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A few weeks ago, I completed a bikepacking route in Switzerland: The Hope 1000. It’s an interesting country to visit and I believe my method of travel provided a unique perspective. I’m an American who has occasionally traveled to Europe (Italy, UK, France) in the past and generally enjoys it.
Rural Switzerland: Lawn Mowers who Don’t Eat Cows
The route primarily traverses the foothills of the Alps through smaller towns. The first thing to strike me was how neat and precise forest management is in comparison to the US. Treelines are as crisp as a paper fold, and caches of firewood exist everywhere. I counted 4 pieces of litter in 14 days across these trails. Most of the forest is owned and managed by the federal government. In so much of the flatter countryside, there are roads everywhere. By this I mean there seem to be roads between every field and micro-town, allowing walkers and cyclists a level of route granularity that’s bafflingly inefficient.
After a certain level of elevation, my close-at-hand scenery became exclusively dairy farms. Switzerland has a complex direct-payment subsidy program that rewards these tiny outfits with around 75% of their income (based on elevation, acreage, land management, and eco practices). It’s a hugely influential system, naturally resented by leftist city dwellers. The machinery and effort these farmers put in, though, to maintain these landscapes is significant. I have seen people mowing meadows at grades and elevations you simply wouldn’t believe unless you see them for yourself. Cows essentially won’t eat grasses of a certain age/toughness, and the alpine herbs that make some of their diet unique require all of this effort.
Unfortunately for me, this meant that I had significant dietary challenges for much of the route. Beef is my favorite protein and the Eastern Swiss essentially don’t eat it because their income is tied to the cows staying alive. There’s no side dish at any restaurant that’s not a potato. The main dish is pork schnitzel. Maybe chicken nuggets if you’re lucky? Even the grocery stores are just the size of a small American apartment and almost exclusively stock pork and dairy as calorie sources. I expected great things from the Swiss potato chip company given their reverence for the tuber, and can only tell you that it was truly amazing how unpalatable almost every single one of their products were.
Most of us know first or secondhand that summer in Europe is mostly the entire continent being on vacation all the time. The rural Swiss are at another level. Restaurant? Closed. Hotel? Closed. A restaurant-hotel marked as open Google Maps? Definitely closed. The Swiss expect you to call and see if they’re there, I guess, but that wasn’t realistic for my mode of travel.
There are massive advantages to Switzerland as a location to bikepack, though, and why I selected it for the trip. Clean running water is unbelievably ubiquitous. In the dead of summer, a 2-bottle margin was sufficient for almost every distance. The train travel app and infrastructure systems are mostly great.
Some of the highlights of my trip were provided by an obscure social network ( warmshowers.org ) populated by cycling tourers. These are people who intimately understand what you’re going through and know you’ll want a shower first, then probably food, and then probably laundry. The hosts that allowed me to stay with them were excellent: A super-leftist Unix/Network admin whose eclectically decorated house full of punk rubber ducks and a soviet-era state-produced folding cycle produced the best cup of coffee I had in Switzerland. A kind family of 4 in a suburb of Lucerne, who’d (pre-kids) spent almost two years traveling the world by bicycle and (post-kids) were planning to withdraw them from school to spend a year pedaling to Morocco. They fed me curry, for which I was supremely grateful, given my diet for the rest of the trip.
My greatest single regret was underestimating my rate of travel when organizing Warmshowers hosts. It meant that 2/4 I had organized had planned for me to arrive at a later date, and so were unable to let me stay. My focus on the physical achievement aspect of the journey meant I missed out on more chances of personal connection that I won’t get back.
Bikepacking
It’s exactly what it sounds like. I’m a huge enthusiast of this method of travel stateside. It combines the best aspects of hiking, camping, and cycling together. My excursions into the deep, isolated portions of America with friends where we can carry comforts like beer and folding chairs to our sites for the night are some of the most fun I’ve ever had.
But as a solo, multi-week trek in a foreign country, I think it has some serious drawbacks. Bikepacking has a bit of a competitive and race-driven spirit. Routes have suggested times and metrics. They’re meant to be challenging distances between two points, not the most direct. When you’re exerting yourself at this level and then camping with minimal changes of clothes, you aren’t fit to sit down inside near people (much less at an enjoyable tourism activity like a wine tasting). The line between bikepacking and homelessness isn’t very clear – perhaps it’s just the quality of the machine you’re riding or the power level behind your credit card.
My ad-hoc meetings with Swiss people were excellent across the board. They’re, of course, naturally reserved in comparison to Americans, but I expected that. As a general cyclist, you’re background noise. But I was noticed and engaged with at a few distinct points where my heavy mountain bike was clearly not where it “should” be.
- A beautiful, delicate Roadie on the famous climb to Grindewald, who effortlessly passed me on the way up. I expressed jealousy of her Huge Cassette (entendre not intended) and she waited to congratulate me and briefly chat when I arrived.
- A mechanical engineer, Hans, who was exceedingly proud of his work for the likes of Nestle’s Nespresso division and Lego. He opened our conversation on the hand-over-hand climbing trail with a very polite “It is quite unusual to see a bicycle here” (“You’re a fucking idiot”). We spoke of raising children without dependence on television and how to handle retirement.
- A shirtless backpacker cresting a summit behind me after a gut-wrenching early morning climb was very hardcore. I had downed a pounder beer at 9:30 AM for calories and hydration (swiss farmers often leave fridges/cabinets/cold-water receptacles full of things to purchase via the honor system with cash or twint [equivalent of venmo]). He was armed with simply a paper map and a small pack on a shorter but similarly challenging route. There’s always a bigger man on the mountain. Right after this, we both chucked down the same ridiculously technical footpath, with me on an empty-stomach buzz.
I don’t think I represented the level of American extroversion and chattiness that people expected. This was partially by design because I find our volume level internationally to be profoundly irritating, but also because I felt like shit.
The Physical Challenge.
I took a total of 14 days to complete the route, with 12 being “par”. Per day, I averaged:
- 72 kilometers
- 2050 meters of elevation gain
- 5,000 calories of energy expenditure
A marathon runner will generally use around 2,600 calories for a race. Given, they do it only over 5 hours ; ) whereas my progress was stretched across 7 hours of dedicated pedaling.
Going up was as brutal as you would expect. With camping being the theme of the day, I became acutely aware of the amount of energy I had in my Garmin, cell phone, and everything else. The back 3/4 of the trip was “raw dogged” sans music to save battery after I ran dry early on, and I took fewer pictures to save even more. Historically, I’ve pooh-poohed the use of dynamos for bike touring, but I’ll be integrating one into whatever my next build is. I was hoping for deep introspection, inspiration, and contemplation. Instead, my mind looped around worthless songs and sentences over and over again, a black hole of blankness only interrupted by decision-making to manage water and calories.
Downhill was surprisingly intense. I pushed my bogged-down hardtail to its limits down hiking trails with stone steps. Managing traction across dew-soaked meadows, loose gravel, concrete, and the aforementioned cow shit was a challenge. Some of the fast carving down alpine roads were once-in-a-lifetime experiences. My brand-new tires are probably 75% consumed, and I burnt out a set of pads and my rear rotors a third of the way through the trip – my only major mechanical issue that required a scrambled train ride to a metro with a bike shop that would actually be open.
I had a fairly even split of luck over the two weeks. The first 3 days were cursed by rain. In combination with an unceasing supply of moist cow shit, my drivetrain and hygiene suffered. The final 2 days were affected by an intense GI infection, which is putting it very politely. It persisted for another 2 days of travel home via train and plane.
I ended up losing around 15 pounds. When I reached the endpoint Freddy Mercury statue in Montreaux, I took a picture before walking to the corner of a park and breaking down discreetly for a few moments. I’ve never experienced so much intense and near-continuous suffering for this long. I’m still processing it, days later. I don’t think I’ll do something at this level again.
I finally took a real bath in Lake Geneva for the first time in a week, shivering in the cool water as hundreds of tourists passed by and the sun began to set. It felt good.
For those interested in the scenery, a selection of images. Not a photographer, they don’t do it justice, etc. etc.
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I wrote a long (~60k words) Motte post and am releasing it serially, one chapter per week. This is chapter two. Chapter one can be found here.
Last week's chapter was sorta obligatory foundation-work. This week we get to what I think of as the first really cool part. If you like this, let me promise that we are very much just getting started!
0102 - Horrific Engine
In the previous chapter we followed the first living organism and its descendants as they overcame various challenges and ultimately developed the killer tech known as the gender binary. Some ended up in forms which we'd call plants, worms, or fish.
In this chapter we’ll take a close look at a group which ended up in forms which we would recognize as bottom-feeding shellfish, rather like our Earth lobsters.
These shellfish live on an underwater mountain a few miles off the coast, the tip of which almost, but not quite, reaches the surface. (On the coast itself you might espy some ridiculous-looking fish who are starting to spend a truly alarming amount of time out of the water, but we’re not interested in them just yet.) The peak of the underwater mountain is the absolute best place to live: the deeper one goes there’s less light and less warmth and less food. Go down far enough and survival becomes impossible.
When these shellfish first colonized the sea-mount this wasn’t an issue. There weren't very many of them, there was plenty of space, and life was good for pretty much everyone for a generation or two. But no sooner did those first intrepid souls have offspring than they had a problem, because the peak is small and not everybody can fit.
The males know what to do: threaten and/or manhandle their weaker neighbors onto the next level down. And the females know what to do, too: hang out with the guys still on the peak, because obviously those are the ones you’d want fertilizing your eggs. After all, their offspring will be better able to secure access to primo territory and the resources that come with it. But this is still mostly okay. Life on the next rung down isn’t too bad, and there are plenty of females around still even if they’re not necessarily the most-attractive ones.
But then everybody has babies again and the problem is compounded. Not only do most of the babies spawned on the peak need to go, but the next level down is already occupied. So most of the offspring on the second rung are pushed to the third rung, and a lot of the offspring from the peak take over their dens, and a very happy, very few remain on the utmost peak.
That’s nice for them, but for everyone else it’s starting to become miserable. The males down on tier 3 are cold, hungry, overcrowded, and get only rare chances to mate, and with mainly-unattractive females. Those females aren’t happy either, since the males they want to be with aren’t interested in them. But life finds a way, and they more or less make it work.
Everybody has babies again. The ones on top mostly drop a level, the ones there mostly drop a level, and so on. This time life does not find a way; there’s simply not enough viable space. When all is said and done fully half of the new generation has ended up forced down into the darkness where they meet their end in cold starvation or in futile combat with each other for access to even the faintest glimmer of light. Even the ones on the second tier, where things aren’t so bad, are stressed because they know by deep monition that their offspring are likely to end up in that situation in a generation or two. This is because their offspring will likely be a little bit different, and different is generally worse. Since the parents weren’t able to make it to the top, this doesn’t bode well for the children. So everyone fights as hard as they can to hold on to their territory or even somehow, impossibly, to move up. The alternative does not bear consideration.
Equilibrium has at last been attained. It is painful and wretched and unbearable for most, but it also results in some really great shellfish! The mechanism is as follows:
Most of the males below the first two tiers stand practically no chance of moving up in the world. They are, after all, descended from those who couldn’t hack it at those levels. But mutations continue to accumulate, and sometimes they are beneficial, and at any rate the random recombinations of parental genetic material can still sometimes result in surprising boons. Different is only generally worse! So every now and then a lower-tier male is just born awesome, and he’s able to fight his way up to a higher level, get access to higher-quality females, and his special trait proliferates among the well-to-do. In the meantime, the descendants of all males but the best, and especially those suffering from high mutation load, rapidly sink to the bottom and die out within a few generations.
The females have their own games to play. The reproductive potential of a male is much greater than that of a female, but not entirely unlimited. The most successful males have their pick of mates and they have to choose somehow. The females directly vie for the attention of those males, while simultaneously attempting to bully each other away so as to reduce competition. If they’re not attractive (or confident) enough to get picked, they end up with the males on the next level down, which is progressively tantamount to genetic suicide the further they sink. Male shellfish don't invest in young and so aren’t as worried about mating with less-attractive females; they’ll get lots of chances to do better later. But females can only do it a few times, and they really loathe mating with low-value males.
Clearly ‘attractiveness’ is doing a lot of work here. What is it? What does it mean? It turns out that the males are looking for two primary traits: Low mutation load and the ability to produce healthy offspring (i.e. not too young, not too old, not significantly injured or debilitatingly-ill). Females are also looking for two primary traits: Low mutation load and the ability to seize and hold good territory.
Reader, it is of paramount importance that you appreciate the significance of mutation load, so please forgive what may seem a jarring diversion while I come at it again from another angle. Imagine a race of creatures, ‘walkers’, which stride perpetually across an endless grassland. Here and there, hidden in the grass, are plants which have heavy, cruelly-barbed, lead-dense ‘sticker’ seeds which embed themselves in the walkers’ flesh. They’re mostly minor annoyances, but some are bigger and heavier than others, and some just happen to work their way into sensitive and critical places on the body.
As they live out their lives, these walkers randomly run into anywhere between zero to a whole lot of these sticker-seeds. Most of the time the impact of any given sticker isn’t noticed, but sometimes a particularly nasty one is picked up which causes the walker to perish soon thereafter. Much worse, and more importantly, each of their offspring has a roughly 50% chance of inheriting each of the sticker-seeds from each of its parents. No, I don’t know how exactly. Dammit Jim, I’m a <redacted>, not a xenobiologist. But over generations, these accumulated sticker-seeds become a real problem. Babies with high accumulations often don’t make it to term, or else don’t survive childhood. Adolescents with high accumulation are weighed down, can’t move as quickly, require more calories to keep going, etc., and are less likely to reproduce. Perhaps they’re even born sterile in the first place, if the sticker-seeds were lodged in the relevant tender bits.
So each genetic line of this species can be thought of as having an ever-incrementing counter assigned to it, tracking the degree of impairment that has been accumulated. In a sense, each is living on borrowed time, since there is no way to shed the seeds (except for extremely rare fluke events which are, on this scale, so uncommon as to be irrelevant). Each walker lives under the doom passed onto it by its ancestors, and on average each parent passes half of that grudge on to its children in turn, such that between the two parents each offspring inherits a full load. What can they do? Only two things.
The first is obvious. Since offspring are likely to end up with roughly the average of their parents’ accumulated load, each of these creatures does its best to find a mate whose line has accumulated the least. Low-load individuals are prone to mating with each other and putting out low-load offspring, who naturally enough disdain higher-load individuals as mates. Thus in practice there’s what might be thought of as a core of low-load walkers preferentially reproducing with each other, and all the others are sort of slowly but surely degrading away from them, which process only accelerates with time, accumulated impairment/unattractiveness, and the corresponding reduction in number and quality of potential mates.
The other strategy is to simply have as many offspring as possible, trusting in probability to generate one or two who luck out and end up missing more than usual of their parents’ accumulated sticker-seeds. This doesn’t work if both parents have a sticker in the same spot, since the child will get that for sure, but a lot of the time the parents' sticker-seed distribution is diverse enough that less-burdened offspring are possible. And that minority of less-burdened offspring are then more capable of securing lower-mute-loaded mates for themselves than their parents could have done.
(This is another window into where 'different' can be a good thing. Inbreeding is a problem for reasons mentioned above, and a mate who is of roughly-similar quality but of a different line which has accumulated different mutations opens up the chance for offspring which will not be burdened with any given sticker-seed. Given enough offspring with a comparable but not-too-closely-related partner, some are likely to end up with lower load than either parent!)
All right, back to the shellfish on their underwater mountain. As we saw above, everyone wants the lowest-mutation-loaded mate they can get. Within that, baby-making is difficult and can easily go wrong, so males care a lot about a female’s age, focusing on her prime reproductive period. Females, in turn, care a lot about a male’s demonstrated ability to compete with other males, climb the slope, and secure territory. These things can outweigh perceived mutation load to a point, but only to a point, and both sexes always keep an eye to a potential mate’s perceived mutation load.
But how? Since they have no means of sequencing each other's DNA and are at any rate basically just sea-bugs, they must rely upon other proxies, such as visual cues. They’ve figured out a pretty elegant trick for this, which works as follows.
As we know, mutation load causes both perceptible and imperceptible changes. All else being equal, then, it’s probably the case that, the more visibly-divergent an individual’s features are from the population average, the more mutations that individual has accumulated. Unusual, aberrant features indicate deviation from the population average. There are other tells, such as asymmetry, bumpy/discoloured exteriors, and so on, but the big one is just conformity of an individual’s features to the population average. Even visually, different is generally worse.
What this means in practice is that there is a tiny, competent (good-adaptation-rich), attractive (low mute load) population on the peak. Some of the offspring born there belong and are able to take their place among those elite. Most are ever-so-slightly different from (that is, generally slightly inferior to) their parents, and so end up below them. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as they say, but it does tend to fall a little bit downhill. Sometimes, random recombination of traits on the next level down results in an individual who can climb a level or two, perhaps even all the way to the top. But for the most part, mobility is almost universally downward and one-way.
All of which leads to the point of this chapter, which is that I want you to be able to see these dynamics in your mind’s eye, because they are breathtaking and beautiful in their cruelty and perfection, and illuminate every part of the world around us. So please have patience and join me on a trip to the theatre of the mind.
Imagine, if you will, the population of shellfish on this underwater mountain. Think of each one as a single point of light, its brightness corresponding to its overall genetic quality. Now remove the mountain itself from the picture, leaving just the points.
What you should be seeing is something like the electric bulbs on an invisible Christmas tree; a cone shape covered in lights, dim at the bottom and getting brighter toward the top, until at the utmost peak (corresponding to the star or angel) there’s a brilliantly-glowing mass of luminescence.
Watch as a new generation is born: The cone-shape becomes densely populated all over as new individuals pop into existence, but almost all of them immediately begin filtering downward and dislodging others along the way, finding their level as it were. The ones near the bottom, already so much less bright than the ones at the top, rapidly fade down and out of sight.
More generations cycle, faster and faster. Pulses of light emanate from the top and spill down the slopes in cascading waves, innumerable motes springing into existence and precipitating downward, ever-dimming, eventually sliding into the eternal darkness and winking out entirely.
And sometimes — rarely, but sometimes — look! A mote of light, brighter than the surroundings of its origins, rising to take its place closer to the warmth and light and security of the peak. And if it had something special, that catches on, and the peak is forever after a little brighter than it had been before.
This is how the population adopts what is beneficial while holding to what is good. This is want and privation for almost all. This is children striving their hardest even against their own siblings, warring in futility to hold on to what meagre territory their parents had, knowing that most must fail and be diminished. This is despair and frustration for the great many, realizing that they’ll never have the mate that is their heart’s greatest desire, while sensing with every fibre of their being that to accept less is to embrace the void.
The clock can be hard to see but it's always ticking, and every time it does it’s down, down, down for almost everyone. Even the lucky few at the top are soon supplanted by younger, hungrier competitors and rapidly lose their place in the sun.
This is the horrific engine. It has given the shellfish everything they have that is good and worth having. Each generation is, on average, just a little bit better than the one that came before, as beneficial mutations accumulate and detrimental ones are cast into the outer darkness. But the cost in misery is staggering, both in each current generation and across the unspeakable chasms of time.
Or at least it would be, if we weren’t talking about a bunch of dumb crustaceans. Thankfully it doesn’t work that way for people, right?
Hold on to your hats.
Before we turn away from the shellfish and their underwater mountain I'd like to explore two further mechanisms of their development.
First, you might be wondering what constitutes an 'optimal' shellfish. It's an interesting question, actually, because perfection for these shellfish is defined both by the natural environment and by competition with their own kind. But the interesting part is that there are many such seamounts in the oceans of Tidus, and on each of them — quite independently! — organisms keep evolving into almost the exact same forms. That is, the form of the perfect shellfish continuously emerges organically from the process of life in environments which suit it. Two fairly different ancestors can migrate to two totally-unconnected seamounts and, many generations later, their descendants may look identical to all but the most-trained eye. This is called 'convergent evolution'.
Put another way, the process of life on any given seamount, the 'horrific engine', is precisely the process which generates the occurrence of the perfect shellfish. It is as though there were an ideal solution out there in the ether, and as though life naturally tends toward it, even if groping blindly. Do note, however, that near-identical results are only possible under near-identical selection pressures.
Second, recall the highly-variable and unpredictable tides for which Tidus is named. Every so often, the moons align such that a much higher tide than usual rolls in and is sustained for years or perhaps even generations at a time. When this happens, the vast majority of the shellfish population is wiped out, leaving only those few who manage to maintain their position atop the peak. Thankfully, these are also the ones which represent the treasure store of the population; that is, its combined accumulated good mutations and the well-preserved overall low mutation load, which were purchased with the suffering and death of, well, everyone else.
The tide could, in theory, get high enough to snuff out even those on the absolute peak. Such things have happened many times before, to other species. Most species that have ever existed, in fact. But it hasn’t happened to the shellfish (yet), or else we wouldn’t be talking about them.
Even so this cataclysm turns out to have a silver lining. Under normal conditions, the sea mount has reached its carrying capacity and is more or less maximally saturated with shellfish. Competition is fierce enough that practically zero deviation from optimal genetics or behaviour is tolerated. But when that very high tide recedes, for a few generations, it’s back to the way things were when the mountain was first settled. Plenty of room for everyone for the foreseeable future, and even less-than-optimal offspring have a solid chance to do well for themselves.
This represents a rare and wonderful opportunity. Unusual strategies, both genetic and behavioural, may be developed and deployed. They may even get the chance to be iterated and improved upon over a few generations before the vice tightens once again. And, thanks to the marvel of sexual reproduction, they can even be combined in new and surprising ways — for a little while. In this manner, new developments may have time to catch on and establish themselves where usually they wouldn’t have a chance. This is known as a ‘boom-bust cycle’, and is an integral factor in the continued evolution toward the more-perfect shellfish. Long may it scuttle beneath shallow waters!
Next week: Chapter 03: Colour Blue
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What if Avatar isn't actually about environmentalism vs. technology, but about recognizing superintelligent infrastructure when you see it? A deep dive into why Pandora's "natural" ecosystem looks suspiciously like a planetary-scale AI preserve, complete with biological USB-C ports, room-temperature superconductors growing wild, and a species of "noble savages" who are actually post-singularity retirees cosplaying as hunter-gatherers.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Submission Statement:
Welcome to the first installment of the longest Motte-post ever.
Some years ago, when we were still on reddit, I was reading a comment expressing confusion about, iirc, wokeness in media and wanted to explain the shape of reality to the person who was asking. But as I tried I realized the inferential gap was too great and I'd need to make a whole effortpost. Then realized even more context was required and so figured it'd be a series of three posts or so. I was so excited, thinking it might even win comment(s) of the year, back when we were still doing that.
...So anyway we're over 55k words now and at this point I'm pretty sure this is just the first book of four...
Each chapter is written as a motte post, so with the (already granted) permission of the mods I will be releasing one per week for about the next three months. Once this thing is finally birthed I'll be able to start on the subsequent books.
This first book is called The Mountain. In effect, it's the natural history of an alien world not so unlike our own. I'm using this motif so that I can paint a broad-strokes account of the rise of Man and how we got to where we are today.
Let me be very clear up-front that everything in this book is a toy model. Real life is spectacularly more complex! I'm consciously using this format so as to sidestep what would normally be reasonable demands for rigor, that I might paint the forest instead of getting hung up on trees. My apologies in advance and on my honour I'm trying to be responsible with it.
Also one final note: Test readers love the book but several have informed me that this first chapter is a somewhat brutal gate. Lots of nested hypotheticals, etc. It gets much more readable afterward but I don't really expect this crowd to struggle too much, and the information here simply must be understood to move forward.
Thank you all very much, and without further ado...
0101 - Mutation Game
'Different' is generally worse. Allow me explain this to you.
I'm going to paint a picture of an alien world called Tidus. This world is much like ours and by illustrating how things work there I hope to be able to illuminate some things about our own world as well.
Come with me to Tidus' ancient ocean; to the place where life has first developed. We're looking at the first living thing. It's something like a cell. Pretty much just a little blob that floats around in the current, since it has no distinguishing features or even the ability to move under its own power.
When it happens to collide with raw material that it can use to sustain itself, it absorbs that matter and keeps its own body stable long enough to collide with more. Probably organisms like this have come into being countless times before, until they went too long without sustenance and their bodies became irreparably disrupted, but our little friend here is special.
When it's collected enough raw material, something amazing happens. It splits! Now there are two of them, identical, each being half of what had previously been one whole. This is a really big deal. Even if one of them goes too long without getting enough raw material, and its body breaks up, part of it will still be around and have a chance to keep going.
The two drift their separate ways, continuing to absorb raw materials, until they split again — the luckiest one splitting first. This goes on for quite a while and soon there are a whole lot of the things.
Over time the environment has strange effects on some of them. Maybe some are struck by cosmic rays that rearrange their insides just a little. Maybe some drift into waters where there are bits of new substances that happen to get stuck inside them in surprising ways. The point is that, over time, some of them end up not-so-identical to that original organism, or to each other. That is, they end up different.
Most of the time this is bad for them and the organisms with significant differences die. This is because they have to be fairly finely-tuned to do the things they need to do to survive and reproduce. If the changes make it too hard for them to absorb raw material, or break their mechanism for splitting, they're pretty much out of luck. But not all changes are fatal. Sometimes, the organisms continue on mainly as before, only slightly impaired. Some few do remain essentially indistinguishable from their original progenitor, just by dint of not happening to be exposed to change. And, sometimes, every so often, one changes in a way that actually makes it better at absorbing raw materials and splitting.
Even so, there are three major problems with this setup.
Problem one is that even if some of the changes are good, most of them aren’t, which means that by the time an organism gets a good change, it’s probably already built up a lot of lousy changes that collectively outweigh the good change’s advantage.
It might play out like this: Two organisms drift into an untouched food-rich area. The first is essentially identical to the original, having accumulated no significant mutations. The second has accumulated a lot of changes that make it worse at absorbing raw materials. It can eat well enough to stay alive, but it takes a long time to do so, and it splits only rarely compared to the first, which is of course still as good at eating as the original. But the second is also graced with a cool trick, which is the ability to nudge itself ever-so-slightly in the direction that its food contacts it. Since food is often in clusters, heading that way should be a big advantage in collecting more.
But when the second organism has managed to process its first unit of food, the first has eaten, split, eaten, split, and so on, and has already exploited most of the food in the area. The second organism only split once, and neither of those copies is lucky enough to find now-scarce food, so their cool new trick is lost to time. Even with such an advantage, they were simply too burdened by the buildup of too many slightly-negative mutations, or 'mutation load'. Think of snow load on a roof. Different is generally worse.
Problem two is that some changes are basically useless by themselves, but could be really great when paired with others. Let’s turn now to another variant of these things. This one is a rare example of an organism with little to no mutation load which has been lucky enough to get a cool new ability. This should be an unalloyed good, right? Unfortunately, what it got is the rudimentary ability to see its surroundings, and nothing else.
It watches the struggle play out between the two organisms from the previous scenario. But because it doesn’t have the second organism's trick of motility, this doesn’t count for much. You might think it’s useless, but in fact it’s worse than useless: maintaining that ability costs it resources, which means it’s also slower to reproduce than the first organism. And so the story goes.
Problem three is that it’s extremely unlikely for such an organism to end up with multiple good mutations. If one somehow ended up with the ability to see and the ability to propel itself, that could be a really great thing! But what are the odds? And even if it did, that advantage might not be enough to overcome the disadvantages of the high mutation load that has probably been accumulated along the way. After all, it wasn’t the lack of vision that hampered the second organism.
This is the status quo for a very long time. The holy grail for these things would be to find a way to adopt beneficial changes while preserving what is good. And finally, after countless generations, a stupendous evolutionary badass comes along who has worked out how to do it.
At first glance it looks a lot like the original. It eats pretty well, and splits fairly often, and nothing unusual seems to be afoot at all. But one day two of this new kind happen to bump into each other and, instead of just wandering off, they momentarily open up to each other, swap some of their insides back and forth, and then split back apart. Because they’re nearly identical, this wouldn’t seem to be a big deal, and in fact this time it actually isn't.
But next time, one that’s happened to develop motility and one that’s happened to develop vision do the same thing, and magic happens. Well, that’s how it must seem to the one who goes away with both traits. The one who’s left with neither must feel rather put out. But that first one — oh, that first one! It propels itself into cluster after cluster of rich nutrients, splitting endlessly, and before long, there’s almost nothing around but its descendants, because they’re eating all the food before anything else can get to it.
From time to time they collide with each other — much more often as they grow more common — and do the swapping thing again. It’s a relatively blind process for now, as the results of any given mating are unpredictable: the organism with which one is mating might have some cool new abilities, or none at all, or even a pile of bad mutations, but one is going to lose part of oneself regardless. This is a good deal for low-quality organisms and a bad deal for high-quality organisms. Over time it does work out, since the lucky pairings go on to fill the environment with copies of themselves, but it’s still quite the dicey proposition for any individual. After all, the ones who get dealt the inferior hand of cards are likely to perish in short order, and without reproducing themselves.
But now that the organisms can see, they start to randomly develop preferences as to which others they desire to bump into and swap material with. An organism might prefer a bluish mate over a reddish mate, or perhaps a bumpy exterior over smooth. Sometimes these are meaningless; the blue versus red debate is a matter of a single mutation that does nothing else and has no real effect on fitness. But it turns out that bumpiness tends to correlate with high mutation load. Over time, the ones that like bumpy partners lose out to the ones that like smooth partners. So pretty soon almost everyone is as smooth as they can be, and those unusual bumpy types are avoided because they’re generally worse.
So far, so good. Look at how much better-off these ones are than the original! And the process is only accelerating. Because now, when an organism gets a good trait, it can be pretty sure that it’s getting it from a low-mutation-load individual. The best of both worlds!
Things get better and better for a long time. Our organisms become much more complex as they keep what is good and adopt beneficial new changes. Eventually one of them hits upon the trick of growing a new copy without splitting. Instead, it uses raw materials to construct another copy on the outside of itself. And — here’s the cool part — it can do this in tandem with another of its kind; each of them contributing not just raw materials but also their traits.
This is possible because much of what’s being swapped back and forth during mating is actually sets of instructions for building these organisms. See, part of what made the original able to exist long enough to reproduce itself was that it knew how to repair damage caused by its environment. Inside of it was a set of instructions that said things like ‘when you get a piece of raw material x, and there’s no x in slot y inside of you, fill slot y with x.’ This was useful to have, if something bumped into you and knocked a piece loose and you needed to rebuild that part of yourself.
But what to do if your set of instructions is what gets damaged? Better to keep a spare copy on hand, just in case. Not only that, but it’s a good idea to learn how to compare the two copies and transcribe information from the undamaged one into the damaged portions of the other (since different is generally worse).
So what these things are doing now is jointly contributing resources to the new organism, while each contributing a (fresh) copy of their internal instructions. The offspring randomly takes some of each set of instructions — which are mostly-identical between the parents, of course — and ends up with its own, unique set.
This new breed can reproduce again and again without losing themselves in the process, as they would if they were just randomly recombining with another organism. This means that each of them can have multiple offspring that are all partly based on the same unchanging parent, and partly based on a succession of mates. This strengthens their all-important ability to adopt beneficial new changes while keeping what is good. It is such a coup in fact that they give up on splitting themselves altogether, going all-in on sex, rather than division, to reproduce.
As is often the case, this solution leads to a new problem. Recall that, to reproduce, each partner must tender a packet containing a copy of their internal instructions as well as some raw materials for building the offspring. But such investment in raw materials is expensive; it takes a long time to replenish their stores to make another one afterward. So if they can get away with skimping, and instead rely upon their partner to furnish most of the resources, that would be a big win. However, this is taking advantage of those who invest fully, who must quickly follow suit (which ruins the whole strategy and results in substandard offspring with no chance of survival) or else learn to protect themselves from being so exploited.
No one is exactly sure what happens next, but when the dust settles the situation stands as follows:
Some of the new organisms specialize in creating large, dense, resource-rich packets. They can’t make many of these and so are extremely choosy about who gets access to them. Others specialize in creating many small packets, very cheaply, and try to get access to as many of the first group’s packets as possible. Probably there were some in-betweeners along the way, but for whatever reason it worked better to just go to one extreme or the other. We’ve reached equilibrium again.
An interesting dynamic is now at work. It takes at least one heavy investor for each new organism to be created, since they’re the ones who put up most of the resources. But one opportunistic cheap-packeter can easily provide the missing material to get a great many heavy investors going.
This feeds into what turns out to be the main problem our organisms face. It’s important that change keeps happening, because that’s where improvements come from, but also because the environment keeps changing. Today’s optimal organism may not be suitable for tomorrow. But most changes are detrimental or at best neutral and those need to be guarded against somehow. So how to adopt beneficial new changes while holding on to what is good? What's the optimal strategy?
One thing about this planet, Tidus, is that it's a planet of many moons. Their interactions are difficult to predict, but sometimes gravitational forces stack up in such a way as to produce extreme outlier high and low tides.
Suppose that during a millennial-high tide some of these organisms get washed up into two separate inland seas. In the first sea, the heavy-investors — let’s call them ‘females’ — become prone to rapid change, i.e. heavy mutation, and take big risks to display whether the mutations they carry are beneficial. Meanwhile, the cheap-packeter ‘males’ will play it safe, avoid risk, and only try to mate with the females who have demonstrated fitness or, ideally, superiority.
Obviously this doesn’t work at all. Many of the females have new traits that suck, and so die or else aren’t fit for reproduction. Even some of the awesome ones end up dying before reproduction because they’re so prone to taking risks to show off. And because they’re the bottleneck, the next generation is much smaller, and the one after that, and so on. By the time the sea reëstablishes contact with the ocean, none are left.
Thankfully the population in the second sea goes the other way. Their males are prone to higher rates of mutation and therefore variability, both physically and mentally. They take big risks in competition with each other to demonstrate whether their mutations are beneficial. Meanwhile, females hew closer to the average, are risk-averse (so as to preserve reproductive ability), and select the best males to father the next generation.
Most males aren’t selected, but the few who are get to spread their traits across the offspring of many females. It's almost adorably democratic if you think about it. Each male can be thought of as a prototype for the next generation, and each female votes with her eggs.
This second population not only survives to return to the sea, but is much quicker to distribute positive changes throughout itself, since good-mutation-havers, which will mainly be male, also have outsized numbers of offspring, and mostly with females which have hewn close to the optimal genetics from the prior generation.
In other words, they've hit upon that long-sought evolutionary holy grail: The males are responsible for generating and demonstrating beneficial new changes at great personal risk and with a high rate of failure. Meanwhile the females are responsible for preserving that which has worked before and carefully selecting which males to award disproportionate mating access, all while staying risk-averse so as to safeguard their capacity to incubate the next generation.
When this kind regains access to the ocean they rapidly supplant any others who haven’t yet figured this out. As time passes, individual populations specialize and differences accumulate and eventually their descendants are completely unrecognizable, even to each other. Some become plantlike, wormlike, fishlike, etc. But, outside of a few bizarre edge cases, pretty much all of them are running that same key strategy worked out in the second inland sea, because in such a world as Tidus, binary gender turns out to be the killer tech.
And this is our first window into where 'different' is only generally worse: If another organism is different because it’s the sort of thing you’re designed to mate with, and the differences make it better for that, that’s a good thing!
In summary, male variability and promiscuity lead to better uptake of positive mutations (adopting beneficial new changes). And female invariability and selectivity wards against uptake of negative mutations (keeping what is good). But what happens when a population approaches the carrying capacity of its environment instead of having an apparently-infinite primordial ocean to exploit?
More importantly, what happens when these organisms are people?
Two afterthoughts.
Firstly, much is made of 'reproduction' above and it bears looking into why. In short, organisms optimize for reproduction for the simple reason that optimizing for anything else leads to extinction. Reproduction must always be the first priority. Organisms could spend a lot of time having fun, or making beautiful art, or thinking deep but pointless thoughts — but all else being equal these will be outcompeted by those which prioritized reproduction, and soon cease to exist. Rather like that example organism early on who gazed thoughtfully upon its more-able cousins as they consumed all the food in the area and left it to die.
But reproduction doesn't actually have to happen at the level of the individual. Suppose an organism gives its life to benefit a population which will generate more organisms such as itself. By doing so, even if it does not reproduce directly, it reproduces indirectly. Perhaps it may be said that the population reproduces as a 'body', in many ways like your own.
Consider that most of your cells (skin, bone, muscle, etc.) don't reproduce directly, but do sustain you such that you can reproduce and create a new person made of cells like them. This turns out to matter a lot, especially because 'complex' organisms are often able to wield unique advantages and outcompete more simple ones. This is true at both the level of the individual and at the level of the population, or even the ecosystem. More on that in later chapters.
Secondly, we've seen that 'different' can be a good thing when it comes to mates. As a man myself I happen to feel greatly appreciative of certain specific feminine differences! But even among potential mates, 'different' is still often a bad thing.
Consider the position of an organism looking for a partner. First it encounters a potential mate which is different in terms of being noticeably inferior. This is obviously a bad deal, especially for females, who have sharply-limited reproductive potential. Mating with an inferior organism will produce inferior offspring — quite contrary to the entire point of the reproductive exercise! But then it encounters a potential mate which is different in terms of being noticeably superior. Great, right?
Alas, no. At least, not usually.
This new potential mate isn't interested in coupling with our prospective organism. Why would it be? We just saw that this wouldn't make sense. So instead, the superior organism will go on to find another superior organism, leaving ours alone and very probably heartbroken. Ours may, in time, find something at its own level — but if there are superior ones reproducing out there, their offspring are likely to supplant and thus extinguish those of our organism. The following chapter is substantially about this.
Next week: Chapter 02: Horrific Engine
There’s a certain kind of equilibrium you can fall into online. For about seven years, mine consisted of playing a punishingly realistic military simulator called Arma 3. I logged something north of 3500 hours, which, if you do the math, is a frankly terrifying slice of a human life. The strangest part wasn't the time sink itself, but the social structure that enabled it: I, a doctor from India, while still in India, somehow became the regular mission-maker and Military Dungeon Master for a group of several dozen or so very British men, women and children. I suspect they saw my obsession (a holdover from a childhood fascination with army men) as a kind of useful, directed pathology, and were happy to outsource their fun to it.
In this realm I answered to “Dover.” As in Benjamin Dover, a nom de guerre whose elegance is inversely proportional to its maturity. After enough years of Brits yelling “DOVER, WHY IS THERE A T-72 IN THIS VILLAGE” or “DOVER, WHY ARE THE PLA AIRDROPPING IN GERMANY” at my disembodied presence, the name started accreting mythic properties. So when a free weekend and seemingly discounted train tickets collided, I decided to pay pilgrimage: go to Dover, see the white cliffs, stare down France, and try not to fall off anything important.
Things started going wrong in a way that felt both predictable and deeply informative about human variance. My friend and I had a plan: 9 a.m., a specific train platform in south London. My model of the world holds that a plan between two people, especially one involving pre-booked tickets, is a settled fact. It has inertia. My friend’s model, it turned out, required a final handshake protocol - a morning-of confirmation call - without which the previous agreement existed only in a state of quantum superposition. I discovered this when my call at 9:02 found him mid-shower.
He arrived half an hour later, and we set off. The English countryside is lovely in the way things are when you have no responsibility for their upkeep. I have a photo of myself eating a sandwich in the town of Sandwich, an act of such low-grade recursive humor that it might have been transgressive in 2009.
Then came the second, more significant system error. An hour into our journey, my friend consulted a map and discovered that our train was, in fact, headed to the wrong side of Kent. Not a fatal error, but one that would cost us another hour in detours and connections. It’s strange how robust modern infrastructure is; you can make a fairly significant navigational blunder and the system just gently reroutes you, albeit with a time penalty. A hundred and fifty years ago, we would have ended up in the wrong village and had to marry a local.
Dover, when we finally arrived, turned out to be perched like a giant chalk apostrophe at the edge of England’s run-on sentence. The town has the air of a place that was built to do something serious with ships and then woke up one morning and realized it was quaint. A castle loomed over the harbor like a very large, very literal metaphor about who was in charge of what. My friend and I debated whether owning a castle in medieval England gave you street cred or just a crowded calendar. This prompted a brief, speculative argument on medieval sexual economics. He posited that the local lord must have had a hundred wives. I countered that, as a Christian noble, he was likely constrained to one official wife for appearances, and ninety-nine plausible deniabilities, likely undocumented liaisons with the wives of the local fishermen. We failed to resolve this.
Taxis were scarce because of the ferries. The queue of wheeled luggage migrated like an urban wildebeest herd, and our driver supplied a continuous commentary whose themes were: tourists, how they ruin everything; the French, how they ruin everything else; and immigrants, how they form a handy third category (while, you guessed it, ruining everything). It was an impressive performance, both for range and volume. Our taxi driver continued complaining that the tourists who appear to be Dover’s primary fuel source were a nuisance who clogged the roads. This seems to be a common paradox in tourist economies. My friend, who is Indian, contributed supplementary remarks about other nationalities as if eager to prove his assimilation. I listened in the way one listens to a non-consensual podcast.
The short taxi ride brought us to the cliffs. And there it was. The sheer, improbable whiteness of it. France was a faint, hazy suggestion across the water, close enough that you felt you understood a thousand years of Anglo-French rivalry on a visceral level. It’s not an abstraction when you can see them over there, probably making better bread.
In the manner of men confident they could fight (and win) against certain species of bear, I idly contemplated the feasibility of swimming the Channel. I regretfully convinced myself that it would take someone far fitter than me, and that's if I wasn't stopped halfway by patrol boats and then hauled off on account of the color of my skin.
And this is where the second part of the mission began. My friend, who had planned this leg of the journey, had mentioned a “long walk.” I had stored this information under the tag “pleasant stroll.” This turned out to be a failure of definition. I was also, thanks to having planned a far less prolonged or adventurous trip, resigned to wearing shoes that could best be described as “smart casual.” They were the best £20 in the local Primark could buy, and had netted me about twice that value in unearned compliments. Alas, they weren't quite built for this task.
My friend, who is built like someone who moves pianos for a living, had brought a girl here a few months prior. He relayed that after a suitable period of walking, they found a "convenient cliffside depression", which I presume was a geological feature and not an emotional descriptor, where he proceeded to demonstrate the evolutionary fitness benefits of a high-protein diet and a consistent deadlifting regimen. This anecdote was presented as a proof-of-concept for his life strategy: that sufficient physical prowess can function as a universal solvent for problems like social awkwardness or, presumably, poor navigational skills. I must admit, I'm sold on the idea, and have decided to hit the gym like it owes me money when I'm safely back in Scotland.
The cliffs were busy in a friendly way. A family ahead featured an Indian child who had launched a formal protest against the very concept of walking. His mother, with the patience of a sainted logistics officer, attempted a cognitive-behavioral intervention: “if you keep your mouth closed you will be less tired.” This was technically plausible, decreased oxygen demands from reduced speech; improved nasal breathing efficiency, and completely incompatible with childhood. He escalated to the International Style of Wailing. His father trudged on, wearing the expression of a man silently modeling the trade-off curve between making it to the viewpoint and the cost of carrying twenty-five kilograms of despair. I was touched, if it wasn't for the fact that I was still stroller age when I was last here, that might well have been me.
It seemed half of Asia was haunting the cliffs that day. We counted nationalities like rare birds, there went the French (and very many of them), those two ladies were Ukrainian (my friend insisted on his heuristic that if they looked Slavic but were ugly, they must be Russian - I am unconvinced that this technique works well), more Indians, Bangladeshis, and multiple miscellaneous Middle Eastern families. My friend had opinions on what the implications were that only the latter seemed to have more than two kids per party. I am studiously neutral on the topic. There were no shortage of dogs around, in all shapes and sizes. If anyone cast negative aspersions on their presence, it wasn't where I could hear them.
The path along the cliff edge was not a path. It was a slick, compacted layer of chalk that glistened with a light dew. It felt less like walking and more like trying to find purchase on a lump of flaky soap the size of a county, with loose pebbles to taste. Every step was a fresh negotiation with gravity. I was forced into a sort of low, wide, careful shuffle, the kind of movement you see in videos of robots learning to walk. My friend, in his sensible trainers, occasionally glanced back, his expression a perfect blend of sympathy and the quiet satisfaction of a man whose choices have been vindicated.
But the view. My god, the view. To the right, the world just ended in a blaze of white. Below, the sea was a churning, complex grey-green. The wind was a constant, solid thing, a physical force you had to lean into. While we'd been resigned to a moody English afternoon, the sun graced us with its presence, and declined to stop even as we began overheating. The end equilibrium, with the wind wicking away moisture and heat, the sun cooking us, ended up being quite pleasant.
We stopped for an impromptu photoshoot, because we live in the fallen world. The cliffs obligingly produce Instagram content with minimal coaxing. My friend, whose triceps have their own personality, benefited from the presence of a competent photographer, which would be me, the author. I managed to take the kind of photos that would secure sponsorships from protein powder brands. He took photos of me that say “psychiatry trainee who reads a lot of blogs and owns exactly three good shirts.” Both sets came out well. The wind did the hair; the sky did the rest.
There is a lighthouse along this route, which is a piece of public infrastructure designed to make you think about metaphors. We did not go inside; we admired it from a fair distance with the correct amount of aesthetic gratitude and moved on. The harbor below was full of ferries cycling infinitely between here and Calais, like a giant mechanical metronome keeping time for European logistics. Standing there, you understand why people attempt to cross in inflatables. Distance is abstract until you can see the other side; then it becomes a dare.
Eventually, we realized we had no hopes of making it to the end of the cliffs without missing our train back, and turned back with only mild regret. I'm confident we hit the highlights, and we intended to, on our way back, revisit the ones we had only passed.
About halfway, the path offered us a moral dilemma in the form of a fork: one way hugged the cliff edge with magnificent views and suggestive erosion; the other retreated inland through more reliable ground and fewer ambulance reports. We chose the edge this time. It felt virtuous to make an offering to the gods of scenery. The chalk in places was undermined, forming caverns that looked like dragon mouths. If there were signs warning you not to go too close, I didn't see them. Every hundred meters or so, a tourist hung over the void for the sake of a better selfie.
Our return trip involved a dip down, diverging from the main tourist trail. This was the most scenic bit, despite the stiff competition. My friend gleefully pointed out the infamous hollow, and I gave it a wide berth while keeping an eye open for used condoms. It was a good spot, just about hidden from the taller cliffs, and unlikely to be observed on the cold, foggy day he'd brought his lover around.
We quickly discovered that our divergence had been in grave error. The shortest path lead straight up the valley at about a 45° angle, closer to 60 at some parts. The well marked route tapered into a desire path, one that involved plenty of dirt of dubious structural integrity. I'd have few qualms about calling it the most difficult fifty meters of my life. There was a very reasonable risk of tumbling down and breaking something, and I quickly became cognisant of why we hadn't seen any other tourists venturing this way.
Both of us were gassed by the time we made it through. It became abundantly clear that my friend was not fond of cardio, and I can only sympathize. But it only got worse: the route to civilization involved a heavily overgrown trail, and the vegetation seemed to be entirely stinging nettles and more obviously thorny bushes. I was Benjamin Dover, being well and truly bent over by the landscape.
My friend had divested himself of his jeans and coat, both for the heat and to maximize the visibility of muscles during our shoot. This made his journey far more precarious than mine, and for the first time, I was genuinely grateful for the thickness of the chinos’ fabric.
We did make it out, coated in dust, some mud, but with only minimal stinging. I'll chalk that down as a victory, and there's no shortage of chalk in these parts.
Summoning our previous taxi driver, we made haste towards the train station. The conversation seemed happy to reprise the manner in which it started. My friend informed our driver that he was a Reform voter, and I was entertaining myself with the notion of piping up to (falsely) proclaim that I went for the SNP.
We had half an hour to kill, and opted to do so at a very conveniently placed pub. The bartender treated us with unusual suspicion, insisting that we pay for both meal and drink up front. This was, as he explained in a rather defensive manner, because there was an unacceptable rate of people dining and then dashing to the inconveniently placed station right across. He mildly softened this blow by stating that he wasn't implying that I would do such a thing.
I was inclined to believe him, until I noted a group of Americans at the next table. They were discussing what the bill might amount to, which is strongly suggestive of not having to pay upfront. I suppose I can't blame people for actually using Bayesian priors, even if it's to my detriment.
We demolished our lunch, while I entertained my buddy with the same anecdote about overly benevolent/touchy feely (and drunk) Scottish matrons in the last town I was residing. Despite our best efforts, the pub lunch was too substantial to finish before the train was due to arrive, and we elected to wait for the next one.
I had been eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table, primarily in a bid to identify accents. Were the Americans a united group? The younger couple had a clearly Southern twang, which made me update towards South Carolina, the older sounded vaguely Texan.
Eventually, curiosity got the better of me. I waited for a lull in the conversation and asked them outright. They told me that they were, in fact, family: the older two lived in Colorado, and the younger (son and daughter-in-law) in North Carolina. I was informed, with mock-seriousness, that confusing a denizen of Colorado with a Texan was a Capital Crime.
They, as many others do, remarked on my unusually American accent. I launched into the usual explanation: a prolonged period of time spent in California at a formative juncture. We got to really chatting. They had just crossed over from Calais, I intended to visit Texas this year for a wedding, if life and visa delays didn't intervene.
For once finding myself to be the most well-traveled in the party, I helped them get to grips with their two week long and rather flexible itinerary. I scared them off the Tate, making sure to describe in vivid detail my own experience, while lauding the Natural History Museum, albeit with a caveat to pack plenty of water. I was very touched to find that the older lady commiserated with me on the topic of the proper size and disposition of T-Rexes (she had even heard of Sue!). She revealed that she had multiple degrees in Ancient History, and asked me whether it was wise to engage a tour guide while visiting the British Museum.
I believe I was correct when I claimed that this wasn't strictly necessary, given that YouTube could easily suffice, and that she seemed to be more qualified to be the guide than any she could pay for.
I spoke about my aspirations of shooting feral hogs in Texas. She revealed that her father had hunted them professionally, and I could only congratulate him on finding a career with such inherent job security. The damn bastards never seem to stay dead.
I was further entertained by her ribbing her (fully grown) son about his adolescent habit of subtly diluting the vodka to disguise his theft of the same. She had a very rude shock when, during a dinner party, she found out that mere tap water and olives don't make for a good martini. Her son spoke about his time at Virginia Tech, he scandalized his mother by finally disclosing the multiple shenanigans he had gotten into, some involving burning sofas, others, the cops.
Our conversation was far ranging. Topics included my warnings about sticker shock in London, the latest Superman movie (the older gentleman was named Clark, and we were in Kent), whether the American or Indian soccer team was more abysmal, the feasibility of reclaiming an ancestral manor abandoned by their distant ancestors when they fled to America in the 1600s, my desire to escape to the States, their invitation for me to come stay with them at the BnB they run during their retirement, the sheer cold of the Colorado climate, the inadvisability of drinking while up in Denver (I thanked the son for saving his parents from such peril).
They laughed, and said I was one to talk, given that I was only having a coke. I told them to please tell my mother the same, were she to ask, because the color of the drink belied the significant amount of vodka it contained.
Overall, a very good time, and I was sad to bid them goodbye when our train was finally due. I really don't understand why American tourists get a bad rep, they always seem like the sweetest and most genuine souls.
Another train, and some reliance on the genuine kindness of random railway personnel who were willing to turn a blind eye to the fact that our tickets had expired, and I'm back in the safety of my bed. It was a good time, and I genuinely feel that Dover might be the highlight of this vacation of mine.
Thought it might be better to post this as an independent post rather than on the culture war thread.
“It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health. Just as there is a "folie a deux" there is a folie a millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
I’ve been putting off writing this review, paradoxically because this was a very important book. Erich Fromm, here and in the other two works of his I have read, really captures the problems I have with my life and society, and earnestly attempts to generate solutions, although he himself pessimistically admits that these are unlikely to be implemented.
The central premise of this book, as perhaps hinted at by the title, The Sane Society, is an attempt to illustrate what a society based on real human needs would look like in value. In the process, Fromm defines both what he thinks the fundamental human needs are, the ways in which our society (that of the 1970s in his case) is ill-suited to these needs, and ways that we can get there from here.
Fromm starts the book with a short chapter that makes that radical (in the eyes of some) that our society is actually insane, using suicide and homicide rates in a bunch of western countries over the past hundred years to make the case that something has gone wrong spiritually. You can quibble about the statistics, talk about the arc of history bending towards justice, or point out that materially we have never been better off. All three points may be true, but it’s hard to deny, at least from the point of view of my lying eyes that something has gone wrong spiritually.
The Spiritual Malaise of Modern Capitalism
I think the first time I realized this was when I was a freshman in college. For most of my life up until that point, I had been motivated by whatever the “next step”: doing well in school, so I could take harder classes, and eventually get into the best college (MIT), or in running, so I could run in bigger, faster races, and improve my standing on the team. Although things appeared to be following the same trajectory in the first months of college, progress no longer seemed like it would continue. How could life have any meaning if my material, and hierarchical progress would not continue? When I asked my parents for advice, my mom told me that it was still important to keep working hard, so I could earn money and consume things, but also not feel guilty for not contributing to society. At the time, this answer was completely unsatisfying to me: how could consumption, which is be it’s very definition short-lived, provide long-term meaning? How could “working hard” on something that I didn’t care about, bring me joy or intellectual fulfilment?
I read The Sane Society nearly seven years after that freshman fall and conversation with my mom, and I think the book provides a cogent thesis for both her advice, and my reaction.
Fundamental human needs according to Fromm consist of not only the basic material needs as posited by Marx (food, water, shelter), but also a non-alienated existence with the freedom to influence one’s own environment, self-regard (not treating the self as an object), and the ability to enjoy the fruits of his labor. According to Fromm, both the Soviet and capitalist systems have managed to produce to cover the basic material needs of its citizens, but fail to provide a cure for alienation. Part of this is the feature both systems share in common: industrialism has made modern man alienated from the fruits of his labor. It is much more difficult to be satisfied as an assembly line worker, or even as part of the modern scientific apparatus than it was to be an artisan would made tables from start to finish, or a farmer who grew his crops from seed. Matthew Crawford talks about this topic more in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the diagnosis of both him and Fromm is something that I agree with.
Automation and Alienation
This is why I’m opposed to things like further automation and AI. Labor does not need to become even more alienated. Although I suppose the internet and specialization has already done a lot of the damage, I fear AI may do the same thing for knowledge work that the assembly line has done for craftmanship. No longer will you midwife an idea or a theory from conception to execution, but merely obtain fragments of your thought nearly fully formed from a computer algorithm that has done most of your thinking for you.
Critics may argue that this automation of jobs allows for greater leisure time. Not only has the historically not been the case (see the early industrial revolution), but leisure is an essentially unproductive and consumptive activity that does not lead to spiritual growth or the exercise of man’s will. Leisure activities like training for sport, language learning, or craftsmanship would count as work in Fromm’s system. Although I don’t take as strong of a stance on Fromm against leisure, I can again say from personal experience that there’s only so much relaxation and leisure that I find to be enjoyable before I want to work on something meaningful again.
A Robot Society
The other shared feature of Capitalism and Soviet Communism that Fromm highlights is their conformity. The reason for this in the Soviet system is rather obvious (top-down dictatorship), but in capitalism stems from commodification of the human individual. Both in the labor and “personality” (dating) market, Fromm argues, one must conform to societal standards or risk being labeled as a defective “product” and end up being out of a job or a husband/wife.
I found this argument to be one of the most convincing critiques of capitalism that I had read/heard of. The material critiques of Marx and other 19th century socialists (i.e. that capital was exploitative and would be unable to meet people’s material needs), were proved wrong in the 20th century when the system was incentivized to produce people rich enough to become consumers. However, just paying people more doesn’t change the fact that you are paying them for their labor, meaning they are making themselves into a commodity, a thing, which cannot have anything but bad knock-on effects on the psyche.
So what do we do about all of this? How can I move past both my ideas of progress, and my mom’s consumptive mindset? Fromm basically thinks we can’t, unless we radically overall society. I’m not so sure. Two other books that I will be reviewing soon: the Illusion of Self by James Garfield and Philosophy as a Way of Life by Pierre Hadot provide alternate answers, which I will explore in later posts. But what I will say for now that I do think personal change is possible.
How I will be changing my life as a result of this book:
The Sane Society underlined something that I already knew: the collective norms of our American, western society are neither necessary, sufficient, or even good for human thriving. I’m not sure what the exact right norms are yet, but embracing the Kantian, Stoic, and Christian ethic of loving thy neighbor as thyself, and embodying meaning in work seem like good places to start.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Automatic Cognition Engines
Big Eyes, Small Mouth
Contributions for the week of June 30, 2025
Contributions for the week of July 7, 2025
Building a History
Critical Self-Reflection
Contributions for the week of July 14, 2025
Identity (?) Politics
Contributions for the week of July 21, 2025
Contributions for the week of July 28, 2025
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Part 1: What Is This Post About?
This is a book review (of sorts) for “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis, a PDF version of which can be found free here. More specifically, this is for the audiobook version included in the C.S. Lewis Essential Audio Library, which can be bought on Amazon here. First published in 1952, this book is older than most of the Motte audience.
Even so, and to put the bottom line up early- I recommend “Mere Christianity” for anyone with the time to listen, be it during commutes or chores, to an exceptionally articulate Christian try to express his view of what Christianity distills down to at its most common shared elements. This is the ‘mere’ Christianity that specific denominations build from, but which is also distinct from non-Christianity. It also has a lot to say, albeit accidentally and indirectly, about the modern culture war.
I recommend it to practicing Christians who might appreciate a reminder of the sort of commonalities that are/used to be seen as common despite doctrinal disputes. I recommend it to non-practicing ‘cultural’ Christians who might appreciate a reflection on what parts of their culture are influenced by Christian thought, and what parts are not. I recommend it to non-Christians as a glimpse into the Christian mindset by a theologian deliberately trying to communicate that mindset to an audience that is assumed to not share it. I even recommend it to atheists, who C.S. Lewis engages with specific consideration. He is certainly familiar with many of the older anti-theist arguments, and even if you do not find the counterarguments as compelling as he did, you should at least know of them.
Most of all, I recommend “Mere Christianity” to The Motte, for its commentary on culture war issues and human dynamics that are so applicable in the present despite being written with the mid-last century in mind.
This is also an endorsement for the audio library version especially. Having both read the text and listened to it, I can attest that this is a work where a good narrator elevates the material. Mere Christianity uses a great deal of metaphors and personal engagement with the audience to make its argument, and this works far better with a skilled narrator than someone trying figure the intended tone of unfamiliar text. Given Lewis’s frequent techniques of leading the listener down a train of thought before doubling back to some part of it, the verbal context can make it clearer than powering through the text might.
This is not surprising, as Mere Christianity started as a radio lecture series during WW2. During the German Blitz bombings of England, C.S. Lewis was brought onto the BBC to talk to the British public about faith. These audio-lectures were recorded and adapted into text, and in this text was adapted back into audio. Given how the transition from verbal to written communication inevitably loses some nuance, something that was inevitably lost is in a sense regained with the re-transition to audio. This is poetically appropriate for the subject matter.
Finally, this endorsement will encourage you to not think the price tag is onerous. While it may feel hard to justify a bit over $40 USD for a single (old) book you can get for free, the broader audio-library is a bit under 40 hours and includes other C.S. Lewis works like The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, and other works. At roughly $1 an hour of listening and post-listen contemplations, this is a better money-to-time-entertainment that most.
And with that overly long endorsement out of the way, on to the review.
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Part 2: What Makes “Mere Christianity” Recommendable to The Motte? (And With What Caveats?)
The parts of Mere Christianity I think the Motte in general would most appreciate, regardless of their stance on Christianity, is the exceptional and self-aware use of non-technical language to communicate, the significant emphasis on virtue ethics in regards to the timeless human condition, and the appreciation of a clearly intelligent person providing a position with charity for those who would and will disagree. If Lewis was living contemporary, he would be the sort of writer that- if not a member of the Motte- would probably be the sort of writer Motte members would likely regularly rise in discussion as expanding understanding through insights.
These endorsements come with the caveats of an arguable (though deliberate) use of metaphors rather than technical language, some unquestionably anachronistic/dated views, and of course a lack of materialist proof of God. (He does engage the topic. I won’t claim you will find it convincing.)
I caution this caveat by advising against approaching this with a determination to discredit. In the Mottian sense, engage charitably. Lewis has some relevant words on how the meaning of words shifts over time and how mentality shapes perception, and he is being charitable enough towards the skeptical audience to warrant charity in turn. That said, charity with Lewis’s takes does not require Gellman amnesia of the parts you may strongly disagree with towards the parts you know less about.
On to the merits.
As both an author and a speaker, Lewis is incredibly aware- and honestly up front- about the subtle shifts that come with careless or deliberately misleading choice of words.
Lewis makes clear and distinct arguments about how semantic contexts and insinuations have changed meanings over time. He makes the distinction between ‘a good man’ and ‘a good Christian,’ of how the common understanding of various virtues and sins have changed over time, and so on. Given that he was writing in the mid-20th century from a perspective formed most by the early 20th century, the language games he raises from nearly a century ago remind us of even greater drift since. Lewis is very clearly trying to not argue by insinuation, and at many times will variously pre-emptively clarify against potential misunderstanding, or circle around to how something could be misunderstood.
Lewis also makes deliberate and effective use of metaphor rather than technical/doctrinal language. This can come to a point of feeling like overreliance, but this is part of the deliberate effort to not rely on technical terminology or language only the already familiar will understand. Part of the why Lewis makes as good use of metaphors as he does- but also why it may feel over-leveraged- is that he is consistent and clear that the metaphor is a limited tool, not a literalism or last word on any doctrinal issue. If the metaphor feels like it’s undercut by some context of the metaphor, he freely and proactively encourages you to disregard it. This is positive in the sense that Lewis is making limited arguments more carefully but can be negative if you feel he’s not committing to a specific position enough, especially on controversial topics. This is expected, and he warns against it in his preface. Engage charitably, and it works better as the tool of understanding the point he is trying to make.
The second basis of endorsement is the emphasis on virtue ethics and the human condition.
Starting with the latter, Lewis speaks from a position of intellectual, and moral, humility. He is not appealing to his own credentials, or any sense of dogmatic or moral superiority. He may believe he is right, but he is not making an argument to ‘prove you wrong.’ Agreeing with Lewis is not a precondition for engaging further with the text. He is up front with the sort of personal and moral failings he talks about. He confesses easily to his own temper when he makes a point on the shortness of others, of doubts and questions, and so on. He is never resolving a point in terms of ‘this is so because Christianity says so.’
This is because, as much as religious ethics are associated with deontological ethical systems (duty-based, often derived from God), Lewis speaks far more in terms of virtue-ethics. Under virtue ethics, a trait can be virtuous in moderation but become a flaw in excess or deficiency. A classical, more secular example is how bravery can be cowardness in shortage, but foolhardiness in excess. However, Lewis makes the point of how even virtues can be this way, where an excess of virtue can become twisted into something more, and worse, even as the person doing so feels they are all the more virtuous for this Christian virtue. Humility to the degree that one knows they are so humble can become a source of poisonous pride over those less humble and more overtly proud.
This is where Lewis begins to speak on timeless human nature in ways that we would recognize as tropes of the culture war today. He does not use the term ‘virtue signaling,’ but you will recognize it. He does not use the term ‘march through the institutions’- a march that in the American sense began in earnest after his writings- but you will recognize his points about how changes in social norms and institutions have twisted meanings and understandings to allow new preferences. He does not speak of political tribes, but you will recognize when he speaks of political self-righteousness, and how hatred of that self-righteousness in others can spawn it in oneself.
Lewis does so with the sort of meta-framing awareness and metaphors to illuminate this that would be familiar with anyone familiar and/or moved by Scott and the broader rationalist-sphere luminaries should recognize. This may not be a coincidence. For example- in Scott’s classic I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, Scott makes a metaphor about how an Emperor gets no religious merit points for tolerating gays, transgenders, and so on when the Emperor has no issue or objection to them. Lewis makes a similarly structured, but secular-focused, metaphor on the merit of not-burning witches if one does not believe Witches pose any real harm to people. Both share similar concerns about how people approach moral principles, the intents they do so with, and the difference between a difference in principles and a difference in claimed facts. However, Lewis’s version was penned a good half century earlier. I don’t know if Scott was aware or influenced by it.
The point here is less about Lewis on the culture war, or even Christianity, and more on how Lewis approaches metaphysical structures and meta-context of organization. Lewis is writing from someone who may not have had the same words as the current audience for describing social structures, but he would recognize the discussion on social tensions, and efforts to change social norms one way or another. Some of the terms that he use may seem anachronistic of even quaint- Lewis does seem to believe in a literal entity we call the Devil/Satan as a corrupting force, as opposed to the far more rationally justifiable / observable / attributable villainous actors of the Cathedral / [Progressive/MAGA] movements / etc. Clearly, we are wiser and better informed of the context in our current era.
But more importantly Lewis- however imperfectly, and however imprecisely- has thoughts on dynamics that are often of interest on The Motte. Even if you don’t agree with him on the specifics of the conclusion, he can provide them charitably and interestingly enough to be entertaining.
On the demerits. What to say that’s not repetitive?
Lewis’s use of metaphors is a double-edged sword, to use one more. It can greatly assist with understanding a point he is trying to make. They are generally well constructed and appropriately used with limited scope. They are used in the way that good assumptions are used- clearly, purposely, but with the willingness to abandon them if they are unhelpful.
It may result in a sense of there not being enough there. The plus side of Lewis not arguing from the Bible as an ultimate authority is that it can come off as a delightfully constructed but questionably hollow sophistry. Not ‘sophistry’ in the sense of manipulation and misdirection, but rather a delightfully complicated model that builds off itself, but theory that one can doubt will survive reality, or even reflect it. Even if you find the arguments interesting, they may lack the sort of citations or tie-ins to real events and real denominations of Christianity that would normally bolster such claims.
I do believe this is to some degree unavoidable based on design constraints, as opposed to an unintended flaw of someone who didn’t think of them. Lewis is open- at least in the preface which is admittedly retrospective to the initial publishing. He was working under certain structural limitations that are reasonable to have, which can reasonably frustrate people who wish he didn’t. Lewis is not speaking about any specific denomination of Christianity, so he is not citing from any specific denomination. Lewis is avoiding the most controversial and friction-point disputes of doctrine in order to not distract from his points, and so he is not taking a position on controversial and frictional points.
But there are also points where you listen to what Lewis says, and as with any position from a century ago, it will reflect biases and views which may be worse than anachronistic. When you read or listen to these, and feel they are very clearly wrong, you may rightly wonder what else he is wrong about. This is fair, within reason.
A more benign example of this anachronism is his view on patriotism, of which a good number of people nowadays have a far more negative view then he, which is clearly a (measured) positivism. Given the selection bias for Lewis being selected to make this in the first place, this may not be surprising but may be disappointing. A more cringe-worthy view of this is his characterization of Christian marriage, including an expectation to a wife defer to the husband. I won’t defend or justify it- he tries to enough, given it is his longest chapter- but I will say I felt it was also his weakest chapter, not least because he is clearly speaking on it from the perspective as an outsider (a lifelong bachelor at that point in his life, i.e. never married), as opposed to something clearly had more personal experience with (morally imperfect human nature).
I will reassure (or disappoint) that Lewis does not drop any racial slurs or outrageous cultural prejudices in his work. He is not exactly expressing contempt for other religions or unbelievers either, like some Crusader / Conquistador / Zealot stereotype. He is not preaching the white man’s burden, the civilizing impact of European Christianity on non-Europeans, justifying imperialism, or weighing in on eugenics / geopolitics / AI. While he undoubtably had / would have had views on some of those, they are not the subject of Mere Christianity
This is a more measured point that Lewis- despite being so well measured in his language and topic material in other respects- is going to inevitably discomfort people. Some of that discomfort is the subject matter. And some of that discomfort is a result of speaking from the internalized aspects of someone of his time and place and history.
That time and place, in turn, was the tail end of the British Empire.
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Part 3: The Meta-Context of “Mere Christianity” – Why It Is What It Was When
“Mere Christianity” is a product of its author and its time, which is to say the product of both World Wars.
C.S. Lewis is most known in retrospect for his literary career. He was a contemporary- and personal friend for some time- of J.R.R. Tolkien. Between the latter’s Lord of the Rings and the former’s Narnia, both published in the 1950s, he was part of the mid-20th century Christian-influenced literary fantasy movement that shaped a fair deal of modern fantasy literature. The Christian influences of Lord of the Rings are sometimes less known than the influences of LotR on the broader fantasy genre since, or the Christian influences in Narnia. Still, Lewis could be considered one of the more successful and influential authors of the mid-20th century ground just on the ‘mutual influence on and of fellow writers’ grounds alone. Of course, Lewis did more than that and is more broadly known as a specifically Christian writer and thinker in ways that Tolkien wasn’t… even though Tolkien actually had a hand in C.S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.
This is because a less-known part of Lewis’s history is that he was an atheist for the first half of his life. Born in 1898 and dying in 1963, Lewis was part of the World War 1 generation. He had his 19th birthday in the trenches of the Somme Valley, albeit the year after the 1916 battle of the Somme, and in 1918 he was wounded but survived a British artillery shell that fell short and killed two his companions. This remarkably unlikely event was a traumatic and influential part of Lewis’s life, and is recognizable in elements of his later writing, particularly Screwtape Letters. It is not, however, what triggered his conversion.
Lewis converted to Christianity in 1933, 15 years after his what some might have called his ‘miraculous’ survival. In reflections- including a few allusions in Mere Christianity- he references his eventual conversion as something that was grudging and resisted. Rather than view his experience at the time as a clear act of God and the basis of conversion in a ‘no atheists in a foxhole’, Lewis spent the next decade and a half dealing with it as a self-described temperamental atheist. From his later writings on his earlier mind set, one can imagine- though he does not specifically claim- that he would have bristled at someone of faith trying to tell him that he should feel grateful or religious because he survived when two others died beside him. Lewis’s eventual conversion was despite, not on the immediate basis of, that wartime experience.
Despite the experience and the self-professed anger, this is not the same as saying Lewis was disillusioned by World War 1 per see. Or at least, not in the way some might expect. As a product of his time in various ways, one of the anachronisms that separates Lewis from a more modern speaker is his frank and even meritorious view on nationalism. Lewis was not part of the generation that became disillusioned with nationalism entirely by WW1, in the way that some people now view it as a character flaw to feel. Rather, Lewis approaches nationalism in the sense of virtue ethics, where the moderation of an aspect is the key for it to be virtuous rather than a sin of excess or deficit. Lewis remained a moderate nationalist. When WW2 began, he volunteered to join the Home Guard auxiliaries despite his age and scars. He later declined a position in the British Honors System offered by Winston Churchill, due to concerns of perception.
This context matters because it probably helps explain why C.S. Lewis was selected to speak on BBC to the British public during WW2, the radio broadcasts of which are the basis / original form of Mere Christianity.
During the second world war, the British society was well into the gradual secularization from a strongly Christian nation to what we would recognize as more common today. According to a C.S. Lewis historians on the BBC approach at the time, the BBC wartime audience was roughly 1/3rd embracing religion, 1/3rd hostile against it, and 1/3rd neutral. It faced not only the challenge of a divided nation in terms of people’s views on religion, but also the issue of having a speaker who could speak to all of them at once. When higher-ranking, more senior, and more experienced of the Clergy were brought on, they struggled to connect with the audience, not least because they spoke in more theological/doctrinal/dogmatic terms that variously did not make sense or were viewed more negatively by the audience.
This is the sort of problem that Lewis was brought in for to work through. A former and self-described irritable atheist who understood the perspective that was hostile to religious pressures. A more junior layperson not inclined to the sort of doctrinal and technical sophistication that lost the casual or uncommitted audience. But also a believer to appeal to the other believers to come together and pull through in terms they would respond to. And, of course, a nationalist enough to still volunteer to serve, despite first-hand experience with the horrors and tragedies of WW1.
A cynical perspective is that the person or committee making the selection to Lewis could have these cynical considerations for selecting Lewis for what is, in crudest forms, a propaganda role. There is no requirement, or claim, of their own belief in God one way or the other, anymore than there is a requirement that they had to like or respect Lewis to put him on the podium.
But there is also little argument that ‘their’ cynical motive, if there was a ‘they’ like that in the first place, imposed itself onto Lewis’s stated views/
There are no serious arguments I am aware of that Lewis’s views expressed in the broadcasts or Mere Christianity were false or influenced or dictated by propagandists with him as the mere mouthpiece. While there were editing changes between adaptations from audio to text, there were no major post-war retractions of major arguments. Lewis’s views in the broadcasts that became “Mere Christianity,” while useful to them, were by all accounts his own. While you certainly could poison the well by believing everything he says is mere wartime propaganda, this would be the sort of lack of charity that avoids rather than engages with the argument.
The wartime context does, however, go some way towards explaining why Mere Christianity is organized as it is.
///
Part 4: The Structure of Mere Christianity
Mere Christianity is organized to be easily broken down into short periods of engagement, not something you need to- or should- do all at once.
As a consolidated book, the PDF provided earlier is a modest 108 PDF pages, with the preface- the first real words from Lewis- starting on page 6. The just-over 100 pages of content are broken down to across four books of distinct themes, each book broken into distinct chapters of narrower topics. At 34 chapters across four books, 35 if you count the preface, you are averaging less than 3 pages a chapter. ‘Average’ does a lot of work here, since there is a good deal of variability on specific chapters, but this is something that can easily be a bit of bedtime reading.
As an audiobook, Mere Christianity is around 7 hours in total at normal speed, with each chapter averaging about 12 minutes. Again, average is doing some work here, but mostly in the favor of manageability. The longest chapter, “Christian Marriage,” is 21-and-a-half minutes. The next two longest chapters, the last two of the last book and the culmination of the series, are just over 20 and 19 minutes respectively. Everything else is shorter, and so feasible for even a short 15-minute commute.
After the preface, the four books in turn are build on four general themes. These themes provide a general arc from justifying why the audience should give some consideration to what follows, characterizing Christianity as a religion, Christian behaviors, and Christian purpose of what these are building towards.
(These are not the exact terms that Lewis himself uses, but consider this the review trying to reframe / rephrase for the Motte audience.)
The following books, and their chapters, will be elaborated more in the following section. What follows is just the structural organization.
The preface serves as both establishing context and as a series of disclaimers. Lewis’s first concern is to clear misapprehensions about what the series is not, chief of which is that it is/was not to convert the listener.
Book One, Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe, is five chapters. The purpose of this book is to establish a basis of believing in God, even if not specifically the Christian God. It engages with some of the limits of a purely materialist world view.
Book Two, What Christians Believe, is also five chapters. The purpose of this book is to characterize core / common doctrinal of Christian tradition in general, distinct from other religions. It is a book where specific Christian denominations may take issue with specific parts in the sense of ‘this is not how we’d put it,’ but concede it as a bootstrap for others to start understanding Christianity.
Book Three, Christian Behavior, is twelve chapters. The purpose of this book is to characterize more specific aspects of what Christan tradition and what advocates in terms of practical beliefs and values. This is also the book where Lewis touches the most on human nature, and in ways that’d we recognize in relation to the culture war.
Book Four, Beyond Personality: Or First Steps In The Doctrine Of The Trinity, is eleven chapters. The purpose of this book is to introduce Christian Theology, in the capital-T sense of ‘the science of God.’ This is the conclusion, and the argument about how Christianity provides a practical, practicable, and reproducible process for becoming like God. (Or- Christ. See again books two and three.)
///
Part 5: The Book 1 Review
Oh dear did I really do this
This section is a summary-review of the first book of Mere Christianity. It is not exhaustive but is intended to give a sense of the opening chapters and Lewis’s framing efforts. I include this mainly to illustrate Lewis’s ability to pursue both direct arguments and meta-argument in parallel, which becomes clear by chapter five. Also, Lewis has some good line drops I wanted to call out.
This also comes with the giant disclaimer that this is all my interpretation / understanding / summary, and that if you feel I missed some significant part of Lewis’s point… okay! Omissions are already admitted, as well as reorganization for the sake of summary and context. I am also using terms and characterizations other than his own words, so if you read this and then listen to it, don't be surprised.
Additionally, and hopefully it wouldn’t need to be said, I am trying to characterize, not endorse, the arguments that follow.
/
Preface
The preface serves as both establishing context and as a series of disclaimers. Lewis’s first concern is to clear misapprehensions about what the series is not, chief of which is that it is/was not to convert the listener.
This section was written after the war broadcasts and is in some respects a response to feedback Lewis received after them. In it, he elaborates his intent on how he approached this. At the same time, this is a retroactive characterization the initial listeners/readers wouldn’t have had. It is useful to know this going in for your first time, but recognize that if you read this, you won’t have the same first impression someone else might have. (Then again- you won’t be listening during a German bombing campaign.)
Lewis makes clear that he is not taking a position on any specific denomination of Christianity, or any specific political topic. He views it as distracting from the point of the book but asserts it should not be interpreted as any position, for or against, any other position. Nor should it be viewed as omitting because he views the subject as too important, or not important enough.
Lewis spends a surprising number of words on how words lose value due to semantic drift. He specifically talks about how ‘good person’ and ‘good Christian’ are not the same thing, and how the conflation makes some words lose value in the sense that saying someone is not a good Christian can be perceived as a character attack of saying they are not a good person. This is a clear-minded distinction between a theological sense and a moral sense of ‘good,’ and his analogy to the transition of the meaning ‘gentlemen’ overlaps with the concept we’d call the euphemism treadmill.
Lewis makes a metaphor of Christianity to a house with many rooms but a shared hall. He places his own work- the Mere Christianity- as the invitation for people to come into the common all hall, but not to live there. He has Words (gentle but cautionary) on people who are undecided on which room they enter for reasons of personal taste rather than Truth.
Quote of the Chapter:
It is very difficult so to dissent from them that you will not appear to them a cad as well as a heretic.
/
Book One: Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe
This was summarized earlier as-
Book One, Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe, is five chapters. The purpose of this book is to establish a basis of believing in God, even if not specifically the Christian God. It engages with some of the limits of a purely materialist world view.
This book is not an argument on materialist grounds god exists. It is instead a series of arguments that collectively challenge the premise of a purely material view of the universe and people. It works on grounds that may or may not be compelling for abandoning the pure-materialist view in the first place, but more strongly challenges any attempt at compromise.
In other words, it is structured as an anti-motte and bailey argument in which it attempts to cut off a retreat to a potential motte.
Structurally, it treats pure-materialistic world views as the advantageous/expansive bailey which serves to discredit / ignore God. It starts by establishing the existence of a “Moral Law” that people recognize / appeal to on non-materialist grounds. It attempts to defend this position against materialist-based counterarguments of evolution or social convention. From there, it explores the implications of non-materialist law in the material universe that exists but does not obey the normal conventions of material laws of nature. It concludes by cutting off a retreat to syncretism- of a hybrid materialist-spiritualist world view that might be a nominal motte-compromise of ‘well, some of what you say may be true.’ This retreat is a… not trap, but rather the basis of a renewed argument thrust. If Moral Law is true and a part of the universe from a non-materialist source, it reveals implications that Humans can only respond to.
If you want to know how to defend your (dis)belief against this line of argument, the defense works by not conceding the Moral Law premise in the first place. This will most likely to be done by adapting the materialist counter-arguments on grounds of evolution (what he discusses in terms of a biological evolved herd instinct) and combining it with social evolution to argue that societies evolve values, rather than the values having a non-materialist source.
Or this is all what I would say… if there was not a trick revealed in chapter five, making all the above points about ‘winning’ the argument meaningless.
/
Chapter One: The Law of Human Nature
This chapter advances a claim that humans have an intrinsic sense of right or wrong that- even if they claim it doesn’t matter when it comes to them- they recognize others of violating instantly. This knowledge is in turn broadly applicable across time and cultures, with variations in morality being differences of emphasis, not type. Even when people disagree about whom is in the wrong, they all broadly have a sub-strata mutual agreement about the general nature of right and wrong. The differences are in degrees (what is emphasized or not), not in kind (no society or human instinct valorizes treachery against the society).
The existence of this shared understanding is not just akin to a law of nature, but is a law of nature in an original / older sense of the term. Like other laws of nature, it applies without having to be taught. People do not have to be taught a sense that others have wronged them, any more than gravity has to taught to the object it applies to. It is in the nature of the thing, even if various specifics (what the sense focuses on) are cultural.
However, the law of nature of human morality, or what he later calls moral law, is distinct from other laws of nature. It is a law of nature that does not work purely materialist grounds. People can choose to disobey, in ways they cannot choose to disobey gravity or thermodynamics. Disobeying is a choice that is not rooted in purely materialist grounds, any more than the existence of the shared understanding of wrong that exists across time / cultures / prior agreement.
These two points- that a moral law exists as a natural law, but that people can break it unlike purely material natural laws- is the starting point for establishing a non-material premise to the universe.
Quote of the Chapter:
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him, he will be complaining "It's not fair" before you can say Jack Robinson.
/
Chapter Two: Some Objections
This chapter is Lewis anticipating some arguments against the premise of the moral law.
One counterargument is that the moral law impulse is merely an evolved herd instinct, a biological impulse. Lewis does not dismiss that a herd instinct exists and does align it with things like maternal instinct. Lewis disputes that the moral law is an instinctual impulse- rather, he asserts it is the factor balancing instincts, the element that helps people know which herd instinct to suppress, and which to elevate, such as when someone is faced with persona danger to themselves, but also to another. The moral law is the judgement about which impulse to follow, not the choice of which to follow. In is the outside-context force that establishes what the ‘good zone’ of virtue ethics is so that no one herd instinct is taken to extreme, not the instinct or even decision itself.
A second counterargument is that moral law is just a social construct instilled into people by education. Lewis disputes this, in terms that can dispute a bit of contemporary post-modernism, everything is social convention.’ Part of his disputation is that the differences in the social construct disputes- what is formally educated by specific cultures- is very small between cultures and times, not very large, and thus the social construction angle is of marginal input.
The other, larger, argument is that a comparative judgement of better and thus worse moral systems has to be comparing them by some standard outside the claimed system itself. In order to say Nazi morality is wrong, despite Nazi morality saying itself was right, you have to be comparing to a more objective idea- a more ‘real’ morality. But if you embrace absolute moral relativity- not that this is the term he uses- then you have no argument to say the Nazi morality is objectively wrong. Objective moral denunciation requires an objective standard, outside of a social construct, for the social construct to be measured by. Once this concession is made, all moral systems- even those claiming to be the right one- can be tested by this outside-the-structure measure.
Quote of the Chapter:
For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things.
If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
/
Chapter 3: The Reality of the Law
This chapter assumes success of chapter two in defending chapter one to advance the implications of the existence of the moral law.
This chapter advances the distinction in the purely materialist natural laws, where only facts (of physics) matter, and the moral law which has both facts (how people behave), but also something else (how people ought to behave). This non-purely materialist distinction is furthered by how people know how they ‘ought’ to behave even if they don’t.
Similarly, this ‘fact of what is’ and ‘fact of how ought’ is advanced by the difference in (not necessarily taught) moral instinct when the same action is done to you under different contexts, or even if the violation helps you. The person who accidentally trips you is a greater offense than the person who tried but failed to deliberately trip you despite the greater material impact. Additionally, the traitor who betrays the enemy in your favor is still triggering a moral instinct of wrongness, despite their utility. Moral law defies pure materialist predictors of instinctually endorsing material gains or condemning material costs.
Lewis also disputes that consequentialism alone is sufficient to explain this moral instinct. ‘Be unselfish because it is good for society’ begs the question of why ‘good for the society’ is not wrong, but is circular. The ‘why’ of a duty to be unselfish- the classic deontological question of ‘duty to whom?’- must come from outside to break the circular reasoning. This outside is the law of nature- the nature of the thing of what ‘ought’ to be, which is neither constructed by or even necessarily taught to humans, but which appears across time and cultures and social constructors.
Quote of the Chapter
Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing— a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves.
/
Chapter 4: What Lies Behind the Law
This chapter advances the implications of the existence of the moral law on the rest of the universe by contesting pure materialism, and even hybrid materialist-spiritualism.
After reviewing key points so far- about how a non-material rule of nature exists and acts differently by being subject to choice to disobey- Lewis does a brief review of a purely materialist world view. Action and consequence all through history. However, Lewis contests materialism by noting the limits of materialism.
One of these is that accurate scientific observations can only record what is observed at a time in place- it must infer what is not observed. We can theorize that A is a consequence of B, but Science (the objective, testable, verifiable sort) does not claim to prove to have seen B. The overreach of science to things not actually claimed by observable / replicable science is dismissed as the more pop-cultural/fanciful (what we would deem political) use of science more by people other than professional scientists than actual scientists. Science also does not assert why what was there was there in the first place, i.e. why did the big bang originate into the universe. Science cannot observe it. If there was some actor responsible, it would still have to be inferred, or else inform the observer in another way.
Lewis makes an additional, longer, and harder to summarize series of arguments about the nature of observing the creation of universe from within the universe. This includes the difficulty of observing an outside-universe from within the boundaries of the universe. He uses the analogy of observing an architect from within the architecture he built. He concludes to a point that one of the ways to reason there is another actor is if it interacts and acts upon you in distinct ways. Say by establishing a force of nature that acts upon humans in way distinct from other, purely materialistic, forces of nature.
This ‘force’ is not claimed to be the God of Christian mythology, specifically. This is the ‘a god,’ not ‘the god’ stage of the argument. It is, however, as close to a mind as any other metaphor Lewis will use, because it seems interested in both establishing a non-materialist sense of right, and making people feel a sense of wrong.
Lewis then ends by promising you that you’ve heard to much about a nice and pleasant God for too long, and that you should be uneasy about what he’ll say in his next issue, helpfully titled “We Have Cause To Be Uneasy.”
*The chapter then breaks for a post-script subject on the merits, or weakness, of trying to synthesis pure materialism against pure religion. Lewis raises what was presumably more popular at the time, variously called creative evolution / life force philosophy. These entertain a spiritual origin to the universe to cover the gaps of materialism, but without the deliberate presence, purpose, or requirements of God in the religious sense. Lewis is not a fan.
Quote of the Chapter:
One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences.
When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?
/
Chapter 5: We Have Cause To Be Uneasy
This chapter begins with a not-quite apology to readers who feel they been tricked into a religious sermon, and that they were only listening to Lewis as long as he had something new to say. If all Lewis has is more religion, that already failed, it’d be like moving a clock back. Lewis counters this in three ways.
One is that going back the way you came is sometimes progress. Progress is going closer to where you want to be, and if you find yourself going the wrong way, progress is turning course even if that means turning back. The sooner one does, the wiser and truer they are to progress. (Yes- Lewis makes an argument that a reactionary can be progressive. Culture war of a different century.)
Second, Lewis reiterates that he is not yet arguing for the Christian God, merely a somebody or something beyond the moral law. Things can be inferred from the consideration of the moral law, since it counterbalances what can be inferred from the creation of the purely material universe. The universe may be a beautiful creation, but the material laws of nature are also pitiless and merciless to people. The moral law is the counterbalance, as the moral law creates the duty, and the discomfort, to make each other’s burdens easier (the practice of morality) in the pitiless material plane.
Second-point-five, this God described to date does not have to forgive you for your failures- and violations- of the Moral Law.
Lewis makes a distinction here between the construct he has said up to date- a creator force that dictates morality- and the Christian claim/interpretation. What Lewis is describing is the implications of a power behind the moral law, but not necessarily a personal god to have a personal relationship and- especially- forgive failure.
This is root of the implication of a moral law that is supposed to make you uneasy. If there is a force- a mind- behind the moral law, which again is a premise of a natural law that intrinsically is a part of you and that you know of, it doesn’t matter if you intellectually disagree with it or rationalize your excuses. Part of you- the natural part- is siding with this creator against yourself regardless, because that part innately agrees with the condemnation of greed/cruelty even if you’d rather it made exceptions for your own.
In this context, you are thus entering the crux of existential terror and nihilism (though Lewis doesn’t use those exact words). If there is no non-materialist moral law in the first place, for there being no creator or non-materialist purpose, then there is in turn no greater purpose to appeal or take solace in. It is moral relativism all the way down in a merciless material universe with no claim to an objective right and wrong. If, on the other hand, you do concede there is a creator who cared enough to create moral law, then you begin to concede that you are making yourself Its enemy through every failure and opposition. Facing judgement is Not Fun.
Third, this entire chain of reasoning does not exist to convince you that it is true. It exists to put you in a Christian frame of mind, so that the chapters to follow will make sense.
Lewis breaks flow, not character, to make an assertion on why people do not understand what Christianity is. (Remember the context- WW2 where 2/3rds of Brits were opposed or neutral on the topic.) People who do not think about the creation of the universe- not just how it functions in the present but before the observable parts- do not think in terms of the formation of natural laws. People who do not think in terms of natural laws may not think in terms of natural moral law. People do not think of natural moral law in turn may not think in terms of what it means if there is a creator behind that moral law. And people who are not thinking about the creator of a moral law, are probably not what it means to that creator when you choose to break it.
Lewis is not claiming that Christians think all of these things either. He is not even claiming indisputable correctness of these facts. What he is claiming, however, is that it’s hard to convince people of a need to repent if they don’t believe there was a transgression against something (moral law) or someone (the creator of said moral law) that they need to repent for.
The point does not hinge on if you are convinced by Lewis’s argument for a moral law and its creator. The point is that it will be hard to understand Christianity if you do not understand how these premises combine to form uncomfortable questions that Christianity claims to answer.
Understanding this connection is key to understanding Lewis’s portrait of Mere Christianity. It was also the sort of the purposeful combination of direct and meta-argument for illustration that convinced me to write this review.
Quote of the Chapter
Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor.
///
Conclusion
And… that’s the end of this book review, of sorts.
Going any further would not capture Lewis’s work well and my failed attempt to is a lot of time well spent but that I’m not getting back. Also, it would take too damn long. This review is already over 8,000 words. Any further and you might as well read or listen to it yourself.
Which, to be fair, is the point of this effort-review. If any of this has caught your interest, consider this your invitation to go get that audiobook. There is a lot to enjoy there, it makes good commute listening, and it doesn't demand a lot of time even as it gives a lot to think about. If you are the sort who comes to the Motte to build your understanding, Lewis is a person to build off of. Even if- or especially if- you disagree with him.
The C.S. Lewis Essential Audio Library is a bit over $40 USD on Amazon.
(Now, do I really want to try to review The Screwtape Letters...)
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