greatest credit, even if the cure be a mere accident. On the contrary, if there is failure in the first case, even when the doctor is exceedingly learned and experienced [lmao], it suffices to prevent him ever being esteemed.”

Fortunately, the treatment is a total success. Manucci gains a reputation as a doctor capable of “resuscitating the dead.” Soon every Mughal aristocrat is seeking out the services of the great Hakim Niccolao. This almost gets him in trouble, when he is called in to cure a governor who has been poisoned on Aurangzeb’s orders. But he’s able to wriggle out of that one, and keeps his reputation intact despite letting the man die. Soon he is treating everybody from princesses to the destitute. In one case a wealthy and powerful eunuch, who has had his nose and ears removed as a punishment, begs Manucci to cure his disfigurement by cutting the sense organs off a fine-looking slave and causing them to fuse with his own face. Manucci ultimately declines, but not before teasing the slave a bit with a threat to do it.

He may avoid nonconsensual nose transplants, but Manucci does get into some pretty weird stuff. For example: Manucci is a huge fan of bloodletting, which leads the jealous native doctors to start a scurrilous rumor that he is a vampire who drinks the blood of his patients. Just as I was getting outraged on his behalf, however, Manucci mentions that he got really excited upon learning that two morbidly obese men had been condemned to death and petitioned the magistrate to let him harvest human fat from the corpses for use in ointments and potions. This leads a succession of outraged fanatics, both Muslim and Christian, to come try to kill him. He escapes them all, through “God, who seemed to cherish a special desire for my protection.”35 Later, after he’s talked one of them out of killing him, the guy admits to consuming human flesh, but chastises Manucci that you’re supposed to do it discreetly.

And then, we get to the exorcisms. When he is universally recognized as the greatest of all doctors, when his star can rise no further, Manucci decides to convince the population that he is a NECROMANCER who can command demons. “This idea spread because I was a man capable of conversation, in which I showed my nimbleness of wit whenever an occasion presented itself.” It turns out this was also a huge business opportunity, and “they brought before me many women who pretended to be possessed (as is their habit when they want to leave their houses to… meet with their lovers).” Manucci is able to cure the women, eventually, but first he has a bit of fun with them:

The usual treatment was bullying, tricks, emetics, clysters, which caused much amazement, the actual cautery, and evil-smelling fumigation with filthy things. Nor did I desist until the patients were worn out and said that now the devil had fled. In this manner I restored many to their senses, with great increase of reputation, and still greater diversion for myself… I was capable of many practical jokes of this sort. What is certain is that I very seldom lost my temper, and knew how to divert myself in proper time and place with harmless amusements.

In one noteworthy case in Goa, a young man came to Manucci despondent because he is impotent. The man’s wife despises him for his condition and has applied to the archbishop for an annulment. Manucci brushes aside the professional doctors (who have just been transferring him between tubs of cold and hot water in hopes of “effecting a change”), and immediately diagnoses the man with “obstruction of the spleen,” whereupon he prescribes “sustaining and fortifying medicine.” The man is completely cured and proudly returns to demonstrate for the archbishop that he is “fit for marriage.” The archbishop orders him to go and bring his wife back to their house, and while she initially resists him, she is soon thoroughly satisfied. The great doctor Manucci practically glows with satisfaction at having restored domestic harmony to a troubled household, and ends with a grave admonition that a man must examine himself honestly and determine whether he is husband material before getting married.

Speaking of marriage, women keep trying to snag Manucci for one — mostly European women or half-breeds, but in at least one instance an aristocratic Mughal woman who begs him to kidnap her along with all her wealth and bring her back to Italy.36 He resists all such attempts, or goes along with them half-heartedly and then doesn’t fight to save the relationship when it falls apart before the big day. The reason is obvious: he isn’t marriageable and he knows it. Not unmarriageable in the euphemistic sense that his young patient in Goa was, nor riddled with venereal disease as his detractors (he informs us with outrage) whisper. No, the problem is his lifestyle and line of work are not suitable for a family. He knows that his job as a man is to provide stability and security for his little polis, but he equally knows that he has no security of stability to offer, just a life in the shadows and a life on the move.

But just as time weathers even the most inhospitable cliffs into rolling and bucolic hills, so age will sand down a violent and erratic young man into somebody basically normal. As he grew old, Manucci became tired of dealing with the Mughals and their plots, and the next time he was offered a chance at retirement he leapt at it. It so happened that the city of Goa was threatened with conquest by a massive Indian army, and Manucci via his usual wheeling and dealing was able to head off the problem and save the city. For this, he was awarded a knighthood by the Portuguese government,37 which he was then able to parlay into a settled and genteel habitation in Madras. Within a few months he had married a beautiful young widow (a woman born in India to English Catholic parents). As far as we can tell, after that he never went on an adventure again, but not to worry, he tells us: “My residence in Madras will offer no prejudice to the continuation of my History, for, besides the spies I employed, the nobles were pleased to forward me news.”

And he better continue his history! Because he hasn’t yet finished telling us the story of Aurangzeb. He does this over the course of hundreds more pages of warfare and familial strife, which I will not attempt to summarize. The upshot is that Aurangzeb the bloodthirsty and lonely tyrant continues to masterfully outplay everybody else in India, and to increase his power against everybody (even the Europeans!). He kills anybody who so much as looks at him funny; the only troublemakers he doesn’t kill are his own sons and grandsons. Not out of some paternal sentimentality, mind you, but because he wants his line to continue. So instead he locks them up, occasionally tortures them, but always takes care to preserve their physical capacity to procreate. At one point, he has literally every single one of his sons and grandsons in a dungeon somewhere. Manucci can’t help but be impressed: “There can be no doubt that if any king ever had recourse to foresight to prevent disorder, it was Aurangzeb.”

But the sort of order represented by Aurangzeb is terribly fragile. Rather than resolve contradictions, it hides them under a rug, presses pause on them, plunges them into a deep freeze. But they’re there, quietly gathering strength, ready to burst forth with a vengeance when the iron grip relaxes even slightly. Aurangzeb brought the Mughal Empire to its greatest wealth and territorial extent, but within decades of his death it had almost completely unraveled. A bitter and sterile legacy for so great a conqueror. But at the close of Manucci’s history, all of that is still far in the future:

The thing most to be wondered at in my History is the wisdom of Aurangzeb, who, in spite of being an old man of eighty-four years, knows how to regulate affairs with such skill that he maintains himself as king against the will of so many claimants.

And speaking of legacies, did Manucci leave any besides a literary one? Across this whole entire epic, the always talkative, always voluble Manucci only mentions it in one single sentence, so quick that a careless reader can easily miss it: “I had a son, but God chose rather to make him an angel in Paradise than leave him to suffer in this world.” For once I don’t think Manucci is deliberately practicing obfuscation. You can sense the pain in every word of that sentence, and in the unrelated sentences around it. This time his brevity is because he’s barely holding it together. To lose a child is an unimaginable horror, but how much worse it must be when it is the first time in your life that your luck has run out.

Many years ago, we discovered an incredible restaurant. It was on the first floor of a nondescript office building in the central business district of a nearby city, and by day it was one of those sandwich shops where people in suits swing by to grab a tuna melt and a bottle of Tropicana. It had some incredibly bland and forgettable name — “City Deli” or “Downtown Café” or something like that. But if you looked carefully, you would notice that there was something different about Downtown City Deli Café. For one thing, the walls had a lot of pictures of horses: some were photos, but more were beautifully illustrated images of armed and armored men on horseback. And hanging over the largest table, which we inevitably snagged…yep, that’s Genghis Khan.

Downtown City Deli Café, it turned out, was run by a family of Mongolian immigrants. During the day they served wraps and sandwiches to hungry office-workers, and in the evenings, when the business district emptied out, they made the food of their people (or an Americanized version anyway, there was a lot less mutton than you would find on the actual steppe). It was usually empty and the cooking took forever, but we didn’t mind — our little kids climbed all over the hideous public art installations outside, we got to chat while we waited for our food, and when it arrived it was hot and delicious. (And so cheap! This was before they invented inflation.)1 We ate khuushuur and mantuu and buuz, and probably other kinds of dough+meat dishes in a variety of configurations, and usually brought some home for breakfast the next morning.

Alas, Downtown City Deli Café (or whatever it was called) didn’t survive its regular office crowd being sent home in the spring of 2020, and whatever lunch spot is now in its place has many fewer pictures of the Great Khan. But our beloved buuz, steamed dumplings of ground meat and onion inside a pleated wheat dough wrapped, are still with us: they’re the khinkali at a Georgian restaurant, the manti at the Turkish market, the great frozen sacks of pelmeni at the Russian grocery. And while they probably weren’t Mongolian to begin with, it was our dining companion Genghis Khan who was ultimately responsible for their spread across Eurasia.

You’ve probably seen this map floating around on the Internet, and this is the book it comes from. There are lots of other cool maps, too — the transfer of curry under the British Raj, the “bread debates” of the twentieth century — but despite appearances Cuisine and Empire isn’t really a history of ingredients or even cooking methods, just as a history of architecture isn’t really about innovations in forestry or framing techniques. Rather, it’s a history of the entire cultural bundle we call a “cuisine,” which obviously includes raw materials and ways of turning them into food, but also has a lot to do with ideas. What is food? What is cooking? What role do they play in human society and the natural world? How about the supernatural world? And what’s the relationship between cooking and the state?

Those sound like strange questions — what do you mean, what is food. It’s the stuff you put in your mouth to make your body run, next question. But even that simple version is itself a belief about food, and even the most reductive Soylent-swiller probably has some thoughts about macros. (In fact, I bet “supplement stacks” are over-represented among Soylent people; caring a lot about nutrition don’t necessarily track with caring a lot about cooking.) And as soon as you get beyond “food is fuel,” it starts to become obvious how many different places you can go. What does your meal look like? Who makes it? How does that person choose what to make? With whom do you eat? Is your food in some sense connecting you to a primordial, pre-existing world, or is it a triumph over and improvement on that world?

Rachel Laudan isn’t the first person to attempt a global history of how people cook and eat, and her excellent introduction and footnotes are a wealth of resources for anyone who’s curious. (I am a little smug about how many of them I had already read.) But her comparative discussion of culinary philosophy — the set of ideas and principles that lead people to cook a certain way, and the way that new ideas lead people to new cuisines — is novel. We can, after all, pretty easily discuss what people ate in the past: you’ve almost certainly enjoyed a fancier version of the Sumerians’ wheat-based flatbreads, and perhaps even the Shang Dynasty’s steamed millet. It’s far more difficult to really wrap our heads around what food meant to them. (Worldviews are incredibly difficult to bridge.) But all over the world, the earliest recorded culinary philosophies look pretty similar.

Cooking was seen as a fundamental cosmic process, an integral part of a holistic, ordered, and hierarchical universe. Each kind of creature had its appropriate food: animals eat raw foods while standing, humans sit or recline while eating cooked foods, and the gods enjoy the fragrant aromas. But there were more hierarchies within these divisions: the right food for a slave or a peasant was very different than the food for a king, and eating the wrong kind of food might cause illness or even physical degeneration. (This particular kind of hierarchical thinking survived into the early modern period, when Tudor doctors confidently explained that the stomach of a laborer, burning hotly to fuel his brute physical tasks, would immediately burn up the refined foods appropriate for a gentleman, while a gentleman’s digestion would be too moderate to extract any benefit from the coarse meals of a ploughman.)

Beyond that, though, cooking was a symbol of civilization.2 Partly this was just because cooked food (and ideally cooked grains) were considered the right kind of food for human beings: non-agricultural peoples who didn’t eat grains might as well not cook at all, and in fact their literate and settled neighbors often claimed they didn’t. But there’s more to it than that: the pot itself stood for the state, and wise rule was likened to being a cook, all of which comes back to a picture of cooking and nature diametrically opposed to our own.

For modern Western society, natural means minimally processed, as close as possible to the way the food grew: brown rice is more natural than white, corn on the cob is more natural than tortilla chips, roast chicken is more natural than homemade breaded tenders which are in turn more natural than McDonald’s nuggets, and just about anything is more natural than that carbonated protein stuff. “Farm-to-table” is a trendy label for restaurants because it elides the kitchen entirely (although patrons and health inspectors alike would probably be alarmed if steaks showed up still mooing).

But for the ancients, the nature of a thing was what was revealed by cooking it. Just as the refiner’s fire transforms dull rock into sparkling metal, so too the backbreaking work of reaping, threshing, winnowing, milling, and baking transforms raw wheat into its true and proper form: bread. Wise governance was meant to do the same thing to people, transforming a raw brute into a civilized human being. A Confucian writer offers this metaphor for kingship:

You have the water and fire, vinegar, pickle, salt, and plums, with which to cook fish and meat. It is made to boil by the firewood, and then the cook mixes the ingredients, harmoniously equalizing the several flavors, so as to supply whatever is deficient and carry off whatever is in excess.

Cooking, like civilization, was the process of transmuting3 the “facts on the ground” into their highest form, revealing their true nature. Cooked was therefore better than raw, more cooked was better than less cooked. Not for the ancients our lightly dressed green salads!

There are two directions to take this. You might pretty easily conclude that the modern idealization of “natural” food is in some sense fooling ourselves: if you’re actually involved in the steps necessary to render something even theoretically edible, like harvesting and threshing grain or killing and skinning an animal, the final steps to make it delicious and easy to eat seem like an obvious continuation. (Even the raw food people chop their meat up small; human teeth just aren’t designed for tearing of hunks of raw flesh, however much my toddler tries.) Some people think serving your family farro with tomatoes is more “natural” than doing the same thing with pasta, but it only seems that way if you’re totally alienated from the giant pain in the butt that is removing the hulls from emmer wheat. Hey, it still looks like a seed, right?

But let’s take seriously for a moment the ancient world’s metaphorical connection between our food and our political order, the idea that cooking does to raw ingredients what society does to human beings, and suddenly the cult of crunch comes into focus. It’s just Rousseau. Or rather, it’s the equivalent of the insistence we see in Rousseau and his heirs, left and right, that modern institutions have deformed us and made us less human. If man has a telos, a role and vocation that isn’t satisfied by simply existing as a member of the human race, then society can be structured in ways that support and enable the realization of that telos — or in ways that make it impossible to achieve, pervert it, and ultimately crush it underfoot.4 And so too with food: our cultural obsession with things “natural” and “unprocessed” isn’t a literal desire to chow down on the grass of the field, it’s a fear that the true nature of foods that ought to be revealed and perfected in cooking are instead perverted by a wicked and uncaring system. It is, in short, a culinary philosophy, and as such it reflects broader trends in our understanding of humanity, the natural world, and the state.

I won’t rehash every one of Laudan’s stories, which move from the ancient world to the rise and spread of Buddhist cuisine (steamed rice, sugar, and ghee; no alcohol or meat) and the development of Islamic and Christian cuisines out of the combination of new religious ideas with existing practical and philosophical elements. (Islamic cuisine, for instance, drew heavily on Sassanid Persian foods, while the Christian ascetic tradition hearkened back to the republican Roman preference for simple, wholesome dishes rather than gluttony-inducing sauces and sweets.) There’s a great deal of borrowing throughout, but it mostly goes one way: from India to China, or from Muslim territory to Christian Europe after the Crusades.

Most dramatic is the Columbian Exchange — which from a culinary (rather than biological) perspective, Laudan argues, never actually happened. Old World cuisines were transported wholesale to the Americas, and maize, tomatoes, and potatoes were eventually established in the Old World, but they made the move shorn of the processing and cooking technologies that turn an ingredient into part of a cuisine. She also has an excellent treatment of the rise of “ethnic” cuisines and the development of “a new culinary philosophy according to which every nation had a long-standing traditional cuisine worth exploring for its delicious taste” and authenticity. (These “long-standing traditional cuisines” were usually invented in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century out of spare parts from the last five hundred years of culinary history, then promulgated as representing the true soul of the nation. They’re mostly pretty tasty, though!)

But instead of getting into all of that, I’m going to tell you about just one of the transitions Laudan documents, because it sheds particular light on the way we eat today (or, at least, yesterday): the transition of European high cuisine from medieval “Catholic cuisine” to French cuisine.

If you’ve ever poked around in a medieval cookbook (and if you haven’t you should try it now, this one is good), you may have found the food was rather unfamiliar. And while I do like my materialist explanations — the cooking environment has changed a lot! — most of it is just that the preferred flavor profiles are also wildly different. Here’s Laudan’s description of Catholic cuisine by the fourteenth century:

The grand dishes included roasts, pottages, meats cooked in acid sauces or sauces thickened with nuts and spices, a carefully balanced puree of rice and chicken sprinkled with sugar (blancmange), and pies and tarts of all sizes… The sauces of Catholic high cuisine were based on vinegar or verjuice (the acid juice of unripe grapes) flavored with spices, including sugar, to carefully balance the cool moistness of the vinegar with the hot, dry, pounded spices; the whole was thickened with breadcrumbs and nuts. One of the most popular sauces was cameline. “To make an excellent cameline sauce, take skinned almonds and pound and strain them; take raisins, cinnamon, cloves, and a little crumb of bread and pound everything together, and moisten with verjuice; and it is done.”

Tastes that we associate mainly with dessert — warm spices like cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, plus a hefty dose of sugar — show up everywhere in medieval food, including in heavy meat dishes. Perhaps the closest things in modern circulation are agrodolce sauce, a sweet-sour balsamic-vinegar-and-fruit condiment that goes nicely on pork, or vinegary Filipino adobo. In fact, elements of Catholic cuisine survived best in regions of the former Spanish colonial empire, because the Spanish resisted the rise of French cuisine. The legacy lasted long enough that mole poblano — a dish derived from the spicy stews brought to Andalusia by the Muslim conquest, adopted by Catholic Spaniards, and imported to the New World by the colonial elite — was reinterpreted by Mexican nationalists in the early twentieth century as a symbol of the seamless mixing of peoples into a diverse nation.

So anyway, while I could easily afford to buy enough spices to beggar King Richard II, I don’t; we don’t cook like that any more. Instead, around 1650, Catholic cuisine was comprehensively replaced. And if you think about the timing for a moment, that makes sense: the Protestant Reformation had fractured European culture, and once the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope, the signaling value of sugar and spice began to drop along with their prices. There was an ideal opening for a rival cuisine to emerge as the high status choice. The eventual victor — which arose in France, reigned supreme for centuries, and continues to influence the way we eat today — was notable for “its multiple ways of combining fat, flour, sugar, and liquids to make new kinds of sauces and sweets, its use of meat essences for flavoring, and its employment of whipped egg whites and cream to create light, airy textures.” La Varenne, the first codifier of this way of cooking, instructed the cook to “take a little diced pork, place it in the saucepan, and when it has melted down, take it out, and mix in a little flour that you allow to brown well and dilute it with bouillon and vinegar.” That’s the first known recipe for a roux, and far closer to how most sauces are made today than the cameline!

If the rich sauces of the classic French cuisine are unfamiliar to you, that’s because they were displaced as the global haute cuisine in the second half of the twentieth century — first by the lighter, more delicate flavors of nouvelle cuisine5 and then by the ingredient-forward, chef-driven style that came out of California. (A great book on this shift, and much more, is Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America.) But from 1650 to 1950, sauces like béchamel and sauce espagnole were the only game in town for fine dining — and they arose from a novel theory of human biology that lasted barely a century.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Paracelsus and his followers promulgated a physiological theory that contrasted sharply with the Galenic medical establishment that had prevailed since the classical era. Inspired by experiments in distillation, they denied the existence of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and instead argued that there were only three: salt, like the solid residue that gave food its body and taste; oil, like the oily fluid that made things unctuous; and vapor, the pure essence of whatever was distilled, that gave foods lightness and aroma. They also argued that fermentation, not cooking, was the fundamental process involved in digestion, so anything that rotted quickly must be especially easy to digest — particularly fresh fruits, herbs, and vegetables, overturning centuries of traditional avoidance of raw plants.

Given the weakness of Catholic cuisine, the new theory arose at just the right time was eagerly adopted by cooks and the general public. Vapor in particular was considered nourishment for the brain, so sparkling water became popular, as did cakes raised with beaten eggs, whipped creams, and mousses. Simmering meat and fish to extract their essence was also a valuable vaporous technique. And most importantly, cooks began to experiment with sauces based on these theories, in which butter or lard (oily) bound flour (salty) with wine or stock (vaporous).

French cuisine’s favored ingredients were “beef, chicken, butter, cream, sugar, fresh herbs, vegetables, particularly asparagus and peas, and fruits such as pears, peaches, and cherries. The flavors came not from spices but from meaty bouillons.” Laudan goes on to give some examples:

Often they were based on a coulis, an extraordinarily rich, expensive, and time-consuming broth thickened with pureed meat. For four quarts, a couple of slices of ham might be browned with two pounds of veal, carrots, onions, parsley, and celery, then covered with stock, bouillon, or broth, simmered until done, and then thickened with a roux made with half a pound of butter and three or four large spoonfuls of flour.

As famously popularized by Carême and simplified by Escoffier, French cuisine became first the pan-European and then the global standard for fine dining. Cooks around the world Frenchified their local foods by adding vinaigrettes, mayonnaises, béchamels, and pastry, creating now-familiar dishes like pastitsio, lasagna, and beef stroganoff. And yet by the time Russia, Hawaii, and Mexico tried to adopt haute cuisine, the physiological theory that had underlain it all had long since shriveled up and died, replaced in the eighteenth century first by the idea that health depended on the balance of acid levels and then by a new understanding of the chemistry of nutrition. But it didn’t matter: culinary philosophies may grow out of other ideas about the world, but then they take on a life of their own.

There are a dozen other equally fascinating stories in this book — I haven’t even touched on the USA’s nineteenth century transition from a cuisine of pork, molasses, and cornmeal to one of beef, sugar, and wheat flour — but they all boil down to the complicated interplay of material conditions and human ideas about the world. Yeah, sure, new ingredients — or new methods of transporting, storing, and processing old ones — do a lot to change how people cook and eat…but new ways of thinking and talking about food do as much or more. And we can’t really understand why we are the way we are unless we know how we got there.

How much of our fondness for “ethnic food” comes from the same semi-mystical fetishization of non-white people that gives us an entire New York Times article about an Arabic word for, uh, being a good cook?6 How much does the rise and fall of convenience foods (as an aspiration, anyway — we still use them plenty in practice) track not only tired housewives’ gratitude for labor-saving shortcuts but the broader cultural preference for scientific solutions? (Baby formula and frozen TV dinners took off commercially around the same time.) And it isn’t a coincidence that the reflexive skepticism of Big Agribusiness that gives us beef tallow french fries and raw milk has become right-wing just as the institutional heft of Big Everything shifted left. The world we know is built out of human choices made for complicated human reasons, and ideas have consequences in the grocery aisle too.

Introduction

There are two stories from the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq that I can’t get out of my head. The first is that in the final stages of war planning, the US Air Force was drawing up targeting lists for the sorties they expected to make. They already had detailed plans2 for striking Iraq’s air defense systems, but they worried that they would also be asked to disable Iraqi WMD sites. So the Air Force pulled together a special team of intelligence officers to figure out the right coordinates for all the secret factories and labs that were churning out biological weapons and nuclear materials. Try as they might, they couldn’t find them. So…they just kept on looking.

The second story comes from an anonymous source who described to Michael Mazarr, the author of this book, the basic occupation strategy that the National Security Council was settling on. The concept was that once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy.” What I find amazing about this is that nobody even stopped to think about the metaphor — how many things march rapidly and decisively after being decapitated?

I am of the exact right age for the Iraq War to be the formative event of my political identity.3 But even if that hadn’t been true, it still feels like the most consequential geopolitical event of my life. The United States spent trillions of dollars and caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million and a million people in Iraq alone. The goal of this was “regional transformation,” and we transformed the region all right. The war destabilized several neighboring regimes, which led them to collapse into anarchy and civil war. Consequences of that included millions more deaths and the near extinction of Christianity in the place it came from.

As an American, I didn’t feel any of this directly,4 but with the benefit of hindsight the war looks even more epochal for us. It marks, in so many ways, the turning point from our decades of unchallenged global supremacy to the current headlong charge into “multipolarity.” I know this may sound melodramatic, but I truly believe future historians will point to it as the moment that we squandered our empire. Remember, hegemonic empires work best when nobody thinks they’re an empire. True strength is not the ability to enforce your commands, it’s everybody being so desperate to please you that they spend all their time figuring out what you want, such that you don’t even have to issue edicts.

Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iraq War, American global dominance was so unquestioned we didn’t even have to swat down any challengers. This is a very good position for an empire to be in, because it means you don’t run the risk of blunders or surprise upset victories that make you look weak and encourage others to take a chance. Conversely, there’s a negative spiral where the hegemon has to start making demands of its clients, which makes the clients resentful and uncooperative, which in turn means that they have to be told what to do. All of this makes the hegemon-client relationship start to look less like a good “deal” and more purely extractive, which can rapidly lead the whole system to fall apart.

Iraq was the moment the American empire went into this negative cycle.

Even if you don’t agree with me about that, presumably you will agree that it was very bad for American soft power and prestige, bad for a number of friendly regimes in the area, and bad for our finances and our military readiness. So to anybody curious about the world, it seems very important to ask why we did this, why we thought it was a good idea, and how nobody predicted the ensuing debacle that seems so obvious in hindsight.

The conventional answers to these questions tend to be either “George W. Bush was dumb” or “Dick Cheney was evil.” I totally reject these as answers. Or I think at best they’re seriously incomplete: if the first Trump administration taught us anything, it’s that the US President can’t actually do very much on his own if the bureaucracy is set against him. The United States is an oligarchy, a kind of surface democracy; big decisions don’t happen without a lot of buy-in from a lot of people. More to the point, the decision to invade Iraq actually was endorsed and supported by pretty much every important politician and every institution, including the whole mainstream media and most of the Democratic Party. Blaming it on a single bad administration is too easy. It’s an excuse designed to avoid asking hard questions about how organizations filled with well-meaning people can go totally off the rails

Fortunately, Michael Mazarr has written the definitive5 book on this very question. It’s not a history of the Iraq War and occupation: it’s a history of the decision to invade Iraq, ending shortly after the tanks went steaming across the border. It’s an exhaustively-researched doorstopper composed out of hundreds and hundreds of interviews with officials working in the innards of the White House and of various federal bureaucracies and spy agencies, all aimed at answering a single question: “What were they thinking?” Let’s get started.

Backstory

There’s a story that the Bush administration came into office in 2001 itching to get rid of Saddam Hussein and looking around for a pretext. Near as I can tell, this is totally false — actually, the entire US government had been looking for a pretext since at least a decade earlier than that. It all goes back to 1990 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Prior to that, Iraq was an American ally and proxy that helped contain the revolutionary regime in Iran. That relationship gave Saddam a long leash and meant he could get away with a tremendous amount. But the leash was not as long as Saddam thought, and he badly overstepped his limits when a diplomatic fight with Kuwait over the terms of some war loans escalated into a military confrontation. Improvisational decision-making was not out of character for Saddam, who had a tendency to do things like go alone into one of his many palaces and emerge wild-eyed the next day declaring that he had a prophetic dream which would henceforth guide state policy. But this time he got into some real trouble.

The Americans kicked Iraq out of Kuwait quickly and easily, and then…hesitated about what to do next. Nobody wanted to keep Saddam around (remarkably, when you have outlived your usefulness, people suddenly start to notice all of your human rights abuses), but nobody wanted to march into Baghdad and topple him either. There was some wishful thinking that the Kuwait defeat would cause Saddam’s regime to collapse, but most US foreign policy thinkers just shrugged their shoulders and figured better Saddam than chaos and a Vietnam-style quagmire. One especially perceptive official put it this way to a PBS journalist:

I felt there was a real danger here that you could get bogged down in a long drawn out conflict…and then you’ve got to worry about what comes after. And then you have to accept the responsibility for what happens in Iraq, accept more responsibility for what happens in the region. It would have been an all-US operation, I don’t think any of our allies would have been with us, maybe Britain, but nobody else. And you’re going to take a lot more American casualties if you’re gonna go much around in Iraq for weeks on end trying to run Saddam Hussein to ground and capture Baghdad and so forth and I don’t think it would have been worth it.

That official’s name was Dick Cheney.

So Saddam was left in place, and throughout the ‘90s American policymakers seethed about it. There was no official policy that said we were going to overthrow him, but prominent politicians like Al Gore were out there writing op-eds saying that Saddam must be toppled and his government dismantled. This produced what Mazarr calls “destructive ambiguity” — everybody knew that everybody else knew that the real policy was to get rid of the guy, but since this was an unofficial position it went through none of the usual policymaking channels and was never formally debated. It also left a lot of room for freelancing.

For example, CIA clandestine operative Bob Baer (whose memoir is a terrifically fun read, by the way) began organizing a coup in 1995, not because he was directly ordered to do so but because he thought it was what his supervisors wanted. Even the strategy of the coup points towards this ambiguity — rather than straightforwardly overthrowing the government, it aimed to spark a rebellion that would gain some momentum but not enough to win, so that when Saddam moved to crush it the US would be pulled in and forced to act.6 Think for a moment about what an odd plan this is, and how it only makes sense if you believe the US secretly wants to invade while officially pretending not to.

The leader of this rebellion was supposed to be Ahmed Chalabi, one of the more fascinating characters in this story. Chalabi was a dapper, cosmopolitan, and erudite bank manager who got exiled from Iraq for gross financial corruption. He promptly reinvented himself as a freedom fighter, rented beautiful houses stocked with fine art in several major cities, and set about ingratiating himself with Western elites. He also began organizing his fellow emigrés and exiles into an effective political lobbying force. Unsurprisingly given his educated and aristocratic manner, he was extremely good at the lobbying part, and soon placed a special focus on the United States, wining and dining congressmen and writing op-eds for major newspapers. Soon he managed to convince the CIA that there were thousands of resistance fighters back in Iraq ready to follow him into battle.

He was good at convincing, but they also wanted to be convinced. Chalabi and his fellow emigrés were charming, cultured, westernized intellectuals who at least pretended to be pro-democracy. It was oh-so-tempting to believe that everybody in Iraq was like that, when in fact they were completely unrepresentative. As a rule of thumb, when a country has a revolution or a civil war or other social breakdown, the ones who make it out are the ones bright enough to see it coming and rich or well-connected enough to escape. Whether it’s the Russian Revolution, the Lebanese Civil War, or whatever you call what’s happening in South Africa, the people who leave are not a random subset — they’re the creme-de-la-creme. Unfortunately the US government somehow couldn’t figure this out in the case of Iraq. They met the emigrés, and were impressed by them, and decided that Iraq really was a civilized and cosmopolitan place under the surface, when in fact the society that created the emigrés had been destroyed decades earlier.

The emigrés represent one pole of the Baptists-and-bootleggers coalition that emerged in the ‘90s to advocate for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. The other is exemplified by Paul Wolfowitz, a soft-spoken academic who bounced between senior government positions and jobs at think tanks. Wolfowitz was a humanitarian in the most sincere sense. Much of his extended family had been killed in the Holocaust. The plight of oppressed peoples was not an abstraction for him, and he dedicated his life and career to the proposition that the United States should use all available means to end tyranny and oppression wherever they existed.

Wolfowitz is commonly described as a fanatical neoconservative, and he is, but I think it’s important to demystify that term. Too often it gets used as a catchall for “people we don’t like,” but at least when it comes to foreign policy the neoconservatives fit squarely within the American mainstream. With the notable exception of Donald Trump, every American president of the past few decades has had essentially the same foreign policy, driven by essentially the same core ideas: (1) Americans are the good guys, (2) it’s the job of the good guys to right wrongs wherever they are happening, (3) freedom and democracy are the non-negotiable inheritance of everybody on planet earth. These ideas drive the neoconservatives, yes, but they also drive Samantha Power and Susan Rice, not to mention Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

If you are an American, it may not be apparent to you how weird these ideas seem to the rest of the world. If I were to characterize how previous empires — and America’s current rivals — think about the world, it would be more like: (1) every country has core interests and peripheral interests, (2) you should not interfere in another country’s core interests if you can help it, (3) different peoples and cultures are adapted to different forms of government, and this diversity makes life spicy and interesting. Perhaps most shocking to Americans: most countries do not self-identify as “the good guys,” instead they think of themselves as a people with a history and a set of territorial claims.7

Mazarr describes this peculiar American quality as “the missionary impulse,” and notes that while it comes from a well-intentioned place, it “can produce a theological and absolutist conception of America’s responsibility as well as a romantic conviction that America can renovate other societies at will.” Or, to put it in blunter words, it makes us do insane things like invade and occupy a culturally alien country on the other side of the world, and stand there in blinkered incomprehension when people don’t like it. Perhaps the most damning thing about this missionary impulse is the way it provides a self-excusing justification for recklessness: since America is definitionally the good guys, all the horrible consequences of America’s dumb decisions must be somebody else’s fault, and anyway we meant well so you can’t really blame us.8 It’s like a speeding driver who hits and kills pedestrians over and over again, and when confronted gets huffy and points out he’s on his way to feed people at a soup kitchen.

Why is our national character like this? It’s one of those eternal questions. Maybe it’s because we were settled by various strains of fanatical Protestants, or because our ethnos was born during the Enlightenment, or some other “genetic” factor. Alternatively, it could be something about our historical development, or perhaps the large oceans that have always insulated us from most of the negative consequences of our decisions. Or maybe it’s just inevitable that whoever the current world empire is will feel this way, a consequence of our “unipolar moment.”9 Whatever the cause, it’s been a frequent source of misunderstanding between American and foreign diplomats, and few more so than Iraq’s.

The inability of the Iraqi regime, and of Saddam Hussein in particular, to “get” America or its motivations is a recurring bit of comic relief in Mazarr’s book, and one of the first big episodes of it occurs here in the mid ‘90s. This was the time when the Iraqis completely shut down their WMD programs and destroyed every trace of them. But even while halting their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons projects, they continued to loudly insist that they were operational. This appears to have been done out of fear that they would lose prestige if they admitted to backing down. Saddam also really wanted the Iranians to think that he still had chemical weapons out of fear that they’d invade if he didn’t, and he figured that US intelligence would obviously figure out that the programs had been stopped, so they didn’t have to come out and say it themselves.

I remember when I was a kid watching Dr. Strangelove, and laughing at the part where the Soviets built a doomsday device without telling anybody, completely defeating the purpose of having a doomsday device. Then I got older, and learned that no actually, in real life the Soviets built a doomsday device, and then didn’t tell anybody, because they apparently assumed that its psychological effect would be more powerful if America found out about it from its spies (naturally, we didn’t find out until after the Cold War was over). Saddam’s mistake was a weird inverse of this, destroying all his doomsday weapons and then just assuming we’d figure it out. I guess the moral of the story is that in real life, these too-clever-by-half schemes where you double-bluff your opponent are rarely worth it.10

Anyway, Saddam destroyed all of his WMD, and then kicked out the UN inspectors so as to maintain the charade that he still had them. At the same time that all of this was happening, the sanctions regime that the US had imposed was clearly falling apart. European and Asian businessmen were swarming all over Baghdad, trying to get things in place for when foreign investment inevitably flooded back into the country. All of this contributed to an ambient sense that something had to be done; the attempt to kick the can down the road was failing. By the late ‘90s, the Clintons had already convinced themselves that a rematch with Saddam was inevitable, but they didn’t have time to act on it before their term was up and a new sheriff rolled into town.

Dramatis Personae

Of all the personalities in the Bush White House, the one that towers above the scene is the Vice President, Dick Cheney. Both at the time and in the years since, Cheney has had a reputation as a Svengali or an evil sorcerer who manipulated a weak-willed and weaker-minded President. This is a gross exaggeration, unfair to both individuals, but it’s easy to see where it came from. Cheney came into office as one of the most experienced and accomplished vice presidents ever — he had worked in the Nixon White House at the age of 28, was elected to Congress, held countless senior government positions, and served as CEO of a major corporation. When somebody who’s used to being in charge comes into an organization in a subordinate role, it can be hard even when everyone is well-intentioned.

But what really sets Cheney apart is what he did after he got there. Mazarr very huffily accuses Cheney of having “contempt for democracy,” but apparently what this refers to is Cheney’s habit of reaching down through many layers of the bureaucracy to get the information or answers he wanted directly, or to make something happen. This, apparently, violated “the norms,” and Mazarr is very upset about it, because he thinks Cheney should have, I dunno, stayed in his lane and allowed himself to be manipulated by the Deep State like every other politician, I guess. One national security official sadly remarked that the system is just not set up to handle a vice president who’s an active player.

Of course this reminded me of nothing so much as Paul Graham’s writings on “Founder Mode.” Everybody who’s run an institution, large or small, knows that as the institution grows, the quality of the information the leader gets is worse and worse. Every bit of data gets padded and massaged and reformulated as it makes its way up through layers of yes-men and of honest men with agendas. The only solution, as countless CEOs and presidents and generals and monarchs have discovered, is to “go deep,” reaching down through all the protesting layers of middle managers to find out the ground truth for yourself. The middle layers hate it when you do this, and they hated Cheney for it, but this is a good way to get results — and alas (since he would become the biggest booster of the war), it worked for Cheney.

The upper reaches of the administration also contained another, very different sort of bureaucratic knife-fighter. Henry Kissinger once described Donald Rumsfeld as “a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability, and substance fuse seamlessly.” Richard Nixon described him as “a ruthless little bastard.” Coming into office, Rumsfeld had not been planning to aim that ruthlessness at the Iraqis, but at the Pentagon bureaucracy. His goal was the transformation and reform of America’s bloated and inefficient military machine. When he suddenly found himself needing to wield that machine at a moment’s notice, it’s no surprise that things went badly.

Rumsfeld was a smart guy, but in a very particular sort of way that you often see in competitive debaters. He excelled at picking apart the reasoning of others and wearing them down with a barrage of needling questions, but he struggled to synthesize and integrate information into his own theories. He had the verbal and intellectual dexterity to argue any side of any topic, but which side he picked was often arbitrary or down to convenience, rather than rooted in deep beliefs about the world. His mind charged fast down well-worn grooves, performing logically valid moves at every step, but rarely making intuitive or creative leaps. He was the kind of person, in short, who is very good at justifying a course of action, but very bad at deciding what needs to be done.

The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is and was considered by many to be an enigma. He had been a political rival of Bush’s and considered running for office against him in 2000. He had a reputation as a good, honorable, moderate Republican. And yet he was the one who delivered a passionate speech to the UN Security Council, full of statements he knew to be shaky at best, and melodramatically waving around a prop purporting to be a vial of anthrax. “How could an honorable man have done such things?” the court historians and biographers have bleated ever since. What an ineluctable mystery!

To clear up the mystery, I think it’s useful to consider a very different episode from decades earlier. In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, at a farming village wrongly labeled “My Lai” on US Army maps, a unit of American soldiers committed various atrocities. As is usually the case with these things somebody breaks the taboo (in this case a soldier clubbed a Vietnamese villager with a rifle butt), and then the violence escalates in a jokey way (another villager was shoved into a well, and a grenade thrown in after him), and then pretty soon you have mass executions, gang rapes, the usual stuff. Finally, you get the sadistic flourishes: forcing Vietnamese parents to watch their children be murdered one by one, torturing helpless people for fun, etc.11 When word eventually got out, people were outraged, and the Army dispatched a young officer to investigate what happened. He wrote a report that to call a coverup would be an insult to coverups, including the declaration that “relations between…soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.” The name of that young officer was Colin Powell.

There are good men, and there are evil men, and then there are company men. Colin Powell was a man defined by his willingness to do what his superiors wanted. He did it in 1968, and he did the same thing (in vastly different circumstances) thirty-five years later. I have never felt like any part of this was very mysterious.

Rounding out the Bush war cabinet we have the National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice. If Rumsfeld and Powell were each a distinct archetype of “competent but directionless” (Rumsfeld: the debate kid, Powell: the loyal soldier), then Rice was a third type, and the most dangerous of all. The key to understanding Rice is that she was a child prodigy: violin, French, and ballet by the age of three. Shortly after that, her teachers decided she had the makings of a world-class concert pianist. By the age of ten we are told she was more or less running her parents’ household, and by the age of fifteen she was off to college. While still a teenager she began pursuing a master’s degree in Soviet studies, and headed to Moscow State University for Russian immersion, then back to do a quick PhD. and begin a meteoric ascent through the professoriate at Stanford.

This is all very impressive, you may say, so what’s the problem? The problem is that as with many child prodigies, Rice got addicted to approval. I suspect this dynamic plays as large a role as regression to the mean in explaining why so many child prodigies never amount to anything. When you are a gifted child you spend your whole life listening to adults praise you, and unless you are an outlier in another way completely orthogonal to giftedness (for example, by being highly disagreeable), then this inevitably warps your entire personality.12 The trouble is you never learn to set your own terminal objectives, never learn to ask whether the next ladder is worth climbing, certainly never get used to the fact that sometimes you need to disappoint your superiors and that they need to deal. Rice had this problem to a terrible extent: decades of praise from the entire American power structure had moulded her into a terrifyingly effective tool. but a tool without agency or purpose. She finally found that purpose in the approval of the handsome, smiling, Chad President she worked for, but that meant she would never put up any resistance to him.

And so we come at last to the man who was notionally running things. We amateur historians have been done a great disservice by the popular attitude towards Bush, which pretty much amounted to “he’s dumb.” Seriously, if you weren’t alive or weren’t politically aware in the early 2000s, you have no idea the extent to which this single slur dominated all public discussion of the President. The memes were all of Bush looking like a monkey,13 or holding a banana, the SNL skits were all of Bush acting stupid, and so on. This was all very unfair: Bush was not an idiot. But the greater crime is that this meant we never got to see people grapple with the paradoxical, almost novelistic aspects of his character. As Mazarr puts it:

This is a man brimming with the most interesting contradictions: at once shrewd and intellectually lazy; aloof from the details of policy, and a recurrent micromanager of speeches and statements; humane and compassionate at some moments, and frat-boy cutting and dismissive at others; a faith-driven altruist capable of titanic outbursts of fury and profanity…essentially genuine and deeply committed to the well-being of the American people and to the promotion of freedom abroad…so heedless of detail as to be repeatedly shocked by the implications of his own choices.

Much has been made of Bush’s valorization of decisiveness, his self-conception as “decider” or “doer,” and his understanding of international relations as a series of contests of “will.” But I think even more important, and even more quintessentially American, was his belief in the importance of belief. People tend to associate this strain of thought with Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, but actually it long predates that (for instance, The Little Engine That Could likely dates back to the 19th century). Again, these are deep cultural waters so all-pervasive, it is hard for us fish to even tell that we’re swimming in them. But once you learn to look, you start to see it everywhere. Isn’t the moral of the ultimate American folk tale, Star Wars, basically just that if you believe in something strongly enough, reality itself will warp to accommodate your belief?

None of these qualities — love of decisiveness, disdain for details and deliberation, believing in belief — necessarily had to be a fatal flaw, but when combined within a single person they congealed into a practice that I will hereby term “VIBE-GOVERNING.”

Vibe-governing is sort of the opposite of “founder mode” — it’s where you find good people, put them in charge of stuff, and otherwise just go with your vibes. If there’s a problem in some part of your organization, you don’t read the error messages memos too carefully — you just make some big decisions, shake things up a bit, give a pep talk or two, and then it’s back to vibes. The concrete details of what’s happening are, let’s face it, kinda boring. Or as Condoleezza Rice once said about the president she adored: “Very intuitive and insightful… He is somebody who very efficiently gets to the essence of a question… He least likes me to say, ‘This is complex.’”

So there you have the stage, and there you have the actors. But history requires one more thing: a spark. I believe there are many worlds out there in the multiverse where that spark never came, and where the US security state ground on peacefully and unobtrusively, and that in those worlds the Iraq War likely never happened. But here in this world, the spark came on September 11th, 2001, and the responses of these men and women to the events of that day set us down a path that was as inevitable and overdetermined as any Greek tragedy.

The Catalyst

The immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was total mayhem. Then-CIA Director George Tenet describes the atmosphere in the White House as “more raw emotion in one place than I think I’ve ever experienced in my life.” Events were moving quickly, everybody was operating in the fog of war, nobody knew what further attacks might happen next, but everybody knew that they might be in personal, physical danger. The President was out of town and only intermittently accessible. Cheney was grabbed by Secret Service agents and hustled into a bunker beneath the White House. Rumsfeld rushed to the spot where the 757 had hit the Pentagon and called the President from the scene of the destruction. Rice also called to tell him, “Mr. President, you can’t come back here. Washington is under attack.”

Extreme events can have a profound effect on your personality. Rice later told a biographer that 9/11 had “changed her psychology.” The changes in Cheney were even more profound: he developed an “obsession” with followup attacks using WMD and articulated a new “one percent”14 doctrine that any terrorist plot that had a greater than one percent probability of being real required immediate action.15 These changes weren’t just the result of being in physical danger and an emotional pressure-cooker — the new administration had just settled into office, and had then presided over one of the greatest catastrophes on US soil in the modern era. They felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility for making sure it never happened again, and perhaps some need to atone as well.

Their mental state was not helped by the next few months. In accordance with Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine, every morning the entire senior staff was briefed with the “threat matrix” — a terrifying list of all the possible terrorist threats that US spy agencies were investigating. The Threat Matrix was several pages long, and CIA Director Tenet later admitted that you would “drive yourself crazy” if you actually read it. Around the same time, results from a wargame called Dark Winter were released. This had simulated a bio-terrorist attack using weaponized smallpox. And then shortly after that, somebody started mailing anthrax to random government officials including Dick Cheney and his daughter.

This was an environment conducive to some truly silly ideas — after all, if the goal was a Global War on Terror, did that mean sending stealth bombers after IRA cells in Belfast, or invading Japan to take out Aum Shinriko,16 or American boots on the ground fighting Hamas? Actually, some people very seriously argued that the answers to questions like these was “yes.” Rumsfeld sent a message to his top generals saying: “Targets worldwide… regions outside Afghanistan and even outside the Middle East… It will be important to indicate that our field of action is much wider than Afghanistan.” His deputy Doug Feith would later confirm that this meant targeting groups not even connected to al-Qaeda. At one meeting at which he pushed for attacks on supposed terror cells in Latin America, he elaborated, “Well, they all read the newspapers… If we knock one back, the others will take notice.”

Feith was an extreme case, but there was a universal sense that this was the time to, as one military planner put it, “get a lot of stuff done off of our to-do list.” Unfortunately for Saddam, he had been on the to-do list for a very long time. And he was not aware of the danger. He knew perfectly well that Iraq had destroyed all of its WMD, and that Ba’athism was the ideological opponent of radical Sunni Islam of the sort that al-Qaeda espoused. Surely, he reasoned, the United States would be calling him any day now to ask for his help against their common enemy.

But he was in terrible danger, because American officials had a completely nonsensical theory of where terrorism comes from (a view that they largely still hold, by the way). Their view was that dictatorships (which are bad) sponsor terrorist groups to do their evil bidding, so we need to knock over the dictatorships (which are bad) and there will be no more terrorism. At first glance this view might not seem crazy: after all, look at Iran! They arm and bankroll Hamas and Hezbollah. And before them, the Soviet Union sponsored all kinds of groups to do their dirty work. And well, err…let’s not look too closely at who else might have occasionally done a bit of that during the Cold War and in the present-day Middle East. Maybe these government really are the source of the problem?

But look a little bit more closely. Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and all the other many groups have something in common: they all operate out of places with exceptionally weak and fragile states (and, if you want to get all lib about it, fractured and hopeless societies). How could it be otherwise? Governments don’t like a bunch of other wannabe governments freelancing on their territory. The natural predator of terrorists is the secret policeman. It might be that these groups receive funding and support from states, but they can only grow in the fertile soil of power vacuums. Anarchy, not dictatorship, is the fundamental enabler of terrorism.

How could the professionals in the White House not have understood this? Once again I will go back to the ultimate American folk tale: Star Wars. Every American knows from childhood that “the rebels” are the good guys. It’s the one constant in all of our stories. But in real life, “the rebels” are never the good guys. The regime, whoever it is, may be bastards, but the rebels are almost always worse. “Rebels took over” is a link in the causal chain of almost every genocide, famine, and civil war in the books.

There was one more reason Saddam was in danger: the war in Afghanistan was going too well.17 The supposed “graveyard of empires” was seeming like a walk in the park, and the US had gone with a light footprint and no real plan about who would rule the place afterwards. Of course, this would eventually all turn into a debacle that returned to Taliban to power, but at the time, in 2001 and 2002, things appeared to be going very smoothly. This had two dangerous effects: it reinforced the notion that you could get sloppy with regime change, and it meant there was still a bunch of excess psychic energy left over from 9/11. As one official put it, “the only reason we went into Iraq… is we were looking for somebody’s ass to kick, Afghanistan was too easy.”

The Non-Decision

By far the longest section of this book is a detailed blow-by-blow of the actual decision to invade Iraq. I will summarize over 300 pages of densely-spaced text for you: nobody ever actually made a decision to invade Iraq. The system as a whole “decided” in the sense that that was the outcome, but this was emergent behavior, like an ant colony discovering a source of food. At no point did any human being sit down and say, “okay, now we’re going to debate the pros and cons of invading Iraq,” and then make a decision that the benefits outweighed the costs. Instead a vast multitude of people — with different goals, presuppositions, and beliefs about the world — interacted over a period of years, and at the end of it an invasion occurred. At some point there was a phase change. At some point everybody started assuming that somebody must have made a decision that we were really doing this, but in fact nobody had. Does a molecule of water decide to join a flood?

This is not to say that nobody was pushing for an invasion. The system included plenty of people who wanted it, like Chalabi, Wolfowitz, and eventually Cheney. But none of those men, not even Cheney, could make the decision. They acted as “policy entrepreneurs.” They spotted the vast impersonal forces that were grinding along inexorably, inevitably, creating an opening, storing up vast amounts of potential energy, and they gave them a nudge in their preferred direction. Can an ant start an avalanche? Probably not. Can a team of ants? Maybe if they find the right boulder and really throw their thoraxes into it. But did the ants cause the avalanche, or did whatever process of continental drift deposited a boulder right there, and whatever freak weather arranged the snow just so?

We find it uncanny when organizations make collective decisions with no actual person involved. Bad news: that’s because governments and corporations are your first exposure to artificial intelligences making decisions, and you’re about to get a whole lot more. A contrarian might argue that this is no different from people — there’s a whole discipline of cognitive science which says that if you peer into our subconscious, we too make decisions in random or inexplicable ways. It further claims that what feel like “reasons” are the output of a whole set of mental machinery devoted to retroactively justifying and explaining our choices. Maybe so. But we also have a whole set of mental machinery, honed by aeons of evolution, for modeling and predicting the decisions of other human beings.

The trouble with a corporation or a government is that, considered as a mind, it is a very strangely-shaped mind. Is it hyperintelligent, or is it retarded? Clearly in some ways the former and in others the latter. And the process by which it comes to decisions may be no more random or irrational than the process you and I use, but it’s less familiar to us, and that matters a lot. But everything I’ve just said about collections of people is even more true of the artificial intelligences we’re beginning to create. We are not prepared for the sheer diversity of cognitive architectures that is about to flood the world. And so much of the endless arguing over whether AIs are dumb or smart comes down to the fact that their capabilities are just differently shaped from ours. I roll my eyes when AI CEOs describe their language models as “PhD level,” because there are huge numbers of things that children can do18 and these models cannot. But there are other things they can do that no human can. And while I think mechanistic interpretability is as cool as the next guy, most of their decisions will be very difficult for us to understand.

Anyway, one big downside of the US government as a whole making the decision to invade Iraq “unconsciously” is that it was never actually debated or discussed in blunt term. This meant no hashing it out in a big room, no arguments sharpening each other, no big list of pros and cons, and, crucially, no big list of risks and how to mitigate them. Nobody even knew what the invasion would look like. Were we going in with a light footprint and knocking out Saddam, then leaving again? Were we engaging in a long-term occupation? Were we just bombing? Was the goal to free the Iraqi people? To fight al-Qaeda? To get rid of the WMD? Nobody knew the answers to these questions. Or perhaps everybody knew the answers, but they all had different ones in mind.

In 2002, as the storm clouds were gathering, Bush gave a speech in which he said:

Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies… [If we] wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.

Saddam Hussein watched the speech, and decided that Bush was probably talking about North Korea.

Of the many fundamental disagreements and inconsistencies within the US invasion planning, one of the biggest was contained in the name, “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Was the goal to free the Iraqis? Or to install a democracy? Or to install a regime that would be friendly to the United States? The neoconservatives (idiots) and the liberal humanitarians (idiots) believed that these three were all the same thing. Naturally, they thought, if you remove all restraints of force and power from a populace, they will spontaneously generate a parliamentary democracy and immediately ally themselves with the foreign power that just invaded them, right? (The only evidence we have against that proposition is…all of human history.) On the other side, Rumsfeld and by extension the Department of Defense were a bit more pragmatic, and proposed essentially installing Chalabi as a king backed by the force of American arms. (Never mind that Saddam Hussein had until recently been…a king…backed by force of American arms.)

Colin Powell hated the idea of forcing a monarch on the Iraqi people, and did what Colin Powell does: stewed and seethed and wrote passive-aggressive memos before falling in line with his superiors. But President Bush also hated the idea (it seems that he saw right through Chalabi and regarded him as a con-man from the moment he met him) and decisively killed it. But that didn’t actually determine anything about what would happen, and Bush didn’t want to make that decision. So no decision was ever made, and right up until the invasion and after, the United States “wanted both to set Iraq free and to determine its future. It wanted to be liberator and hegemon at the same time.”

Another fundamental contradiction, bound up with the previous one, was about how expensive and involved this was going to be. Rumsfeld, who had come into office preparing to declare war on the Pentagon bureaucracy, was fanatically committed to the smallest possible footprint. As the army planners began drawing up designs (for an unclear mission with unclear goals), he continually pushed back on every proposal, asking why it couldn’t be smaller, demanding justifications for every unit allocated to the effort. Sometimes Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, would demand to know why particular “fire teams” (a four- or five-person unit), or even a particular individual was assigned. He also automatically rejected any plan or proposal involving a round number of troops (on the basis that a request for a thousand people could not be the result of considered analysis). The result was that the United States went into the country with a vastly smaller number of troops than it might have.19

Rumsfeld had an odd ally in his efficiency monomania: the neoconservatives. They saw an invasion and occupation of Iraq as just the first step in a broader US-led restructuring of the entire world order. As one of them put it, “This isn’t the battle for Baghdad. This is the first battle for Tehran.” In their view, the US had to use a light footprint in order to keep spare capacity for the next 3-4 wars that they expected to launch into immediately afterwards. Their phrase for this was “recocking the pistol.” One military planner Mazarr interviewed said, “No wonder Rumsfeld was only giving [US CENTCOM commander] Franks 100,000… because six weeks into this we were going to Syria.” Or as another put it, “We have a unique space in time to shake the Etch-a-Sketch clean.”

On the other hand, there were plenty of other people aware that this mission was not going to get done on the cheap. One USAID representative was informed that Iraqi schools needed to reopen within a few weeks of Saddam’s toppling, and that obviously they would need new textbooks that weren’t full of Ba’athist propaganda, so could they please develop, write, edit, and print millions of new textbooks for every grade level…in Arabic. Needless to say, this didn’t happen, but kudos to whoever made the insane request. Obviously if America was going to leave Iraq as a thriving democracy, it couldn’t have all the schoolchildren still using regime textbooks. But if the plan was for America to change Iraq down to the textbooks, what else did they then need to plan for, and how much would that cost?

These questions were not answered. By and large, they were never even asked. And when they were asked, the answers were not forthcoming. For example, in this September 2002 opinion piece, Washington Post columnist William Raspberry asked, “How will you govern a defeated Iraq?” The huffy reply from the administration was, “Why do we assume that the Iraqi people are unable to provide themselves with a decent government?” Oh, I dunno, maybe the entire history of the region, and everything the US government already knew about the state of Iraqi society? Later, when an aid agency asked who would be providing security for post-conflict reconstruction, a senior American military officer helpfully suggested that they “hire warlords.” (Apparently he did not realize that in Iraq, unlike in Afghanistan, there were no warlords available for hire.)

Perhaps the greatest indictment of Bush is that he didn’t recognize the level of confusion amongst his own subordinates, and didn’t move decisively to clear it up. No doubt he would protest that he was not “a details guy,” but one of the most basic tasks of any leader is to ensure that everybody under him knows what the goals are, knows what the strategy is, and knows what the plan is. And yet Bush failed at an even more profound level, because he didn’t actually know these things himself, let alone explain it clearly to his underlings. The result was that “agencies and departments were constantly backstabbing each other,” driven by the divisions and mistrust amongst their principals. Again, the most basic job of a boss is to resolve these conflicts and ensure that his team is indeed acting as a team, and Bush totally abdicated this responsibility. At one meeting when Rumsfeld was presenting some military plans, Rice asked to keep her copy of the slides, and Rumsfeld physically grabbed them across the table. The two of them were literally pulling the sheaf of papers back and forth across the table, until Rice asked Bush to adjudicate: “Mr. President, I need to keep these.” Bush shrugged and walked out of the room.

Bush wasn’t the only one who vacillated uselessly. Another bit of dark comedy in this book is the pathetic head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Hans Blix. It was Blix’s job to say whether Iraq had actually violated the UN resolution requiring him to admit inspectors (which would provide the casus belli if he had). Instead, he produced maddening circumlocutions like, “The answers can be seen from the factor descriptions that I have provided. However, if more direct answers are desired, I would say the following: The Iraqi side has tried on occasion to attach conditions… It has not, however, so far persisted in this or other conditions for the exercise of any of our inspection rights.” This is just a small sample of his output. When one of Blix’s colleagues declared that Iraq did not appear to have a functioning WMD program, Blix quickly sprang into action, and asked for several more months to write additional reports.

Surprisingly, given the chaos and indecisiveness within the White House, once a decision was made to start selling war to the American people, all of the supposedly independent institutions of American life quickly fell into line. Part of America's marketing is a supposedly raucous culture of internal dissent, but that’s mostly for show and to keep would-be troublemakers distracted or entertained. One of America’s true strengths has always been a shockingly cohesive and disciplined ruling class, and when word went out that class obediently lined up like iron filings under the influence of a magnet. Every major newspaper and news program, including ones supposedly opposed to the Bush administration like the New York Times, instantly began parroting the party line that Iraq had WMD and Saddam must be toppled and it would all be easy and fast. Nearly every major politician also endorsed the war, including Bush's previous election opponent Al Gore, his future election opponent John Kerry, and the entire Clinton dynasty.

In fact, the American aristocracy had such internal solidarity, and such a stranglehold on political discourse, that even a decade later — when the true scope of the disaster was widely apparent — it was still verboten in Washington high society to admit just what a catastrophe it all was. Serious, fundamental criticism of the Iraq War was restricted to far-left radicals at outlets like Counterpunch and far-right paleoconservatives at places like The American Conservative. Both were firmly outside the window of acceptable opinion. This phenomenon, where an informational “firewall” is maintained against an obvious and important truth that could undermine the legitimacy of the entire system, is supposed to be something that only happens under oppressive or authoritarian governments. But in fact, even in countries like China or Iran, most of the work to maintain such a firewall involves “soft” methods: scoffing, and shunning, and imposing a social cost for having the wrong views.

These mechanisms are deployed with great effectiveness in the United States, and even more so in Western Europe, where supposedly democratic regimes routinely declare major issues of popular interest to be unacceptable topics for political contest. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing! True democracy sounds dreadfully unstable, so it’s good we don't have it. And a complex society probably can’t survive having all of its basic presuppositions up for debate all the time. But sometimes these mechanisms prevent a vital practice of reflection and accountability and self-correction from playing out, and as far as anybody could tell in 2013, American elites were going to get away scot-free and would be able to pretend that Iraq had never happened.

And then this guy showed up.

A few years ago there was a fun meme where people collected reasons why other people said we got Trump. But no, seriously, that video is why you got Trump. Every respectable institution in American society compromised itself over Iraq, and every candidate in the 2016 election pretended it wasn’t a big deal, and then one man stood up on stage and told them all that they were full of shit. No, Iraq wasn’t the only issue where the views of the majority of Americans had literally no representation in either party (immigration and the degradation of the native lower class were also significant), but it was a big one. Economic theory tells us what happens next: when a monopoly gets lazy, it creates an opening for entrepreneurs. Trump spotted a big, wide open opportunity, and he seized it. That’s why you got Trump.

Aftermath

On March 20th, 2003, thousands of US soldiers swarmed across the border into Iraq. Organized resistance from the Iraqi armed forces collapsed quickly, and then almost immediately things went off the rails. In decades since, a lot of blame has been placed on the decision to demobilize the Iraqi army and security services. This was, indeed, very dumb, insofar as it involved taking hundreds of thousands of resentful, highly-trained soldiers and throwing them onto the streets with no salary. Many of these men became the nexus of the various uprisings and guerilla wars against American occupation which slowly escalated into almost a full-blown civil war. But dismantling the army was actually just a special case of the more general “de-Ba’athification” wherein everybody who’d held an important position in Saddam’s government was purged from public life.

What did we think would happen to a society when its entire upper stratum — everybody educated, or influential, or connected, or used to running things — was sliced away? Apparently, according to one senior US official, “Most people thought an Iraqi leadership would arise.” Pause for a moment to admire the absolute insanity of that sentence. I especially like the use of the impersonal construction: “would arise.” It’s such a perfect distillation of the Rousseauian notion that the people, liberated from their oppressors, would spontaneously generate a harmonious and functional society. (This is, no doubt, why you see so many hunter-gatherers practicing parliamentary democracy.) Notice also how vague the statement is: “an” Iraqi leadership. But who, specifically? There is a weird echo here of what Peter Thiel calls “indefinite optimism” — a gauzy assurance that someone, somewhere will figure it out. Don’t worry, “the market” will deliver “innovations”. But markets don’t deliver innovations, particular individuals with particular theories do, because they believe that they can beat the market. Something akin to that process can happen in politics too, but you may not like the result.

It was about one week into the invasion when the US realized that “liberating” the Iraqis and giving them “democracy” might not be a very good idea. Around this time we see a memo gingerly suggesting giving “those who share the President’s ideas a head start in the post-Saddam political process.” The language is very careful; after all, as it notes, “There is tension between our interests in steering the process toward a moderate and free Iraq, and our interest in winning immediate broad support in and out of Iraq for our policy.” Finally it declares that “hasty” elections and an “excessively ‘hands off’ approach” may produce “an anti-democratic result.” This is a remarkable statement: people voting might produce a result contrary to democracy! But of course it makes total sense when you realize that democracy actually means “people we like.” This is the logic behind the “democracy fortification” attempts we now see in Europe and the United States — for example calls to ban the most popular political party in Germany, or actually banning the most popular presidential candidate in Romania. They tried to do it to Trump too! But first, they tried it in Iraq.

In any case, it didn’t matter. US forces rapidly lost control of the situation in Iraq. The first sign was a mass outbreak of looting, which both destroyed much of the remaining infrastructure in the country (and countless irreplaceable historical artifacts) and fatally damaged the credibility of the occupying forces. If they couldn’t even keep thugs from ripping air conditioners out of hospitals, how could they possibly govern the country? As months went by, the violence and chaos got worse and worse. One US interrogator recalls a visit to a VIP prisoner: Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s deputy prime minister. Aziz spoke fluent English and retained his swagger even in a military interrogation center. One day, he noticed that his captors had a different look in their eyes when they came into his cell. He smirked. “The first few days were quiet, weren’t they? People were waiting for you to tell them what to do. They wanted to be told what to do.”

Mazarr lays blame for the disaster squarely at the feet of what he calls “moralism” in American foreign policy. By this he means emotional appeals for particular courses of action on the basis of a moral imperative, rather than a dispassionate weighing of benefits and costs, risks and opportunities. It’s the driver killing pedestrians on his way to the soup kitchen again. Mazarr ends his book (published in 2019) with a bracing warning that US relations with Russia are about to fall apart for the exact same reason. Relentless NATO expansion right up to the Russian border is viewed as an existential concern in Moscow, and it’s not at all clear how it benefits the US either. But rather than making an argument for why it actually wasn’t risky, or would bring some huge strategic advantage to the United States, its proponents couched the decision in moral terms. Countries “deserve” to have a choice to join NATO. What kind of heartless monster would refuse to let the noble Estonian people have a choice?

In light of the Ukraine war, this warning seems eerily prophetic. But it isn’t just Ukraine: since Iraq the US has plunged both Libya and Syria into immensely destructive civil wars, again for no clear strategic reason and triggering a wave of refugees that have destabilized friendly regimes in Europe. At least we didn’t get drawn into an occupation ourselves in those cases, but that’s small comfort to the millions who are dead or displaced. Mazarr closes his book with a story about interviewing a senior official in the Bush administration. As he finishes the interview, packs up, and is about to leave the office; his source stops him and says:

You know, it will happen again. We’ll do it again.

How many more times?

1

Many thanks to reader Tanner Greer at The Scholars Stage for recommending this book to me.

The Scholar's Stage

Researching the Communist Party of China is my day job. Here I write long reads on international politics, ancient history, and American conservatism.

By T. Greer

If you’re an English-speaker who studied Latin in school, you might remember Caecilius, who est in hortō. (Technically I suppose I should say you might remember Caecilium, but if we indulge that level of pedantry we’ll be here all day.)

Lucius Caecilius Iucundus is a real historical figure: he was a Pompeiian banker whose home, charred business records, and wax tablets were excavated in the 19th century. He’s most famous, however, as the main character of the first volume of the Cambridge Latin Course, where his household — wife, son, slaves — becomes the setting for a series of charming stories of lawsuits, dinner parties, accidental murder, and political intrigue. The exploits of the Caecilii familiarized generations of students with Latin grammar and vocabulary, with the details of Roman culture and everyday life from food to slavery to religion — and with the tragic finitude of all things. (The final chapter is called “Vesuvius” and, spoiler alert, Caecilius does not make it. The final line leaves his loyal dog, who opened the book by bothering the cook, guarding his dead master “in vain.”)

The Cambridge Latin Course is incredibly popular: since its original publication in 1970, it’s gone through six editions and is currently used in something like 40% of secondary school Latin classes worldwide. The stories are delightful, the conceit of hanging them on real archaeology whenever possible is inspired, and students love it. It’s just terrible at teaching Latin. And worse, it’s terrible on purpose.

It pains me to say this, but Caecilius and his garden — in fact, the entire Cambridge Latin Course — must be extirpated root and branch.

There are two basic schools of thought on how to learn Latin. Naturally, therefore, they resent each other passionately, compose vicious diatribes about each other’s failings, and issue dire warnings about the terrible fates that will befall students who suffer under the other method — and they’re both absolutely fine.

The traditional approach, sometimes called the “grammar-translation” method, focuses on drill and memorization to master the complexities of Latin grammar. This is a major undertaking, because — unlike modern English — Latin is a highly inflected language: where English mostly conveys grammatical information with word order and helper words, Latin instead changes the words themselves.1 Yes, of course this is a thing English does occasionally, like when we make plurals or comparatives or change our pronouns (I mean “he” to “him,” not “he” to “she”), but Latin turns it up to eleven. The word abitūrīs, for instance, is built off of the basic verb meaning “to go,” with a prefix meaning “away from,” in a form that indicates it’s a future active participle, and with an ending that shows it’s the indirect object of its sentence. It means something like “for the people who are about to go away,” but all of that semantic information is packed into eight letters. And the whole language is like that! Latin texts are incredibly meaning-dense, so if you don’t recognize the forms you’ll end up with no idea what any of it means.

Learning Latin with the grammar-translation method means memorizing and reciting charts upon charts until they’re so deeply ingrained that grown men who last glanced at a textbook during the Truman administration still know them by heart. (Seriously, try this.) The prototypical scene from grammar school is a roomful of boys chanting the accidence: amō, amās, amat… And once they mastered that, they would go on to practice parsing the grammatical characteristics of a word, translating Latin texts into English, and tackling the dreaded English-to-Latin “prose comp.” The “Romans Go Home” scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a pitch-perfect example of how this works; the centurion is more or less my beloved middle school Latin teacher in a helmet.2

The opponents of the grammar-translation method advocate what’s usually known as the “natural” method. Forget memorizing charts, they say: Latin is a real language that was spoken by real people, and it should be learned the way you would learn any other language. If you decide to study French, do they immediately plop you down in front of a chart of the passé simple, or drill you on the genders of nouns? No! If you take French, you just start talking about the weather and what color shirt François is wearing and whether you like to have lait in your tasse de café. If you mix up le banc and la banque your teacher will laugh at correct you. You’ll pick up the grammar as you go, and if you start getting confused someone will explain it to you in French. So why not do that for Latin, too? See abitūrīs in context often enough, according to this theory, and you’ll just absorb its meaning without needing to memorize a chart.

The most popular text for the natural method, Danish linguist Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latin Per Se Illustrata, is (except for the author’s name on the title page) entirely in Latin.3 It introduces grammatical concepts gradually, in contexts that try to make it clear exactly what’s going on, with illustrations and marginal notes (in Latin!) to clarify. It’s incredibly popular among Latin autodidacts, and when I eventually devote some of my copious free time to getting my Latin really good again, it’s probably what I’ll use.

So which one is better?

Well, better for what? Or, to put it another way: why would a person learn Latin? Ask any school that offers it as a subject and you’ll get a whole laundry list of justifications: all those roots will help the students’ English vocabulary, it’s a good structured introduction to how grammar works more broadly, it teaches patterns of critical thought, it sets you up for learning other languages, all the tweedy Oxford dons did it so we should too…4 And none of that is wrong, precisely — those are all pleasant ancillary benefits — but if they’re your actual goals there are better and faster ways of achieving all them. You might, for instance, drill SAT vocabulary, or teach grammar in English class, or dive right into whichever other language it is you actually want to study.

No, the real reason to learn Latin — the standard against which any program that purports to teach Latin should be measured — is to read Latin. Does this sound facepalmingly obvious? The reason to learn a thing is so you can do the thing, film at 11! But in fact no less a personage than Mary Beard, the most famous classicist in the world, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that she can’t just pick up a piece of Latin and read it. Really reading Latin the way you would read English (or French, or Chinese, or whatever) — you know, moving your eyes across the words on the page in the order they’re written and simply understanding what they mean — is not at all a universal skill, even among people who have dedicated their lives to studying the ancient world.5 But any approach to Latin that doesn’t set you up to actually read it is a waste of your time.

So far, so me-reciting-natural-method-talking-points. But the truth is, both ways are demonstrably capable of getting you there.6

Critics of the grammar-translation method like to describe it as an innovation of the 18th or 19th centuries, introduced only after Latin was so thoroughly dead that people could stick it to the page like a dead beetle. This is false! Many of the pedagogical techniques go all the way back to the ancient world! A wonderful overview of Latin textbooks for Greek-speakers in the Roman Empire finds side-by-side Greek and Latin texts and exercises in translation from one to the other. St. Jerome, who translated the Vulgate, learned Latin as a young man from Aelius Donatus and a formal grammar complete with charts. A thousand years later Latin was no one’s native language, but it was still the lingua franca of educated Europe…and all those men who wrote all those tremendous works in Latin, from Erasmus to Thomas More to Athanasius Kircher, started out as schoolboys reciting the accidence. Queen Elizabeth I learned Latin from the man who invented the pedagogical practice of “double translation” (translating Latin to English, then back again, to check how you did), and she wrote Latin poetry in her spare time.

But the thing is that all that dreary memorization was meant to be a stepping-stone. I can imagine few things more depressing than two or three years spent drilling grammar and translating mindless sentences back and forth before you’re allowed to see Caesar — that misses the point! You memorize what abitūrīs means so that when you see it in a sentence, you recognize it at once and move along. Parsing, translation, and the interminable labels (ablative of means! passive periphrastic! dative of breakfast foods!) are analytical tools that you can pull out of your back pocket when just reading fails you. Sometimes, however, teachers and students mistake them for the goal itself. The failure mode of the grammar-translation method is an eternal resort to the dictionary and the charts, the painstaking substitution of an English word for each Latin one, until you end up treating great works of literature like a giant Sudoku.

Or, as C.S. Lewis put it in Surprised by Joy (my review here):

The great gain [of reading] was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek.

That is the real Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom the Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle. The very formula, “Naus means a ship,” is wrong. Naus and ship both mean a thing, they do not mean one another. Behind Naus, and behind navis or naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, slender mass with sail or oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding.7

The natural method promises a shortcut straight to reading (and possibly also speaking and writing, if that’s your jam). And it, too, can work! I recently purchased ’s splendid Osweald Bera, an Old English reader that employs the same inductive approach as Ørberg’s Latin text (but has a much more engaging storyline). Then I made the mistake of leaving it out on the kitchen counter, whereupon it vanished for several days until one of my children appeared, clutching my book and announcing, “Mom, I think I found the dative!”

But you can’t do that unless you already know about the dative — or at least what an indirect object is. And unfortunately, because most schools no longer teach English grammar in any sort of formal way, Latin is often a student’s first introduction to concepts like “tense” and “participles” (let alone the subjunctive mood). This makes the fully natural method hard, because a student who doesn’t have a solid framework for grammar will have no mental hooks on which to hang all these new features: he just won’t recognize what it is that’s happening. Of course it’s still possible to learn this way — we all learned to speak as babies without knowing anything about grammar in any a priori sense8 — but it takes an absolutely enormous amount of repetition to internalize something without the conceptual scaffolding to organize it. (Ironically, this probably means that students at classical schools, who are the only ones getting structured English grammar instruction nowadays, are probably better equipped to learn Latin with the natural method than anyone else. But that’s rarely how those schools do it.) The entirely natural method can be done quite successfully, but there’s a reason it’s especially popular with motivated adult learners who already have some linguistic background.

If the failure mode of the grammar-translation method is Latin-as-Sudoku, playing hunt-the-verb through an impenetrable thicket of subordinate clauses until you’ve finally beaten the sentence into submission, the failure mode of the natural method is simple confusion. The poor Latin student sometimes ends up like someone who took four years of high school French and still can’t understand the directions to the bathroom. Yeah, you maybe, kind of, get the gist of it? You recognize the basic vocabulary, at least. There’s definitely something about cohorts doing something, or maybe something is being done to the cohorts… I’d argue that’s even worse: at least treating Latin like a puzzle lets you figure out who’s doing the verb to whom, even if you eviscerate the text in the process and have to piece it back together like Frankenstein’s monster.

Of course, the real answer to this is just “don’t fail” — a successful student of either method can get to the point of just reading, so picking an approach becomes a question of maximizing the number of students who can succeed. And there’s an obvious solution: combine them! Give some big-picture grammatical instruction so the syntactically naive get the conceptual framework to understand what they’re seeing. Have some charts so that they can see where abitūrīs fits in to the whole system. And then give them lots and lots of engaging stories that use all this grammar in context, because the whole point of learning Latin is to read it and there’s no reason to wait until Caesar to have something to read. Let them go from parts to whole and whole to parts at the same time, and let it all sink in through practice and repetition.

And that’s exactly what the Cambridge Latin Course claims to do. Only it does it in the stupidest way possible.

The CLC grew out of a crisis in the postwar British academy.9 Up until the 1950s, a mastery of classical languages had been a clear class marker: it was heavily emphasized at the public schools, it was required for admission to Oxford and Cambridge regardless of the student’s intended studies, and it could win university scholarships and social mobility for the ablest boys of the lower and middle classes. Almost definitionally, the men who built and ruled the British Empire had learned their Latin grammar — because they couldn’t have gotten those building and ruling gigs without it. It wasn’t that Latin itself was a prerequisite (although there was certainly a great deal of identifying the two great historical empires, to the point that the various enemies of perfidious Albion toyed with the idea that they themselves were the descendants of Carthaginians); rather, the habits of mind produced by years of the grammar-translation approach were supposed to be the qualification. The classically educated man, John Sharwood Smith later wrote, was expected to be “able, by virtue of [that] training, to master any problem in any sphere of life as long as it was amenable to intellectual analysis.” (Alas, General Sir Charles James Napier did not actually announce his whirlwind 1842 conquest of the Indian province of Sindh with the one word telegram peccāvī, “I have sinned,” but it’s exactly the sort of clever, breezy, effortless display of superiority that was supposed to characterize the classically educated man. Which is why the apocryphal story has stuck around.) I made fun of the people who like Latin because they want to LARP as Inklings, but they’re not wrong — after tweed, there’s no better symbol of the pre-WWII British social order than having your children study Latin. Unless it’s having them study Greek.

When that social order crumbled after the war — with the loss of the Empire, the weakening of the class system, and the sudden disreputability of the very idea of an “elite subject” — Latin came under threat. In 1960, Oxford and Cambridge both dropped it as an admissions requirement. In 1965, the Labour Government abolished the state-funded grammar schools that had offered Latin and Greek for the cleverest children in favor of a single comprehensive system for the whole country. A classical education was no longer an entrance ticket to the ruling elite (or at least a position as a colonial administrator) — in fact, it might no longer be available at all.

Britain’s classical scholars quickly realized that if their discipline was going to survive outside the confines of Eton and Harrow, it would have to be in the new, mixed- ability comprehensive schools, and it would have to be taught to children who might never reach the point of reading real Latin texts. Frankly, that was mostly already the case: for decades classicists had worried that most students dropped Latin as soon as they finished their O-Levels (about tenth grade) if not before, so that they met mostly their textbooks and rarely the Romans. (It’s bad enough to spend years doing nothing more than memorizing grammatical forms before you’re allowed to get your hands on Caesar; how much worse to do all that and never get Caesar at all!) Charles Brink had fretted that they got only “the preliminary to a classical education which never follows.” But now that there was no more elite academic track for the elite academic subject — now that the subject itself had been knocked off its pedestal — something had to be done.

That something was the Cambridge School Classics Project, which was founded in 1966 with the express purpose of “improv[ing] the teaching of Latin in the early stage.” To save Latin education, the scholars and teachers decided, it had to be fun and engaging from the start — and it had to be utterly unlike the Latin of the past, which had been an elitist training ground for snobs. This wasn’t just savvy marketing: the people behind the project had exactly the politics you would expect from 1960s British academics. They might love Latin, but they hated the intellectual and socioeconomic elitism it had come to symbolize. So when they published the first of their eponymous textbooks in 1970, they eschewed anything that reminded them of the bad old way of doing things.

Unfortunately, the bad old way of doing things had a lot going for it, and the CLC suffered from their lack. To take a particularly egregious example: ever since the Romans started analyzing their own grammar, we’ve copied the names they coined for various forms. They don’t make as much intuitive sense to an English-speaker — the name of the ablative case, which is used (among other things) to express motion away, is obviously derived from the Latin word for “having been carried away” — but they’re still tremendously useful. The first edition of the CLC left them out entirely and instead labeled the forms A, B, C, etc.10

That’s more or less the problem in a nutshell: horrified by the aristocratic pedigree of Latin class as a roomful of boys chanting full charts of accidence, the authors present grammar not just inductively but piecemeal. The declensions are thrown at students all at once — but only in three cases, with the fifth and final one waiting until halfway through the second textbook in the series. New forms are presented for recognition but never formation, and certainly never systematic analysis, which is a disaster for a language full of things that look the same and are actually completely different. A word ending in -ī could be a plural subject or a singular possessive (or an indirect object or a first person past tense verb…), and a student who meets one version six months or a year after another (and never sees all the options side-by-side) will have great difficulty remembering the latecomers. This doesn’t matter so much for simple stories, since you can probably figure it out from context, but as the sentences grow in length and complexity and the dependent clauses swell like clusters of fruit, pausing to sort it out every time is like solving a polynomial when you can’t remember 7+3.

None of this troubled the authors of the CLC: they wanted to make a Latin for everyone, which meant that it had to be fun and engaging and accessible (which is to say, not too hard). The most talented students, who would presumably be the only ones to stick with the subject regardless of how it was taught, could muddle through, and everyone else would enjoy their little taste of Latin. And okay, fine: if you’re resigned to the idea that your textbook is the only exposure most of your readers will ever have to the material, it doesn’t much matter whether it teaches them enough grammar to prepare them for the real thing. If we’re comparing failure modes, the worst-case outcome of the Cambridge Latin Course is a vague fond familiarity with Roman culture and a soft spot for Caecilius and his family. Given what most people seem to recall from their secondary education, you could probably do worse! (No one seems to feel that way about, say, trigonometry.) But the problem is that the CLC is intentionally designed to create that failure mode. The ideological aversion to anything even resembling the traditional grammar-translation approach (even when it’s incredibly useful!) so hamstrings the instruction that even a gifted Latin student comes out of it ill-prepared to read real texts. John Wilkins, the linguistic consultant who guided the first edition, argued that “it is better to let students develop their own ‘personal grammar’ (or way to competence) rather than imposing a pre-analysed ‘pure grammar’ on them,” which is all well and good unless the personal grammar is, uh, wrong.

Luckily, the Cambridge School Classics Project is highly responsive to criticism and the recent new edition of their textbooks addresses a terrible problem that people have complained about for years: the egregious shortage of female representation.

The story of the Cambridge Latin Course is a terrible tragedy. Its reading-forward approach — carefully scaffolding the student’s exposure to increasingly complex grammar, presented in historical context and through honestly wonderful stories (I have cried) — is such a good idea…and the actual product is utterly poisoned by its roots in the ressentiment and massive social changes of the 1960s. It’s as though teaching kids to read using phonics had somehow gotten conceptually wrapped up with the Nixon Administration and was tossed out wholesale to prove the educators’ ideological bona fides. (Actually, that’s not a terrible description of something that actually happened: the push for the whole word method in American literacy instruction shares a number of features with the development of the CLC — and the faults are similar, too. There’s a tagline for you: “like Lucy Calkins, but for Latin.”)

Like Ridley Scott’s execrable Napoleon movie (or any number of novels I won’t name here), a good idea executed poorly is often worse than never doing it at all — because now no one else can do it. There is, demonstrably, a market for Latin textbooks that take a very different approach from the CLC. There is no market for “the same approach as that incredibly popular book, but structured more sensibly” — and there won’t be until my entirely reasonable plea is heeded. The Cambridge Latin Course is razed and the ground sown with salt. Perhaps then, heeding antique precedent, something better can rise.

Way back when the world was young, when men were men1 and before the corners of the maps even had cute illustrations of dragons in them, a young man with above-average competence and ambition had a straightforward path to glory. All he had to do was round up a few dozen of his closest friends and form a kóryos, and then go raid and pillage a neighboring village. If he was lucky it’d go well, and the survivors would carry off some women and some easily transportable forms of wealth, and then sit around and tell stories about how awesome they were.2 If he was really lucky and repeated this feat a few times, then the whole enterprise might begin to snowball. His dozens of friends would turn into hundreds of friends, and soon he’d be laying waste to entire regions and later generations would memorialize him as an ancestral spirit or war god.

Yes, life was simple back then. Then along came states — of many different sorts, but what they all had in common was brutal and efficient punishment for any sort of brigandry. Not to worry though, there were still opportunities for the young man of uncommon energy and hunger. If he lived during a period of collapse or retrenchment, a career in petty conquest of his neighbors might still be open to him. If, conversely, he lived during a period of imperial expansion, then he could lead an expedition, either publicly or privately-funded, out into the corners of the map (which by now were adorned with adorable pictures of dragons), and plant the flag of his fatherland upon the still-twitching bodies of the natives.3 Out there, somewhere else, life was a bit more free-wheeling and Hobbesian, more amenable to ultra-rapid advancement for a young man with more talent than class.

More time passed, and the dragons disappeared again. The corners of the map got entirely filled in, and then every last bit of land got shaded in the color of some basically-functional nationstate. What now, for the young man who had won the genetic lottery but not the social one? In times of peace, militaries become bloated with careerists and aristocratic failsons, but give them a salutary stretch of war and they quickly revert to lean, mean, meritocratic machines. We see the same basic pattern recur in conflicts as different as the American Civil War, World War II, and the Russo-Ukrainian War: an initial phase in which one or more armies are commanded by blundering incompetents, a transitional phase in which the incompetents are rapidly killed off or forced to retire, and a terminal phase in which the battlefield is controlled by dead-eyed men of ignoble origin and impressive ability.4 And so it is that the army seemed like a natural place for a Napoleon Bonaparte, or for any other intelligent, sensitive, ambitious, frustrated young man.

Okay, but now imagine that you live in a globe-spanning hyper-empire that has ushered in an era of incomparable peace and prosperity. Can you imagine somebody like Napoleon or Alexander or Genghis Khan joining the US Army today? Like, the army with all the powerpoint slides and DEI consultants? It’s inconceivable. Laughable, even. For a time, there was a lively debate within the Psmith household about where the bulk of these men do end up in our civilization, but then a guy named “Big Balls”5 took over the United States government and the answer became obvious. The answer is startups.

This insight answers a number of mysteries about the world, like: why it is that management books and military strategy books sound so eerily similar? Or why it is that if you read a war memoir and let your eyes lose focus like you’re doing one of those Magic Eye puzzles, you suddenly find yourself reading a business memoir? To be sure, war and business are very different activities, but they attract a similar sort of personality. This was especially true back when war was a more independent and entrepreneurial affair, as it was when most of the great military classics were written.

Every society offers official avenues of advancement that look like a complex game with byzantine rules, a cross between a ballroom dance and one of those incredibly fiddly board games. Most people take the deal: they put energy and excellence into learning all the moves, all the weird interactions and all the exceptions. But actually, the game is for show. The true game that moves the wheels of history is Nomic.6 Some people break through to this new level of reality after a long and distinguished career of a more conventional sort; others hear it as boys in the call of the kóryos. Both war and business, at least in their rawest and most elemental forms, offer direct manipulation of this deeper layer of the simulation. Rather than pour your ingenuity and craft into brilliantly following the rules set by others, you aim to brilliantly devise new rules and new scenarios and a new playing field that ensure you always win. This obviously isn’t quite true in the civilized world, where military commanders and entrepreneurs alike have to obey certain laws, but the flavor of it remains.

The other similarity between war and business, the central paradox that they both share, is that while they are on some level a free-for-all where the only thing that matters is winning, the actors in the mêlée are not individuals but complex, hierarchical organizations. This means that war books and business books don’t just have authors with similar psychological profiles, they have largely overlapping subject matter too. In either arena, you must master the craft of welding men into a titan whose skin and muscles are individuals, whose bones are loyalty, and whose tendons are ambition. At the smallest scale, this looks like charismatic leadership in the Weberian sense. At the very largest scale, it looks like institutional design and incentive alignment…plus a healthy dose of charismatic leadership.

This also explains why most war books and most business books are useless.

The basic problem is just the recurring one that “process knowledge” cannot be losslessly converted into a propositional form suitable for writing down. Imagine reading a book by Jascha Heifetz about playing the violin and then thinking that you knew something about playing the violin. I hammered this point to death in an old review of a very bad book about business, so go read that if you want to hear more about it. You might object that large parts of the art of leading men to victory actually are propositional, but that runs into the other point I belabor in that review I linked above: every army and every company is different, and the situations they find themselves in are different too. As with parenting, so much of the skill of leadership is not about dealing with people in the abstract but dealing with these particular people in this particular situation. The same is true of strategy and tactics, which are less about memorizing a particular set of gambits and more about learning to rapidly assess the situation and come up with a winning move. What this means is that it’s hard to get more specific than Cambyses’ advice to Cyrus: “Just be incredibly good at whatever it is you do.”

But what if there were a business book that leaned into this rather than hiding from it?

I want to be very clear that I went into this book preparing to hate it. Some reasons for that include: (1) an old mentor of mine once told me that Horowitz had nothing important to say, (2) the book got so popular that it became a bit of a cliché and a dreary pillar of the startup-industrial complex, and (3) Horowitz begins every chapter with a set of gangster rap lyrics as epigraph.7 So there I was, preparing to hate the book, and then I flipped to the first non-introductory chapter and read these words and knew that I would love it:

People always ask me, “What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.8

The book begins with an accelerated narrative of Horowitz’s childhood and early career where he tells outrageous stories, like the one about the time he started a fist fight at a pickup basketball game because somebody insulted his brother, and received a gruesome black eye, and then talked his now-wife out of standing him up for their blind date. He ends each story with a solemn bit of business-speak like, “and that’s when I learned about optimizing synergies.” I assume this is total deadpan performance art and a send-up of conventional management books, but it’s actually even funnier if it isn’t.

Even here, though, we get glimpses into the soul of the author, and into the deeply countercultural message of this book. Why did he start a fistfight? Because somebody had disrespected his brother, because blood is thicker than water, because it is the job of the strong to protect the weak. Why is it important that his wife went on the date? Because calling it off would have been disrespectful, because it would have shown that she could not keep her word — and she went on the date because she is a woman who keeps her word and who respects him. That’s right, it’s honor culture…

…and suddenly the rap lyrics start to make more sense. Black people have their own distinctive culture of honor, inherited with some modifications from that of the antebellum South and from the Scots-Irish of Appalachia who have fought and won almost all of America’s wars. Horowitz is a nerdy Jewish guy with communist parents, but he grew up around black people, and imbibed through them the Scots-Irish mindset, and through them the gloriously premodern ideology of the Iliad: show off your strength, keep your promises, kill anybody who makes you look like a chump, protect your honor. This is not a book about how to succeed at business, but a book about how to be and become a certain kind of man.9

Horowitz believes that apart from virtue being its own reward, this kind of man will tend to win. That’s partly because he will be respected, feared, etc., but mostly because this kind of man is willing to endure unimaginable stress and suffering in pursuit of his goals. A founder/entrepreneur in the Horowitz vein is the opposite of the bureaucratized domain-agnostic professional managers that run most of corporate America. His name is on the building, his family and friends have invested their life savings in his company, he has promised every person he hired that he will protect them and fight for them in exchange for their loyalty, and when times get tough he can’t just walk away — because to do so would be to lose his honor. It would mean betraying everybody who ever trusted him, and the man of honor would rather die than do that, so he will work until he wins or dies.

In The Managerial Revolution, James Burnham wrote about the transition from an economy full of small-scale owner/proprietors to one dominated by a technocratic managerial class directing productive resources owned by others. We call both these systems “capitalism,” but Burnham points out that they’re actually completely different. For one thing, the professional managers are interchangeable, and they view the companies they work at as interchangeable. It’s Claire Hughes Johnson-ism. Conversely, the petty proprietor, like the startup founder, is “all in”: his name is on the door of his small business, he has backed it with personal loans, he cannot just pick up and head over to another corporation and keep his career.

Economic historians consider the transition from small owner-operated businesses to modern manager-run corporations to be one-way and in the past. But the tech world has brought back the old model on a grander scale. Of course we recognize that startup founders have vastly more internalized consequences of success and failure. (If a professional manager makes a transformative impact to his business, he will get a nice bonus, but he will not make billions of dollars like a founder. If a professional manager totally screws something up he might need to change jobs, but he will not be ruined like a founder.) But what Horowitz tells us is that the highest reaches of Silicon Valley have also brought back a much older culture and ethos as well. It’s non-WEIRD, obsessed with personal glory and honor, governed by “thick” social attachments and personal ties of loyalty. This instantly explains the massive cultural gulf between tech company CEOs and the vice presidents one or two levels down.

Horowitz believes the ability to endure, to survive, to chew glass, and then to laugh and ask for more, is especially valuable in the tech industry because it’s so unpredictable and changes so quickly. Fortuna’s wheel turns dizzyingly fast in tech: the exalted are quickly humbled, and those in the gutter suddenly discover that they’re sitting on the key technological enabler of whatever the new fad is. So the overriding directive is — survive. Figure it out. One more day. Okay, now one more day again. Never surrender. One more day could bring the relief army riding over the horizon, the technological breakthrough or the acquisition offer or the market zeitgeist change. You just need to sit in this trench and keep the enemy at bay for one more day. Tomorrow might bring news of peace. It will all have been worth it, brothers! Come on, let’s just make it one more day.

When you are sitting in that trench, and the bombs are falling all around you, your only objective is to figure something out. If Horowitz believes one thing, it’s that: “There is always a move.” He practices what he preaches. At the nadir of the dot-com bust he was unable to raise money in private markets, so he took his failing company public. When he needed one particular deal to stay in business and the guy in procurement on the other side said there was no way in hell he would do the deal, he found out what that guy’s favorite product was and with his last money bought the company that made it and integrated it into his own. There is always a move. This is the central article of faith for Horowitz, as it has been for most victorious generals. If you think all roads lead to defeat, you aren’t thinking hard enough. There is a move that keeps you alive one more day. There must be. Find it.

Sometimes the only move that keeps you alive is to lay off 80% of your staff. Yes, you need to do it. Personally.

People won’t remember every day they worked for your company, but they will surely remember the day you laid them off. They will remember every last detail about that day and the details will matter greatly. The reputations of your company and your managers depend on you standing tall, facing the employees who trusted you and worked hard for you. If you hired me and I busted my ass working for you, I expect you to have the courage to lay me off yourself.

I had never read sentences like that in a business book before, but this is not a business book. It’s a book about honor. You must lay them off yourself because to do otherwise would be despicable. It would mark you forever as a dishonorable coward, and that in turn would taint your company, your associates — everybody who ever trusted you. You would heap ignominy upon ignominy, adding to your betrayal of the fired employees (which now cannot be helped) the betrayal of those who lent you reputational capital at any step along the way. Dishonor pollutes everybody who ever loved you, and by extension the people who loved them. This is a harsh creed, but it certainly gives you a reason to behave correctly. And part of behaving correctly is confessing your failure.

Going into a layoff, board members will sometimes try to make you feel better by putting a positive spin on things. They might say, “This gives us a great opportunity to deal with some performance issues and simplify the business.”… do not let that cloud your thinking or your message to the company. You are laying people off because the company failed… The message must be: “the company failed and in order to move forward, we will have to lose some excellent people.” Admitting to the failure may not seem like a big deal, but trust me, it is. “Trust me.” That’s what a CEO says every day to her employees. Trust me: This will be a good company. Trust me: This will be good for your career. Trust me: This will be good for your life. A layoff breaks that trust. In order to rebuild trust, you have to come clean.

Horowitz thinks you need to be honest with your employees all the time, not just during layoffs. I mention this because it is a stark contrast with the conventional wisdom peddled in management texts. When I began reading this book, I thought Horowitz was the anti-Claire Hughes Johnson because he does not believe in domain neutral expertise, only domain neutral honor and character. But actually he’s the anti-CHJ because he believes in telling people the truth. The phrase that made me go absolutely ballistic when reviewing Scaling People was, “Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.” Horowitz believes that leadership is disappointing people all at once. Or as he puts it: “If you are going to eat shit, don’t nibble.” In the section covering this he provides many very good and practical reasons why this is actually in your interest. I believe all of them. But don’t be fooled, this is not why he is telling you to do this. He is telling you to do this because he wants you to preserve your honor.

Does this job sound stressful? We actually haven’t gotten to the stressful part yet. The fundamental job of a CEO is to make a continuous stream of high-stakes decisions, while maintaining excellent quality of decision-making, despite not having time to think properly about any of them. “Oh no, they’ll experience decision fatigue.” Yes, but they need to suck it up and produce a constant stream of excellent decisions at a very high decisions-per-second anyway. This is actually still not the stressful part. The stressful part is that if the CEO is doing his job well, every single one of those decisions will be among the most painful or agonizing or otherwise difficult that he has ever made.

The person who first explained this paradox to me was Byrne Hobart at the Diff. Consider a one-person company. That one person is making all of the decisions. Some of them will be easy, like what to order for lunch. Some of them will be hard, like whether some major change in strategy is a good idea. But in the course of a normal day, most of the decisions that lone person faces are easy, with a few hard ones mixed in.

Now imagine that this person hires somebody to work for them, and imagine that they do a good job delegating. The underling is now in charge of some part of the business. He or she is making a share of the decisions in that area. If the delegation went well, the underling can make all the easy decisions themselves, but for the really tricky cases…well…maybe they should ask their boss’s opinion. So the boss is getting a filtered set of decisions disproportionately biased towards the hard ones. You may think that’s okay, because they are also making fewer overall decisions but ahh…the delegation went well, so the business has grown, so there are many more decisions to be made per day. The boss is making as many decisions as ever, they’re just harder on average, instead of the equal mix they had before.

The CEO of a large company sits at the limiting case of this process after it has taken many, many, many more steps. A large company can process a vast number of decisions per second. A huge majority of them are handled by frontline workers, and they pass the ones that are a bit above their pay-grade on to their bosses. Those bosses maybe handle a bunch of the medium-difficulty decisions, and pass the truly tricky ones another step up the chain, and so on. So the CEO receives a highly filtered and selective stream of the worst imaginable decisions. And again, this is in the happy case where they have done a good job delegating and therefore their company is able to grow. Enjoy.

The odd thing about this burden is that it’s once again curiously like being a soldier. A soldier friend of mine once told me, “To be a junior officer is to have the power of life and death over every living thing within artillery range.” That sounds like its own special kind of decision fatigue hell. But the thing is that wartime is an exceptional condition that everybody recognizes as exceptional. CEOs look like normal people. I have friends who are CEOs. You would not know what their jobs were unless you asked them. It’s like how there are some horrible diseases that get you tons of public sympathy, and other horrible diseases that get you none at all. There is something weird about there being people who are walking around, experiencing something akin to battlefield conditions all the time, but who look totally normal on the surface.

I can already hear you saying, “Boo hoo, do the big scary CEOs have their feelings hurt that they’re not appreciated? Nobody cares.” And Horowitz has already anticipated your critique. He agrees with it. He has an entire chapter titled “Nobody Cares.” Again, the comparison to a military commander is illustrative. Did your entire army catch Dengue fever and your logistics train get destroyed by freak floods and your enemy is suddenly getting supplied advanced weapons by another country? Nobody cares, bro. Just figure out how to win. You literally have one job. A general who barely lost when heavily outnumbered, or a startup CEO who almost made it, might be an impressive person in some objective sense. But nobody cares. History’s verdict will be, “Loser.” That’s the rule, and it comes with the job title. Nobody cares.

After eight heart attack-inducing years, Ben Horowitz finally sold his company. He and some of his surviving employees made a moderately enormous amount of money, and as he looked around and wondered what to do next he knew that the answer would be: not starting another company. But it seemed an awful shame to let all the hard-earned wisdom he’d accrued just rot away inside his head, so he called his old boss and friend Marc Andreessen and the two of them discussed their dissatisfaction with the venture capital scene. Most of the VCs were finance bros with no experience running companies (this is still 100% true, by the way) and a condescending attitude towards the founder/CEOs they backed. Horowitz remembers one particularly deflating instance when a famous venture capitalist asked him, in front of his team: “When are you going to get a real CEO?”10

And so was born Andreessen-Horowitz (better known as a16z), a venture capital firm with the innovative new premise of helping founders build good companies. When the firm was founded, they were the enfant terrible of startup finance, and even when this book was written, they were elite and hip. But since then something strange has happened. They’ve been successful. So successful that they started raising enormous amounts of institutional capital, which they then needed to find a way to deploy at scale.11 The result is that they’ve turned into what a friend of mine once termed “the Wal-Mart of startups.” What an odd mirror of the process that happens to every successful startup as well — young companies are all quirky and weird in their own way, but big and successful ones all look much more similar.12

But maybe the former renegades have one more trick left in them. You can interpret Andreessen’s Time to Build manifesto, and his subsequent involvement with the Trump administration, in many ways, but I view it as an attempt to reverse Burnham’s managerial revolution more broadly. Silicon Valley was a refuge for an older and more vital form of capitalism which had almost gone extinct everywhere else. Now Andreessen and Horowitz are trying to bring that updated model of owner/proprietorship back to the rest of the economy. If they succeed, both a cause and an effect of it will be a new elite. And not just a new elite, but a new kind of elite, with a very different set of preconceptions and values. Less interested in consensus, less averse to conflict, touchier about their honor, more personally loyal, more prone to grand displays. They will seem more like the military men of the nineteenth century and less like the corporate leaders of the twentieth century. Less Jack Welch, more Elon Musk.

For millennia, a young man of uncommon energy and ambition had many ways to achieve his dreams. For a few terrible decades, the only thing he could do was become a tech bro. But the nature of the kóryos is that as it succeeds it grows, and now the mounted hordes are poised to spill across the rest of the economy. Do you feel the thunder of the hooves? Do you hear the baying of the dogs? History is starting once more, and we may find that the long twentieth century was not the future, but an interlude. A dream.

When I was twelve years old, my grandfather gave me a copy of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. This single fact probably goes farther than any other in explaining How I Got This Way: the book blew my mind and kicked off a lifelong fascination with big-picture, multidisciplinary investigations of how the world, well, Got This Way. (Or, if you’re a hereditarian: roughly 25% of my genes come from a guy who thought this was a good book to buy for a twelve-year-old girl.)

You may remember that Guns, Germs, and Steel is framed as a reply to a man named Yali, a “remarkable local politician” whom Diamond encountered while walking on the beach in New Guinea in July of 1972. (Back before Diamond’s second career as a pop-science public intellectual, he was an ornithologist focusing on the birds of northern Melanesia.)1 They chatted for a while about the prospects for New Guinean independence, and local birds, and then Yali asked a question that Diamond spends a couple of paragraphs boiling down to something like, “Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?” (Which is of course what Guns, Germs, and Steel tries to answer.) But that’s not actually the way Yali put it, and his real question — indeed, his whole story, which is fascinating in its own right — suggests a whole ‘nother set of answers

Yali should be better-known.2 He may have been from a backwards backwater, but he’s one of the true Player Characters of history. If we lived in a better world, he would be the subject of a prestige cable drama3 — or maybe a Robert Eggers film, because the values and assumptions of his society are incredibly foreign to a Western audience. And so to really understand and appreciate Yali’s story (and the question he asked an American ornithologist on the beach one day) you need some background about the tribal cultures of the New Guinea coast and their reaction to contact with Europeans. Which is to say, you need to understand cargo cults! Because what Yali actually asked (per Diamond’s recollection twenty-odd years later) was: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

“Cargo” is the catchall word for Western material culture in Pidgin English,4 the lingua franca of New Guinea’s many language isolates, and New Guineans were understandably obsessed: before European contact, they were living in the literal Stone Age. It would be an exaggeration to say that they hadn’t made any technological progress since their ancestors settled the island 50,000 years earlier, since they domesticated several local plants (taro, yams, and the cooking banana) and got pigs plus a little admixture from some passing Austronesians about 1500 BC, but they were solidly Neolithic and had been since time immemorial. So of course as soon as they encountered cargo — especially steel tools, tinned meat and dried rice, and cotton cloth — they wanted it desperately. And they almost universally believed they could get it by ritual activity.

The prescribed rituals varied. One set, recorded in secret by an American Lutheran missionary in the late 1930s, involved the locals setting up tables in front of the local cemetery and decorating them with flowers, food, and tobacco. Then they danced wildly until dawn in twitching, trembling fits so uncontrolled that some devotees continued to sway and shake for days or weeks afterward. Those lucky people were believed to have a special connection to the ancestors that would let them receive dream messages about the cargo shipments their tables and dancing would surely bring. A different cult was led by a man who had a long piece of iron he claimed brought him messages from the future. He told his followers that if they set out all their food in cemeteries as offerings to their ancestors, handed all their Western goods and money to him for safekeeping, and renamed Tuesday to Sunday, they could expect a god to send them airplanes full of cargo flown by the spirits of the dead disguised as Japanese servicemen. These spirits would bring them rifles, tanks, and other materiel and help them drive out the white people, and then the god would change the natives’ skin from black to white. Oh, and also there would be storms and earthquakes of unimaginable violence.

Forget everything you think you know about cargo cults. (Especially forget those pictures you may have seen of “decoy” airplanes or satellite dishes made out of straw and wood: one popular airplane photo is from a Japanese straw festival, another is a Soviet wind tunnel model, and the radio telescope is just one advertisement from a British ice cream company.)5 Nowadays we use “cargo cult” as a lazy shorthand for “copying what someone successful seems to be doing without really knowing why and hoping you get the same result,” but that’s not what was happening at all. If the New Guinea natives built airstrips, it wasn’t out of a belief that airstrips attract cargo planes like planting milkweed brings Monarch butterflies — that would be seem silly but basically understandable from our frame of reference. No, it’s much weirder than that. They built airstrips for exactly the same reason anyone else does: because they thought cargo planes were coming. They just thought the planes were coming because of the dancing.

This is a story about epistemology. And also about Jesus sending you a case of Spam in the mail.

In 1949, Lancashire-born anthropologist Peter Lawrence arrived in Madang Province, New Guinea to do fieldwork for his doctoral dissertation. The Australian colonial authorities then governing New Guinea warned him not to go to the Rai Coast, which was currently rife with unrest due to the periodic cult enthusiasm they called “cargo activity”(not to worry, they added; a local leader called Yali was calming things down). Instead, Lawrence settled some thirty miles west among the Garia, about whom he would eventually write a series of groundbreaking ethnographic studies, and began to do his research. And then, about three months into his stay, his native informants asked him to help organize the clearing of an airstrip. Why? he inquired.

‘To fly in your cargo and ours’, came the embarrassed reply. It eventuated that the expected cargo consisted of tinned meat, bags of rice, steel tools, cotton cloth, tinned tobacco, and a machine for making electric light. It would come from God in Heaven. The people had waited for it for years but did not know the correct procedures for getting it. This was obviously going to change. They now had their own European, who must know the correct techniques and had demonstrated his goodwill. I would ‘open the road of the cargo’ for them by contacting God, who would send their and my ancestors with goods to Sydney. My relatives living there would bring these goods to Madang by ship and I would distribute them to the people. An airstrip would eliminate the labour of carrying.

Lawrence found this all rather surprising: partly because he hadn’t expected to find cargo beliefs so far from the area he’d been told housed cult activity, but also because the Garia explanation seemed perfectly sensible given their assumptions. “I now saw cargo cult as a fascinating intellectual challenge,” he writes. “Previously I had never considered that it had a serious logical basis.” So he began to ask more questions, and he quickly learned that everyone in Madang held some form of cargo beliefs — and that their theories about the source of manufactured goods were a window into their world. Here was far more than the pattern of social relationships he had intended to study (though he would publish on that); it was an entire worldview, complete with “highly systematized ideas about man’s place in a cosmic order.” And once you learned to peer through the New Guineans’ lens, their periodic explosions of cargo cult activity — so threatening and disruptive to the colonial authorities, so damaging to attempts at local economic development — made total sense. So he wrote a book about it.

Madang District (which is in Madang Province) is on the northern coast of New Guinea and is mostly rugged, mountainous jungle that rises abruptly from the coast of the Bismarck Sea. In 1950 Madang had a population of about 24,000, which was fragmented into a then-unknown number of culturally and linguistically distinct groups (some with as few as 150 members). Despite their divisions, though, they traded, intermarried, and went to war with each other, and they all shared a basic cultural outlook and way of life. They lived as subsistence farmers in small villages, growing gardens of taro and banana, keeping pigs, and supplemented their diets with hunting in the bush and fishing in the rivers. They had virtually no social stratification or economic specialization: aside from the few men who were experts in making canoes or conducting religious rituals, everyone did everything from hunting and farming to building houses to making tools, weapons, and clothes.

Lawrence is a trained anthropologist, so of course he spends fifteen pages doing detailed case studies of five different Madang District societies (this one has totems! this one is patrilineal but that one is cognatic!). For our purposes, though, the distinctions don’t really matter: the things you need to understand to make sense of cargo cults — the basic assumptions about material goods and religious ritual — are universal. First, like many small-scale societies, the Madang natives had no real concept of profit, reinvesting surplus, or individual economic advancement. In their subsistence communities, material wealth was as much (or more!) a symbol of social relationships as it was a matter of practical utility. Their entire social world was built around the expectation that you would “think on” (i.e., give your stuff to) a wide network of relatives, neighbors, in-laws, and trading partners, who would then immediately give you back other stuff of equal value. Having stuff was a source of prestige, but only because of what it meant for your connections to other people. In the absence of goods to exchange, there could only be suspicion and the threat of warfare. It’s almost the inverse of our concept of “networking,” where social relationships (while also valued for themselves) are instrumentalized for economic advantage. And it’s self-reinforcing equilibrium: anyone in Madang who managed to accumulate an unusually large amount of stuff, whether through luck or skill, would face a more dramatic version of the “black tax” that plagues people from less-WEIRD societies trying to enter the professional world. There’s no incentive to create wealth when you don’t get to keep it!

The other half of this equation is that New Guineans drew no distinction between the natural and supernatural. They understood gods, spirits, and their ancestors to live in the real physical world, sometimes invisibly and sometimes taking the form of a human or animal. The gods were basically like humans, only more powerful and often possessed of inscrutable whims, and religion was a matter of getting the gods to “think on” you just like a person might. Your relationship with a deity was all about mutual obligation and equivalent exchange: observing taboos and performing rituals created the same kinds of ties between man and god that trading pigs created between man and man. There is no moral or ethical content here; it’s do ut des all the way down. But the New Guineans thought appeasing the gods was absolutely essential, because they believed that all knowledge, technology, and skill — all their agriculture, pig husbandry, seamanship, and clever manipulation of their environment — were not the products of human discovery. Rather, they had been invented by the gods who gave them to mankind. Thus it followed that the ritual knowledge — knowing how to get the gods’ favor — was vastly more important than any kind of practical or technical expertise. If your neighbor has more and healthier pigs than you do, it can’t be that he gives them better food or provides better care; probably he just knows the ritual for a better pig god.

Lawrence sums up these two bits of background like this:

It was these values and epistemological assumptions that provided the threads of consistency in the otherwise variegated socio-cultural pattern of the southern Madang District: the assumption that a true relationship existed only when men demonstrated goodwill by reciprocal co-operation and distribution of wealth; and the unswerving conviction that material wealth originated from and was maintained by deities who, with the ancestors, could be manipulated by ritual to man’s advantage.

And then the Europeans showed up. You can probably see where this is going.

The first white man to set foot in Madang was Baron Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, a Russian anthropologist who had once been bailed out of jail by Leo Tolstoy.6 Maclay made three trips to the area in 1871-3 and thoroughly impressed the locals, who were fascinated by his enormous ship, his scientific equipment and firearms, and even his clothes. He impressed them even more by his total nonchalance in the face of death: when he was told that two men were plotting his death, he went to their village and told them to kill him quickly because he was tired, then lay down in front of them and went to sleep. And of course he gave the New Guineans gifts of metal tools, mirrors, cloth, beads, paint, and the seeds of unfamiliar plants, so naturally they decided he was a new god who had invented a new type of material culture and was now coming to give it to them. But there was no real attempt to do any kind of ritual — if you wanted Maclay’s goods, all you had to do was come talk to him and offer something in trade.

In 1885, however, New Guinea became a German colony, first through the New Guinea Company and then under direct Imperial rule. (In 1914 it would come under Australian control, which continued in one form or another, except for a brief period of Japanese occupation during World War II, until some time after Jared Diamond met Yali.) The new German settlers were there to make money, not conduct ethnographic research. They were also substantially less friendly to the local inhabitants, who immediately concluded that while Maclay had been one of their own gods who was fond of them, the Germans were hostile gods from elsewhere. Eventually, of course, death rates of Europeans settling in the tropics being what they are, they realized that the Germans were human beings. Still, they were clearly humans whose special god had given them a dramatically superior material culture, and it cried out for an explanation. They settled on something like this:

Here in Madang there lived two brothers.7 One day they fought with each other and decided to go their separate ways. The first brother, Kilibob, built a canoe to paddle away, but the other brother, Manup, built an enormous steel-hulled ship. Kilibob fled in shame at his own inadequacy and Manup began to stock his vessel. He filled its capacious hold with natives and all their things: bows, canoes, yams, pigs, slit-gongs, and so forth. Then he invented cargo and stowed it belowdecks too before setting sail along the coast. At each village Manup passed, he put a man ashore and offered him the choice of either a bow or a rifle, a European-style dinghy or a native canoe with outriggers. Each man rejected the rifle as a useless hunk of wood and the dinghy as too unstable on choppy seas. Finally Manup departed in disgust and sailed off to a faraway land where he met white men. Manup gave the white men all the cargo the natives had been too stupid to select, and also taught them the correct rituals to get more. But one day Manup will come back, and he will bring cargo for us when he does.

There are no records that the people who passed around this myth practiced any particular rituals meant to speed Manup’s return, but the story offered a satisfying explanation of why the Europeans were so much more powerful. That was especially welcome because, by 1914, repeated attempts at both active and passive resistance had been crushed. The locals decided they had no real choice but to cooperate with the Europeans — which meant, among other things, becoming Christians.

There had been Catholic and Lutheran missions in Madang for years, but until this point no one had expressed much interest. In the 1920s, however, villages began to present themselves en masse for baptism. There were a few reasons for this. Partly it was smart politics to ingratiate themselves with their rulers. Partly Christianity seemed to go along with the organized and Westernized lifestyle being imposed on them. But mostly, they wanted cargo. They were beginning to depend on trade goods like metal tools, canned food, and machine-woven cloth, and they wanted more of it. The Europeans had cargo. The Europeans were Christian. Therefore, obviously, Christianity housed the ritual means by which cargo could be obtained — or, in Pidgin English, it was what would opens the rot bilong cargo, the road along which cargo would come.8 They expected their cargo to turn up exactly like the white people’s did: on a ship from Sydney, the main port serving Madang, labeled with their names. The new story went something like this:

God created Heaven and earth. He made Adam and Eve and gave them cargo: tinned meat, steel tools, rice in bags, tobacco in tins, and matches. When they angered God by having sex, he took away their cargo and threw them out to wander the bush. Their descendants grew more and more wicked until at last God decided to destroy the world with a flood, but he saved Noah and showed him how to build the Ark, a European-style steamer, and gave him the clothes of a European ship’s captain complete with peaked cap. When the Flood subsided, God gave the cargo back to Noah’s family. However, Noah’s son Ham was very stupid and witnessed his father’s nakedness, so God took away his cargo and sent him to New Guinea, where his descendants had to make do without any cargo at all. Eventually God felt sorry for the New Guineans and sent missionaries to teach them his ways so that he could send them cargo once more. If we obey God’s commands, he will order the spirits of the ancestors — who live with him in Heaven, which is not (as you may have been told by some foolish people) in Sydney, Australia, but rather in the sky above Sydney — to carry some of the cargo he has created down the ladder from Heaven to the wharves of Sydney, where it will be labeled with our names and shipped to us in New Guinea.

The first recorded cargo cult in New Guinea was just…Christianity.

You might think the missionaries would have realized something was off, but they mostly stayed at their missions; most of the “fieldwork” was done by poorly-compensated native helpers who mostly believed the cargo doctrines themselves, and were eager to convert as many people as quickly as possible to hasten the arrival of cargo in New Guinea. When the new converts did have an opportunity to talk with more orthodox believers, linguistic barriers became a serious problem: perfectly ordinary Christian phrases were understood in completely different ways. “To root out evil” was translated into Pidgin English as rausim Satan,9 but “Satan” had been reinterpreted to mean the old deities with their traditions of polygyny, sorcery, and so forth, who “blocked the road of cargo” and provided an inferior material culture. All the ritual objects were generally known as “satans.” Lawrence quotes a Garia informant who told him, “The local deities always try to trick us into performing the old rituals again in their honour. But what they gave us was only rubbish—taro, yam, and all that stuff. If we yielded to temptation, God would not send us the real cargo—steel tools, tinned meat, and rice.” But it went far beyond that. Among the Garia, Lawrence writes,

‘God blessed Noah’ (Genesis ix. 1) (Pidgin English: God i bigpela long Noa; Garia: Anut Noale kokai älewoya) came to mean ‘God gave cargo to Noah’ on the grounds that in Melanesian culture the concept of blessing could be given practical expression only by the presentation of wealth. The phrase ‘the Mission wanted to help us’ (Pidgin English: misin i laik halivim/litimapim yumi, Garia: misin tianesigebule eya) came to mean ‘the Mission wanted to give us cargo.’ Such phrases as ‘the period of ignorance’ (Pidgin English: taim bilong tudak; Garia: ägisigigem kolilona) and ‘the understanding of God is with us’ (Pidgin English: tingting bilong God istap; Garia: Anut po nanunanu pulina) were understood as ‘the time before the cargo secret was revealed to us’ and ‘we now have the ear of God (and the means of getting cargo)’ respectively.

By the end of the 1920s, Madang was nominally almost entirely Christian, but Lawrence concludes that “relations between natives and missionaries, although on the whole extremely amicable, were nevertheless based on complete mutual misunderstanding.”

Again, this may seem pretty silly to a contemporary Western reader, but imagine for a moment that hyper-advanced aliens have suddenly appeared in your town. They have technology beyond your wildest dreams, and they’re vaguely scornful of your primitive lifestyle — what do you mean you combust hydrocarbons to generate energy? Wait, your planet is still using photosynthesis?! But when you inquire where their fabulous devices come from and how they work, the aliens explain that, obviously, they perform rituals invoking their ancestors, and then their tribal totems deliver and operate their technology. Maybe they even let you watch, and, yep, there the aliens are, vocalizing with their creepy alien noise-sacs and waving their slimy appendages in particular ways, and their hyper-advanced technology coalesces out of thin air and does exactly what they want it to do.

Are you going to say “gosh, I guess my entire understanding of the nature of the material universe is wrong, apparently magic is real”? Of course not. You’re not stupid. You know how the world works. If something is happening, there must be a rational scientific explanation for it. So you develop some theories. Maybe what you can see and hear isn’t the whole story: maybe their rituals are actually activation codes for an invisible cloud of nanomachinery that assembles on command. Maybe they’re emitting some kind of electromagnetic signal you can’t perceive (will the aliens let you do some full-spectrum analysis while they’re invoking the ancestors?), and if you could copy it you could make this work too. Or maybe the aliens are just lying to you, because they don’t want you to have their cool stuff.

That’s more or less where the people of Madang landed when, predictably, it became clear that despite the baptisms, hymns, and prayers…there was still no cargo. One school of thought held that God was indeed sending their ancestors down the ladder to the Sydney wharves with crates of cargo for them and wicked crewmembers were going through the ship’s hold in transit and replacing their names with those of Europeans, but many more concluded that the missionaries were holding back some vital cargo secret to prevent God from sharing the white man’s bounty with the natives. And so, of course, cults arose claiming to teach this secret.

By this point Madang had become sufficiently Christianized — and the European Christians were so obviously in possession of the cargo secret — that the cult doctrines were all syncretic variations on either Catholic or Lutheran theology. They typically claimed that the great secret was that God or Christ was really some figure from traditional mythology. One story (this one belongs to the dancing cult I mentioned above) went something like this:

After Manup gave cargo to the white men, he regretted abandoning us, his original followers, here in New Guinea, and planned to return and make amends. Thus he caused himself to be reborn as Jesus Christ so that he could come here with the missionaries. But the Jews became angry that Jesus-Manup wanted to share cargo with us, so they conspired with the missionaries to imprison him in Heaven and keep the cargo for themselves. When our rituals succeed in setting Jesus-Manup free, he will bring us the rifles he took away from Ham so that we can have our revenge on the Europeans who are stealing our property at sea.

When Japanese troops landed in Madang in December of 1942, many of the cults welcomed them with open arms in the belief that they had been sent by God to liberate the people. Here’s Lawrence:

As the collaborators literally believed that their hope of a better future lay with their new masters, they did everything they could to please them. They told their followers that if the Japanese were to ‘open the road of the cargo’, which the Europeans had persistently ‘closed’, they must help them conquer all New Guinea. They must help kill or drive out every white man or woman, regardless of nationality or status: Australian, German, American, serviceman, or civilian. As a result, many ugly incidents occurred. Allied airmen and other prisoners (including natives) captured in the bush were bound hand and foot, slung on poles, and carried in to the Japanese. It is said that while they were ceremonially beheaded, the natives held dances in honour of the event.

Of course, that turned out poorly: when the Japanese ran out of food and began to retreat under the Allied advance, they stopped paying for the labor they demanded, robbed gardens, stole livestock, and eventually shot and ate the New Guineans themselves. The leader of one cult, outraged by this behavior, marched into Japanese headquarters to upbraid the commanders: he told them that his rituals had brought them to New Guinea, but now that they had shown themselves to be his people’s enemies he would be transferring his support to the Americans and Australians. So the Japanese shot him too.

But the end of the war was far from the end of cargo activity. By 1945, all of Madang was thoroughly suffused with cargo belief, which was intimately tied up with resentment of the colonial authorities who were keeping the cargo secret from them. The Allied military occupation kept things temporarily in check, but in one area where the occupation ws lighter a local cult leader orchestrated a short-lived military uprising with leftover Japanese grenades. Still, there was no clear leader for these forces to crystallize around.

Enter Yali

Yali was an unlikely cargo messiah. Born around 1912 on the Rai Coast (near Madang), he spent his teens and twenties in the liminal places between native and colonial society, first as an indentured servant in a European-style town and then as a local official who assisted the authorities with their patrols into the highlands. After the 1936 death of his beloved wife he joined the Police Force, a paramilitary constabulary staffed by New Guineans and commanded by white Australians. But like many men of his generation, his truly formative experiences came during the Second World War. At a time when many of the New Guineans on the Police Force were deserting or even collaborating with the Japanese, Yali worked closely with his Australian officers in the evacuation of threatened areas and watching the coast for landings. Then in early 1943 he was promoted to Sergeant of Police and sent to Brisbane for special training in jungle warfare. And he was amazed. Here’s the summary from Lawrence, who got it from Yali himself:

Yali saw things which he had never before even imagined: the wide streets lined with great buildings, and crawling with motor vehicles and pedestrians; huge bridges built of steel; endless miles of motor road; and whole stretches of country carrying innumerable livestock or planted with sugar cane and other crops. He was taken on visits to a sugar mill, where he saw the cane processed, and a brewery. He listened to the descriptions of other natives who saw factories where meat and fish were tinned. Again, he suddenly became more aware of those facets of European culture he had already experienced in New Guinea: the emphasis on cleanliness and hygiene; the houses in well-kept gardens neatly ordered along the streets; and the care with which the houses were furnished, and decorated with pictures on the walls and vases of flowers on the tables. In comparison, his own native culture—his rudimentary village with its drab, dirty, and disordered houses, the mean paths in the bush, the few pigs that made a man feel rich and important, and the diminutive patches of taro and yam—seemed ridiculous and contemptible. He was ashamed. But one thing he realized: whatever the ultimate secret of all this wealth—and this he understood in very much the same way as other natives—the Europeans had to work and organize their labour supply to obtain it. Again he compared this with native work habits and organization. He felt humiliated by what he considered the deficiencies of his own society.

And then the Australian Army made him an offer. The exact wording is fuzzy, since this is Lawrence’s translation of Yali’s recollection of what he had been told more than a decade earlier, but Yali reported that he was told: “In the past, you natives have been kept backward. But now, if you help us win the war and get rid of the Japanese from New Guinea, we Europeans will help you. We will help you get houses with galvanized iron roofs, plank walls and floors, electric light, and motor vehicles, boats, good clothes, and good food. Life will be very different for you after the war.” Yali took it literally. If the New Guineans helped the Allies win the war, the colonial authorities would arrive with vast loads of cargo and remake New Guinea along Australian lines. He joined up.

Yali’s wartime exploits were a dramatic tale of adventure and heroism, most notably his epic three-month trek across 120 miles of trackless bush, and he was invited to record a radio talk in which he repeated the promises of Brisbane to his people. After the war, he was praised as a hero and highly regarded by all the military and colonial authorities. He could have been dispatched from Central Casting for the role of “exceptional native” or “Brown Sahib”: tall for a New Guinean, well-spoken and dignified, always dressed in a spotlessly white shirt and immaculately-ironed shorts, he was gallant in action and had been thoroughly loyal in a time when many policemen were openly deserting. Lawrence, who spent weeks talking to him in 1956, writes that he “gave the impression of almost complete Western rationality. He genuinely liked Europeans, took pleasure in their company, and wanted nothing more than to count them among his friends.”

But the assimilation was an illusion. (Or so Lawrence argues — “it was only after several weeks of continuous conversation with him that I realized the truth,” he confesses in a footnote.) Just like the Christian converts who said “blessing” but meant “giving cargo,” Yali could talk with Westerners about public service and civil administration and what he had seen in Brisbane, but he continued to assume that the Westerners’ material culture had been created by their God, who could supplement human production by sending readymade cargo in times of shortage.10 He didn’t expect that anyone would actually hand over the cargo secret, but that didn’t matter — by this point he knew and trusted a great many Americans and Australians, and he was content to have them pass along a share of what God was providing for them.

Yali now had a new project: to encourage the people of Madang and the Rai Coast to cooperate with the authorities and get their communities in order so they could enjoy all the goods he had been promised in Brisbane. He set to it with a will, regaling whole villages at a time with the saga of his work against the Japanese occupation, his miraculous trek through the jungle, and what he had seen in Australia. But once again, the message was misinterpreted through the lens of cargo talk: when Yali tried to explain that he had seen fesin bilong wokim kaikai (methods of food production — i.e., factories where food was canned), this was reported as having seen fesin bilong wokim kako (cargo). Soon rumor had it that while he was in Australia, he had seen Jesus-Manup creating cargo — or even more elaborately:

During Yali’s great journey through the bush, he was killed by a Japanese patrol. Like all spirits of the dead, he then went to Sydney, where he met the King. Then he ascended the ladder to Heaven, where he also met God and Jesus-Manup. God promised Yali that after the war, he would send cargo directly to the King, and the King would personally supervise its labeling and lading to ensure that it comes to New Guinea with no interference. Once the cargo arrives, Yali will distribute it to us.

Once again, there were amicable relations based on complete mutual misunderstanding. The people of Madang and neighboring areas thought Yali was a superhuman being who had discovered the secret source of cargo and would share it with them. Yali, in turn, did his best to suppress cargo cults — not because he thought they were wicked or incorrect but because he assumed the Australians would be angry if people tried to steal their property — but kept saying things that cult leaders could spin as endorsing their doctrines. (In fact, they began to invoke Yali in their rituals.) And the authorities in Canberra and Port Moresby saw him as a fully secular, Westernized propagandist who would “prepare the people for the long, slow road to material, social, and spiritual advancement by indoctrinating them with the gospel of hard work.”

It’s not hard to see why they might think so: Yali was encouraging his people to co-operate with the authorities as much as possible and to imitate the Western way of life: to settle in large new villages built in straight lines, with clean well-made houses and streets; to dig latrines and wash themselves and their clothing regularly; to stop their traditional practices of abortion and infanticide so that the population would grow; and to send their children to the mission schools. And people obeyed him with a will: according to a Lutheran missionary, one village copied the only Western lifestyle they had seen, the Allied army camps, and structured their day around whistle-blasts that indicated time for reveille, cleaning, and breakfast. But every time Yali left one area and headed to another, his instructions were inevitably transformed into cargo propaganda. The authorities were beginning to get nervous. So in August of 1947 they summoned him to the capital for guidance.

Yali was delighted. He assumed that he was about to take delivery of all the cargo he had been promised in Brisbane, and he hoped that he would also be given an official position and have his powers and responsibilities clarified. But things went wrong almost immediately: the ship that was meant to take them to Port Moresby broke down and Yali was left to cool his heels for almost a month waiting for spare cargo space on an airplane like an ordinary native. (It was obviously unthinkable to waste a precious passenger seat on a mere New Guinean.) When he finally arrived, he was taken on a variety of official sightseeing tours, instructed on how to organize local village councils of the sort the bureaucrats wanted, and taught about the new program for native education. More encouragingly, he was also appointed local Foreman-Overseer to continue the propaganda and reconstruction work he had already begun, the highest official status any New Guinea native had ever enjoyed. And then he asked about his cargo.

…Yali approached the officer in charge of the party and asked him when the reward pledged to the native soldiers four years earlier would be handed over. When would he and his people receive the building materials and machinery he had been told they were to have? The officer is alleged to have replied that the Administration was, of course, grateful for the services of native troops against the Japanese and was, in fact, going to give the people a substantial reward. The Australian Government was pouring vast sums of money into economic, educational, and political development, War Damage Compensation, and schemes to improve medical services, hygiene, and health. It would be a slow process, of course, but eventually the people would appreciate the results of the Administration’s efforts. But a reward of the nature Yali had imagined—a free hand-out of cargo in bulk—was quite out of the question. The officer was sorry, but this was just wartime propaganda made by irresponsible European officers on the spur of the moment.

Yali was bitterly disappointed. His entire program had been based on the assumption that the promises would be kept and that his people’s standard of living was about to increase dramatically, and now he had to go home and announce that there would be no cargo, only — eventually — some hospitals and maybe some loans to start new businesses. But then something even worse happened: he discovered the theory of evolution.

Yali had long wondered why the various white Native Affairs officers he encountered didn’t seem to care much about Christianity or the missions. Wasn’t that the Westerners’ religion? Now he had an opportunity to discuss the matter with a more educated New Guinean, who explained to him that while some of the white men believed they were descended from Adam and Eve, as the Scriptures said, others believed they were descended from the monki. Yali was furious. Not only had the secular administration reneged on their promises to give him cargo, now it turned out the missionaries had also lied about the origins of mankind. Clearly, they could not be trusted to reveal the cargo secret either. It now appeared that both roads to cargo — indirectly from the Australians and directly from God — were closed. And yet Yali had just been granted official powers and responsibilities, and he still wanted to use them to promote orderly and prosperous lives for his people…who were expecting him to turn up in a ship full of goods he didn’t possess.

If he didn’t want to fall into total disgrace, there was only one solution: Yali leaned into his heretofore-unintentional role as cargo messiah. He went home and told his people that the authorities had reneged on their promises and the missionaries had lied about the road to cargo. Henceforth they must abandon their Christianity (and their quasi-Christian cults, which for them were more or less the same thing) and return to the ways of their ancestors. But this didn’t mean giving up the hopes of cargo: with the help of a new prophet, Yali promulgated a myth that went like this:

As everyone knows, Jesus-Manup, the indigenous New Guinean cargo deity, is held captive in Heaven (above Sydney) as a result of the crucifixion. However, when the missionaries urged us to “root out Satan,” they took many of our satans and put them in glass cases in a place called “Rome.”11 Yali himself saw many of the satans on display in Rome when he visited Queensland in 1943. However, just like Sydney, Rome is connected to Heaven by a ladder, and so one day Jesus-Manup descended the ladder and discovered his fellow New Guinea deities. He immediately taught them the cargo secret, and if we obey Yali’s instructions and return to the old religious ceremonies, the old gods and goddesses will return to us and bring cargo with them.

Through both his formal status from the governing authorities and his role as leader of the new cargo cult, Yali was the single unquestioned authority in the region, free to remake New Guinean life as he saw fit. He instituted his own police, courts, and punishments, and he ran political cover for his cult with the authorities. The people were warned never to repeat their myths lest the Europeans steal the gods back to Australia again; if questioned about the tables they set up and decorated with flowers, for instance, they must simply claim to be beautifying their houses in the Western manner. And so for nearly two years, Yali ruled Madang Province as a virtual king.

His downfall was inevitable — arrest, trial, five years in prison. (In a real Al Capone twist, they got him not on a count of cargo activity but “deprivation of liberty” for the jail sentences he imposed on wrongdoers under his extralegal authority.) By the time he was released the moment was gone; he never recovered his position, though people continued to pay him to “wash away” their baptisms so they could return to paganism. But what about his question? Why is it that the Westerners developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but Yali’s people had so little cargo of their own?

Well, one story goes like this:

Plate tectonics and natural selection created some places that had large seeds, domesticable animals, and few barriers to the spread of people, things, and ideas. The people who lived there were able to have many children and live in great cities, where they could work together to make cargo. Other people were unlucky and lived in places that did not share this bounty, so they had no cargo. The people who had cargo went to the places where people with no cargo lived and were very cruel to them. They told stories about how they were better than the people with no cargo. However, now that cargo has come to the unlucky people who did not have it before, we can see that all people are really the same and that it was only the places they lived made them seem different.

This isn’t wrong in the same way “Heaven is in the sky above Sydney, Australia” is wrong: it probably is pretty hard to develop a state if you don’t have grains, and it would be churlish to criticize the New Guineans for not hitting the Iron Age when there’s virtually zero iron on the island. But it’s missing something vital. For instance, the guy who asked this question was the leader of New Guinea’s greatest cargo cult! That fact seems, I don’t know, relevant. And it’s probably not a complete coincidence that the people who think you get airplanes by doing a dance for the god who invented airplanes didn’t have airplanes. If you think you can’t make new things, of course you won’t.

Jared Diamond is so eager to counter nineteenth-century anthropological theories of racial inferiority that his version of the cargo myth, like all the others, leaves out human agency entirely. But answering Yali’s question doesn’t have to mean choosing between “congenitally stupid” and “passive playthings of geography”: what people do matters, and what people do depends on how they understand the world. Cargo cults were a completely logical, reasonable, and natural extension of the New Guineans’ preexisting beliefs about the origin and function of material culture. Every time they learned something new about Western society and Western goods, they slotted it neatly into their worldview and updated their behavior accordingly. The worldview was just…wrong.

Cargo cults may not be a great metaphor for “copying what someone successful seems to be doing without really knowing why and hoping you get the same result,” but they’re a wonderful metaphor for “assuming the novel thing you’ve just encountered fits a paradigm with which you’re already familiar.” That’s a devilishly difficult trap to escape, and the worst part is that you don’t know you have to: if it were easy to step outside your fundamental epistemological assumptions, they wouldn’t be your fundamental epistemological assumptions. And yet sometimes that’s the only road along which cargo will come.

Imagine a prophet who tells you he has a special understanding of the universe and can predict a far-future eschatological event with certainty. This might be one of the many apocalyptic preachers of a conventionally religious sort, or it could be a different sort of prophecy like the believer in scientific Marxism who has deduced the laws of history, or the charismatic business leader explaining to investors why he will inevitably conquer the world of B2B SaaS.

Prophets of whatever sort are often a bit vague about the exact date of the end times (with the exception of the Millerites and Daniel Kokotajlo), but they usually provide a list of more immediate signs and wonders that will herald the ultimate fulfillment of the prophecy. Perhaps they are miraculous events that build up to the final revelation, or they could be the inevitable developmental stages that societies progress through on their way to socialist utopia, or it could be revenue targets for the next few fiscal quarters. When a prophet gets these intermediate predictions right, it’s often good for their credibility. But conversely, how do you feel when a wannabe prophet is wrong again, and again, and again?

I am speaking, of course, of the wrongest and worst prophets who ever lived: the last few centuries of atheists.

People really don’t like it when you point this out, but past generations of atheists made specific and detailed predictions about what would happen as religion loosened its grip on the mind, or what science would reveal about the nature of the universe. Those predictions have been uniformly awful. For example: Enlightenment-era skeptics acknowledged that there were a vast number of purported miracles, apparitions, and self-reported mystical experiences. They conjectured, reasonably enough, that some of the supposed miracles were “pious frauds,” and the rest were delusions brought on by religious superstition. They predicted that as the proportion of religious people waned, both sources of miracles would dry up. Naturally, nothing of the sort has happened (even when normalizing to total population).

Or let’s consider a very different sort of wrong prediction: cosmology. The secularists of ages past just knew that science would soon disprove the Biblical story of creation ex nihilo. They were confident we would discover that the universe was deterministic, eternal, and unchanging. They also expected the number of free parameters in the laws of physics would decline as we got closer to a grand unified theory. Obviously none of this has gone their way. First there was that awful Big Bang theory (invented by a Catholic priest even!) which seems unpleasantly like the kind of thing for which Genesis could be a metaphor (and which was actively opposed by many scientists for this reason). And from there things just got worse — we had quantum mechanics, which Ernst Mach called “darkly metaphysical,”1 and then the triumphant return of teleology, and then a profusion of physical constants that seem both arbitrary and wonderfully fine-tuned for our existence. This is not what David Hume told me would happen.

The fact that the atheists centuries ago were wrong about…approximately everything doesn’t actually have much bearing on whether God exists. Atheism has adapted. Today, instead of telling you that reports of miracles will inevitably decline, they will tell you (with equal confidence) that they will continue at the same rate forever because of…something to do with fMRI machines.2 And the eternal and unchanging universe is back, baby: it’s just the multiverse cosmology of eternal inflation now (which even takes care of the fine-tuning problem).3 There are about as many ways to be an atheist as there are to be religious, so why should we care that one particular set of guys from the 17th through early 20th centuries got repeatedly owned by events?

Ross Douthat cares, because he thinks that much of the intellectual and cultural power of modern secularism comes from a widespread but undeserved sense that the God-deniers have been proven right about stuff. Another way of putting it is that the default position for the intellectually serious has shifted from belief to unbelief. Among the educated class, at least, it used to be only the brave weirdos who were atheists, and now it’s only the brave weirdos who aren’t. Douthat quotes a Tom Stoppard play where a philosopher muses: “It is a tide which has turned only once in human history… there is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, the noes had it.” And Douthat thinks that this shift of the default, this sense that maybe at one point in the past it was reasonable to believe, but that today it is not, is completely 100% made up and unearned, founded on a self-congratulatory retconning of history.

You could summarize the argument as “nothing has actually changed.” Imagine yourself as a stone age wise man or woman, deeply intelligent and deeply convinced that the world is full of gods and spirits. Or imagine yourself as a medieval scholar, investigating the nature of optics, inventing new sorts of algebra, and reading the Bible every night. A committed secularist today can feel some intellectual kinship with the two people I’ve just described, despite the yawning metaphysical gulf. But that kinship comes from a patronizing, yet generous and sincere, sense that “they didn’t know any better back then.” What exactly is it that we know better? What discovery about the universe was made between then and now that makes religion no longer intellectually respectable? We just got done saying that many of the important discoveries actually had the atheists nervously revising their dogmas, rather than the believers.

I have never heard a good answer to this question. It’s true that we know more, and that our knowledge has given us undreamed of power over the world (I am writing this screed from the cabin of an airplane that is transporting me across a continent in safety and relative luxury, with the entire written corpus of humanity at my fingertips). But which of our discoveries have fundamentally changed the character of the universe that we find ourselves in? The most common answers are the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, which according to the usual story brought us the shocking revelation that mankind’s position in the universe is inconsequential and perhaps even random.

But Douthat argues, and I agree, that this is all quite overblown. It’s undoubtedly true that these discoveries undermined a particular cultural and intellectual synthesis that existed in early modern Europe, but that synthesis was already buckling under political and economic challenges. Did Copernicus really cause the rise of secularism, or were his discoveries seized upon by ambitious princes and revolutionaries who were already chafing at traditional religious authorities? The former story is the one we were all taught in school, but I think there’s more evidence for the latter. For starters, there were plenty of other radical changes in cosmology that the Church happily slurped up, assimilated, and harmonized with its doctrine. For another, the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin had a much less dramatic impact on Chinese and Indian religious authorities. The myths, rituals, and metaphysics of the East were no more or less compatible with heliocentrism; the discoveries just happened to arrive during a very different political situation.

In fact you could even argue, as Douthat does, that these discoveries actually bolstered the specifically Christian picture of the universe, by revealing it to be law-bound at a much deeper level than anybody had ever guessed. We scientists have a curious faith that our questions will have comprehensible answers and that the mysteries of the universe will reveal themselves to our insistent prodding. But there is no a priori reason to assume that this would be so. The extreme version of this argument is Boltzmann brains, but the more moderate version is the countless traditions that have viewed the universe as chaotic or arbitrary (Pope Benedict XVI once got in trouble for pointing out that Islam is one such tradition, and that this could explain why the Muslim world never had a scientific revolution). Far from challenging it, the success of modern science should be viewed as a triumph for the Christian world-picture which holds that the universe was created by a supreme mind, and that we were made in its image to be stewards and custodians of that universe.4

And then there are all the dogs that didn’t bark. Consider, for instance, the Drake equation. Since I was a kid we’ve discovered that those vast spaces revealed by Edwin Hubble are full of more exoplanets than anybody would have guessed, and yet we still haven’t found advanced life. If the atheists like to crow that modern cosmology makes mankind less consequential, doesn’t this discovery make us seem…more consequential? And yet strangely, the world is not full of thinkpieces arguing that Science has now proven that the cosmos is an infinite garden created just for us, so we need to leave our silly nonreligious and materialist superstitions behind.

In fact, once you start looking, there are plenty of other cases where new scientific discoveries could have bolstered the atheistic worldview, but they didn’t.5 The contrarian conclusion is obvious: you live in a conceptual universe that is fundamentally the same as that of the stone age elder or the medieval scribe. It is mysterious, full of wonder, full of order, and gradually revealing itself to us as we increase our power and mastery and knowledge. The world-picture is fundamentally the same, and the claim that it isn’t is self-justifying propaganda in service of an intellectual fad.

Okay, maybe not exactly the same. Our forebears believed that the gods and immaterial spirits played an active role in the world, directly causing miraculous or uncanny events and overturning apparent physical law in a capricious manner. These days, at least among the intellectual and educated classes, we do not believe this. Charles Taylor wrote an extremely long book on this topic, and I touched on some of its implications in my review of a Dostoevsky novel. This is a super significant change, and while it long preceded secularization, I have a hunch that it might have contributed to it far more than the highfalutin’ intellectual stuff we’ve talked about. Anyway, guess what? Douthat thinks you should believe in miracles too!

I really appreciated this part of the book, because I am the sort of deracinated modernist lib Christian who gets slightly embarrassed and defensive whenever the topic of miracles comes up. I’m sitting there at coffee hour after church, and somebody is telling me about how their daughter’s cancer went away after they prayed to St. So-and-So, and I’m smiling and nodding and hoping that it’s true and thinking to myself, “You know, sometimes cancer does just go away,” or, “I wonder how many people there are who prayed and were not healed.” Blame it, if you will, on having read too many Michael Shermer columns at an impressionable age,6 or on being a little too good at seeing through the esoteric writing of that snake Edward Gibbon. I am also acutely aware of arithmetic, and of the fact that with seven billion people in the world, and most of them able to broadcast to an algorithmic feed that amplifies the most interesting and unusual stories, I am invariably going to hear about a lot of events that sounds like they should be so rare as to be impossible.

So this is the book I needed, because Ross Douthat is a very smart man who is also aware of all these facts, and yet he has produced a full-throated and unabashed defense of miracles. He begins by turning my above arguments on their head. Actually, he says, any kind of mystical or supernatural or miraculous event is such a disreputable thing to believe in that (at least if you swim in educated Western circles) you should assume people usually don’t talk about these things when they happen, out of some mixture of fear and embarassment.7 And it isn’t just individuals: the “Official Knowledge” of our society pretty much rules out supernatural occurrences a priori. When it comes to universities, or government agencies, or even the respectable parts of the media, atheistic materialism is somewhere between a powerful intellectual default and an actual institutional requirement. If there were good evidence of miracles happening, probably only crazy people would report on it, and you would either never hear about it or would dismiss it because of the source.

There is a real irony to this state of affairs. The restrictive assumptions of Official Knowledge are more or less directly ported over from the “guild rules” of the scientific establishment, because our system of rule valorizes credentialed experts even when they aren’t literally in charge. And those guild rules of science are the way they are because they’ve been wildly successful for centuries, because the universe really is surprisingly orderly most of the time. And as I said before, much of why science dared to set those rules is itself the outgrowth of a specifically Christian worldview that dominated early modern Europe (this is one of the major subjects of Charles Taylor’s very long book). So in a real sense, it’s the “fault” of Christianity that wondrous and miraculous occurrences are no longer an acceptable topic of conversation in elite circles.8

In the Middle Ages, many miracles had the official sanction of the state, the universities, and all the other epistemic organs of society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many miracles were recorded. And as I said at the start of this review, secularists like David Hume assumed that as soon as the miraculous lost official sanction and encouragement, the flood of stories would dry up as people stopped claiming or pretending to experience them. But what actually happened was that disenchantment didn’t really happen on the ground. People still report miraculous healings, experiences of contact with a sublime Other, mystical visions, even really crazy stuff like levitation or bilocation. In this respect our society is a bit like a communist one, where the entire ruling class adheres strictly to a certain dogma and everybody else quietly pretends to believe it while actually disbelieving it, because it clashes profoundly with their direct experience of the world. Disenchantment is official but virtual. The official encouragement and recognition of miracles stopped, but the miracles kept pouring in. Douthat discusses many of them, some quite hard to dismiss as an individual’s hallucination or forgery because they were seen by many witnesses, others reported by committed materialists who recount them the way a religious believer might shamefully discuss almost losing their faith. Or as Chesterton once put it:

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them… it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.

But isn’t the very torrent of miracles itself a problem for believers? After all, one of the most noteworthy things about wondrous or uncanny or miraculous events is that they seem to happen worldwide, to people of every imaginable creed or culture, at roughly the same rate. Shouldn’t this count as evidence against most religions, which claim that their own doctrine is true and all others are false?9 Curiously enough, no. If you actually go and look at how even the most jealous and narrowminded faiths in history interpreted the miracles reported by heathens, you find that basically none of them deny their reality. Frequently they will interpret the miracles bestowed upon followers of rival religions as acts of diabolical rather than divine power, but only very rarely do you see them claiming that they are fake. Chesterton again:

No religion that thinks itself true bothers about the miracles of another religion. It denies the doctrines of the religion; it denies its morals; but it never thinks it worth while to deny its signs and wonders.

Nevertheless I, like Douthat, do actually think that one religion is more true than all the others. And here we see one more example of how the predictions of past generations of atheists have failed to come true. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, European academia was dominated by people applying the techniques of source criticism to Christian religious texts — especially to the four canonical gospels. These writers brought great verve to their task, challenging the traditional attribution of authorship of much of the New Testament and digging up all sorts of apocryphal writings that had been excluded from the scriptures for supposedly political reasons. At the height of this movement, it was common knowledge among “educated” people that the Gospels had been written hundreds of years after the events they described, that most of the early Patristic and Christian Neoplatonist writings were medieval forgeries falsely attributed to ancient authors, and that the “historical Jesus” was a political freedom fighter who never claimed to be the Messiah — or possibly who never existed. It seemed like the foundations of the Christian religion had been demolished, or at the very least unsettled, and everybody expected that this trend would continue.

Instead, it turned out that most of the revisionist scholarship was completely fake.10 I’m a little frustrated that this story isn’t better known, because it ought to be one of the biggest scandals in the history of academia — bigger in my view than the slow-motion replication crisis that’s currently hitting social science and medical research. As I mentioned in my review of The Cruise of the Nona, academics tend to get unusually excited and sloppy when they think they’re “overturning” received wisdom, and this vastly increases their error rate. It’s true of revisionist attempts to overturn traditional archaeology (which are now being totally disproven by population genetics), and it was true of 19th century Biblical criticism too. These writers were so delighted with themselves for freeing mankind from superstition, so giddy at their own edginess, that they made inexcusable factual mistakes and logical leaps. Their scholarship was basically one big circular argument, where starting from secular assumptions they argued their way via epicycles to a secular conclusion.11 But many of the specific, concrete historical claims that made the whole edifice hang together have lately turned out to be totally false. Surprisingly, the unearned triumphalism of the 19th century writers still pervades academia because, well….we all know the answer, and it really isn’t very surprising, is it?

All of this sound and fury and debate over who wrote the story has a way of distracting us from the story itself, and I’d like to end this review by encouraging you to read it even if you don’t believe it. The narrative of the Gospel has been the single biggest influence on the millennia-old civilization that you (probably) are a child of. But it isn’t just the story of that civilization, because it’s also somehow had an electrifying effect on just about every other culture that’s ever come into contact with it. Forget all your beliefs or disbeliefs or presuppositions, doesn’t that sound interesting? Isn’t that the sort of thing that an educated person in the year 2025 should have direct experience with?

So pick a Gospel, any Gospel (yes, they have some important disagreements on the details,12 but the overall story is the same), and try just reading it through from start to finish. Maybe next week would be an auspicious time. And as you read, try to forget all the associations you have with Christianity, positive or negative, and read the words. If you want, you can imagine yourself in the cultural frame of the first people to encounter the story, and who were much more shocked by it than you will be. But even you, who have spent your whole life subtly marinating in the moral and cultural world that this story built, will be a little bit shocked if you read the words. Because just taken at face value, it’s a really weird story.

It begins, like countless Indo-European myths, with the miraculous birth of a great hero, and a succession of dangers that befall him in childhood. This is classic perennialist stuff, maybe the biggest cliché ever, repeated in myths and legends all over the world. Maybe that should bother Christians, because it means our story is one myth among many others. Or maybe it shouldn’t, because if our story is true, then it is in a sense the story, and we should expect to find echoes of it in all times and places, like refractions in a funhouse mirror. The one thing that’s already strange about this story, though, is how insistent it is on its own specific historicity. All the other myths and legends of demigods and heroes tend to begin with something like: “long ago when the earth was young,” or “once in a strange and faraway land.” But this one has dates, and at the time it was written those dates were recent! It cites names of witnesses, and mentions specific people and places. That doesn’t make it true, of course, maybe they all made it up in a conspiracy of lies, but it does make it different from most legends of a great hero sent by the gods.

Anyway, the hero is born, survives his childhood trials, is officially recognized and charged with a mission by the gods, and then begins roaming the countryside: recruiting a fellowship, righting wrongs, and lifting up the sorrowful. Once again, we’re solidly in monomyth territory, this is the plot of like every adventure story ever. But wait a minute…look more closely and the details are all subtly wrong. Like, the “meeting the mentor” stage of the hero’s journey isn’t supposed to have the mentor immediately proclaiming the young hero as Lord. And then there’s the wandering part — most of it just seems to involve upsetting or confusing people. Zero monsters are slain. Zero Roman legionnaires are ambushed or waylaid by this supposed revolutionary folk hero. His only really heroic acts are miracles of healing, but whoever heard of a legend of a Great Physician? And the people who get the healings tend to be ones who, in the view of this society, don’t deserve it — heretics, prostitutes, lepers, the possessed — all of them “unclean.” Some of the healings even deliberately violate the law. Is he the first ever anarchist, come to overthrow not only the Roman occupation but also the rules of the Jewish religion? Is he a prophet of just using common sense and being nice to each other?

No. At other times He makes the law more restrictive, sometimes to an almost unbelievable degree. There were already rules against adultery, but this new hero, or prophet, or whatever He is demands perfection. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.” (Matthew 5:28-29). I’m sorry what? Just who does this guy think He is? And yet His morality gets even weirder than that. Many of the worlds religions, philosophers, and sages have roughly converged upon a recognizable set of ethical principles for being a just and righteous man. You know what it doesn’t include? “…do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well… love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5: 39-44). This is an impossible standard and seemingly insane advice. In most places, following it is the equivalent of slow suicide.

His morality contradicts every normal human intuition about fairness, but He seems oddly unconcerned about fairness. Often, as He wanders the countryside healing and upsetting people, He explains His view of the world in simple stories. The stories are about everyday things familiar to the agrarian population of first century Palestine, sheep and vineyards and olive trees and rapacious officials, stuff like that. But think a little too hard about any of these stories, and they make no conventional sense at all. “You know how sometimes you have a hundred sheep?” I imagine everybody nodding along at this point. “Well, if one of your sheep went missing, wouldn’t you ignore the other ninety nine, and spend all of your time looking for the lost one?” Yeah, totally… hey, wait a minute! No, I would not do that. That is not what any sensible shepherd would ever do! Ninety nine is a bigger number than one! But He’s already moved on: “So you know how when you have a group of vineyard workers who work all day, and another group who only show up at the last minute, and then you pay both groups the exact same amount, and…” NO! I do not know that, because that does not make any economic sense at all, ARGH. But He has no time for your arithmetic born of scarcity, because He lives amidst infinity, and keeps telling you, maddeningly, that you do too, and that by giving yourself away you’ll have more left than you started with.

The weird story has a weird ending. He makes a grand triumphal entrance into the capital city, in accordance with a bunch of famous ancient prophecies. But again, if you look closely all the details are subtly wrong. Rather than ride in on a majestic war-horse the way a great hero should, He instead rides on a donkey. And where’s His sword? It’s simultaneously like a royal procession and a parody of a royal procession, on different levels. Rather than say anything that would make Him popular with either the mob or the authorities, His preaching turns bleak and apocalyptic. He prophecies the destruction of the city. The man is clearly skilled with words and has picked up quite a following. Wasn’t He supposed to deliver the people from their oppression? He could whip up a riot and try to take over the city if He wanted to, but instead He castigates the religious leaders. But weirdly He seems most angry about the things that everybody knows just have to be that way, like selling sacrificial animals at the Temple. The performance leaves even His supporters confused and upset. One of them tips off the authorities, and He is stealthily arrested, tortured, and then publicly executed.

There are people who will tell you that Jesus did not rise from the dead, but that He was a great moral teacher with a lot of good advice. But if He didn’t rise from the dead, then wasn’t it actually the worst advice ever? The example Jesus provides is an example of how to get killed: first you make people jealous, then you make them mad, then you confuse and demoralize your followers, then you refuse to speak in your own defense. If the real story ended with the Crucifixion, then surely it’s a story about what not to do. The lesson we would draw from it would be, “Don’t imitate Jesus, imitate the worldliness and adaptability of the Jewish elders, imitate the power and cruelty of Rome.”

The whole question then, the one on which our interpretation of this very strange story ought to hang, is what really happened on the third day after the execution. The story’s version is that He came back to life and spent weeks walking around and talking to people before vanishing again. Though here again, the story is weird. The Gospels all note that many of the people Jesus knew best didn’t recognize Him at first. That detail raises all kinds of doubts and troubling questions, and seems like a very odd thing to include in the story if you were just faking it. But the story is what it is, and dozens of the people that supposedly encountered the risen Jesus would later go through agonizing tortures and cruel deaths because of their unwillingness to say that they had made it up. Even if you don’t believe in the Resurrection, it sure seems like something quite unusual must have happened there.

What that something was, I leave up to you. Neither Douthat nor I is here demanding you convert. But if you do read the story yourself, and if — like many before you — you find that you can’t quite shake it out of your mind, then my advice is to keep asking questions. For the master of the vineyard promises the same reward both to those who have labored from the first hour and to those who arrive at the eleventh hour.