Avc87
10d ago
My objection here is the same as to your last post. You suggest a kind of natural and eternal meritocracy, which generates a natural and eternal aristocracy (Natural aristocrats are naturally only ever replaced by other natural aristocrats). You believe that everything good clumps together, martial valour, beauty, intelligence, charisma, appreciation for higher things etc. Likewise everything bad clumps together, and that what is good and what is bad is more or less consistent throughout history. These valuable traits are invariably introduced by bandit conquerors tempered by war, nomadic lifestyles and harsh climates. In your system class mobility may take place, but only after the natural elite has lost its valuable genetic material, and only after the natural inferior class has acquired it from that elite. It seems you even believe that good artisans and merchants have aristocratic ancestry, so the virtues of the middle class (conscientiousness, prudence, industriousness etc) also flow from the loins of the warrior aristocracy. Is that the history of our planet? I dont think so. China has been conquered by countless nomadic peoples and the sum contribution of all these barbarians to what we could call higher Chinese culture is zero. The Chinese culture was not generated by heroic conquerors with high IQ scores, it preexisted and outsurvived the intruders, and indeed assimilated these barbarians into the Chinese ideology. Elites come and go. Bandits overcome sedentary bandits to become sedentary bandits, this is just the fate of human societies.
Bandit conquerors do have some virtues, in the way that cartel bosses have virtues, cunning and military acumen, a proficiency for deception and spectacular cruelty. Meanwhile, I should think many of the traits and virtues highly valued in modern societies, and which you ascribe to the warrior nobility, probably ended up on the tip of a high pole.
This mountain may be a metaphor but it is certainly a bizarre one. A 60% unemployment rate! The structure reminds me more of something like South Africa than Uruk. Where are the slaves, the working class? Only a very prosperous society could afford to keep a ”shoal” alive.
I see no reason to suppose that horse nomads are cognitively superior (or inferior) to agriculturalists. It seems you presume that a conquering people must be superior to a conquered people in every way, you even imply that pastoralists are more physically attractive, but there is no evidence to support this. The military advantages that nomadic societies enjoy (mobility, access to horses, ability to live of the land and thus to mobilize a large share of the male population, proficiency in war related skills such as hunting etc) are obvious and unrelated to IQ. You need no childish Gobineauism to explain it.
Is this what happened when the Mongols conquered China, when the Arabs conquered Egypt, when the Turks conquered Anatolia? Did societal complexity increase. Did IQ scores go up?
The farmers become experts at incorporating the incoming waves of Nobles without losing as much of their own identity
You speak as if this is a kind of alternative path for nomadic conquest to take, but as far as we can tell this is basically what always happens. The thin nomadic elite melts into the existing, and almost invariably more advanced, sedentary culture. Of course the real subject of this chapter is the Aryan conquests, conquests about which we can say very little. We know almost nothing about pre Aryan cultures and whether they were truly dim witted or not, they left no written records. I do not think they were any more dim-witted than the Song or the Byzantines. Nor do I see any reason to assume that Aryans were different from other pastoralist groups. More sophisticated cultures can succumb to less sophisticated ones, it has happened countless times throughout history.
In any case the Indo European conquest was obviously not the origin of civilization or high culture. The early cities of Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, the Indus Valley seems to have been built by indigenous agriculturalist cultures. These civilizations precede the development of sophisticated into European civilizations by millennia. If anything barbaric Aryans probably disrupted the development of civilization. Basing of a comment you seem to believe that the Egyptian elite was Aryan? This is not far removed from Aryans emerging from an ice moon. The suggestion of a kind of "eternal and natural" aristocracy descended from the Aryans is baseless, as are all of the inferences you make about the culture of these "nobles". Beauty, sophistication, intelligence and glory are not one and the same as power. Sometimes a beautiful, sophisticated and intelligent society gets subjugated by the 1000 bc equivalent of Hells Angels and that is just how it goes.
Since you are discussing history you should probably cite sources, preferably ones up to date with the latest scholarship.
Any source is better than no source, even a source that is likely to be criticized. At the very least a source is something to bite into were as this post is just a string of unsubstantiated claims about everything from the American civil war to Wokeism to decolonization. In the previous chapters you also had no sources but you did atleast develop your arguments because you allowed yourself to linger on a topic for more than a sentence or two.
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