Chapter one is here.
So this chapter turns out to be one of my surprise favourites. Here we're going to jump entirely off the mainline tracks of culture warring and come at things from a nearly-, and I daresay undeservedly-extinct perspective which I think ought to enjoy itself another day in the sun.
By the way, comments have been far less constructive than I'd hoped. Sneering remains permitted (and perennially popular) but, if you will, I'd like to offer instead a challenge: Take any piece of this and show me how to replace it with something more illuminative in the same number of words, or fewer. And if that doesn't work, at least show me a way to say things more beautifully. We do not, after all, live in Tidus, and I prefer to believe that beauty has its own justifications. This goes for the whole project and is, as I understand it, rather the purpose of this site in the first place.
Also, one of my dependents took a hatchet to this chapter when I left a screen open earlier today and some hasty reconstruction was required. In keeping with the above, please consider this a general invitation to critique structure and form, and if any splinters should have missed my smoothing hands please do be so kind as to point them out to me. The use of red markers and expletives is hereby approved.
Finally, if you're lurking and enjoying The Mountain, please consider making an account to drop me a line in private. Some people's minds are fastened tight against these patterns, and I don't expect to alter them even by tapping directly upon the knot (in forthcoming chapter 9 but a little bit in this one as well); but I know the rest of you are out there. I know this because a happy intercourse has already sprung up with a few readers who have both eyes to see and ears to hear and thought to tell me so directly. When I'm done posting here I'll probably put together a substack or something and we can all hang out in a discord somewhere and have some truly excellent conversations.
Oh — and I can't recall whether it's @self_made_human or @Primaprimaprima but at least one of you should enjoy this chapter immensely. Bon appétit to whichever of you; or both. <3
0107 - The Race of Kings
When we spoke of shellfish it was easy to think in terms of 'superior' and 'inferior'. The ones near the peak are stronger and more beautiful. When it comes to apes, we can add 'smarter' and 'better-coördinated' to that list. We spoke in terms of each species undergoing processing by the horrific engine which, despite the many miseries it causes, also results in more-'perfect' specimens.
At this point in our story, humanity and a few of its close cousins have spread out across the primary archipelago of Tidus, occupying islands which range from the arctic to the tropical, the arid to the humid, the barren to the fertile. Some of these are very near to each other and the peoples there are in regular close contact, their genetics and cultures blurring into each other over time. Others of these island groups are separated by wide expanses of ocean, leaving different branches of ape-descendants free to develop in relative isolation.
Humans (and their cousins) mainly pursue three distinct lifestyles. The first is little-changed from the way the hairless killer apes lived, though semi-permanent villages are popular. These are the hunter-gatherers, who sometimes manage to stay in one place for long periods of time but are always fairly open to picking up and moving along as seasonal cycles alter the availability of their forage and prey. This way of life suits them well but is fairly limited in terms of how many people it can support.
Some of the hunter-gatherers notice that not only do useful plants seem to grow in the same places every year, but also that they can facilitate the process, and pretty soon they become agriculturists. These are the second kind. Permanent settlements and food storage become key to their way of life. If their diet is not nearly as varied and nutritious as it used to be — they tend to grow up shorter, weaker, sicklier, and almost certainly less-intelligent — at least calories are less of a problem, and much larger, more-stable populations become possible. They still hunt for incidental meat now and again, and many do cultivate animals, but the average man has greatly-reduced access to it.
The third and final lifestyle into which humans specialize best suits islands upon which agriculture is limited by environmental factors. These ones become pastoralists, adept at herding and breeding animals such as sheep and goats. They are obligate nomads for the simple reason that their herds must regularly move to fresh grazing territory.
Agriculturist societies tend to be inwardly-focused, as their path to growth generally lies in the development and effective management of territory they already hold. Pastoralist societies tend to be outwardly-focused, as they're always on the lookout for new pasture for their growing herds (and the multiple sons who will soon need territories of their own) and so skirmish with each other constantly. Grazing lands don't need to be developed; they simply need to be cleared of their current inhabitants, typically other pastoralists. The hunter-gatherers, meanwhile, mainly try to stay out of the way of the other two, retreating to ever-less-desirable regions in the face of the more populous, better-coördinated farmers and the hungry, warlike herders.
Before long the demi-human cousins, only ever suited to hunter-gatherer life, are displaced entirely, leaving only H. sapiens standing, though in many cases temporary cross-breeding has meant that a lot of those extra-human genetics have been incorporated into certain specific human populations and not others; this is fascinating but I won't harp on it except to acknowledge that humans can apparently mate with lots of strange creatures and get viable offspring which, one can't help but note, does undermine the category somewhat...
But even among the humans there is a tremendous amount of variation, physically, behaviourally, and phenomenologically. Needless to say these different conditions and ways of life bring about substantial psychological changes among the different kinds. The herders look down upon the settled farmers as small, weak, and cowardly, subsisting on porridge and having lost the instinct to fight. The farmers regard the herders as terrifying brigands, almost a force of nature, prone to sweeping in at any time, taking the accumulated fruit of the farmers' labour (and any pretty girls), and burning the rest.
Neither the farmers nor the herders think much of the hunter-gatherers, who are generally so few and so poorly-coördinated that they fade into the background of history; their only defense is to recede into territory that no one else is going to bother with. The farmers and herders leave them there, as we shall too in our narrative, even if some of them do persist to this day in obscure corners of Tidus and perhaps even in the margins of this book.
This leaves the herders and the farmers. Their relationship recalls that of predator and prey, or even plant and animal. Quite literally, if only generally, carnivores and herbivores. These kinds are in an arms race with each other as the farmers seek to safeguard their own existence — once the idea of walls is invented it rapidly becomes enormously popular — while the herders are hard at work figuring out ways to crack those eggs and get at the juicy fruit within. Put another way, one kind specializes into collective productivity and defense, while the other specializes in martial excellence and offense. One favours the slow, safe, relatively-stable path, while the other takes great risks in pursuit of great rewards. Male and female, if you will.
The two do eventually become united, however, creating the thing we call 'civilization', and here is how it happens.
Far in the cold, arid north of Tidus, in an island chain where the climate makes agriculture difficult, a tribe of men arises along the usual pastoralist lines. Countless generations of development in this setting, in constant competition with others like them, has forged them into something special. They are consummate warriors, prizing honor and courage above all else. They call themselves, in their own language, the 'Kings' or the 'Nobles'. They're tall and strong and beautiful, of course. They're also, to be blunt, simply more mentally-acute; more prone to the trait we now call 'openness to experience.' Rather than sort of passively existing, they notice new patterns and start to put all sorts of pieces together.
These are the first to tame and ride horses, including into battle. They are the first to invent the wheel. They invent chariots for combat and wagons for hauling goods and families with them as they roam. And, perhaps most importantly for our purposes, they also invent the first boats capable of more than minor inter-island hops. Instead of sending a few warriors in canoes, these people can travel long distances and show up overnight with huge warbands, horses, chariots, stores of weapons, food, supplies, and their women and children too, practically without warning.
Breeding horses turns out to have a beneficial upshot: the patriarchs responsible for such things notice that traits are passed on from generation to generation and they even work out some of the rules. In a hitherto-unprecedented leap of intuition and self-reflection, they realize that people work the same way. They begin selecting mates carefully and prizing the bloodline traits of their ancestors.
Indeed, from here on out, the Nobility's preöccupation with pedigree will come off as borderline-obsessive to ignorant commoners, who scoff at such apparent pretentiousness even as they couple randomly in the gutter. The Nobles can tell that there are major phenomenological differences between them and the conquered. For this reason royalty is also prone to inbreeding to a degree which often occurs to moderns as unseemly: they realize that such precious things might be lost by admixture. (Incidentally, if you've ever wondered why the breeding and racing of horses is 'the sport of kings', well, now you know. And judicious inbreeding yet remains a commonly-deployed tactic in that domain.)
This gives us a good vantage point from which to briefly survey the Nobles' unique religion. Each family has a 'sacred fire' in its hearth, an ancestral flame passed on from father to eldest son, tended carefully lest it go out. When it does there are special rituals by which it might be reïgnited, which call upon one's forefathers to participate. Maintaining the flame is but one part of a man's duty to perpetuate the spirit of his male ancestors, as is having a son who might one day take up the mantle in turn. Women in this society leave off worshiping the fire of their father and are instead inducted into worship of the fire of their husband. In a symbolic sense the fire is the family, is the male line itself. (And when you read about ancient peoples' obsession with 'the hearth', you'll see now that it was much more to them than the place where they happened to cook their food.)
So you will understand the aptness of the simile when I say that the next thing to happen is that these people sweep the world as a wildfire. An eldest son might inherit his father's herds and grazing rights, but his younger brother must carve out a place for himself; kindle a new flame. Excepting the sudden death of the firstborn the only way he's going to manage this is by banding together with a whole lot of other second sons and striking out into the world to find land and wives.
When the Nobles encounter agriculturists they only notionally recognize them as belonging to the same category of being as themselves; as 'people'. It's not hard to see why. We've already covered how the farmers are smaller, weaker, and generally slower; lacking in martial excellence; and have mainly lost any sort of spirit of valour or the impulse to conquer — the very attributes which the Nobles would recognize as virtue (lit. 'manliness'). A Noble would sooner die in battle or take his own life than live in servitude to another man, his dignity and reproductive potential curtailed in exchange for the 'privilege' of continued existence.
Yet, when the Nobles take an agriculturist area by force and kill or drive off whoever was in charge before, the conquered population generally just goes along with it. (The lioness yawns.) And at any rate the agriculturists lack the strength, intelligence, skill, or inclination to do much about it, excepting in cases of the most intolerable abuse; though even those generally have more to do with the spectre of starvation than anything involving dignity. So here again we see an icon of male and female: the conquered people lose some liberty, yes; but they weren't as phenomenologically interested in that in the first place, and indeed they sleep a lot better with Nobles on top of them to fend off other invading males. The next generation, also, is likely to have some of the best of both 'parents' — more on that in a moment.
One thing which may surprise the modern reader is that the Nobles are not universalist with their culture and customs. Which is to say that, once they become élites in an area, they're unconcerned about whether the subjugated aboriginals practice their same religion, or tell their same stories, or even speak their same language (except to interact with superiors). They understand themselves as fundamentally different, and these things as being right for them. Why should a field labourer have a sacred fire in his hearth? He is not descended from the race of kings. And when Nobles develop writing and philosophy, they've no expectation that these things will be common in the population, due to the Nobles' entirely-correct assumption that most of the proletariat won't even possess the required mental capacities! They even develop separate legal codes such that, for example, it's legal for a Noble to strike or kill a prole, but never the other way around.
The Nobles have a real passion for hunting. Today, when this is mentioned at all, it tends to be framed as something to do with preserving martial virtue, or conspicuous consumption, or status games involving the commoners who after all are not allowed to participate, with the best game reserved for the tables of the rich — and, yes, all of that is true. The Nobles really do eat a lot more meat than anyone else. But all these things are beside the actual point, which is that the Nobles understand hunting as a sort of sacrament. It is a symbolic exercise of their perceived place in creation. Like the eagle, or falcon, which rises above all life below and chooses which to take and which to spare, the Nobles understand themselves as husbands, arbiters of those beneath. They kill; they cultivate; they tend; all from a position of not just unquestionable but morally-evident superiority. Those who exist below them in the great chain of being are reliant, after all, upon such predation for their own good. And so Nobles are also prone to taking such apex predators for their personal, and corporate, heraldic devices.
(Indulge me in another sidebar here; as usual I simply can't help my own fascination. Nobles consider themselves to be above the nitty-gritty details of labour and support. As descendants of warrior-aristocracy, they're never short on subjugated labour to do the little things for them. In time they'll refer to themselves as 'gentle', by which they mean they are free from having to get their own hands dirty with such indignities. And even to this day, 'gentlemen' are prone to hunting sports: preserving, across so many generations, this connection to their roots; this psychological window into their societal rôle. I should appreciate it if when you hear the word 'gentleman' you would glimpse, if only for a moment, the ancestral horse-nomad sitting atop a pile of skulls in his recently-bloodstained keep, walls being scrubbed by fresh slaves and concubines.)
From island to island, chain to chain, this race comes, conquers, establishes itself at the top of the social hierarchy, and sends many of its own sons to go forth and do the same. And, while women of the Noble race are of course most highly prized as wives, plenty of admixture does occur. It's not uncommon for lesser sons to take as wives the most beautiful women of the conquered territory; often they even marry the now-available wife of the prior ruler. As we know, such a woman functionally is a storehouse of the very best genetics of her own people.
In short, synthesis occurs! Over time, the lines between ruler and ruled blur in the middle as the Noble genetics of the rulers trickle down into the general population and the best examples of the conquered people find their way higher in society. The universal habit of high-status men to have their way with lower-status women only accelerates this process. And in the long run even households of the lowest status are served by inheriting some genetic components of their betters.
New peoples are forged. Their elites are mostly-genetically Noble and have much in common with each other; their proletariats are mostly-genetically aboriginal and vary a lot from place to place except that they are generally pretty dim. This never changes much for the simple reason that the traits required to survive as such an elite — mainly, ruling and organizing one's population to defend against, or conquer, the domains of other elites — have more to do with the cognitive and phenomenological adaptations of the Nobles than of labourers. But genes do transfer from one set to the other, up and down, and in time the ruling classes of various islands may come to understand themselves as more united with their land and people than with their far-flung Noble kin. Given how broad an area the the Nobles conquer, how geographically-separated they become, and how many generations go by, the Noble-descendants become much less recognizable to each other.
As an aside, the Nobles don't conquer nearly the whole world. Far enough to the east as to make travel or commerce impractical, a similar story is playing out with the herders and farmers of that region; here the farmers become experts at incorporating the incoming waves of Nobles without losing as much of their own identity. And, to the south, the ancestral vale of humanity turns out to be so geographically-isolated that it will also mostly be left alone for a very long time in what can rightly be called tepid instagnation. For that matter, on the other side of the world is a whole great archipelago inhabited by its own peculiar peoples, entirely cut off from the rest for most intents and purposes; but the Nobles do end up in possession of a great swathe of the planet's islands, and when their descendants manage to solve the problem of getting to those other places, they will find no real competition. We'll get there soon.
International politics takes a new shape within the geographical area conquered by the main body of the Nobles. Each area has an elite class of nobility which exists upon a much larger body of aboriginal labourers. These rulers recognize the rulers of other nations as nobility but do not consider themselves kin unless literal marriage pacts are made, which often happens such that alliances are forged against other elites. The elites have two main problems. One is that they need to keep their subject peoples docile enough to not cause trouble internally. The other is that they need to maintain their own martial virtues in order to compete with the elites of other polities and the still-wild Noble cousins who have a way of showing up on the border from time to time.
Militaries, then, are typically built about of a core of elite warriors, raised from birth to embody the excellence of their ancestral martial tradition and make use of any modern innovations. However, quantity has a quality all its own, and in some eras the winning strategy is to arm and equip as many common soldiers as possible without sowing the seeds of one's own downfall. It's no surprise that commoners are, as a rule, led by noblemen. Besides Nobles being better-suited to it for both genetic and educational reasons, letting armed aboriginals lead themselves is obviously not such an attractive idea. (Later on this will very gradually evolve into the modern distinction between officers and enlisted men.)
When two peoples meet one must always be subjugated by the other. Trade is possible only so long as each side imagines that it is gaining more by detente than it would by war; that is, that the trade balance benefits it more than its economic competitor. If a polity trades with its neighbour and this makes the neighbour substantially stronger, it can only be a matter of time before said now-stronger neighbour is looking for territory and wives for its extra sons and transitions to a war footing. Therefore, a nation finding itself in such a position is ever well-advised to make military alliances against its future competitor before it becomes capable of striking first. The only historically-attestable partial exception is when two peoples manage to unite long term against a common enemy, though even here one almost always ends up dominating the other economically, socially, and genetically.
So far so good. A huge portion of the surface of Tidus is now occupied by combined polities consisting of Nobles on top, focusing on martial excellence and intellectual pursuits, and an aboriginal proletariat on the bottom, focusing on labour ('civilization'). Such systems are mostly internally stable, but face threats from without. Not only from the expansive elite classes of other polities, but also from that same genetic pool of herders which remains out there, beyond the frontier, developing yet more powerful strains of human and occasionally disgorging enormous warbands of horsemen armed to the teeth, looking for a comparatively-feminine nation to conquer and call their own.
We have noted before how the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but it does usually fall a little bit downhill: Without the selection pressure of nomadic, perpetually-violent pastoralist life, the elite classes of these polities degrade exactly as would be expected given a much more secure, luxurious existence. Defensive forces of Noble-descendants who have grown up surrounded by silks and banquets find themselves facing off against hordes of hard men who grew up sleeping outside and hunting from horseback from childhood. Sometimes the advantages of agriculturally-based civilization are enough to offset such disparities — some of those walls get really, really big! — and then again it must be admitted that sometimes they are not.
Over and over, then, we see the following pattern: An agriculturally-based society with Nobles at its head establishes itself in a fertile, temperate area. The nobility makes all sorts of intellectual and technological progress, but by degrees loses many of the virtues which made its initial conquest possible; aboriginal admixture is also a factor here. And then invaders sweep in from the Nobles' far-ancestral homeland and absolutely wipe the floor with the incumbents, installing themselves as the new ruling class of the area. These northerners push into warm lands as though a demon were lashing at their backs, which often is indeed the case — the next tribe of northerners, from even farther north, even stronger and better put-together.
Just like when we watched the genetics cascading down the Christmas tree, we can now imagine the Nobles' ancestral homeland as a sort of planetary pole from which pulses emanate and wash over much of the surface of the globe. This process iterates across millennia and innumerable generations. It results in a world much like our own was up until fairly recently.
In the coming chapter we'll zoom in on a typical Tidan society of that era to see how it operates in practice, and also discover our first clues as to how all of this — the understanding of this entire system of the world, which was once so commonplace as to not bear mentioning — has become all but lost, such that most modern people struggle to wrap their heads around it even when it's explained directly to them. Indeed; how it has come to pass that they've developed a practical cognitive blind spot about the matter.
Hey, let's take a quick minute to talk about peacocks. Male peacocks are best known for their large, iridescent, geometrically-patterned plumes.
On the surface this might seem kind of crazy. Those tails are very heavy, and demand a lot of resource investment, and are generally as a stone around the neck of these jungle fowl who after all must be able to whisk about hither and yon and escape from predators. But it is precisely for this reason that peahens find them so attractive! The peacock's plumes are a signal to the ladies that, look, I am so otherwise-fit that I can even afford to do something this ridiculous and impressive and get away with it.
This is a common pattern across many species, with males putting enormous amounts of time, effort, and energy into elaborate displays which tell the females exactly whose sperm they should accept. Once everyone is fit enough to merely survive, the competition, and fitness, becomes instead about comparative status. Any male heard grumbling about how absurd and pointless the whole dynamic is will rightly be recognized as a loser who can’t compete. The only thing less-attractive than failing, is failing and then complaining about the system.
Of course, there is such a thing as too big a plume, even for a peacock, but in a prolonged boom time there might actually be so much slack that the plumes grow larger than is long-term sustainable: When the limits snap back to normal, it may paradoxically only be the smaller, ‘uglier’ males who are so unencumbered as to be able to survive, provided that any can at all. Species do, after all, go extinct all the time, and believe it or not this is one way that it happens!
There can even be a sort of death-spiral effect toward the end: The worse the situation gets, the stronger a signal is being sent by maintaining or even doubling down on the practice. Ever more outsized rewards until it's far too late and the axe is well and truly laid at the roots of the tree.
Humans also peacock, obviously. Some of the ways they do it are apparent, such as conspicuous consumption of expensive luxuries. But there are quieter ways to do it, too. We'll get to that soon.
Next week: Chapter 08: Beneath the Moons
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Notes -
Except that it's the DAUGHTERS who are responsible for maintaining the hearth fire and rituals around it. The hearth is more than just "where we cook our food" but it is in the domestic sphere, the woman's sphere. It is Hestia, not Hephaestus, who is the god here.
Men may have rituals around wildfire/need-fires (see bonfire traditions) but that's separate and parallel. Even kindling the Easter Fire comes under this heading, not hearth fires.
If you're at the point where your sexism is rewriting history, I think this entire project works better as a draft for a fantasy novel. Or brush up on what rituals you are writing about so you know what they were, not what you want them to be.
I have generally preferred to let you be, but in this case I think you're offering a window into some deep and cool mysteries and others will enjoy a little back-and-forth.
Firstly, you're taking far too mean a view across both space and time. I cannot recommend highly enough The Ancient City by Coulanges. Here are some passages, emphases mine:
Here we see that it was first and foremost the duty of the man to keep the fire burning. Bachelors had fires also. Yes, when women become incorporated they do take over tending of the flame, but this can be understood on a symbolic level: It is also in women that the male line itself is perpetuated, and only right for them to participate.
My suggested takeaway here is that the god(dess) of the hearth being feminine is more a peculiar, incidental, not-particularly-meaningful phenomenon found in specific offshoots, not in any way representative of the deep roots.
You put me in a difficult position here. Were we in the forum I'd ask for a word with your husband; as it stands I'll just suggest that you might at least reciprocate the courtesy which I have so consistently attempted to extend.
I'm not going to mod you for the comment you deleted, but you are kind of being an asshole here. People are allowed to push back on your thesis ( isn't that what you want? To get responses, including criticism?) and responding to a critic with a patronizing "know your place, woman" isn't acceptable in this forum. Maybe that's how you'd like it to be and think it should be, but it's not how it is.
Fair!
Oh but I didn't. I responded to her critique amicably, by quoting a publicly-available source, and offered a helpful interpretation.
Then she kept talking, and so did I.
The assholery was in response to her repeated and ongoing pattern of bad-faith, low-effort, antagonistic, disrespectful sneering, which I had up to that point ignored pretty entirely. Hence the placement after her quote where she arrogantly suggested that my work here is on par with 'a fantasy novel' and that I had better try actually learning something instead of just describing how I want things to work. Only problem being, I know a lot about this, actually, and she doesn't. I wouldn't talk to anyone on this site the way she's been talking to me. Including her, thus that response.
For what it's worth, though we won't see eye to eye on this, I consider what I said to her to be both true and kind. Your opinion is the one that matters, but at least know where I was coming from. I didn't think it correct to respond to her in kind.
Actually I think that in this context you're responsible for her behaviour, at least to the degree that you are for mine. So are you intending to do anything about that? I enjoy her liveliness and unselfconscious declarations, but the lack of a civil tongue in her mouth is becoming disruptive. She might at least double-check what she thinks she knows before telling me I'm an ignorant hack.
(EDIT:) Anyway I think what you're asking for here is an indication on my part that I'll refrain from such responses in the future, which I hereby affirm.
If you want to report someone's posts for being uncivil you may do so, but generally we're a lot harder on personal comments than we are on snide critiques of arguments.
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Don't be an asshole.
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Men - do all stuff, invent thing, conquer thing, get big brain bigger and bigger
Women - sit on ass, do nothing, grow bigger tits to entice and trap men
This is pretty much what I'm taking away from the Parable of Tidus right now. Wake me up when you have women contributing to the survival of your Viking overlords.
Well, about that...
You're proving too much.
While a young woman whose chest inflates to an absurd size while she laughs maniacally is a really funny mental image (compare that one Wojak where the guy is sitting on his brain), it's also kind of silly.
The root of the matter is that sexual dimorphism [and hence division of labor] is, from an evolutionary standpoint, superior to the alternative. That's why it persists in most creatures, to some degree, including humans.
We could go down the modern academic route of "well, then obviously evolution was intentionally sexist", and that said dimorphism was established and imposed by a genetically-inbuilt plot by men, but you will notice that women were (and are) emancipated [from men] relatively quickly after a particular society's technology level makes that feasible, a tipping point the modern West crossed around 1910 (and completed that project around 1970; though note that 2 world wars, a famine, and [so far] the depression may have slowed that down some).
That's a remarkably quick turnaround for a gender inherently programmed to oppress women. What's going on there?
I get into this a bit more throughout the series (later books) but I just don't think men and women have each other figured out yet. If anything, by nature, I think men are fairly happy to indulge women and children in their stated preferences even to a fault, especially when we think it's likely to get us what we want in the moment, whether that's their presence or their absence. We can be pretty short-sighted about this both individually and corporately.
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Also, Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, is somewhat hermaphroditic (I specify this because I'm not sure about Hestia in Greece). One of her symbols is a phallus, the flame has the power to reveal a phallus and impregnate a virgin, etc.
Yes, the conception of Servius Tullius. But again, note it is the female servant of the house who is tending with the proper rites to the fire, not the male head of the house.
Another tradition of sacred fire associated with a goddess or saint:
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This wonderful chapter of the genuine true history of the evolution of our race (indeed, might not one say, our Race?) has moved me to the depths. So moved am I, in fact, that I have to share an earlier, cruder version of this great truth as presented here. Oh, would that I could claim to be of The Race! But alas, I am one of the lesser breeds, the natural inferiors of the noble barbarians of the true North!
From 1926, an obscure essayist named Hilaire Belloc and his paean to The Nordic Man (see page 104 onwards of this essay collection). I can only excerpt certain plums here, but I urge you - all you seekers after truth, after hard scientific fact! - to read the whole thing, inferior though it be to the stellar work showered upon us here.
Of course, your insinuation, that the conclusions OP have drawn must be factually incorrect because you find them morally abhorrent, is spot on.
While in the past anthropologists were forced to wrestle with the hate fact that a few ethnic groups have completely dominated huge swaths of the planet's surface in its brief recorded history, with today's wisdom we now know this was purely due to economic and climatic factors - it is very fortunate and convenient that the varied economic and climatic conditions of the many countries the Indo-Aryans dominated, for example, simply happened to favor them every time. In fact, such outdated terminology is already giving way to more factual and less inflammatory terminology. Soon anthropologists will be able to speak of the Indo-Socioeconomic Migrations rather than uncouth "Aryan" conquests.
Thanks for the defense.
Someone asked her in another thread whether she actually had any substantive arguments or just intended to be petulant (I'm editorializing here since I don't remember the actual words) and she didn't answer.
Here we have a post that is pure sneering sarcasm without even the most cursory attempt to engage constructively or angle for the truth. Does that even break any rules, technically?
Even so on balance I like having her around and would prefer that she continue to do her thing. Thanks for reading.
To be fair, I don't read you in the OP as making a substantive argument either.
What's in the OP is a story or a narrative. But anybody can tell a story about history. What would make it an argument is some reason to believe that it's true or useful.
HereAndGone presents Belloc's parody of that story. Belloc also does not, strictly speaking, make an argument. But I think his response is insightful, because the appeal of, for lack of a better term, the Aryan story is that it feels powerful. It fits with intuitions; it's poetic. It conjures up the image of the horse-riding, fire-guarding, sky-worshipping chain of fathers and sons that rode out of the steppes to conquer the world. Seeing the man on the horse is something difficult to unsee. Truth and evidence are beside the point if it resonates with the soul.
So what Belloc does is take that same story and make it look absurd. His doggerel is counter-poetry. Instead of seeing the great conqueror on a horse, you see the absurd pretensions of 20th century racialists, midwit eggheads concocting silly fables in defiance of what is plainly visible among the people.
It's a war of memes, and it's being argued on that level.
But if what you want is to know how the human race and human civilisation actually developed...
Go somewhere else. None of this is that.
You know what, this is some appropriate meta-criticism. Thanks for the opportunity to respond.
It is a war of memes. Of maps. The territory is implicitly inaccessible, and all we're left with is debating the merits of various subjective reconstructions. Within that, what I'm writing here is my best, most honest, good-faith interpretation of what actually happened, given certain necessary constraints such as brevity and with an eye to showing yet more interesting things down the road. Any part of this could be expanded fractally, but then we'd still be debating how the first cell got its start and nothing of import would have been said of anything else at all.
Meanwhile, HereAndGone's contribution is not good faith, not honest, not her best. It's buffoonery, calculated to mock and offend. It's a sneer. It's a pigeon strutting around knocking over pieces and shitting on a chessboard and then acting upset when it's not taken seriously. (The assertion about hearthfires was the first salient one she's made. She was wrong about that, but I'll acknowledge the validity of the attempt and wish more would follow that example.)
Probably this sounds like I'm upset. I'm not; actually I've worked a lot with pigeons and am quite fond of them. Subtly-amazing creatures, and I sincerely do enjoy having her around. What's beginning to irritate me is the people who can't seem to distinguish the difference here; who suppose that my declination to 'argue' with her is tantamount to an admission of defeat. Perhaps that's on me for expecting too much, even given the themes upon which I'm writing.
If you want that, abandon all hope, because it's not to be found anywhere at all.
The best that can probably be done is for someone to spend a long, long time trying to put the puzzle together, then turn around and offer you his cliff notes. Ideally several such people would do this and compare and argue. Will you go next?
Well, I don't think it's meritorious to confidently expound on a matter that I - and you - are ignorant of. Honest doubt is superior to confidently propounding a narrative that's not grounded in evidence. Otherwise we end up just doing this. I don't personally have a macro theory of prehistory, and I don't think I need one in order to question someone else's.
What I suggest is that macro theories like this are usually made far in excess of actual evidence, and therefore tend to reflect a combination of the ideological biases of the theorist and what audiences find narratively compelling. I interpret what you've written as a variant on the Gobineau/Grant Nordicist theory, and I think that theory has been successful because it's flattering to the people who made and received it and because it's aesthetically or narratively compelling. It's in your very title here - 'The Race of Kings'. Narratives about an ancient group of super-people have weight and heft to them. Poetry. Conan the Cimmerian has an appeal to him.
But let me compare a different narrative - say, Gimbutas' Civilisation of the Goddess, and the Great Goddess hypothesis in general. The Great Goddess narrative in some ways complements your own; the primary difference is who the protagonists or the good guys are, with the Goddess people postulating an indigenous egalitarian society rooted in feminine wisdom that was overcome by evil horse-riding militant patriarchalists. Even so, I think it's fair to be very skeptical of the Great Goddess people. The theory has a certain poetic resonance, a thrill for the soul, as is undeniable if you ever read Robert Graves, but that is insufficient to commend it for actual belief.
I take Belloc's parody as useful because, as the saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a position that they were never reasoned into. If someone was enchanted into a position, you have to enchant them out of it again.
What was prehistoric human civilisation like? I'm not entirely sure. There's some archaeological and genetic evidence, and I have some guesses, but they are not particularly confident guesses. The point I want to make here, however, is that we should resist the lure of poetry. I think what you're writing here is not a dispassionate survey of historical evidence, but rather a story. Honestly, I think it'd be more productive to respond to your narrative in literary terms, rather than historical.
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Yes, yes, we're all snowy white big-brained men on here (except those of us who aren't).
Swear to God, I never thought I'd be fighting for the conservative viewpoint of not being a total pain in the behind, yet here I am.
I'm pretty much pure "Mediterranean man" according to the poetry you quoted above, and I neither claim to be a Nordic ubermensch nor prostrate myself to my Aryan betters (the current state of the Nordic lands is, I think, strong evidence against any claims of unblemished superiority). Nevertheless, I lost to the urge to sneer at your comment that was, itself, pretty much 100% sneering.
And what are you doing to uphold this standard in particular? Above, you actually challenged a factual assertion from the story about hearth-worship being patrifocal. That's fantastic! However, you also felt the need to leave a whole separate comment (and not your first on this series) just moralistically jeering.
As a matter of fact, I don't agree with all the factual assertions and implications of this series. Off the top of my head, two big problems I have with it are that while the author literally once said offhandedly something to the effect of "of course all women aren't cynical whores," he doesn't address at all societies which practice 'hard' arranged marriages, which would mean women have pretty much no say at all in their mates, and we would expect to lessen, or at least change the form male peacocking takes, as well as cease to force women through a hypergamous darwinian selection process. In addition, I find his insinuations his fairly convincing view of how stone-age tribes slugged it out explain modern racial politics pretty risible. By the time of the last serious elite-supported defense of pure hereditary elitism - De Gobineau's age - the claims European Elite Human Capital represented nearly pureblooded Aryans ruling over potato people peasants were completely false. Warfare had simply gotten too lethal by the Middle Ages, to the point nearly all European nobility represented former commoners raised to knighthood and eventually higher rank to replace some Aryan conqueror unceremoniously stuck through with an Ottoman crossbow bolt or whatever.
Nevertheless, you don't see me here in the comments doing a "dumb racist uncle at thanksgiving" impression.
We could all write fantasy worlds where it just so happens very conveniently that evolution works exactly the way we want it to bring Our Guys out on top.
Maybe if Europe and North America are indeed being over-run by brown-skinned people (citation needed), this is also evolution in action. Nature cares nothing for whatever fancy culture we create, it is what survives is the winner. In a hundred years if every 'white' land is echoing to the call of the muezzin, that will be the 'winning' race. We may not like it, but just-so stories about "a harsh northern island" on a made-up world won't cut it.
Just last week someone was mad at me for my (imagined) assertion that 'Europeans' are peaceful innocents while tropicals are bloodthirsty savages. How well would you say that take has aged?
Imagine complaining about the ending of a movie when you're 2/3 in, and also deciding that the director (about whom you know nothing) must obviously be sublimating his tawdry sexual anxieties into the narrative because there's simply no other way we might get to such a point. One might begin to ponder the nature of projection.
I will prefer to avoid entanglements with someone who thinks that Islam is a race.
Pretty well actually, the "blond beast" and "Aryan noble" conceptions are perfectly compatible; martial virtue vs. base savagery. I know that this is mere setup for your true thesis, but so far you're definitely not beating the allegations.
An important dimension is that of how people behave among others within their own society. We can speak of high trust and low trust, etc. But I don't think that what we see in modern European countries, even among genetic Europeans, can mostly be traced back to the Aryans. Aryans went all sorts of places and most of them turned out differently.
I don't think Aryans exist any more, and if they did I wouldn't expect them to conform to my standards of intra-society conduct. (Tropicals are definitely still with us and they generally behave as I expect them to.)
Their spark, though; the phenomenological 'shining' which made the Nobles so different from others, has been exploded outward into innumerable populations in which it reconstitutes itself among the generations at variable frequencies. Next week's chapter sheds some light on this.
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I think you're now selectively and dishonestly embracing the same kind of eugenic arguments you decry in the Mountain. The fact (many) Muslims' violent cultural rejection of some dysgenic aspects of modernity may help them thrive in our future does not have any bearing one way or the other on whether races that practiced barbarian warrior pastoralism dominated because of that in the past.
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Thanks, I appreciate some constructive feedback.
Totally fair. All I can really say is that more material than you'd probably believe is on the cutting room floor. I do gesture at what you're talking about in places, but the deeper truth at which you're pointing here is more the sort of thing that will be important in later books. Then again the crescendo of gender (in book one at least) isn't until chapter 10, so I suppose you'll have to wait and see.
One thing I'll suggest for now though is that 'hard' control of women pushes them, if anything, further toward adultery, since they're shorter on less-objectionable options. Who has harder control of his women than the Emperor? Yet he's also the guy deploying eunuchs to manage them.
Would you mind elaborating? I don't really remember doing that and this may be a case where I implied something accidentally. Related to the below?
Yes, well-said. We do get to that next week and then again the week after. Only so much development can be covered in each chapter and only in so many dimensions. I think you're slightly overstating things here but you'll need to let me know down the road whether I end up scratching this itch for you.
The one that I had in mind when I wrote that is specifically this paragraph from chapter 6:
I don't think you've demonstrated that the struggle of divergent prototribes to assimilate in IIRC the bronze age directly maps to what can't be read as anything other than a criticism of modern welfare states.
also,
The Emperor can't be anywhere at once, and you can't uncuck yourself, only avenge the humiliation. I'd be willing to bet that in pre-Confucian Chinese states with both large Imperial harems and absolute proprietorial control of commoner women in monogamous marriages with their husbands, the commoners actually had much lower rates of infidelity simply because they could actually keep an eye on/meaningfully restrict their women, and also for the reason if anyone fucks any of your 5000 wives you're technically a cuckold but it's rather disingenuous to say it's exactly the same for obvious 'per capita' reasons
Yeah, and actually my best test reader also advised me to remove that. I'm thinking I should have listened. The lesson is implicit, there's some temporal whiplash, and in general it feels like a cheap throwaway sort of shot. Probably I'll sand it off in whatever the next iteration of this book is.
I don't have leanings on this one way or the other (though by the way you might look into the treatment of women in Ancient Greece for comparison). What I do think is that human beings are understandably extremely driven to exercise agency in mate selection, and from certain perspectives it is only morally correct for a person who, due to societal externalities, is forced into mating with low-quality partners, to find a way around that problem by hook or by crook.
When I described women cheating on their partners a few chapters ago, I did so dispassionately; even compassionately. Who among us could survive such judgment? Though for asymmetrical reasons the same is not true for creepy rapists. Feminine enthusiastic consent is worth a lot more evolutionarily than the thirst of an undesirable male.
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I suspect that, like most commenters assuming this is going to culminate in thoroughly-litigated culture war thread talking points, you're jumping ahead of yourself and this is in fact going to get much weirder and more interesting.
Oh my yes. What tipped you off? Or are you a friend in disguise, to whom I may have offered a hint as to where this is going?
I did intentionally let the weirdness drip through a little more in this chapter, just a touch.
But as I've alluded to previously, book one is fairly prosaic foundation deployment. For the later books to work I need sex and race to be at least somewhat as intelligible to the reader as they would have been to an ancient pagan, but at this point in Western history we're several generations deep into a titanic project aimed at preventing exactly that.
For this reason chapters nine and ten especially are culture war central and probably exactly as egregious as everyone is anticipating. But my intent with them is quite apart from that. I just need to complete the narrative so as to answer several implicit questions, and also because unless I show people exactly why they can't see certain things they probably never will.
Of course, it'll all be laid out from what I hope is a fresh and innovative perspective, and hope also to delight and amaze you with some angles I can pretty much guarantee you've never considered before.
And along the way I'll be better and better able to offer some glimpses through the cracks at the things on the other side. Or perhaps I should say, hold up the occasional tiny mirror such that the reader gets an impression of the things casting shadows on the wall.
To be honest book two is already so weird that I fear I'll lose most readers within a couple chapters, and it only takes off from that point. Weaving moments of pertinence in among the flights of abstract world building is proving to be a challenge. But the payoff is so worth it, provided I can manage to get us that far.
So bear with me. I do need to sew up race and sex, at least at Tidus' level of resolution, but this is less a culmination than an obligatory step on our way to somewhere much more interesting. And strange.
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A reading from the scriptures:
Thanks for this. I intend to meditate upon it today.
Actually took an entire, full course on Nietzsche but due to (imo) the deficiencies of the professor got almost nothing out of it and kind of wrote the whole thing off. He was extremely lib and highlighted all the anti-Christian angles without, as was clear to me, understanding them; while ignoring any parts which might be critical of his own biases.
As the years have rolled on I've increasingly come to realize what I missed. Time is harder to come by now, but I can feel Freddy waiting to meet me in the near future.
If you're still largely unfamiliar with his original works, then you have a very special and unique experience waiting in store for you. For those who only know Nietzsche through reddit /r/atheism soundbites, the beautiful subtlety of his thought is reduced to caricature. Few other thinkers in history so reward careful and prolonged meditation, and few others were so thoroughly opposed to quick and easy answers. (Jung described Nietzsche as a "devious mind who laid many traps for unsuspecting intruders" in the catacombs of his soul.)
One thing that all readers of Nietzsche can agree on is that questions of nobility, of distinctions of rank, of ascendancy and degeneration, were at the forefront of his mind, so you'll find plenty to reflect on there.
Academic commentaries on Nietzsche are largely useless. Just dive in and enjoy the ride.
The last thing I remember was the professor talking about how gluttony is good actually, because Christianity says it's never okay to enjoy food, but Nietzsche shows us how actually it is all right to enjoy food sometimes and so frees us from religious bondage.
And I thought, this guy clearly doesn't have any kind of handle on English, history, culture, Christianity, philosophy, or probably even Nietzsche himself for that matter. What am I doing in this place? So I left.
Gotta say this is hitting the nail on the head. Inasmuch as The Mountain has a standalone message, apart from the context of the series, this is it. But I'll wait to elaborate until the epilogue.
And yes, Nietzsche is clearly being put before me to read. Thanks for the quote and the rec.
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