Bronze Age Mindset, Bronze Age Pervert (self-published, 2018). What, to the mom, is nudist bodybuilding? I tried this once, by the way. I was squatting thirty pounds at the time in the form of my nine-month-old son. The experiment had to be called off because my weight kept trying to nurse. Thus ended my brief flirtation with the alt-right. But that’s okay, because reviewing
This is a good review in that you engaged with a substantive critique of BAP's argument. It shows you actually read the book, which most critics didn't. So I applaud you in this respect, for demonstrating diligence and seriousness.
But you made 2 very obvious mistakes.
First of all, the title of the book is "Bronze Age" mindset. Not prehistoric, neolithic mindset.
This section here shows good research and attention to detail, but you are analyzing the wrong historical time period:
"As for the first: Hunter-gatherers are almost universally opposed to any demonstration of individual excellence. As anthropologist Richard Lee discovered to his chagrin when he tried to purchase a fat ox as a Christmas gift for !Kung Bushmen among whom he was doing ethnographic research, no one likes someone who’s better than them. Strong social norms among the !Kung require self-deprecation, and if the successful hunter (or, in this case, ox-purchaser) doesn’t insult his own prowess, his neighbors are glad to do it for him. “[W]hen a young man kills much meat,” one of the !Kung finally explains to the bewildered Lee, “he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. … So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.” Humans are naturally unequal in ability, but on a small scale and without the technology to capitalize on individual achievement, a coalition of the mediocre can always topple a “great man.” Rob Henderson's Newsletter has an extensive review of Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior that goes into all this in much greater detail, but the short version is: this is an unnatural egalitarianism, it is consciously and consistently enforced by the community, and it is created and perpetuated by men."
We Frogs are interested in building a fearsome civilization which admires human excellence, aspirational science, physical strength, and moral character. Rather than the current status quo which subsidizes weakness, victimization, resentment, ugliness, addiction, and dependency.
We despise the San Fransisco program to give out free heroin, in order to encourage drug addicts to destroy themselves.
What we believe in instead is the Spartan agoge, a militaristic program which introduces men to incremental iterations of hardship and suffering, in order to strengthen men, reinforce toughness, and emphasize honor, duty, brotherhood, integrity.
MythPilot wrote a beautiful, in-depth analysis of the Riace Bronze sculptures which illustrate a society designed to produce a phalanx of unbreakable infantry, and men of the highest caliber of strength, courage, wisdom, and excellence.
Your 2nd mistake is when you criticize Bronze Age Mindset in the conventional sense, arguing that Bronze Age Mindset lacks a concrete plan of recommendations for a better future — you miss that BAP has already addressed this objection in great depth.
"The mastery of matter and development of the self are all well and good, but by themselves they’re sterile; without a future to beget, this is all just onanism. And, look, if you think you’ve got a real chance of being Achilles you have my blessing to go for κλέος ἄφθιτον over family: live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse for your bros. For everyone else: being fully human means growing up. Even Odysseus had a wife, a son, a home.
This is a book for the kóryos, but the kóryos is meant to be a temporary state followed by a reintegration into society as a man. Bronze Age Mindset never makes that transition. Perhaps it’s not meant to; not all books must be all things to all people. But for a book that’s meant to be an exhortation to the young, a vision of a better, higher, and purer world, it seems strange to stop halfway. BAP pulls back a curtain and exposes some features of our world, he suggests some steps forward — the cultivation of excellence, the reaching beyond the self. But reaching beyond the self means taking your place in the great chain of being; greatness means inscribing your will on the face of the world. It isn’t the work of a single generation. It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this."
Michael Anton made the same argument, and the same criticism. So, I admit it's the natural reaction to Bronze Age Pervert, to wonder why he doesn't lay out a detailed alternative to the dysfunctional status quo. But this would be a tactical and rhetorical mistake, which BAP explained in his essay, "America's Delusional Elite is Done":
In any case, I find Anton’s demand that I engage in a debate about the rightness or wrongness of the ideas behind the American Founding rather unfair and, for the reasons stated above, somewhat besides the point. If my book doesn’t speak about forms of government it is because that’s not its intention, nor my aim right now.
When Andrei Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn were dissidents against the Soviet regime, when other dissidents wrote their samizdat, would it have been fair to ask them for a complete and total accounting of their vision of the best form of government? The opposition to Soviet tyranny sought regime change, and it would have been unfair and even senseless to demand of them a precise accounting of, say, their vision of what a post-Soviet division of powers or notion of rights might look like. Dissent against the Soviet system united liberals, reactionaries, the religious, the secular, monarchists, ethnonationalists, cosmopolitans, Russians, Latvians, Bashkirs, and any other things besides. They all had one immediate aim.
The purpose of my book is to provide samizdat in the tradition of what Solzhenitsyn was doing in the Soviet Union and to bring into view, unapologetically, the reality of nature that is denied by our regime; a reality that it seeks to repress, increasingly with coercion and violence.
If you fail to see that you live in the Soviet Union of the 1970’s or 1980’s, or rather something slightly even more repressive than the Eastern Bloc of that time, it may be you don’t know about the threats, financial ruin, and mob violence that Trump supporters and anyone really who steps out of line has been subject to since at least 2016—but actually since some time before that.
To give just one egregious example, there is a group, Hamilton 68, that is a plain front for the American security state establishment, dedicated to calling Americans who criticize the state of things Russian agents, and to forcing their identities to be revealed so as to subject them to violent harassment and physical attacks. This is the same function that the figure of the sycophant had in ancient Greece. These attacks are carried out by so-called “antifa,” but what in fact appears to be the establishment’s paramilitary force—the last Democrat vice presidential candidate’s son was a violent member (an impossibility as a “coincidence” for anyone remotely familiar with how Washington DC works)—abetted by police “stand-downs,” as at San Jose in 2016.
This kind of state-supported mob violence is beyond what existed in say, the Czechoslovakia, Poland or Yugoslavia of the 1980’s. But it is supported even by major Republican Senators like Marco Rubio, who have openly excused antifa mob violence for political purposes. Mitt Romney has romanticized them as well. This doesn’t even begin to cover the financial ruin that regime critics face which, again, exceeds the punishment meted out to average dissidents in the Eastern Bloc by the 1980’s, both in frequency and intensity.
The people targeted by Hamilton 68, CNN, and similar “private” organs for this kind of vigilante mob violence and harassment aren’t just “skinheads,” but include, e.g., grandmothers from Florida who happened to support Trump on Facebook in 2016.
It is, I repeat, the tyranny of our time that my book seeks to oppose, and it is written in the spirit of Solzhenitsyn, one of my heroes, who stood against a similar tyranny.
My response to Anton’s challenge regarding the best regime is that my book isn’t intended to provide a complete elaboration of this alternative or a philosophical treatise regarding the best form of government. I would indeed be happy with a state of things where that frank discussion could be carried out, even in private. That isn’t the America or the West of today."
Overall, I think this was a well-written essay, your prose is very good, I like that you engaged with the subject matter, but you made a couple key mistakes which missed the point of our belief system.
I hope someone is making a 10 year plan for Mr. & Mrs. Psmith and Douthat to form an editor-in-chief triumvirate at First Things.
This is a good review in that you engaged with a substantive critique of BAP's argument. It shows you actually read the book, which most critics didn't. So I applaud you in this respect, for demonstrating diligence and seriousness.
But you made 2 very obvious mistakes.
First of all, the title of the book is "Bronze Age" mindset. Not prehistoric, neolithic mindset.
This section here shows good research and attention to detail, but you are analyzing the wrong historical time period:
"As for the first: Hunter-gatherers are almost universally opposed to any demonstration of individual excellence. As anthropologist Richard Lee discovered to his chagrin when he tried to purchase a fat ox as a Christmas gift for !Kung Bushmen among whom he was doing ethnographic research, no one likes someone who’s better than them. Strong social norms among the !Kung require self-deprecation, and if the successful hunter (or, in this case, ox-purchaser) doesn’t insult his own prowess, his neighbors are glad to do it for him. “[W]hen a young man kills much meat,” one of the !Kung finally explains to the bewildered Lee, “he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. … So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.” Humans are naturally unequal in ability, but on a small scale and without the technology to capitalize on individual achievement, a coalition of the mediocre can always topple a “great man.” Rob Henderson's Newsletter has an extensive review of Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior that goes into all this in much greater detail, but the short version is: this is an unnatural egalitarianism, it is consciously and consistently enforced by the community, and it is created and perpetuated by men."
We Frogs are interested in building a fearsome civilization which admires human excellence, aspirational science, physical strength, and moral character. Rather than the current status quo which subsidizes weakness, victimization, resentment, ugliness, addiction, and dependency.
We despise the San Fransisco program to give out free heroin, in order to encourage drug addicts to destroy themselves.
What we believe in instead is the Spartan agoge, a militaristic program which introduces men to incremental iterations of hardship and suffering, in order to strengthen men, reinforce toughness, and emphasize honor, duty, brotherhood, integrity.
MythPilot wrote a beautiful, in-depth analysis of the Riace Bronze sculptures which illustrate a society designed to produce a phalanx of unbreakable infantry, and men of the highest caliber of strength, courage, wisdom, and excellence.
https://mythpilot.substack.com/p/uncomfortable-discoveries
Your 2nd mistake is when you criticize Bronze Age Mindset in the conventional sense, arguing that Bronze Age Mindset lacks a concrete plan of recommendations for a better future — you miss that BAP has already addressed this objection in great depth.
"The mastery of matter and development of the self are all well and good, but by themselves they’re sterile; without a future to beget, this is all just onanism. And, look, if you think you’ve got a real chance of being Achilles you have my blessing to go for κλέος ἄφθιτον over family: live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse for your bros. For everyone else: being fully human means growing up. Even Odysseus had a wife, a son, a home.
This is a book for the kóryos, but the kóryos is meant to be a temporary state followed by a reintegration into society as a man. Bronze Age Mindset never makes that transition. Perhaps it’s not meant to; not all books must be all things to all people. But for a book that’s meant to be an exhortation to the young, a vision of a better, higher, and purer world, it seems strange to stop halfway. BAP pulls back a curtain and exposes some features of our world, he suggests some steps forward — the cultivation of excellence, the reaching beyond the self. But reaching beyond the self means taking your place in the great chain of being; greatness means inscribing your will on the face of the world. It isn’t the work of a single generation. It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this."
Michael Anton made the same argument, and the same criticism. So, I admit it's the natural reaction to Bronze Age Pervert, to wonder why he doesn't lay out a detailed alternative to the dysfunctional status quo. But this would be a tactical and rhetorical mistake, which BAP explained in his essay, "America's Delusional Elite is Done":
https://americanmind.org/salvo/americas-delusional-elite-is-done/
"Reality, Not Regime Change, Is the Point
In any case, I find Anton’s demand that I engage in a debate about the rightness or wrongness of the ideas behind the American Founding rather unfair and, for the reasons stated above, somewhat besides the point. If my book doesn’t speak about forms of government it is because that’s not its intention, nor my aim right now.
When Andrei Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn were dissidents against the Soviet regime, when other dissidents wrote their samizdat, would it have been fair to ask them for a complete and total accounting of their vision of the best form of government? The opposition to Soviet tyranny sought regime change, and it would have been unfair and even senseless to demand of them a precise accounting of, say, their vision of what a post-Soviet division of powers or notion of rights might look like. Dissent against the Soviet system united liberals, reactionaries, the religious, the secular, monarchists, ethnonationalists, cosmopolitans, Russians, Latvians, Bashkirs, and any other things besides. They all had one immediate aim.
The purpose of my book is to provide samizdat in the tradition of what Solzhenitsyn was doing in the Soviet Union and to bring into view, unapologetically, the reality of nature that is denied by our regime; a reality that it seeks to repress, increasingly with coercion and violence.
If you fail to see that you live in the Soviet Union of the 1970’s or 1980’s, or rather something slightly even more repressive than the Eastern Bloc of that time, it may be you don’t know about the threats, financial ruin, and mob violence that Trump supporters and anyone really who steps out of line has been subject to since at least 2016—but actually since some time before that.
To give just one egregious example, there is a group, Hamilton 68, that is a plain front for the American security state establishment, dedicated to calling Americans who criticize the state of things Russian agents, and to forcing their identities to be revealed so as to subject them to violent harassment and physical attacks. This is the same function that the figure of the sycophant had in ancient Greece. These attacks are carried out by so-called “antifa,” but what in fact appears to be the establishment’s paramilitary force—the last Democrat vice presidential candidate’s son was a violent member (an impossibility as a “coincidence” for anyone remotely familiar with how Washington DC works)—abetted by police “stand-downs,” as at San Jose in 2016.
This kind of state-supported mob violence is beyond what existed in say, the Czechoslovakia, Poland or Yugoslavia of the 1980’s. But it is supported even by major Republican Senators like Marco Rubio, who have openly excused antifa mob violence for political purposes. Mitt Romney has romanticized them as well. This doesn’t even begin to cover the financial ruin that regime critics face which, again, exceeds the punishment meted out to average dissidents in the Eastern Bloc by the 1980’s, both in frequency and intensity.
The people targeted by Hamilton 68, CNN, and similar “private” organs for this kind of vigilante mob violence and harassment aren’t just “skinheads,” but include, e.g., grandmothers from Florida who happened to support Trump on Facebook in 2016.
It is, I repeat, the tyranny of our time that my book seeks to oppose, and it is written in the spirit of Solzhenitsyn, one of my heroes, who stood against a similar tyranny.
My response to Anton’s challenge regarding the best regime is that my book isn’t intended to provide a complete elaboration of this alternative or a philosophical treatise regarding the best form of government. I would indeed be happy with a state of things where that frank discussion could be carried out, even in private. That isn’t the America or the West of today."
Overall, I think this was a well-written essay, your prose is very good, I like that you engaged with the subject matter, but you made a couple key mistakes which missed the point of our belief system.