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 -
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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