Peter Sean Bradley

The World Before Us by Tom Higham

Deep time captivates me. The idea of learning about human prehistory spanning a period of 40,000 years from 70,000 years ago to 35,000 years ago is like contemplating the infinity of space. Written history goes back around 3,500 years. When we first started writing things down, we already had a history that went back ten times that length.

Deep time is deep.

It is also a Dark Age. There is no written record that can let us know what we were doing during this period. We get some clues that push back our scant knowledge as we find megaliths at Gobeckli Tepe erected something like 10,000 years ago. Past that and it is almost total darkness.

But there is candle flicker in the deep past as Tom Higham explains. The candle is the advance in DNA science that have been pioneered over the last twenty years. Because of this science, we have been able to identify a contributor to the human species from a tiny piece of a forefinger and a few other bone fragments. The DNA analysis from those tiny pieces have allowed scientists to identify the Denisovans, whose genetic legacy is found throughout Asia and into deep Melanasia.

I had not realized how set apart Denisovans were from Neanderthals:

While Neanderthals differ from modern humans at an average of 202 base positions along the 16,500 base pairs of the mitochondrial genome, the sample from Denisova cave differed at 385 positions, almost twice as many.

Higham, Tom. The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins (p. 74). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Nonetheless, one of the fragments discovered came from a girl whose parents had included both a Neanderthal and a Denisovan. One would imagine that the odds of this are astronomical.

Recent discoveries are upsetting the linear progression we used to think existed. Higham notes:

At Mandrin, then, it looks as though we have something completely new. Instead of Neanderthals being replaced by modern humans in Europe around 41–43,000 years ago, it seems that moderns entered significantly earlier. They did not persist, however, and were themselves replaced by Neanderthals. It was only around 7–8,000 years later that modern humans once again repopulated the area, this time in greater numbers and at many more sites.

This is the first time we have found an interstratification like this in Europe: first we have Neanderthals, then modern humans, then Neanderthals again, then modern humans. This is obviously extremely significant, but how can we explain what happened at Mandrin? How could humans have entered Neanderthal territory so much earlier than we considered possible? I have two thoughts on this. The first concerns the population of Neanderthals in Europe 50,000 years ago. We have evidence that they were under some degree of stress in terms of their genetic diversity, which was low (I will discuss more of this in Chapter 15). A study of mitochondrial DNA in thirteen Neanderthals showed that they appeared to have gone through a bottleneck and a population contraction.9 We can imagine Neanderthal groups perhaps isolated from one another around 50,000 years ago, and present in lower numbers than before. Perhaps this was the moment when modern humans made this initial incursion. But why did moderns not remain in Europe? Why did Neanderthals replace them later on?

Higham, Tom. The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins (p. 138). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

The success of our kind was not a foregone conclusion.

I picked up a lot of cutting edge information, but the problem in my opinion is that Higham spends a lot of time in the technical weeds. He is one of the foremost researchers on the issue of dating artifacts in deep time. He was involved in a lot of the discoveries he discusses. This might be interesting for some people, but as a casual reader, I am less interested in the mechanics of dating. Frankly, I skimmed all of that information to find the juicier parts.

If you like deep discussions of technical problems, then this is your book. If you are interested in nothing but the “gosh-wow!” stuff, then you might not want to invest in this book.

Creepypasta

Tales from the Gas Station: Volume One by Jack Townsend

A Lonely Broadcast: Book One by Kel Byron

The Neverglades: Volume One by David Farrow.


Wiki defines “creepypasta” as:

“A creepypasta is a horror-related legend which has been shared around the Internet.[1][2][3] The term creepypasta has since become a catch-all term for any horror content posted onto the Internet.[4] These entries are often brief, user-generated, paranormal stories that are intended to frighten readers. The subjects of creepypasta vary widely and can include topics such as ghosts, cryptids, murder, suicide, zombies, aliens, rituals to summon entities, haunted television shows, and video games.[1] Creepypastas range in length from a single paragraph to extended multi-part series that can span multiple media types, some lasting for years.[4]”

The three books I picked out seem to fit this category. They started out as internet blogs, are in the horror genre, and are part of a series.

Tales from the Gas Station was the most entertaining by far. It occupied a horror zone adjacent to the weirdness of “Welcome to Night Vale.” Night Vale is a podcast that features developing news reports from a small town in the American Southwest. It has secret police, para-dimensional visitors, UFOs, and every other kind of conspiracy that the tin-foil hat brigade imagines emanates from Area 51.

The Gas Station in Townsend's story sits in the woods outside an unnamed small American town with dark, spooky forests. It is an area where cultists have compounds in the neighborhood, eldritch gods build enclaves, and the odd serial killer might wander in for a slushie. Jack is the protagonist of the story. He's dying of some odd ailment, so he doesn't engage much with his life. Things happen around Jack, who refuses to admit surprise or much interest because it would involve him in the life he is shortly to exit.

The existential weirdness and the nonchalant attitude of Jack are a great part of the charm of this story.

In addition, a plot, character development, conflict, and growth emerge in the story, which was a pleasant surprise. I enjoyed this story. It wasn't great literature, but it was entertaining.

I found A Lonely Broadcast less worthwhile. Evelyn McKinnon returns to Pinehaven to work in a radio station in an old first tower on the outskirt of another small American town surrounded by dark, spooky woods. This story has no humor, as Evelyn discovers that the forest is haunted. The haunting seems to be composed of equal parts of The Fog by Stephen King and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. Dead things don't stay dead in the forest. They come back mutated and kill the living. The townspeople seem to know this to a greater or lesser extent but it is kept mostly quiet. The radio station where Evelyn works is a warning station against the macabre.

I found the story far beyond my tolerance for willing suspension of disbelief. Evelyn is the twenty-eighth person to work at the station – the others having been killed – but station management is still sending in people to get killed? Evelyn grew up in the town, and her father was killed fighting the mystery, but Evelyn knew nothing about what was going on? There was no orientation for Evelyn about what to expect? The government hasn't evacuated the entire area and sent in a pacification force? In the first part of the book, Evelyn gets a call on the air from somebody who it turns out was her best friend, but she didn't know the person when she got the call?

The Lonely Broadcast series seems to be well-received. It is now in multiple sequels. To me, though, it was not original enough to hold my interest.

Likewise, I did not finish The Neverglades by David Farrow. In this book, we have another secluded, remote, small American town hiding in the pine forests of the Pacific Northwest. The main character is a local police detective who runs into weird deaths. He's helped out by a seven-foot-tall being who wears a fedora, smokes a cigar, and goes by “the Inspector.” This being is from another dimension. It turns out that the “Neverglades,” as the area is called, is an arena for interdimensional incursions.

I didn't find the mysteries very compelling. It seemed like the stories I read were designed to bring in the Inspector, who can then unravel the mystery. There was nothing wrong with the stories. I didn't find the characters or plots compelling. Though, if Scoobie Doo is your kind of thing, this might be your kind of thing.

Creepypasta

Tales from the Gas Station: Volume One by Jack Townsend

A Lonely Broadcast: Book One by Kel Byron

The Neverglades: Volume One by David Farrow.


Wiki defines “creepypasta” as:

“A creepypasta is a horror-related legend which has been shared around the Internet.[1][2][3] The term creepypasta has since become a catch-all term for any horror content posted onto the Internet.[4] These entries are often brief, user-generated, paranormal stories that are intended to frighten readers. The subjects of creepypasta vary widely and can include topics such as ghosts, cryptids, murder, suicide, zombies, aliens, rituals to summon entities, haunted television shows, and video games.[1] Creepypastas range in length from a single paragraph to extended multi-part series that can span multiple media types, some lasting for years.[4]”

The three books I picked out seem to fit this category. They started out as internet blogs, are in the horror genre, and are part of a series.

Tales from the Gas Station was the most entertaining by far. It occupied a horror zone adjacent to the weirdness of “Welcome to Night Vale.” Night Vale is a podcast that features developing news reports from a small town in the American Southwest. It has secret police, para-dimensional visitors, UFOs, and every other kind of conspiracy that the tin-foil hat brigade imagines emanates from Area 51.

The Gas Station in Townsend's story sits in the woods outside an unnamed small American town with dark, spooky forests. It is an area where cultists have compounds in the neighborhood, eldritch gods build enclaves, and the odd serial killer might wander in for a slushie. Jack is the protagonist of the story. He's dying of some odd ailment, so he doesn't engage much with his life. Things happen around Jack, who refuses to admit surprise or much interest because it would involve him in the life he is shortly to exit.

The existential weirdness and the nonchalant attitude of Jack are a great part of the charm of this story.

In addition, a plot, character development, conflict, and growth emerge in the story, which was a pleasant surprise. I enjoyed this story. It wasn't great literature, but it was entertaining.

I found A Lonely Broadcast less worthwhile. Evelyn McKinnon returns to Pinehaven to work in a radio station in an old first tower on the outskirt of another small American town surrounded by dark, spooky woods. This story has no humor, as Evelyn discovers that the forest is haunted. The haunting seems to be composed of equal parts of The Fog by Stephen King and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. Dead things don't stay dead in the forest. They come back mutated and kill the living. The townspeople seem to know this to a greater or lesser extent but it is kept mostly quiet. The radio station where Evelyn works is a warning station against the macabre.

I found the story far beyond my tolerance for willing suspension of disbelief. Evelyn is the twenty-eighth person to work at the station – the others having been killed – but station management is still sending in people to get killed? Evelyn grew up in the town, and her father was killed fighting the mystery, but Evelyn knew nothing about what was going on? There was no orientation for Evelyn about what to expect? The government hasn't evacuated the entire area and sent in a pacification force? In the first part of the book, Evelyn gets a call on the air from somebody who it turns out was her best friend, but she didn't know the person when she got the call?

The Lonely Broadcast series seems to be well-received. It is now in multiple sequels. To me, though, it was not original enough to hold my interest.

Likewise, I did not finish The Neverglades by David Farrow. In this book, we have another secluded, remote, small American town hiding in the pine forests of the Pacific Northwest. The main character is a local police detective who runs into weird deaths. He's helped out by a seven-foot-tall being who wears a fedora, smokes a cigar, and goes by “the Inspector.” This being is from another dimension. It turns out that the “Neverglades,” as the area is called, is an arena for interdimensional incursions.

I didn't find the mysteries very compelling. It seemed like the stories I read were designed to bring in the Inspector, who can then unravel the mystery. There was nothing wrong with the stories. I didn't find the characters or plots compelling. Though, if Scoobie Doo is your kind of thing, this might be your kind of thing.

This book is an intense and detailed examination of the development of Christian theology between the Cappadocian Fathers and John of Damascus. This was a period that the resolution of Trinitarian issues and rise and fall of Christological issues. The author, Johannes Zachhuber, is a professor of Theology at Oxford, who brings an encyclopedic knowledge of the history and the philosophical issues into the discussion. Along the way, he introduces us to the theological players, such as Gregory of Nyssa. John the Grammarian, Severus of Antioch (St. Severus for the Monophysites), and John of Damascus (“the Damascene”) in a way that give reality to people who are either unknown or only vaguely known.

This is not a work for the faint-hearted. Having some background in Aristotelian metaphysics is essential, and, even then, for amateurs like myself, the fine distinctions between nature, physis, ousia, enhypostaton, prosopon, hypostasis, idiotes, and other concepts is taxing. However, since I approached this mostly as history, I found the discussion interesting. This review will favor that perspective. There are other reviews of the text that explain the philosophical elements that are vague to me. https://www.academia.edu/101676467/Review_of_J_Zachhuber_The_Rise_of_Christian_Theology_and_the_End_of_Ancient_Metaphysics

Zachhuber starts with Cappadocian Fathers, the brothers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory, and their friend, Gegory of Nazianzus. The Cappadocians were active in the late Fourth Century. Basil died on January 1, 379. His work was carried on by his brother and friend.

The issue for the Cappadocians was the relationship of the Persons of the Trinity. Previous efforts at this had proven problematic. Origen was very influential but offered an explanation that lessened the Son:

Origen argued for a slight but important distinction between the two divine persons: the Father, he suggested, was God in the fullest and most proper sense of the word; the source of all being including the Son.32 The Son thus received his divinity by derivation from that source. He was god, but not ‘the' God. He was not a rival or competitor of the Father. He was not, for example, entirely simple without any participation in the plurality of the created world which explains why he, not the Father, became directly involved in salvation history and, specifically, the Incarnation.

Zachhuber, Johannes. The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics: Patristic Philosophy from the Cappadocian Fathers to John of Damascus (p. 21). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

Zachhuber notes that the “crucial ontological subordination of the Son to the father functioned as a door opener to more radical Arian positions.” After the Council of Nicea (325 AD), Origen's explanation was seen as incompatible with orthodoxy. Orthodoxy adopted the Athanasian position that the Father and the Son were Homooousias, i.e. of the same substance. The opposition position proposed by Arius was “Homoiousias,” meaning “of a similar substance.” Homoiousians appealed to the authority of Origen, but the authority of Origen was something that the orthodox tradition did not want to entirely repudiate.


This is a long review. Please visit my Medium page for the rest of the review.

https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/christian-theology-christian-metaphysics-the-long-and-winding-road-f25641ae7075

240319 The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture by Robyn Faith Walsh

The Gospels as Doctoral Dissertation

The thesis of Robyn Faith Walsh's book - The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture – is that the key understanding of Biblical scholars has been fundamentally mistaken, at least with respect to the Synoptic Gospels. Those scholars conceive of the Synoptic Gospels – the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but not John – as texts that somehow organically emerged from particular communities and which therefore reflect the concerns and understanding of those particular communities.

Walsh says that this is completely wrong. Applying her encyclopedic knowledge of how books were written in antiquity, Walsh argues that this paradigm makes no sense of how writers actually came to write books. According to Walsh, anyone who could write a book was a member of the elite. As such, their audience was other members of the elite. Therefore, they didn't represent the voice of some disenfranchised, illiterate community, but, rather, they represented elites talking to other elites about things that interested the elites.

Thus, Walsh explains:

It is in this critique of the “death of the author” that I place my own project: texts are the products of authors engaged in certain practices and conventions that correspond with their social contexts; they are not disembodied or passive filters of broader cultural structures.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 86). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

And:

Paul offered an alternative means of achieving prestige and cultural capital within an otherwise limiting field. Similarly, for the elite head of the household, having financial means and social status “might allow one to give hospitality and patronage to a specialist, but that status alone did not confer an aptitude for skillful learning and literate practices.”74 Yet, in supporting and consuming the kinds of intellectual (and other) products Paul offered, even an illiterate head of a household could hold some distinction in the fields of learning and literate culture.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 126). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

So, instead of compiling a gospel to preserve the things that her remembered Peter saying, the author of Mark would have been an elite looking around for some “literary product” that might catch the attention of other elites. After putting the “literary product” into a written form, “Mark” would then have circulated his product to other members of his elite circle for their entertainment. “Mark” might have received feedback from his friends, which he might then have incorporated into the “Gospel of Mark.”

Here is Walsh's description of the process:

Aware of the civic biographical tradition of distinguished statesmen, philosophers, and other leaders, he wants to engage that literary genre, offering a bios of another notable figure and philosopher who came to an ignoble and untimely end. However, here is he faced with a problem. He would like to write about a Judean figure – perhaps one of the many rural teacher-types and wonder-workers who claimed to be a son of god – but none of them (John the Baptist, Honi the Circle Drawer, Jesus of Nazareth) is a member of the dominant leadership or aristocracy. Yet, among his collected texts, our author has some material expressing an interest in Jesus, including copies of the letters of another elite cultural producer who is a Pharisee and a divination specialist by the name of Paul.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (pp. 131-132). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

According to Walsh, this was the norm for how other texts, ranging from plays to histories, were produced in antiquity. She, therefore, concludes that this model applies to the writing of the Synoptic Gospels.

In her book, Walsh makes two broad arguments. First, she argues that current Biblical scholarship is based on a paradigm based on 19th century Romantic notions about the community or Volk curating Volkisch traditions. She spends nearly half the book discussing the relationship of German Romanticism with German Biblical scholarship from Schelling through Herder and the Brothers Grimm to the twentieth century. This is an informative and interesting read, particularly if you have only superficial exposure to these people and their ideas.

Walsh correlates this approach with the “invention of tradition.” German Romantics were not so much discovering history as inventing it. Tacitus's Germanian was retooled to propagandize German exceptionalism, which is ironic since Tacitus was probably making things up about the Germans as a kind of “noble savage” counterpoint against his fellow decadent Romans. Walsh describes the period as follows:

A dichotomy underscoring the inherent differences between Germany and Rome persisted throughout the nineteenth century as “‘Rome' more than ever, came to signify antinationalist tyranny, elitism, and ultramontanism, and its symbolic defeat grew increasingly important to the establishment of German cultural autonomy.”95 In Suzanne Marchand's masterful work on German cultural history and classical antiquity, she details the extent to which Vorgeschichte was characterized by misplaced nationalistic pride. It was simple enough to construct a narrative that linked the German people to a long history of opposition to Rome's excesses. From Tacitus' biting account to Luther's valor, thinkers like Madame de Staël (1766–1817), Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), and Ernst Curtius (1814–1896) were emboldened to claim that Rome never faced a more hated and resistant enemy than proud Germania.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (pp. 77-78). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Likewise the Brothers Grimm substantially changed their folktales to make them more palatable to elite German tastes. Walsh writes:

Hindsight reveals that the Grimms utilized questionable methods in cataloging their folktales. As Chapter 2 illuminates, their “sources” for these tales were more often than not their social peers and not the “common people.” The Grimms also incorporated into their fables numerous literary embellishments in order to make Kinder- und Hausmärchen more palatable to their audience.76 Thus, the notion that the folktales and “fairytales” of the Grimms represented the commonly held narratives of the German people is nebulous at best and arguably a rhetorical invention. I contend something similar is at play with the Synoptic gospels.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (pp. 155-156). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Walsh jumps from this Germanic “invention of tradition” to the German founders of modern Biblical studies. She argues that they lived in a world that assumed that texts were like folktales and Tacitus, expressions of a community by the community. Walsh argues that based on this paradigm, Biblical scholarship began the process of reading the Gospels as representing the values and expressions of a community, rather than what they should have been doing, namely, reading the texts in the same way they should have read the Brothers Grimm's collection, as the product of elites talking to elites.

Walsh convinced me that Biblical scholarship – at least in its highest form –has gone overboard in its search for the “Markan community” and the “Lukan Community.” On the other hand, I didn't need much convincing. Thirty years ago I read John Dominic Crossan's The Birth of Christianity https://www.amazon.com/Birth-Christianity-Discovering-Immediately-Execution-ebook/dp/B003JBHVWC/ref=sr_1_4?crid=2896A4XCGS5S4&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.G5frHgq8Jcze839mPQwarxCoPBNHncOlTzHsDI9mHmvgT3umk6bFqFjr02PHFP4NGIV7rhEDzF3ARUB7Oi8ONiq4F5pS5Qf30o3cy6QZY-8c32oYtNh-ndz0giGc5aJzyESwwtn1LEuyWYJvTMeAOhnWrd8lLN-_dCiNnXfc-7l0ThAxcpQZPZyEOawmpzb4ZOwifzOCICI5zV58N3S6RnvVLoAkNKJC0JxWscJSJ3M.PCPCdn5lMoREZK2RAhKPkDLEqgOwFML8vZRsB58u1T8&dib_tag=se&keywords=John+Dominic+Crossan&qid=1710878134&s=digital-text&sprefix=john+dominic+crossan%2Cdigital-text%2C286&sr=1-4 which charts the back and forth of various “communities” in early Christianity, i.e., circa 33 AD to 45 AD based on finding “layers” in the texts of the Gospels. When I realized that he was finding these “communities” in what amounted to a ten-year period, I concluded he was just making things up. Finding that much concrete activity in the phrasing of a passage seemed more like invention than discovery.

So, I was reasonably disposed to agree with Walsh, and I waited for her to apply her insights to the Biblical texts and to examples of scholarship that had invented “communities.”

But I didn't get any. Walsh doesn't address the texts or the interpretation of Biblical texts in any substantial way. Instead, she has her “guilt by association” undermining of the Romantic tradition do half of her work.

That's weak. I am totally ready to agree that (a) the Romantic tradition oversold communities as the creator of texts in a strong way and (b) 19th Century German Biblical Hermeneutics was indebted to Romanticism, but that does not mean that particular Christian communities could not have played a role in the production of the text or that the text could not have reflected the views of some Christian tradition. As a caution against reifying hypothesized communities, Walsh does well. As proof that the writer was totally separated from a Christian community, not so much.

The other half of Walsh's argument is based on Walsh's study into writing as an elite enterprise. The purpose of the attack on German Romanticism was obviously to clear the deck for this latter argument. Walsh observes:

Liberated from strict adherence to oral traditions or Christian communities, we are better able to assess topoi the gospels share with other first- and second-century writings.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 141). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

For Walsh, the Gospel writers could not have been members of the community that are depicted in the Gospels. Walsh notes:

Authorship was a specialist's activity that required significant training and rhetorical skill.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 124). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

And: Kurke's folktale analogy is necessary precisely because she concedes, as I argue in Chapter 3, that the nature of producing literature in antiquity required an elite cultural producer and certain social conditions. To use her words, “it [is] impossible to postulate an author who is not a member of an elite of wealth and education.”53 Herein lies the difficulty with the oral tradition thesis. As

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (pp. 190-191). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Presumably, such elites would not have been living in Galilee or Rome or Alexandria, at least not among the Christians, who were presumably, slaves or poor.

The problem is that Walsh spends no time discussing who these communities were or who these elites were. She speculates that Mark may have been written to the circle around Pliny (as an example) but doesn't go much further than that.

Were there no wealthy Jews or God-fearers in Rome or Alexandria? That seems unlikely.

In any event, Walsh argues that the audience for cultural products, including the Gospels, was other elites with an interest in the topic. Pliny, perhaps.

Walsh is very informative in giving many examples that support this understanding. These examples are very informative and interesting.

However, Walsh doesn't make the sale in my mind by discussing the circumstances of the production of the Gospels and why John could not have hired a scribe or how Mark could not have known a wealthy “culture producer” in Rome.

One question that naturally comes up is why any “elite network” would be interested in a Jewish wonder-worker on the fringe of empire. She offers two points, one in passing and the other in detail.

The passing point is that in the late first century, Jewish issues were on the forefront of Roman minds. There had been a major war against the Jews in 70 AD, one result of which was to place on the throne the general who won the war. Romans were therefore interested in this slice of Empire. Josephus did a sturdy business in Jewish subjects. Likewise, Tacitus's Annals are noteworthy for how they go out of the way to describe the beliefs and culture of Christians and Jews in a way that no other group gets described. I had thought that those passages were interpolations, but they may represent a trendy interest in Jewish matters.

The other point that Walsh makes in detail is that there was a “genre” of “subversive biography.” This “genre” would take counter-cultural characters – non-elite, lower class, picaresque individuals – and tell stories about how they had overcome by their wit. This does not seem to be much of a “genre” but the subject did exist. The biography of Jesus may fit into the tropes of this genre.

Thus, Walsh believes that Gospels are literary products, not historical. She shares that the gospel writers may have had no information about Jesus apart from what they read in Pau, perhaps, which they filled out with the tropes of other literature. She writes:

If the gospels writers are aware of any oral tradition about Jesus, it is the position of this monograph that these elements are irretrievable to us, if they existed at all.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 156). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

And:

To this point, I have argued that the Synoptic gospels are conventional literary artifacts of the imperial period, not records of oral tradition and Christian exceptionalism.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 134). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Walsh points that features of the Gospels fit in with other literary products:
While this manner of “secrecy” is not unique among ancient authors – indeed, shockingly few of our extant ancient biographers name themselves in their titles or prefaces – particular literary habit cannot be taken as evidence for amorphous concepts like “oral tradition.”97 Both anonymity and the notion of the “eyewitness” are themselves rhetorical tropes that must be scrutinized before being taken literally.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (p. 160). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

And:

He then begins to write his bios engaging a certain set of issues that are important to him. Those issues might include esoteric teachings, food laws, Stoic ethics, or constructing a new, divine genealogy that subverts the one continually being reified by the Roman imperial family (e.g., the Aeneid). Any gaps in his narrative can be filled with references to other bioi of heroes, philosophers, or divine figures like Alexander the Great, or other established literary authorities (e.g., Plut. Mor. 718a: “[Plato instructs that beings born of God] do not come to be through seed [οὐ διὰ σπέρματος], surely, but by another power of God [ἄλλῃ δὲ δυνάμει τοῦ θεοῦ]”). As for other demonstrations of pneumatic ability or power, there is no shortage of testimony about afflictions and healings at the hands of gods like Isis and Asclepius (IG, IV 1.121.3–9; Mark 5:24–26), including in popular literature (Apul. Met. 1.9). He may even add some original plot device or anecdote to demonstrate literary skill. Something like the so-called Messianic Secret conveys to the reader why they may have never heard of Jesus before, while also arguably acting as a thauma in the tradition of paradoxography, Horace, or Vergil's Camilla.88 Luke's worldwide census under Augustus, passing reference to the Syrian governor Quirinius (2:1–7), and convoluted references to Capernaum (4:31) are all seemingly fallacious details, but they make for great storytelling. Like Philoxenus' octopus, elements of Jesus' bios like his location, teachings, wonder-working, and death provide ample opportunity for the practice of literary allusion.

Walsh, Robyn Faith. The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture (pp. 132-133). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

There is a lot in here that a Jesus Mythicist like Richard Carrier would find supportive.

Again, though, Walsh is not good on application of model to facts. She barely interacts with Richard Bauckham's thesis that the Gospels betray their sourcing in eyewitness accounts by a scant assertion that there is no evidence of oral transmission. This point misunderstands Bauckham – Bauckham argues for actual eyewitness testimony, not oral transmission.

Her best internal evidence in favor of literary invention is the facts that Luke gets “wrong.” She writes:

Luke proceeds to chronicle a series of historical facts and events – again, several of which do not hold up to scrutiny (e.g., a “world-wide census [ἀπογράφεσθαι πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκου

The Separation by Christopher Priest


I had been meaning to read Christopher Priest's “The Inverted World” (published in 1974) for four decades. I don't know why I kept putting it off, but I finally read it in 2023. The story has one of the best opening line in science fiction – “I HAD REACHED the age of six hundred and fifty miles” – which just hooks the reader into finding out how this can be possible.

The setting of “The Inverted World” is the real attraction. Priest describes a city slowly winching its way through Europe. For some unexplained reason, the world has become topologically distorted. The world behind the city falls off as time slows down – people can spend months behind the city, but when they return only a day has passed. On the other hand, time speeds up ahead of the city – pioneers who go ahead for a day return to find that months have passed in the city.

The reason for this is not explained until – maybe – the end. The story deals with the problems of bridging rivers and gorges and climbing mountains as we discover the strange world that the protagonist – Helward Mann – lives in.

It is fascinating and somewhat claustrophobic story. The reader is constantly trying to make sense of the strange time/topographical features of the world, which serves as a useful distraction to problems with the plot or characters and compels the reader to the conclusion to find out “what the heck is going on????”

Alas, I found the conclusion to be muddled. I wasn't sure if the city residents description of their reality was true or was supposed to be a subjective hallucination caused by the power system used by the city.

Priest's writing technique in “The Inverted World” is mildly unconventional. He would alternate between chapters told in the first person by Helward Mann and chapters told in the third person by some other person, which added to the sense of confusion.

Thus, in The Inverted World we have themes of an unreliable narrator and utter confusion about what is going on, really.

The Separation (2002) is my second Christopher Priest book.

It is very well-written, but the themes of unreliable narrator and ultimate confusion about what is going on have become more acute. The writing is good. The presentation is compelling, However, if you are trying to keep the details straight, you will go bonkers.

Which seems to be the point.

The Separation appears to be an alternate-history (Alt-hist) science fiction book. At least that was how I was diagnosing it, until I thought it was maybe a mystery, but ultimately I concluded it was a very strange alt-hist novel.

The story starts with a historian named Stuart Gratton finishing a book tour on one of his books of oral history on Operation Barbarossa during World War II. Gratton's specialty is obtaining oral histories – the lived stories of people who fought during World War II. Almost immediately, Priest starts dropping hints to the experienced science fiction reader that we are dealing with a time-line that is not exactly our own. Priest via Gratton mention the “Sino-American War in the mid-1940s.” Well, that didn't happen, unless he is referring to American troops that were in China during Mao's conquest of China. My dad mentioned drinking Tsingtao beer in Tsingtao as he heard Communist shelling in the mountains when he was in the Navy in approximately 1949. So, maybe something like that was a jump-off for this alt-hist.

Otherwise, it seems that Gratton's history was much like ours. It seems that America did become involved in the European War and Germany was defeated. On the other hand, there is a reference to the Republic of Masada, which seems to be a Jewish State on the island of Madagascar. The deportation of European Jews to Madagascar was an idea floated by the National Socialists as a solution for the “Jewish Problem.”

Gratton is toying with the idea of hunting down a strange reference in Winston Churchill's notes about a “J.L. Sawyer” who was both a conscientious objector and a RAF bomber pilot. That is a strange combination and Gratton thinks there may be a short book in the subject.

He is presented with the memoirs that might be from man's daughter – Miss Angela Chipperton – in which we learn that there were two J.L. Sawyers. They were twins and rowed for England during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. One of them (“Jack” or “J.L.”) met Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess. The other (“Joe”) smuggled a Jewish girl out of Germany (Birgitte), whom he subsequently married. Jack became a bomber pilot; Joe became a conscientious objector.

We learn that Joe was killed in London during the Blitz. Jack was shot down and then assigned to work for Churchill for a short time, returned to the air war, was shot down again, spent two years in a German POW camp, learned that Birgitte had remarried, and then learns that he had a daughter – Angela – with Birgitte from an affair he had with her. Joe goes to Australia and seems never to have met Angela, except Angela gave Gratton the notes we are supposedly reading.

Thus starts the confusion.

The theme of twin confusion is repeated through the book. Hess chortles to Jack about the crazy pranks he and his brother must have played as identical twins. Later we learn that Churchill used a double to visit the bombed out British. Later still, Jack is assigned to meet Deputy Fuhrer Hess in a British POW camp after Hess's crazy flight to England on May 10, 1941 in an effort to broker peace between Germany and England. Jack determines that the man the British are holding is an imposter, which is a bit of this-timeline speculation. (Although “Hess” never denied being Hess during 40 years of imprisonment...as far as the public knows.)

The story keeps looping around to May 10, 1941. That was the day that Gratton selects as his jump off point because he was born on that day. It was the day of Hess's flight to Germany while being chased by the Luftwaffe. Jack sees the chase on a bombing run to Hamburg.

Then, the story starts to change in subtle, confusing, and jarring ways. We learn from Jack's Jewish navigator writing to Gratton from the Republic of Masada that he was the only survivor from the flight that Jack's memoirs claimed he survived and rescued the navigator. The two of them were rescued in the North Sea according to Jack's memoirs, but according to the navigator's letter to Gratton, only he was rescued.

We also learn that Jack claimed to have been married to Birgitte. Was this true or was Jack lying to his crew to cover up the affair.

Jack confirms to Churchill in 1941 that Joe was killed in the Blitz in 1940, but Birgitte gets a letter in 1940 telling her that Joe was discovered alive in a men's home with a concussion. Joe survives, joins the Red Cross, and then meet with Deputy Fuhrer Hess in 1941 in Portugal.

At this point, the reader starts wondering if he has misread the earlier chapters.

Joe and Birgitte's marriage is on the rocks, but Birgitte and he have a child – maybe Jack's child – who is a boy, not Angela. Angela disappears from the story as does Stuart Gratton. By the end of the story, Joe has helped to broker peace between Germany and England in 1941, which leads to a stronger post-war England, America invades Russia through China, and Germany withdraws from Western Europe.

We are now truly in an Alt-hist story.

All of this is told through memoirs, news clippings, and journal entries.

It is all fascinating. The change from one history to a completely different history is subtle. The reader initially is left thinking that they just misremembered things or perhaps the narrator lied. Maybe Joe lied to Churchill about the death of his brother in 1940? Maybe Joe did die in that time line. In the final timeline, it does not seem that Churchill ever met Jack, although he did meet Joe.

So, by the end of the novel, we have a really interesting, well-done experience – well-written, captivating, engaging – that leaves us wondering “what is going on here????”

Just like The Inverted World.

Along with May 10, 1941, the latter part of the story – the Joe Timeline – loops around Joe waking up in an ambulance from his concussion. We are repeatedly treated to long scenes where Joe moves forward into the future only to wake up again in the ambulance. There is a brief interlude where the report of a Red Cross psychologist describes Joe's concern that he may be hallucinating his current existence. It may be the case that the entire Joe Timeline is simply the report of a very unreliable narrator waking up from a concussion.

Again, an ambiguous ending like The Inverted World.

Ultimately, this is a work of literature, not really science fiction. Literature is about characters; science fiction is about plot and setting. The real story here is about the characters and seeing them engage with different and changing stimuli. Certainly, there is a plot and setting, but both are shifting, almost dreamlike affairs, with no fixed points.

I enjoyed the story. I would recommend it to someone with a high tolerance for ambiguity and reflection.

Two Gods in Heaven by Peter Schafer


The idea of the Christian Trinity seems like such a departure from what I've been taught about Jewish Monotheism, that I thought the idea was invented ex nihilo.

Sure, there are some odd passages that seem to gesture at more than one God in heaven. Abraham meets with three strangers, for example, but that seems to be God and two angels, not the Trinity. Elsewhere, God refers to himself in the plural case, but so do English monarchs. These “proof texts” seem to have an easy explanation.

Yet, we clearly have something going on in the Baptismal formula in Matthew 28:19-20 which commands that catechumens be baptized “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” So, clearly within 40 years of Jesus's crucifixion, we have something “Trinitarian” going on.

How did a Jewish culture come to accept such a non-Jewish concept? It

The answer should not involve denying the premise by arguing that it was pagans that adopted Trinitarianism. The early Church was Jewish. The apostles were Jewish. A lot of Jews in the diaspora became Christian. There was not a clear demarcation between Christians and Jews until the second century, according to some scholars, and much later, according to others.

The answer according to some scholars, including Peter Schafer and Daniel Boyarin, is that Judaism was pre-adapted to accept Trinitarianism because it already incorporated a binitarian idea into its theological and social understanding. From that perspective, Christian beliefs about a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was not such a radical innovation.

One thing to keep in mind is that first century Judaism is not the Judaism we are familiar with. First century Judaism was far more diverse because the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD ended those forms that had been based on the Temple. What was left was Christianity and what became rabbinical Judaism, which are both daughter religions of the Judaism.

Schafer and Boyarin stress in various books that Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity developed in communication with each other. Each group adopted or rejected ideas from the other. The idea of “schismogenesis” – where one group deliberately distinguishes itself from a neighboring group by adopting contrary mores or customs – applies to Schafer and Boyarin's presentation.

Central to the binitarian speculations of Temple Judaism was the vision of “one like a Son of Man” in chapters 7 through 12 of the book of Daniel. One of the visions is that someone who looks like a human being (“one like a Son of Man”) is presented to the Ancient One and is “given dominion and glory and kingship forever.” To wit:

(Dan. 7:9) I watched until thrones were set in place, and an Ancient of Days (‘atiq yomin) took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, and its wheels were burning fire. (10) A river of fire issued and came forth from before him. Thousands upon thousands served him, and myriads upon myriads stood attending him. The court sat in judgment, and the books were opened. ... (13) As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him. (14) To him was given dominion and glory and kingship; all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.

Schäfer, Peter. Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (p. 20). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Schafer and Boyarin read Daniel as being premised on the habit of prior Jewish texts that describe God as both a young warrior figure and an old monarch. These types were divided into separate persons in Daniel.

That doesn't mean that there were two God, however. In some way, the two persons, or powers, were grammatically confused. References for one turned into references to the other. The clues and effects are subtle, but Jewish readers were attentive.

This ties into the thread of Wisdom literature. The wisdom tradition “probably goes back to the third century BCE” in the book of Proverbs, according to Schafer. The wisdom tradition personified God's wisdom as a created being who was present at creation. (Prov. 8.22, 29-30.) The Wisdom of Solomon identifies Wisdom with the Logos. As with the “two powers,” there is a confusion between God and Wisdom:

Wisdom flows from God. In a platonic sense, she is the archetype of his perfection and at the same time his emanation, which imparts God's glory and active workings into the earthly world: “In every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets” (7:27).

Now we have come full circle. Wisdom is (in biblical terms) with God and is enthroned with him, yet at the same time she is identical to him as the platonic archetype, emanating as God's working into the souls of humankind. This drive of Wisdom to be immanent in the earthly world of human beings is—with varied accents—common to all three books of wisdom. In the biblical Book of Proverbs, it is still expressed with reserve, as directly after Wisdom plays before God the text continues somewhat cryptically, “I was playing in his inhabited world, finding delight in humankind” (Prov. 8:31). In Wisdom of Solomon, the drive toward immanence is philosophical, and in Jesus Sirach, it assumes a totally new form. The author of Jesus Sirach lets there be no doubt where the personified wisdom ultimately belongs:

(24:8) Then the Creator of all things gave me a command, and my Creator chose the place for my tent. He said, “Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.”

Schäfer, Peter. Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (pp. 28-29). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

So, Wisdom is both a part of God and somehow separate from God.
Schafer relies on Wisdom 24:23 to conclude that Wisdom is embodied in the book of the Torah.

(24:23) All this (tauta panta) is the book of the covenant (biblos diathēkēs) of the Most High God, the law (nomos) that Moses commanded us as an inheritance for the congregations of Jacob. “

All this” refers to everything that had previously been said about wisdom; all this is now interpreted as the Book of the Covenant between God and his people Israel—that is, as the Torah (Greek nomos). Wisdom, God's personified messenger on earth, is now embodied in a book, the book of the Torah. This reinterpretation of biblical wisdom paved the way that classical rabbinic Judaism would take: from personified Wisdom to the book of the Torah, which needs to be interpreted.

Schäfer, Peter. Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (pp. 29-30). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Christianity went in a different direction, namely, Wisdom/Logos continued to be personified in a person:

In contrast to this, New Testament Christianity continues the line of the personified (male) Logos, referring it to Jesus: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

This Christological interpretation can be found, of all places, in the oldest complete Palestinian targum on the Pentateuch that we know of: the so-called Codex Neofiti. In the Aramaic translation of the Codex Neofiti, Genesis 1:1 reads, Mileqadmin be-hokhmah bera de-YYY' shakhlel yat shemayya we-yat ar'a,11 which can only be translated literally as, “In the beginning, by means of wisdom, the son of God perfected the heaven and the earth.”

Schäfer, Peter. Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (pp. 30-31). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Philo of Alexandria – whose life encompassed that of Christ – accepted the idea of the Logos bridging between the immutable God and the created world.

The “two powers” idea continued into Rabbinic Judaism. The Son of Man figure in Daniel led to speculation about other figures occupying that space, including Melchisedek or an angel. One such speculation from the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, the Third Book of Enoch, and Hekhalot literature had Enoch – who was taken and was no more – being transformed into the angel Metatron. Metatron – not actually named in the Bible - was theorized to be the angel that God assigned to escort the Jews to the Promised Land. This angel carried the name of God and was given divine authority. Metatron was eventually described as a kind of lesser God. Schafer explains the reasoning in this passage:

Rav Idith immediately falls for the heretic's provocation, admitting that the “Lord” (YHWH) is Metatron and even offering an explanation for it: Metatron is the angel with the same name as God—namely, YHWH. The proof text for this (Exod. 23:21) tones it down only marginally by proving “only” that God's name is contained “in” Metatron, which presumably means “in his name.” With that the heretic's trap snaps shut, and he immediately retorts, if God and Metatron have the same name (that is, YHWH), and hence the two are interchangeable, then it is only logical for us also to revere Metatron, which in plain language means that we worship him as a second God. The heretic does not even need to refer explicitly to the context of the Bible verse Exodus 23:21, which the rabbi so carelessly cited—which is unmistakably about an angel whom God will send in front of Israel and Israel must obey: “Be attentive to him and listen to his voice; do not rebel against him (al tamer bo).”

Schäfer, Peter. Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (p. 126). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Of this same angel, Exodus 23:21 says that this angel will not forgive transgressions. Since the forgiveness of sins was a prerogative of God, this angel seemed to have the power and authority of God. This made for speculation.

This speculation made its way into the midrash, where it was treated with great hostility, along with those who advocated “two powers” theology. For example, Metatron gets demoted and flogged, and Rabbi Aher (Elisha ben Avuhah), who advocate otherwise, was disgraced. The fact that this theology had to be repudiated by the Rabbinic literature is good evidence that this had some kind of traction (and that it was too close to the hated Christian mutation to be tolerated in early Rabbinic Judaism, such are the forces of schismogenesis.) Schafer notes:

With his exegesis of Exodus 23:21, Rav Idith opened a Pandora's box, saying exactly what the heretic wanted to hear—namely, that Metatron is a second divine figure next to God, as the author of the Third Book of Enoch also claimed. Of course, this is neither his personal opinion nor that of his rabbinic colleagues, but he lets himself be cornered by the heretic, who consistently has the better arguments and well-nigh imposes this conclusion on him. Rav Idith obviously rejects the heretic so vehemently because the heretic's opinion was not merely a side issue that the rabbis could simply disregard. On the contrary, it was a view that had found a place in the heart of rabbinic—or more precisely, Babylonian rabbinic—Judaism.90 The notion of two Gods in heaven was attractive and had become, in influential rabbinic circles, even acceptable. This is the only way to explain the rabbi's harsh and yet awkward reply. There is reason to assume that here too the direct opponents of the rabbi can be found among those circles that stand behind the Hekhalot literature and especially the Third Book of Enoch.

Schäfer, Peter. Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (pp. 127-128). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Things are different in the past. History is complicated. Schafer notes:

Not until the nineteenth century did monotheism become the generally valid norm, not least under the influence of Protestant Christianity.

Schäfer, Peter. Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (p. 134). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Schafer observes:

The proximity of binitarian ideas of pre-Christian ancient Judaism to thoughts and images as encountered in the New Testament is obvious. This is not merely a matter of parallels, much less equations, but rather of the fundamental insight that Second Temple Judaism prepared the stock on which the New Testament could draw. The fact that this, apart from many other themes, also applies to the notion of a “second” God next to the “first” God is an insight that is only slowly beginning to gain acceptance.

Schäfer, Peter. Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity (pp. 135-136). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

This is a fairly short read. It is informative and generally accessible. It covers ground previously covered. I would recommend it as a useful way of understanding the complexity of human intellectual development as a general theme, and the context of Christian theology, in particular.

240224 The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

This book promises a lot. It promises to turn upside down the reader's understanding. It promises to reveal hitherto concealed facts about early human civilization. It promises to undercut the conventional understanding of the history of early human civilization. It promises to tell us how we got “stuck.”

“Stuck” is a favorite word of the authors. “Stuck” is used 16 times. “Stuck” is a kind of criticism of modern Western society, as the authors imagine it. For example, they write the following:

Second, we'll start answering the question we posed in the last chapter: how did we get stuck? How did some human societies begin to move away from the flexible, shifting arrangements that appear to have characterized our earliest ancestors, in such a way that certain individuals or groups were able to claim permanent power over others: men over women; elders over youth; and eventually, priestly castes, warrior aristocracies and rulers who actually ruled?

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 121). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

So, how do they do?

In that they oversell the sizzle and provide a product that is far less then what they promise, not very well in my opinion.

What got me interested in the book was the promise to reveal human “deep history” – history prior to the last approximately 7,000 years. Scholars can sketch out a trace of human history up to around 5,000 years BCE. Before that time, things get sketchy. For example, we know that Jericho has been more or less continuously occupied since 9400 BCE. https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/ancient-jericho-the-first-walled-city-in-history By 8,000 BCE Jericho can be called a “town” with about 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants. Jericho appears to be the oldest such community that we have evidence for. The age of Jericho means that by the time that ancient Hebrews allegedly arrived at the walls of Jericho around 1,200 BCE, Jericho had a history that went back a further 8,000 years.

Ponder that.

History is deep.

Jericho's history is dwarfed by still deeper human history. Prior to the founding of Jericho, humans had been wandering the landscape of the region for a further 40,000 years.

What were they doing?

I purchased this book with the hope of finding out. Unfortunately, Graeber and Wengrow are less interested in telling us about what science has to say about the deep human past than in using an imagined past – both deep and far more recent (substantial attention is paid to the attractions of North American Native culture from the 18th century) – as a foil against modernity.

For example, the book beings with a critique of Rousseau and Hobbes' notion of the “state of nature.” Neither philosopher intended the idea of the state of nature to be historical. Rather, they used the state of nature – a hypothetical condition of equality that existed before human communities – as a way of critiquing their cultures.

Similarly, Graeber and Wengrow critique Rousseau to argue that the idea of a primitive condition of human equality is a mistaken quest. Although they acknowledge that Rousseau didn't think such equality ever existed as a matter of history, the authors spend a lot of time and effort arguing that we won't find such equality in the past.

As an attack on a strawman, they win they point.

However, they go on to create their own version of an ur-state of human equality, but this time it is labeled “freedom.” Their write:
Is this an example of how relations that were once flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck? If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality'), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 519). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

So, apparently, we are now “stuck” but previously we were not “stuck.” What did things look like before we became “stuck”? They write:

Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one's surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (p. 503). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

It is hard to see where Rousseau would disagree with this new formula.

Where does this formula come from? If you aren't paying attention, you might think that Graeber and Wengrow have proven it somehow. They offer a lot of anthropological examples which give the impression that they are marshalling unassailable evidence They offer examples from the Wendat, California versus Northwest Indians, Egypt, Sudan, Gobekli Tepe, etc., etc. They have all of human history to cherry-pick. What they don't offer are counter-examples that prove their point or some logical demonstration as to why these three freedoms are basic.

. While criticizing other anthropologists for projecting their biases into the evidence, Graeber and Wengrow do the same. It is worth noting that Graeber was heavily involved in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. I didn't know this until after I had finished the book. There were red flags throughout the book that made me suspect that this book was aiming at indoctrination rather than objectivity. One such “tell” was the resurrection of Marija Gimbutas's hoary “The Goddess and Gods of Old Europe (1982).” While Gimbutas has always been popular among the feminist left and people who want to feel smart in having their biases confirmed, her theories that Europe was occupied by matriarchal Goddess-worshippers until the nasty Indo-Europeans invaded an imposed patriarchy and Sky God were rejected by anthropologists.

Graeber and Wengrow attempt to rehabilitate Gimbutas via “recent research” on DNA that shows that there was an influx of invaders into Europe. What they don't explain is how this proves a matriarchal society was overturned. No one to my knowledge ever denied that there were population invasions. Long before DNA research was possible, no one disputed that the intrusion of the Indo-European language family into Europe meant that a new population had arrived.

What's going on here is that Graeber is, and Wengrow may be, men of the Left and they have fairly conventional post-modern attitudes about feminism, colonialism, the evils of patriarchy, and the rest of the social imaginary package that constitutes the evils of modernity. They also probably know that they are going to score major points if they beat the feminist drum. All that is missing is some evidence of this matriarchal culture.

It is confirmation bias as far as the eye can see. Thus, they offer the example of the Iroquoian longhouses being run by a council of women. This may be surprising to the average person but I read anthropologist Marvin Harris's excellent “Cow, Pigs, Wars, and Witches” back in the 1970s. Harris described the Iroquois as an exception because their men were often away from home on raiding parties. In other words, there was a reason for this exception. They don't mention this and I suspect that we will find similar reasons apply to the scant other examples they mention, such as the Hopi, Zinu and Minangkabau, a Muslim people of Sumatra.

By the way, what do these examples have to do with Gimbutas' thesis? Nothing, really. We can't infer from a handful of exceptions to an unknown group as if it were a matter of deductive reasoning. This point is particularly germane when the reader understands that it is key part of Graeber and Wengrow's argument that social forms are not determined; rather, social forms just happen (perhaps because the intelligent hunter-gatherers tried one form, disliked it, and moved to another form, and sometimes because we got “stuck” for some reason.)

Graeber and Wengrow also offer the Cretans as a matriarchy based on Cretan paintings depicting women as larger figures and smaller male figures as bowing toward them. What this shows is aristocracy. According to other sources, there both male and female figures that are depicted as larger than other figures who are serving the larger figures.

Could Crete have been a matriarchy? Sure, but my problem is that this sounds like a lot of anthropology I read as a child in the 1960s that depicted the Mayans as peaceful. Later anthropology revealed the bloodletting, wars, and human sacrifices of the Mayans. It is not the case that Western scholars are always projecting racial inferior stereotypes into non-Western culture. A lot of anthropology involves using the imagined non-Western culture as an example of a utopia that the West missed out on having.

Sort of like Graeber and Wengrow do.

Graeber and Wengrow are particularly obnoxious on this front when they fall for the Kandiaronk hoax. Kandiaronk was a “Wendat Philosopher-Statesman” - an Indian chief - who befriended the French in approximately 1683. A Frenchman named Baron de la Hontan (Lahontan) purportedly transcribed conversations between Kandiaronk and the Governor General. Surprisingly, Kanriaronk turns out to have been the very model of the Enlightenment philosopher, with piercing comments about inequality and money.

Graeber and Wengrow discount the possibility that Kandiaronk was what moderns would call a “sock puppet” to put Lahontan's ideas into circulation, but this kind of thing was an established industry at the time. Lahontan's memoirs may be accurate, but if that was the case, they would have been exceptional in that regard. David Bell who teaches on the French Enlightenment at Princeton has this to say:

https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity


The error that Mann makes—and that Graeber and Wengrow uncritically repeat—is in some ways an understandable one. It can be very tempting to mistake Western critiques of the West, placed in “indigenous” mouths, for authentically indigenous ones. The language is familiar, and the authors know exactly which chords will resonate with their audience. Genuinely indigenous critiques, coming out of traditions with which people raised in Western environments are unfamiliar, can seem much more strange and difficult. The reductio ad absurdum of this mistake comes when people take as authentically Native American the words of Pocahontas, in the Disney film of the name: “You think you own whatever land you land on / The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim...”

The error is also—of course—deeply political. It fits what Graeber and Wengrow describe in their conclusion as a principal aim of the book: to “[expose] the mythical substructure of our ‘social science,'” and to reveal, contrary to what social scientists insist, that humans still have “the freedom to shape entirely new social realities.” Many Native Americans in the time of Kandiaronk still possessed this freedom, they claim. European societies, meanwhile, were incapable of real self-criticism. It took the wise Huron to open Western eyes to the possibility of a genuinely revolutionary politics. Graeber and Wengrow themselves now want to play a similar role.

Unfortunately, if their treatment of the Enlightenment is any indication, in pursuing this goal they are willing to engage in what comes perilously close to scholarly malpractice. I don't have the expertise to comment on Graeber and Wengrow's arguments about matters other than the French Enlightenment, but the quality of their scholarship on this subject does not bode well for the remainder of the book, to say the least.

Other scholars offer searing criticism in their area of specialty. For example, Graeber and Wengrow claim that Europeans, unlike Indians, would often stay with the other culture when given the opportunity. This claim – which will bury itself in many minds like a virus or earworm – is based on a doctoral dissertation which says that there was no difference between the cultures – no matter what culture the person came from, they wanted to go home.

The treatment given to Karl Marx is noteworthy. Graeber and Wengrow argue against economic determinism but they never call out Marx on that point. Instead he gets treated with deference as one of the people with courage to say “slightly ridiculous” things. This is the “dog that didn't bark” inasmuch as most anthropology is “Marxist,” not in the sense of advocating “from each according to the ability, to each according to their need,” but in the sense of a willingness to correlate cultural developments to economic realities. Marvin Harris, who I mentioned earlier, falls into this category.

But Graeber and Wengrow have nothing to say about how their discipline got “stuck” by adopting Marx?

And what is this “stuck” anyhow? Apparently, in the past, people had the ability the ability to boldly re-imagine their society and make changes if they chose.

Obviously, we can't do that, which is why slavery was not abolished in America in 1965, serfdom wasn't abolished in Russia in the 1850s, and a virulent form of social organization that subordinated everything to the State didn't collapse in Europe in 1989. It's also why no one has ever tried to form communes, some of which have been successful for decades.

What are they talking about.

This is not to say that there are no virtues in this book There are nuggets of information. I didn't realize that California Indians did not rely on the “three sisters” form of agriculture, for example. It is clear that the idea of an “agricultural revolution” leading to sedentary communities is not entirely accurate – although there may still be a positive correlation between the two. James C. Scott, who is given deferential treatment by the authors, has a lot of interesting things to say about this in “Against the Grain.”

The idea of “schismogenesis” is interesting:

Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘schismogenesis' to describe people's tendency to define themselves against one another.

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (pp. 56-57). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

On the other hand, I can see where it applies to direct interactions, but the authors apply it to explain the differences between California Indians and Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Most Indians in these two “cultural areas” would never interact with each other. Why didn't this effect lead to a checkerboard pattern of cultural differentiation?

But on the whole, it didn't address my interest in “deep time.” Where it moved into things I knew, it was wrong or overly simplistic.

I cannot recommend this book

240220 How to Stop Time by Matt Haig

Tom Hazard is a morose loner. Born in 1581, he fell in love in 1598. He lost his love and never loved again.

Not once in the next 400 years.

Tom has a rare genetic condition that opposes progeria. Rather than aging quickly, Tom – and a few others – age very slowly, about one year for every fifteen years. Since the condition kicks in at puberty, Tom spends eighty years as a teenager. In his youth, i.e., the sixteenth century, this raises fears of witchcraft. Tom learns discretion.

In the 1890s, he discovers an organization of similar individuals who take control of his life, insisting that he avoid entanglement with “mayflies,” i.e., those who live and die within the allotted eighty years. People like Tom call themselves “albatrosses” in homage to the alleged long lives of the bird.

This book skips back and forth between the present – London circa 2018 – and various episodes in his past. Tom and his beloved wife, Rose, had a child, Marian. Marian received the albatross gene, but when Rose died of the plague in 1619, Marian disappeared. He's been looking for her ever since.

Tom has lived through history and met some great people – Shakespear, Fitzgerald, Cooke, Samuel Johnson, and others – but he is not an interesting person. He comes across as morose and awkward. He seeks to live an average life. As the story opens, he takes on a job teaching history to school children. There is a romance. There is also tension as Tom comes to trust the Albatross Society less.

I liked the story. I tend to like stories with protagonists who are essentially immortal. The hopping around in time in the story was fun and kept the story moving along. The story ends with action after a slow burn build-up. I could pick some nits about how conveniently the threads of the story came together in the last ten pages, but I am not because I enjoyed the ride.

This book is being made into a television serialization starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Tom Hazard. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/miptv-2023-benedict-cumberbatch-series-matt-haig-how-to-stop-time-1235376489/#!

How to Read the Summa Theologica: A Practical Guide for Beginners by Joseph Anthony

This is a short, easily-accessible book about a far longer, far less accessible book. The latter book is the Summa Theologica (the “ST”) written by St. Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century.

As someone who has read the ST proper (i.e., through the close of Part III), I can see that author Joseph Anthony's book is a good roadmap for tackling the longer project. Anthony provides a 10,000 foot survey of the four parts of the ST, offering a sketch of its organization and a survey of its parts. After twenty years of reading the text, I don't think I quite understood the organization, which Anthony describes as having an “exitus-reditus” structure:

The Big Picture of the Summa Theologica forms what John of St. Thomas (a 17th-century Dominican theologian) called the “golden circle of theology.”

What did he mean?

It's simple.

The Summa is ordered to show us how all things — especially the human person — come from God, and how all things — especially the human person — return to God.

In philosophical language, this is called the exitus-reditus structure. In English, that would be translated as “exit-return.”

This structure was used by ancient Greek philosophy to show how all things emanate from (exitus) the source of all being, and how all things return (reditus) to the source of all being. In fact, most primitive religions believed that things come from a creator-god, and that all things eventually return to the creator-god.

Anthony, Joseph. How to Read the Summa Theologica: A Practical Guide for Beginners (p. 65). Kindle Edition.

Thus, the first part discusses that from which men come, i.e., God. The last three parts – the two parts of part II and part III – discuss how man can return to God. Anthony explains:

I'm not sure too many people nowadays think of our moral life as a journey toward — or away from — God.

But for St. Thomas — as well as for Catholic moral thought in general — our moral life is the road we must travel to reach God.

How?

Our actions change us. Our good actions make us better, and our bad actions make us worse. To use language that perhaps we're more familiar with, our good actions keep us in a state of grace, while our bad actions lead us toward the state of mortal sin.

If to be in a state of grace is to be with God, and to be in mortal sin is to be away from God, our actions are how we move toward or away from God.

St. Thomas organizes the Prima Secundae in this way: He begins by asking, What is the goal — or end — of human existence? and then he spends the rest of the Prima Secundae answering how we achieve that end.

Our end is complete happiness with God, and we achieve this end by living a moral life devoted to doing good and avoiding evil.

Anthony, Joseph. How to Read the Summa Theologica: A Practical Guide for Beginners (pp. 74-75). Kindle Edition.

I don't think most Christians think this way anymore. I suspect that the belief that prevails today has the return to God turn on a mental state of faith and trust in God, in having a relationship in the modern idiom.

Anthony explains the genre of Summas and provides a brief description of how various Summas came to be in the academic culture of medieval Europe. He also offers a tip that took me a while to learn:

Here's an important key to reading the Summa: St. Thomas always begins with the “no” side of the argument, and his own position is always on the “yes” side. By stating the “no” side first, St. Thomas clues you in on his own position. In the article we're studying, the “no” side argues there's no need for a teaching beyond philosophy. Therefore, we know St. Thomas is going to argue why a teaching beyond philosophy (i.e., sacred doctrine, or theology) is needed. Once you realize that St. Thomas always follows this structure, reading the Summa becomes much easier, because once you read the first sentence of an article, you know St. Thomas is going to take the opposite position.

Anthony, Joseph. How to Read the Summa Theologica: A Practical Guide for Beginners (pp. 40-41). Kindle Edition.

I don't think this is totally accurate. There are occasions when the answer to a question is “yes.” For example, when he asks whether something is “fitting,” such as “Is it fitting that God be called the Father?” However, the first objection will tell you the answer he will take, such as a statement that starts “It would seem that it is not fitting that God be called the Father.”

Bingo! At that point you know that the opposite is Aquinas's position.

As the reader can see, this book is written in plain and clear language. It takes maybe thirty minutes to read. If you are going to approach the Summa, it is not a bad introduction and survey to start with.

The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man by Alan Fimister


This is a difficult book. I'm not sure whether it is difficult because it is dealing with the texts of Christian prophetic literature, which are famously difficult, or because the thesis of the book is novel and surprising. The novelty of the thesis is not – according to author Alan Fimister – because the thesis is new but because it is so old that it has been forgotten.

Fimister argues that it proper to call the Catholic Church “Roman,” as in “the Roman Catholic church,” only so long as we understand that the “Roman” being referred to is the Roman Empire which is holding back or restraining the Anti-Christ.

See what I mean?

The clues are all there in the texts and Fimister's thesis is supported by various church fathers. It's really not his fault that no one pays attention to St. Paul's most obscure prophecy in Thessalonians 2, chapter 2:

“Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him, we beg you, brethren, not to be quickly shaken in mind or excited, either by spirit or by word, or by letter purporting to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you this? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming. The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 92). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

Got that? There is a lawless man who will be revealed and slain by the breath of Lord Jesus but this “mystery of lawlessness” is being restrained by “he” until “he is out of the way.

In a word, huh? Who is “he”? Why is “he” restraining the “mystery of lawlessness”? Does “he” know “he is doing this?

According to Fimister, the “he” has traditionally been considered to be the Roman Empire:

According to the majority of the Fathers, “what” and “he” who restrains the “lawless one” (unanimously identified by the Fathers as the Antichrist of whom John speaks in 1 John 2:18–22 and 4:3) is the Roman empire and the Roman emperor.220 St Thomas considers in his commentary on this epistle how it could be that the Antichrist has not come by his own time when it would seem that the Roman empire has perished. “The Roman Empire has not perished,” he explains, “but passed from the temporal to the spiritual order.” The revolt of which St Paul speaks will be against the faith and government of the Holy Roman Church.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 93). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

St. Thomas was writing in the thirteenth century, the last Western emperor of Rome left office in the fifth century. There was still a “Roman” emperor on the throne of Constantinople, but it still seems like a stretch to think that the Roman empire was doing much in the West, unless the “Roman empire” had been translated into the spiritual order of the Catholic Church, aka the “Holy Roman Church.”

According to Fimister, this interpretation is found in Tertullian (c 160-c 225):

In chapter thirty-two of his Apology, Tertullian explains that this teaching of St Paul secures the loyalty of the Christian to the empire—for all their refusal to express that loyalty in pagan rites: There is also another and a greater necessity for our offering prayer in behalf of the emperors, nay, for the complete stability of the empire, and for Roman interests in general. For we know that a mighty shock impending over the whole earth—in fact, the very end of all things threatening dreadful woes—is only retarded by the continued existence of the Roman empire. We have no desire, then, to be overtaken by these dire events; and in praying that their coming may be delayed, we are lending our aid to Rome's duration. More than this, though we decline to swear by the genii of the Cæsars, we swear by their safety, which is worth far more than all your genii.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (pp. 94-95). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

The same interpretation is found in Hyppolytus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Lactantius, and St. John Chrysostom. Fimister points out that this understanding was shared by the leading theologians of the West:

St Ambrose (c. 340—397) asserts:

The Lord will not return until the Roman rule fails and antichrist appears, who will kill the saints, giving back freedom to the Romans but under his own name.234

St Jerome (c. 340–420) in his Commentary on Daniel 7:8 confirms:

We should therefore concur with the traditional interpretation of all the commentators of the Christian Church, that at the end of the world, when the Roman Empire is to be destroyed, there shall be ten kings who will partition the Roman world amongst themselves. Then an insignificant eleventh king will arise, who will overcome three of the ten kings.235

Likewise, in his De Civitate Dei St Augustine (345–430) expounds St Paul in the same sense, although with a little more reservation:

For what does he mean by “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now holdeth, let him hold until he be taken out of the way: and then shall the wicked be revealed”? I frankly confess I do not know what he means. . . . However, it is not absurd to believe that these words of the apostle, “Only he who now holdeth, let him hold until he be taken out of the way,” refer to the Roman empire, as if it were said, “Only he who now reigneth, let him reign until he be taken out of the way.” “And then shall the wicked be revealed”: no one doubts that this means Antichrist.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (pp. 99-100). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.
This seems surprising.

But is it? Shouldn't we expect the Roman Empire to play a role in Christian prophecy?

Fimister points out that Israel's interaction with Rome began during the so-called “intertestamental period.” Of course, it wasn't intertestamental at all to non-Protestants since that period left us Maccabees I. In Maccabees I, the Jews engage with Rome in an effort to find an ally against the Greeks. The Romans are depicted quite favorably as an altogether satisfactory ally for the people of God.

In the Christian era, the depiction of Rome is equivocal. On the one hand, Rome is “Babylon” and the beast with ten horns. Rome crucified Christ and destroyed the temple.

On the other hand, St. Paul tells Christians to support the empire. Josephus identified the destroyer of the temple with a prophecy of rulership. Rome was folded into Messianic expectations by Josephus:

No doubt the ability of the Judeans of the first century to make such precise calculations was limited, but as inter alia Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus bear witness, messianic speculation was frenetic and this last verse would seem to confirm that the people who would destroy the Temple and the city would be the Messiah's own people. What could be more natural then than Josephus's conclusion that Vespasian was the Messiah? Natural but wrong, and hardly compatible with the idea of the Messiah being “cut off” (Daniel 9:26). In fact, the implications are more startling still: that the people of the Prince who is to come, of the Messiah who was cut off in AD 30, who brought an end to victim and sacrifice and confirmed the covenant with the many, are the Romans.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 56). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

Over time, the assessment of the Roman Empire became more favorable, particularly after Constantine began using the resources of the Roman Empire to benefit the church. This was a reason why it was such a shock in the West when Rome was sacked, an event which lead St. Augustine to write the City of God, explaining that Rome was not City of God and that Christians should distinguish between the earthly city and the heavenly city. In the East, though, the Roman Empire which continued became the Kingdom of God.

In the West, though, Rome fell, and the anti-Christ did not come. The explanation for this anomaly turned on interpretations of Daniel and Revelation which described the beast as having ten horns. The horns were understood to be the successor barbarian kingdoms which continued the Roman empire. Eventually, the Roman Empire was “translated” to the Roman Church, i.e., the Catholic Church, and it was the Catholic Church that serves to restrain the coming of the anti-Christ.

In my experience, Rome and the Roman Empire are generally portrayed as villains. If they figure into prophecy, it is as the answer to the decoding of symbols. But it was not always so. Even Jesus's slighting “render unto Caesar” teaching was coupled with an outreach to the gentiles. This is an interpretation of the “turning over of the tables” narrative, I have not seen:

Of course, the real purpose of the Lord's cleansing of the Temple was precisely what He said it was: to remove from the part of the Temple reserved for the worship of the Gentiles profane activities which implied the exclusion of the nations from the worship of the one true God. It was certainly not to provide the casus belli for a revolt against the Romans. Rather it foreshadowed the sending down of the Spirit to convert those very Romans from their idolatry to the worship of the God of Israel. The idolatrous coins were brought into the outer court not by the Romans but by the Temple authorities who, by their rejection of the Messiah, were soon to bring upon themselves and into the precincts of the Temple far more violent and terrible trophies of the false gods of Latium than a few imperial denarii.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 86). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

Rome is the subject of typology from Psalms according to St. Cyril of Jerusalem:

Back in the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem read Psalm 2 in the same sense. But again you ask yet another testimony of the time. “The Lord said to Me, You are My Son; this day have I begotten You”: and a few words further on, “You shall rule them with a rod of iron.” I have said before that the kingdom of the Romans is clearly called a rod of iron;

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (pp. 106-107). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

St. John Henry Newman continued the tradition of reading Rome into prophetic literature in the nineteenth century:

Indeed, as St John Henry Newman would have it (commenting on 2 Thessalonians), it endured into his own day:

It is not clear that the Roman Empire is gone. Far from it: the Roman Empire in the view of prophecy, remains even to this day. Rome had a very different fate from the other three monsters mentioned by the Prophet, as will be seen by his description of it. “Behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns.” [Dan. vii. 7.] These ten horns, an Angel informed him, “are ten kings that shall rise out of this kingdom” of Rome. As, then, the ten horns belonged to the fourth beast, and were not separate from it, so the kingdoms, into which the Roman Empire was to be divided, are but the continuation and termination of that Empire itself,—which lasts on, and in some sense lives in the view of prophecy, however we decide the historical question. Consequently, we have not yet seen the end of the Roman Empire. “That which withholdeth” still exists, up to the manifestation of its ten horns; and till it is removed, Antichrist will not come. And from the midst of those horns he will arise, as the same Prophet informs us: “I considered the horns, and behold, there came up among them another little horn; . . . and behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things.”

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 108). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

Fimister discusses prophecy and history. He notes that in 800 AD, Pope Leo crowned Charlemagne as Roman emperor. The implication in this act was that the papacy had the authority to dispense the title of emperor as it chose. This act was coupled with a division of temporal and spiritual authority, with the spiritual authority being higher. The implication, therefore, was that the Church at all time reserved the spiritual dimensions of “Romanitas.” Fimister explains:

If, then, the universal imperium is essentially spiritual and the Roman state persists only as an exemplar polity, it is easy to imagine that the papal vision of ecclesiastical Romanitas is simply correct and exhausts the doctrine, and in a sense this is true. The centrality of this concept (of a universal spiritual power) to Western culture is illustrated by the enthusiasm in the second half of the twentieth century for human rights declarations and international and supranational institutions designed to guarantee peace and human dignity, even perhaps by the contrasting enthusiasm in the first half of the twentieth century for the absolute state that enters the heart and mind and demands the whole person. From the perspective of an authentic Catholic analysis of temporal power, such institutions are absurd: towers of Babel that seek by finite effort and power to traverse the infinite.382 As Pius XI asseverates:

There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ.

Fimister, Alan. The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church (Os Justi Studies in Catholic Tradition) (p. 160). Os Justi Press. Kindle Edition.

So, those who assert that Catholics are “Roman Catholics” or merely “Roman” are engaging in a proper attribution of titles insofar as they recognize that Rome played, and is still playing, a key role in prophecy.

Insofar as the Church that restrains the anti-Christ is Rome, Roman is Catholic; Catholic is Roman.

This is an interesting book. It is also surprising insofar as it is so out of touch with the spirit of the modern world. It may be the case that Fimister's points were better known to Catholics, at least, prior to Vatican II, but this kind of “triumphalism” is frowned on today.

Nonetheless, this is an interesting glimpse into a history that we no longer know. Fimister's approach also answers questions about biblical interpretation, such as the scourging of the moneychangers and the prophecies in Revelation and Daniel. This book is not an easy read because of the depth of its erudition and its counterintuitive - to modern minds – understanding of ecclesiastical history. However, it is worth reading because it provides food for thought.

240213 The Occult in National Socialism by Stephen E. Flowers, Ph.D.

This is an odd book. On the one hand, it has a lot of solid scholarship about German culture prior the Third Reich. The author, Stephen E. Flowers, seems to document and footnote his points. He makes some solid observations about a variety of points.

On the other hand, he lurches into some weird territory. The agenda of his book seems to be about unlinking National Socialism from accusations about its alleged occultic, pagan, or Satanic antecedents. At times, Flowers seems to come off as a National Socialist (NS) apologist who wants to make sure that they are not wrongly accused of that kind of nonsense. Given what they are accused of this seems like a lawyer claiming victory by exonerating a serial killer of jaywalking.

In addition, Flowers goes off on paranoid tangents accusing the Christian Churches of spreading lies about the Nazis occult history. He also blames the Christian Churches of causing the Holocaust by allegedly cultivating anti-semitism, He doesn't offer an explanation for why the Holocaust happened in Germany, and not anywhere else in Europe, even though he acknowledges that the German culture responsible for the Holocaust was post-Christian.

Likewise, Flowers drops in casual references to the “left hand path” as if that was something known to people with no prior knowledge of occultism (or as if it described something real.) He also talks about “magic” as if it were real. He seems to mean something like using rituals, rites, or memes to elicit psychological responses in an audience. In other words, what most people would call “psychology.”

Flowers clearly has an agenda. Given his casual references to the “left hand path” of occultism, trusting his readers to understand this “inside Baseball” reference, and the anti-Christian animus, I suspected he was an occultist.

Bingo! Wiki reports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Flowers#cite_note-1

Stephen Edred Flowers, commonly known as Stephen E. Flowers, and also by the pen-names Edred Thorsson, and Darban-i-Den, is an American runologist, university lecturer, and proponent of occultism, especially of Neo-Germanic paganism and Odinism. He helped establish the Germanic Neopagan movement in North America and has also been active in left-hand path occult organizations. He has over three dozen published books and hundreds of published papers and translations on a disparate range of subjects. Flowers is still an active representative of heathenry and Odinism, and has appeared online in spaces associated with neo-Nazi activity, such as Red Ice TV.

It seems like Flowers is not protecting Nazism from paganism; he's protecting paganism from Nazism , although apparently there is something of a practical overlap between these things according to this article. https://www.spiralnature.com/culture/heathens-nazi-problem/

Knowing Flowers' agenda and bias is a useful tool for reading this book. I don't think anyone should fear contamination by racist ideas because this book is not racist or antisemitic. (It may be more anti-Christian and anti-Catholic, but who cares? Right?) Apart from that, there is nothing wrong with undercutting hysterical tropes that want to explain the cosmic evil of the Nazis with cosmic evil causes.

I have read several books on the history of National Socialism and occultism. My interest comes from a perspective 180 degrees off from Flowers. My interest as a Catholic is the Catholic relationship with National Socialism. This interest has a tendency to lead to investigations into German culture and the German counterculture.

Flowers takes the reader through 19th century occultism. The reader is introduced to Guido von List, Baron Heinrich von Sebbottendorf, and Lanz von Liebenfels, who are usually identified as mysterious sources that led to National Socialist ideology. Flowers offers some of the best biographical descriptions of these odd figures, although he generally distances them from National Socialism on the grounds that they were not antisemitic or represented some other departure from what would become National Socialism. The nineteenth century occult world is murky and Byzantine with its theosophy, ariosophy, Madame Blavatsky, various occult lodges, and, of course, Aleister Crowley. The characters come and go and change sides in a way that is possible only for fanatics in a tiny community .

One of the interesting points that Flowers makes is to explain many of the quirks of Nazi leaders on the Lebensreform (Life Reform)/Reformbewegungen (“Reform Movement.) This was the nineteenth century movement toward health and clean living by practices like vegetarianism and nudity. Why was Hitler a vegetarian? Because he was influenced by the Reform Movement. Flowers points out:

The Reform movement is the great-grandfather of the American hippies†23 of the 1960s and must be viewed as a broad and all-inclusive movement beyond the model of partisan politics. The men who made up the Nazi leadership came of age when this movement was in full swing, which perhaps accounts for a great deal of the unorthodox beliefs held by many of these men—for example, why Hitler was a teetotalist, antivivisectionist vegetarian!

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 66). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Political developments often lag twenty to forty years behind popular culture. If you want to find out why leaders today are doing something, it is useful to look at what was popular and cutting edge when they were young.

Germany prior to the Third Reich had a strong counter-culture. Theosophy and related occult ideas found a culture already manured by the Reform Movement. At the elite level, Germany was not a conservative Christian culture during the nineteenth century:

//This changed in the nineteenth century. Rational idealism, practiced by Kant and Hegel, was turned into a materialistic economic political philosophy by Karl Marx. Traditional Christian theology was subjected to widespread rationalistic attacks by the new biblical criticism. At the same time, there was an influx of exciting and apparently effective religio-philosophical conceptions from the East. Ideas imported from the Buddhistic and Brahmanic religions, especially as embodied in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, all led to a new way of thinking that was ready to wipe away the old established philosophies and theologies. One of the most important figures in popularizing the new revolutionary way of thinking was the artist Richard Wagner, followed by his former acolyte, Friedrich Nietzsche. This package of ideas was a potent mix for cultural change.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (pp. 38-39). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Richard Wagner was the nineteenth century “rock star” who used his influence to make paganism/antisemitism “cool.” Wagner mediated Schopenhauer's philosophy to a broader culture. He mentored Nietzsche. His son in law was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose “Myth of the 19th Century” was important to the subsequent Volkisch movement. Flowers writes:

//The roots of the Nazis' conception of Positive Christianity lie in the late nineteenth century with the school of Richard Wagner and his son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. They crystalized a vision of an Aryanized Christianity, devoid of what they considered Judaic elements. Jesus Christ was seen as the Aryan Man, and, commenting on his use of ancient pre-Christian Germanic imagery and myth in some of his operas, Wagner himself identifies Wotan and Christ (Steigmann-Gall 2003, 101).

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 424). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Flowers offers an explanation of the NS concept of “Positive Christianity” that I haven't seen before. The citation of authority for his approach is scant or non-existent, but it does make sense and fits a lot of the facts:

Technically, the term Positive Christianity meant a Christianity shorn of its miraculous fables and its Jewish context. It posits the role of the historical individual named Jesus as an exemplary model of the Aryan Man.*96 The foundational documents of Christianity (i.e., the Bible) were subjected to text-critical examination by which all irrational elements were eliminated and the whole message and nature of the religion remade in the image of the philosophical approach of the nineteenth century. The roots of the Nazis' conception of Positive Christianity lie in the late nineteenth century with the school of Richard Wagner and his son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. They crystalized a vision of an Aryanized Christianity, devoid of what they considered Judaic elements. Jesus Christ was seen as the Aryan Man, and, commenting on his use of ancient pre-Christian Germanic imagery and myth in some of his operas, Wagner himself identifies Wotan and Christ (Steigmann-Gall 2003, 101).

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 424). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Flowers defines “positive” in the sense of “critical”:

//Because later mythology about Nazi occultism has focused so much on ideas of paganism and “weird science,” one aspect of the movement that has gone virtually unremarked—although it is the only occult topic that would later be explicitly mentioned in the Party Program of the NSDAP—is “Positive Christianity.” At first glance this formula appears to be a general reference to some sort of “affirmative” Christianity. But this is not the case. In this context, the German adjective positiv (from the French positif) actually refers to the philosophical concept of the application of critical knowledge and reason to the questions of theology and biblical text criticism pioneered by nineteenth-century thinkers such as Emil-Louis Burnouf (1821–1907) and Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891).

For some, the practice of what became known as biblical textual criticism among German philologists in the nineteenth century provided a deep blow to the possibility of believing in the doctrines taught by the church over the previous centuries. Such criticism had begun as early as the late seventeenth century, but it reached a high point among German philologists of the nineteenth century. As the Bible was scientifically (linguistically) demonstrated to be a hodgepodge of texts written at different times by various interests and authors, with little underlying coherence, it became harder for thinking men to believe in the mythology constructed by the churches. This, then, opened the door for elite thinkers to engage not only with a burgeoning atheistic scientism but with various forms of neopaganism as well.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 78). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Flowers also notes:

German biblical criticism developed an agenda of “deJudaizing Christianity in the name of Reason.” The “grandfather” of German Positive Christianity was Paul de Lagarde, a professor of Oriental languages, who was influential on both Wagner and Chamberlain. “Through the pens of these writers, Jesus was transformed into an Aryan hero struggling against Jews and Judaism.”

Generally speaking, early twentieth-century German opposition to Christianity and Christian doctrines was not so much rooted in pre-Christian paganism as it was in hypermodernistic materialism and scientism. The hostility to Christianity and to traditional religion that many leading Nazis felt was largely rooted in the same soil as the opposition to these ideas found among Russian Bolsheviks. In both cases their particular political and economic ideologies were envisioned as replacements for the church and religion. A revived form of paganism, as understood based on scholarly evidence of the past, would have been far too difficult to control over time.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 112). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Given its genesis as a form of Protestant exegesis, “Positive Christianity was mainly anchored in Protestant areas of Germany.” The deJudaizing of Christianity made major inroads into Protestantism in the form of the German Christian movement. A substantial number of German Protestants were associated with the deJudaizing German Christians but ran up against the “Confessing Church” that refused to jettison the Jewish roots of Christianity. Flowers notes that Luther's antisemitism was a salient point of contact between the NS party and Protestants.

The anti-modern trend among conservatives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was well stocked with quotes from the works of Luther. Lutherans tended to vote disproportionately for the NSDAP, as compared to Roman Catholics.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (pp. 197-198). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.


In contrast, affiliation with the NS party led Catholics to apostasy. There were many apostate members of the NS party, including Himmler and Goebbels, who left the Catholic Church, and Hitler, who did not. This tendency to apostasy had historical roots:

Lanz joined the Pan-Germanic political/esoteric movement—and there is even the suggestion that he converted to Protestantism (Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 92). The gravitation toward Protestantism was common among the generally Catholic “conservative” revolutionaries of Austria as they undertook to alter their cultural environment in a radical way. This was done in a spirit of nationalism, to rid German culture of Roman influence, and was known as the Los-von-Rom! (Away from Rome!) movement. The main basis of Lanz's protest against the church was his belief that it had abandoned its original purpose, which according to him was to serve as an Ariosophical institute for the sacred and heroic cultivation of the race. What Lanz intended to do was to reform this state of affairs by founding his own order of Templars, which would restore the church to its original purpose as an overseer of racial purity.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 140). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Flowers is keen to protect paganism from Nazism. I question the high percentage of pagans he estimates (15 to 20%) but clearly the pragmatic Hitler was not going to alienate the majority of Germans who still remained factually or notionally Christian:

In the final analysis, after accessing and studying the original sources in the German language for more than forty years of research, it is my conclusion that the occult, esoteric, and even pagan elements present in National Socialism are almost entirely a matter of something that was present in the individual Party leaders and the rank and file of the membership, not something that was official or overtly promoted by the regime. There was a struggle between the pagan and Christian wings of the Party on a deep ideological basis; Hitler gave the victory to the Christian faction. The pagan faction of the country, almost all of whom did sympathize to some degree with the NSDAP program (in the beginning, at least), accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the population. This was a significant minority, but not numerous enough to constitute “the masses” Hitler was so interested in manipulating. To have sided with that minority, toward which he had no personal ideological sympathy in any event, would have been ideological suicide. The Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were masters of the magic of propaganda aimed as acquiring power and maintaining it. The secrets and ritual of this form of magic are on display in Mein Kampf and in the ceremonial programs of the NSDAP. These methods were not, however, aimed at a revival of paganism or at some worship of anything or anyone other than Hitler, the apparatus of the NSDAP, and the idealized (Nazified) image of the German Volk and state. Hitler's models were largely taken from those of his rivals, the Bolsheviks of Russia. The Nazis imitated the game of the Sozis, they just looked much better doing it.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (pp. 595-596). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Flowers is definitely correct in describing National Socialism as a hodge-podge of attitudes depending on a particular leader. Himmler, Rosenberg, and Hess were pagans or occultists. Hitler believed in “magic” in the psychological sense used by Flowers. Goebbels and Goring were probably just opportunists who lived like de facto atheists. There was no core ideology like Communism's official atheistic position that Nazis had to adhere to.

This is an exhaustive and exhausting book. At times, I did not know how much stock to give its claims given Flowers' heterodox – even kooky – beliefs. On the other hand, he may be right about a lot of his claims. If you have an interest in the subject, I would say read other books before coming to this one, but don't necessarily avoid this book.

Dead Lies Dreaming by Charles Stross

I've been a long-time fan of Charles Stross's “Laundry Files” series. The Laundry was Great Britain's occult protection division. It was where the wizards and combat magicians were stockpiled. Anyone who had stumbled onto the secret that higher-level computation was the door into magic was drafted into the Laundry to keep the secret under wraps.

The series has always been a whimsical combination of a spy novel and a Cthulhu horror story.

In the first eight books, we followed the career of Bob as he moved from IT schlub to Eater of Souls. Along the way, we learned that there were vampires and there was an invasion of Elves. The purpose of the Laundry was to forestall the day when the stars aligned and Dark Elder Gods returned. The conundrum was that magic becomes stronger the more computing power is found in the real world.

The Dark Elder Gods returned somewhere around 2017. At that point, the series went from urban occult fantasy to a kind of alt-hist/parallel universe where the British Government was taken over by the Dark Pharoah and elven warriors crucify Santa Claus outside of a department store.

A lot of the whimsy that made the Bob part of the series so enjoyable has left the series.

This newest iteration follows new characters, namely a brother and sister born into a family of traditional magicians who have pledged to kill a child every second generation for power, and the friends of the brother. These characters are all “metahumans,” which means that they have magical/paranormal powers. The brother is wasting his powers on petty robberies to finance a silly movie about Peter Pan. The sister is the executive assistant to an evil Hedge Fund Trader/Priest of a god named “The Mute Poet.” The McGuffin of the story is the recovery of a concordance of the Necronomicon.

This story didn't grab my attention like the prior stories. My main problem is that the characters are unlikable. The brother (“Imp” short for “Impressario”) is obsessed with making an avante-garde version of Peter Pan. He can “push” people into doing what he wants. His friends can cause depression (Doc Depression), cause them to have accidents that luckily favor the friend (Game Boy), and move in some indescribable way that is impossible to stop (the Deliverator). They team up with a metahuman thief-taker who can manifest small objects. (Wendy Deere.) The sister (Eve) is obsessed with power, engages in torture at her boss's behest, and provides phone sex at his demand. I take it that Eve loves Imp, which is a nice thing, but much of the relationship seems based on plot convenience.

I don't think I cared about any of the characters. It didn't help that Stross uses victim group classification to manufacture stipulated empathy for the characters. Game Boy is a transexual whose parents tried to “pray away the gay” and made him wear dresses. Deliverator and Wendy are lesbians who start a relationship for no reason that makes sense. Even Imp and Doc are homosexual. Eve does phone sex at the behest of her evil boss. The fact that the characters are all non-binary, and, therefore, presumably oppressed is supposed to do the work of creating empathic characters out of characters who are narcissistic, slovenly, opportunists intent on using each other.

Even the villain in this book is non-binary.

What the heck does it mean when everyone in a book is non-binary? Is the author fishing for awards? Does he think that is what the audience expects? Given the fact that the non-binary population is 3 to 5% of the total population, it seems too unrealistic not to mean something. Was Stross “checking the boxes” and making sure that he has every category covered except “straight”?

That's what it seemed like to me and I am woefully tired of the “check the box” approach to entertainment. I am not here to be programmed with “right think.” I don't need to know the sexuality of any character unless it is germane to the story. Stop using sexual orientation as a poor substitute for writing characters.

The fact that I am kicking about this is some evidence that I was not fully engaged in the book. Here's another example — I got tired of Stross's use of the term “gammon” to refer to a stereotype of an English man. “Gammon” means “ham” and refers to the skin color and corpulence of the individual. It comes across as the “n-word” for white Britons. Admittedly, the villainous “Bond” character likes to characterize lesbian women as “dykes,” but he's not a nice person, and the use of this terminology is meant to trigger us into disliking him. In contrast, “gammon” is used by Eve, whom I assume we are supposed to like. So, again, what is the meaning of this? That anti-white racism is common and tolerable when committed by upscale young women?

Maybe I shouldn't have let these things influence me but it is a sure sign that I was not invested in the characters, i.e., that they were annoying me.

That said, the plot works like a well-oiled machine. The action and thrills are all there. The weirdness of a Cthulu-style reality was presented. It was entertaining.

It just wasn't Bob.

A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich by Christopher B. Krebs


There is an interesting book to be written about the rediscovery of Tacitus's Germania, but this is not that book.

I have a high tolerance for technical detail and minutia, but “A Most Dangerous Book” by Christopher Krebs went well past my limits. I think the problem was that I kept waiting for the “most dangerous book” part, which, of course, does not happen until late in the narrative when the Germania becomes a primary source for the Nazis. When that happened, I was not surprised although I was exhausted by Krebs' efforts to inflate the significance of the Germania.

This book is mostly about the reception of the Germania. It reminds me of Stephen Greenblatt's “The Swerve,” which was about the discovery and reception of the poem “On the Nature of Things” (De Rerum Natura) by Lucretius. Greenblatt's book promised to describe how De Rerum Natura changed the course of European history, but never came close to making that showing. Instead, Greenblatt's book, like this book, bogged down into a collection of references to the subject book over the centuries, most of which show that the book was taken out of context or largely ignored. It seems to be a mark of this genre for the author to oversell the importance of the book, probably in an effort to attract readers to what is a book of limited interest for those with an “inside the game” love of books.

A problem with both Greenblatt's book and this book is that we never get an introduction to the text. We are told about what people say about the text. We are told about people's reaction to the text. There is, however, never anything more than a broad gesture at the major themes of the work. Certainly, the reader can go and read the text for themselves. Readers should do that. However, it seems like a wasted opportunity to bait the hook with a survey of the work in question.

What also unites Greenblatt's book and this book is that both works were the chance discovery of long-forgotten, last remaining texts by Poggio Bracciolini. Krebs writes:
SILENCE IS almost all we hear of Tacitus for much of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Then, toward the end of 1425, a year otherwise conspicuous for its lack of conspicuousness, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) in Rome sat down to compose with “a hasty hand” one of his many letters to his lifelong friend Niccolò Niccoli in Florence. Secretary by profession, humanist by passion, Poggio reeled off letters that detail his life in general and his hunts for manuscripts in particular. This time he had grand news. As a skilled writer, he knew to withhold this tidbit for last for his correspondent, another bibliomaniac:

Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (p. 56). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

It stirs the romantic cockles of my heart to think about someone marching into a monastic library and pulling out a lost manuscript. I could die satisfied if I pulled off that trick.

The problem is that the next move in disseminating this book is that it wasn't disseminated. Poggio lent it to another scholar who forgot to return it for decades. The text mysteriously moved from site to site until it resurfaced decades later. If the rescue of Tacitus's The Germania from a monastic library was miraculous, grace preserved the text from being lost during this decades-long interregnum.

Thereafter, the reception of the Germania depended on the prejudices or agenda of the recipient. Italians used it to show that Germans were barbaric. Germans used it to show that their ancestors were noble and that there was something like a unified German culture. A fair bit of editing occurred to remove some of the less attractive descriptions of German ritual sacrifices by some of the German commentators.

Krebs walks us through a lot of German history in the guise of talking about the Germania. In a lot of this history, the Germania does not seem to play a significant role. References to the Germania are few and far between.

This changed in the Nineteenth Century with the humiliation of the French victory over the many Germanic states. In the later Nineteenth Century, the Volkisch movement started, and interest in the Germania waxed. After the (second) French victory over the German Reich in World War I, revanchist Germans look to the Germania for inspiration. Even during the Nazi period, interest in the Germania is hit or miss. Himmler loves the Germania, particularly with its putative connection of German virtues with the farming class. Other leaders, including Hitler and Goebbels, were less interested in the antiquity that the Germania represented.

There was a definite “crank” strand in the Nazi movement who turned to the Germania for inspiration. Krebs argues that Nazi anti-miscegenation laws were putatively rooted in the inspiration of Germania:

Though it waned as years went by, Günther's impact on National Socialist ideology was profound. His doctrine was outlined in handbooks like The ABC of National Socialism and summarily found its way into school curricula. It figured centrally and prominently in doctrinaire booklets authorized by Heinrich Himmler, and it left traces in the second part of Mein Kampf (Hitler's library contained many of Günther's writings).60 Rosenberg, who may have initiated the conferral of the NSDAP prize, also noted in his Nuremberg speech the race expert's legal impact. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor was passed “out of the deep conviction that the purity of German blood is the prerequisite of the survival of the German people.” On the strength of this creed, then, the Reichstag “unanimously decreed the following law . . . : Marriages between Jews and citizens of German or related blood are forbidden.” Just as the Germanen, in Günther's interpretation, had discouraged mixed marriages in an effort to retain racial purity, National Socialist legislation prohibited mixed marriages between Jews and Germans. It was hardly the only National Socialist law based on an alleged Germanic practice. Shortly after coming into power the Nazis dissolved unions and passed the Law for the Organization of National Labor, which framed the relationship between manager and employees as one of “leader” and “followers,” the former answerable for the common good, the latter obliged to be loyal—just like Tacitus's Germanen in chapters 14 and 15.61 Similarly, what the Nuremberg race laws chiseled into stone was ultimately an adaptation of the erratic ethnographical stereotype that the Roman historian had taken from Greek sources and applied to the Germanen in chapter 4. As a result ideologically aligned readers of the Germania considered the laws concerning the “Jewish question” as the “most recent effort” to restore the racial purity Tacitus mentioned.62 But there had never been any such thing.

Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (pp. 229-230). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

On the other hand, there are books that argue that the Nuremberg laws were based on American precedents, and those precedents were certainly not based on Tacitus. So, as with most of the book, the actual impact of the Germania on history is nebulous.

Krebs's book also contains a surprising passage about the Catholic bishop of Munich, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber's, attack on the crypto-paganism that the Nazis seemed to be projecting in 1933. Krebs writes:

A FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT noted the “breathless silence in the mighty room.”1 When the cardinal-archbishop of Munich and Freising, Michael von Faulhaber, ascended the pulpit of Saint Michael's Church in Munich to deliver his New Year's address, he held the heightened attention not just of his audience, with its numerous journalists from around the world: The newly installed National Socialist regime also listened uneasily. It was December 31, 1933. The Weimar Republic was dead but its gravediggers not yet certain of their power, and the cardinal made them nervous. Saint Michael's, the largest Renaissance church north of the Alps, on the preceding Sundays of Advent had proved too small to host all who wanted to attend, so Faulhaber's sermons were transmitted by loudspeaker to two other churches, both filled to the last seat. With forthright eloquence “welded in the fiery forge of the . . . prophets of the Old Testament,” Faulhaber had addressed inopportune issues.2 While the National Socialist program contained an article (number 24) that decried the Old Testament as an offense against the “moral sense and the sense of decency of the Germanic race,” he had spoken about its value. And although he was careful to qualify his statements, he “should” have foreseen, in the words of the Security Service (SD), that in praising the people of Israel for having “exhibited the noblest religious values,” he would outrage some and comfort many others.3 Julius Schulhoff, a German Jew, thanked the cardinal in a letter, expressing his hope that God would strengthen his “wonderful courage.”4 Michael von Faulhaber showed courage again in his fifth sermon that New Year's Eve; he would need more for many weeks after.
The telling topic on the last day of the year was “Christianity and Germanicness” (Christentum und Germanentum).* The archbishop worried that there was “a movement afoot to establish a Nordic or Germanic religion.”5 The merits of Christianity were being cast into doubt. But who could possibly take a look at the Germanic existence before Christianization and doubt them? To explain his surprise the cardinal proceeded to rouse a drowsy specter of the Germanic barbarian from 450 years of sleep: Wittingly or not, the picture he sketched was almost an exact replica of the barbaric Germane that Enea Silvio Piccolomini had brought to the fore in his influential treatise in the fifteenth century. Like his predecessor Faulhaber used “a small but valuable historical source,” and with it painted for his congregation an abhorrent picture of polytheism, human sacrifices, and “savage superstition.” He disapproved of the pre-Christians' warrior existence with its primitive “obligation of the vendetta” and denounced their “proverbial indolence, mania for drinking,” carousals, and “passion for dice playing.” The list of shortcomings was long, and all were substantiated using Tacitus's text.

Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (pp. 214-215). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

And:

A secret SD memo reported that all five speeches met with an “enormous resonance,” but none more than the New Year's address.6 The national and international press—including the Bayerische Staatszeitung, the New York Times, Le Temps (Paris), and Il Lavoro (Geneva)—all covered it. National Socialists of all ages and ranks refuted, scorned, and attacked the address in journals like Germanien, People and Race, and the Vanguard. It was “a political crime,” they said, and its speaker, “a categorical and determined enemy of the National Socialist state.”7 Alfred Rosenberg, the regime's chief ideologue, charged the cardinal with “severely disgracing the process of self-reflection which [was] under way in the Third Reich.”8 But the German people would not, he added threateningly, “quietly accept such utterances.” Far from acquiescing, Nazi opposition took violent form during the night of January 27, when two shots were fired into the living room of the cardinal's home. No one was hurt. The book containing the sermons came under fire as well. Members of the Hitler Youth, “with the warrior passion of the ancient Germanen,” tried to disrupt its distribution.9 Just as in May 1933, when the Bebelplatz in Berlin had crackled, ablaze with a bonfire of books, they burned it in the course of a demonstration (to no avail: It sold at least 150,000 copies and was translated into eleven languages). A caricature ominously suggested that a similar fate might be in store for its author. Even though some critics occasionally ventured into the territory of rational argument, all in all the reactions “cast the contemporary cultural sophistication in a less than flattering light,” as the archbishop wryly wrote.10 When he uncovered the barbarian past, barbarity reared up in the present.

Krebs, Christopher B.. A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (pp. 216-217). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Along with Jewish businesses and synagogues, Faulhaber's residence would be attacked on Kristallnacht. Opposing revanchist antiquarianism can be a dangerous occupation.
In sum, like a lot of books of this type, there is a flood of information. Whether that information is interesting or material to the reader depends on what the reader hopes to find. I appreciated the passage about Faulhaber. Was that germane to the topic of the Germania being “a most dangerous book”? Probably not. I'm not sure Faulhaber mentioned the Germania; it seems that he was responding to volkisch romantic stereotypes that were in the air at the time.

So, whether the reader will find this book worth the investment depends on what the reader hopes to find. As Krebs concludes:

“In the end the Roman historian Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book; his readers made it so.”

But isn't that true of all books?

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America Paperback by Pekka Hämäläinen

https://www.amazon.com/Indigenous-Continent-Contest-North-America/dp/1324094060/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=indigenous+continent&qid=1704578332&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-catcorr

If you have ever played Axis and Allies, you have a sense about how the European conquest of America went. Axis and Allies is based on World War II. The Axis players start with a big lead in manpower and material. The American player starts way behind. However, after a few years of game play, the American player's productivity catches up and the American player starts putting on as much manpower and material ever turn as the Axis players has on the board.
The game is over at that point.
There is a sense on the part of most people that Europeans were bullies once they arrived in North America. A holistic view of post-Columbian history puts the lie to this view. America was discovered by Europe around 1500 AD. The French, English, and Spanish began putting colonies on the edges of the Atlantic seaboard around 1600 AD. By 1800 AD – two centuries later – the European colonies were still within a few hundred miles of the Atlantic, notwithstanding European superiority in technology, science, economics, and organization. It was only in the mid to late 1800s that Western power went into hyperdrive and white settlers flooded into the larger portion of North America.
Pekka Hamalainen surveys the long history of the contest for North America. His book describes a pattern of European interaction with the indigenous population. Beginning with the earliest explorers, native tribes in North America were able to stop European incursions into their territory. Spanish explorers frequently found themselves directed into deserts or stopped cold by the superior power of the native tribe. This power was typically found in the larger population of the native tribes compared to the European interlopers, but it also was based on the tribe's knowledge of local conditions and its flexible political arrangements with other Indian nations.
English colonists found themselves checked for a long time by the Iroquois Confederation. The Six Nations were ablet to parley their strategic position near European settlements, playing off the French and English powers, to strengthen their position in relation to other tribes, which they crushed, enslaved, or drove off. Hamalainen asserts that Iroquois were the best armed indigenous power on the continent, who rendered French military power moot. The Five Nation hegemony broke down after the English had defeated the French in North America, thereby depriving the Iroquois of the strategy of playing both ends against the middle. The Iroquois also made the mistake of siding with the English when the Americans were developing into the regional power.
What finally did the Six Nations in was that they found themselves being picked apart in the same way that they had pitted the French against the English. Hamalainen points out that an epidemic played the dispositive role in the end of the Six Nations, but the Iroquois had survived prior epidemics. The difference was the changed political environment:
IN JANUARY 1777, IN the midst of the cataclysmic war, one of the most significant turning points in American history took place, throwing almost all war strategies into question. Abruptly and shockingly, the Six Nations ritually extinguished their central council fire for the first time in the history of the league. Suddenly, the Iroquois Empire was no more. A disease epidemic had broken out, and the Iroquois, suffering and dying, turned against each other. Shockingly, their confederacy split into incompatible factions: the Tuscaroras aligned with the fledgling United States; the Oneidas struggled to remain neutral but eventually clashed with the Mohawks and burned their towns. The Onondagas tried to remain neutral but eventually sided with the British. The Senecas, caught in the middle, suffered heavy losses. With the Six Nations debilitated by a civil war, unprecedented strategic options became available to Americans. (p. 312-313.)
The pattern of a local Indian nation utilizing its position to check white settler advances was repeated in new territories. Further to the west, the great Sioux Confederacy acted as the check on European expansion. In the southern Plains, the Comanche empire was the power broker for approximately a century. Comanche power was projected into northern Mexico where the Comanche plundered and took slaves.
Hamalainen's position appears to be Indian-centric. Readers may come out of this book thinking that their prejudices in favor of the oppressed Indians have been vindicated. Hamalainen's narrative makes a hash of the oppressed/oppressor narrative. The tribes that acted as a check on European expansion were often engaged in imperial practices like genocide, ethnic cleansing, slaving, and raiding for plunder. Hamalainen makes this observation about interactions with the Sioux:
The Sioux were strangers to the Lakes Indians, and their ceremonies and diplomatic protocols were drastically different. Ignored and excluded from commercial and diplomatic circles, the Sioux retaliated, attacking and killing Meskwakis, Odawas, and other Lakes peoples. “A general League” formed “against a common foe,” and when Sioux ambassadors visited the village of Chequamegon at Lake Superior's Chequamegon Bay in 1670, Wyandots ritually boiled and ate them. (p. 132.)
Although Hamalainen's narrative emphasizes Indian autonomy, it also reveals that Indian success was premised on location to the Europeans. Successful tribes were in a “Goldilocks Zone.” If they were too close to Europeans, the density of European population with the magnifier of technology would lead to the destruction of Indian society. If the tribe was too far, they would be at the mercy of tribes who were able to intercept European technology, particularly European gun technology. The ideal position was to be in a location where the tribe could act as the middle-man between those Indians harvesting resources and the Europeans with the technology and goods. Hamalainen explains:
Fundamentally, it was a matter of distance and geography. North America had become divided in two: there was the narrow and patchy colonial belt on the coastal plains, where Europeans dominated, and there was the immense Indigenous interior, where Native territories extended deep into what, to Europeans, was a great unknown. The two Americas were almost complete opposites. In the interior, the Columbian Exchange often worked to the Indians' advantage. Deadly germs were brought inland by European traders, but their impact remained limited, whereas new military technology—guns, powder, metal, and horses—became available through colonial border markets and extensive Indigenous trade networks. In a transitional belt where the Indians were neither too close to European colonies to fall under their epidemiological shadow nor too far away to reap the benefits of their commerce, several geographically privileged Indigenous regimes rose to challenge colonial expansion on their own terms. This emerging belt was where great fortunes could be amassed, and where empires were won and lost. (p. 258.)
Ultimately, the ability of the Indians to remain in the Goldilock's Zone and to play off European factions came to an end in the late 19th century. By that time, white population swamped the Indian's local advantage in population. Europeans were able to project power throughout North America by railroad and telegraph. The dividends of the Industrial Revolution overwhelmed the advantages that Indians had in local knowledge.
This is a readable book. The survey format fills in a lot of details that are too often assumed. Although Hamalainen's bias is conventionally on the side of the oppressed Indians against the “white settler” oppressor, his scholastic integrity prevents this book from becoming another bit of moralizing.

George Franklin Feldman's book goes a long way to documenting the inconvenient facts. Feldman is not a professional scholar, which probably is to his credit in this day and age. He seems to be a layman with an interest in digging up information on a particular theme, namely, the dark side of history that professionals seem to want to bury.[3]

Feldman's book is another book indebted to Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization. [4]


Taking a leaf from Keeley, Feldman begins with well-established archeological sites establishing the long war before civilization, i.e., before the “white colonists.” One such site — the Crow Creek site — dates to around 1325 AD in central South Dakota. The Crow Creek site was a fort prepared for defense against an attack. The attack came and resulted in the massacre of over 500 Indians. Feldman describes the carnage supported by the archeological record as follows:

Whoever the attackers were, there is archeological evidence that the villagers expected them. A huge fortification ditch, 1,250 feet long, had just been completed, or was in the process of completion, when the attackers struck. At least five hundred men, women, and children were killed — and not just killed by mutilated. Hands and feet were cut off, each body's head was scalped; the remains were left scattered round the village, which was burned. (p. xv.)

A death toll of five hundred was rarely reached in massacres of Indians by “white colonists.”

The violence of this attack followed previous rounds of violence. Feldman notes:

War was not new to these unknown people. At least two of them had been scalped before and survived; others had projectile points embedded in their bones, which had been healed over. Othe excavations at a site north of Crow Creek, Whistling Elk Village also indicate that warfare in the plains was a way of life in the pre-history era of Middle America. (p. xv.)

So, to underscore the point, we have archeological evidence of Indians scalping Indians long before any “white colonists” set foot on North America.

Warfare was endemic before Columbus. Feldman reports that twenty percent of burials between 1400 BC and 300 AD on the Channel Islands of California show that the cause of death was the result of skulls being crushed. Burial sites for the Oneota Indians in west-central Illinois indicate that one-third of the burials were of individuals who had died violently. (p. xviii.)

None of this should be surprising to anyone who has read Keeley or is acquainted with the tradition of low-level warfare that plagues hunter-gatherer culture. What Feldman brings to the table is the other part of this tradition, which involves the terrifying treatment of war victims. Feldman notes the “cutting off way” warfare strategy used by Indians; the attacks by ambush, the unwillingness to attack unless the attacker had overwhelming superiority, the capture of captives, etc. These are laid out in detail in “The Cutting Off Way” which I reviewed last month.

What Feldman brings to the table is the darker side of Indian warfare. Feldman looks at the documentation available for particular Indian tribes. This approach is necessary because that is how the written records are organized. In other words, people who dealt with the Natchez dealt with the Natchez and not the Apaches. This approach also allows an examination of the diversity among Indian tribes. Thus, it seems that all the tribes discussed in the book engaged in torture-executions of prisoners. These executions seem to follow a standard model where the prisoner — male or female, warrior or not — was tied to a post and then attacked by all members of the community. On the other hand, ritualized sacrifice to deities was associated with a minority of tribes, e.g. the Natches, the Pawnee, and the Huron. Headhunting was more endemic. Scalping seems to have been a short-form version of headhunting. Heads may have been preferred but scalps were portable. (See p. 91.)

Cannibalism is more problematic. Anthropologists have described some highly ritualized cannibalistic practices. The Kwakiutl had an order of cannibals — the hamatsas — that ate corpses, although the corpses may have been the corpses of slaves killed for the purpose. Iroquois and Chippewa had a reputation for eating the villagers they had ambushed and slain.[5] Sometimes Iroquois raiding parties would use the children they had kidnapped on raids as an available larder during their escape from enemy territory. Archeological evidence supports the conclusion that the Anasazi engaged in culinary cannibalism.

Although these practices were generally reciprocated, they were still terrifying to neighboring populations, particularly so after one tribe began to dominate surrounding tribes.[6] At some point, the non-dominant tribes found it in their interest to move far away, either incorporating themselves into stronger tribes or attempting to carve out territory in some other contested territory As Feldman notes, the idea that tribes occupied the land they happened to be on when the “white colonists” arrived is problematic given the constant state of warfare that existed.

History is complicated, but one has to wonder what was going on. Why did Indians do these things? How did they feel about doing these things? On the one hand, there seems to be a lack of empathy for other Indian tribes. Feldman points out that a lot of the names for Indian tribes that we know mean things like “enemy” or “other.” So, the lack of empathy may have been quite real.[7]

Empathy is often the product of being able to imagine oneself in the position of the Other. Indians were able to make such connections. We know that Indians found these practices terrifying. When they were on the losing side, they were quick to realize that getting out of the way was preferable to becoming a torture victim or a side dish. The ethos of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is fostered by the realization that others can easily find themselves in the position to do unto you. While war was endemic, so was trade. Indians could see the Other as themselves when convenient.

This insight seems particularly germane to cannibalism. It does not seem that anyone was particularly proud of cannibalism. Even the groups that acknowledged cannibalism tended to excuse it based on circumstance. Who is getting eaten is never clear from the description of the Kwakiutl hamatsas. It doesn't sound like the Kwakiutl were marching off to harvest neighbors for dinner. There does seem to be a broad antipathy with being identified as a cannibal.

Again, what gives? Perhaps, the answer is that it was good to have a terrifying reputation as someone who might well torture their enemy to death if captured in war: Pro-tip — don't go to war with those people. On the other hand, cannibalism is a bit over the line. Indian tribes needed allies. Being the kind of people who ate other people might just make the tribe an “enemy of mankind” rather than just a tough neighbor. You wanted to cow your neighbors, not inspire a crusade by everyone else to exterminate you.[8]

In short, if you found yourself living in a tough neighborhood, terrorism was a strategy to communicate, “don't mess with me.”

Feldman offers some potted tu quoque arguments against the “white colonists.” Thus, at the tail end of one war in the 1680s, Puritans responded to the usual Indian practices of torture and ambush by taking the heads of various Indian leaders — who had been killed on the battlefield or while trying to escape capture — and mounting them on pikes in Boston, Plymouth, Harford, and Taunton. These six heads remained on display for decades, it is said.

We might wonder at the barbarity of our ancestors, although there was a tradition of displaying the heads of executed traitors in England. In addition, the six heads represent a fraction of the head-hunting that was going on among the Indians themselves. Finally, in terms of the strategy of terror, the display of heads, communicated what would happen to the perpetrator of the next surprise attack, which may have been the only way to speak in a language that the Indians would understand.

Feldman also points out that the Mexican government had an off-again/on-again policy of paying for Indian scalps. This is probably the basis of the claim that “white colonists” adopted the Indian practice of scalping, although, in other contexts, Mexicans are not identified as “white.” This Mexican policy led to an industrialization of the Indian practice of ambush and scalping by Mexicans, escaped slaves, other Indians, and some well-known Mexican and American entrepreneurs. Even the description that Feldman gives undermines the “Oppressed/Oppressor” narrative that we are supposed to adopt. The Indians against whom this practice was directed — the Apache — were winning their own game of genocide and terror. The Apache had effectively driven the Mexican population into small territorial enclaves where they awaited their eradication.[9]

The bounty for scalps policy of the Mexican government was less about marshaling terror as a weapon, than creating a privatized system for projecting military strength. The bounty was a kind of system of marquee and reprisal.

History is complicated. There is no reason to think that American Indians did not engage in torture, headhunting, cannibalism, or genocide given the extensive archeological and documentary evidence that they did. If they did, they were quite ordinary in terms of cultural norms throughout the world.

Further, terror is an effective strategy. It worked for the most part. There was no system for adjudicating disputes. Each tribe lived in a Hobbesian world of sovereignty where it was the sole determiner of justice, law, and order. There was no higher power to appeal to. In a Hobbesian world, life is “nasty, brutal, and short” and so one needed to be nastier and more brutal to make the other guy's life shorter.

The problem is that this strategy ran up against a clash of civilizations. Western cultures would not accept ambush, torture, and terror directed against them at their stage of development, and when they had the population resources, they did not have to. Some Indian cultures, on the other hand, could not give up their way of war. Alfred Kroeber studied the Yuki-Kato cultures of California. These cultures were head-hunters who were engaged in a genocidal conflict with each other right up to the arrival of “white colonists” in large numbers in the 1850s.

The California Genocide is often discussed, but how much of it was fueled by the clash of cultures. On the one hand, California Indians were trained to terror tactics. On the other hand, population and technology had reached a tipping point in favor of Westerners. Are we to believe that California Indians did not attempt to employ the strategy that had worked for them during their history?[10] And if they did, what kind of reaction would that have provoked?

This leads to the recent attack by Hamas. Gang rapes and burning babies are pre-modern, but not, as we've seen, irrational. If the purpose is to scare off neighbors, then Hamas is replicating a strategy that worked for tens of thousands of years. On the other hand, as we've seen, these clash of civilization scenarios do not work out well for the vastly outnumbered and outgunned pre-modern civilization.

Can Hamas give up its terror strategy? The Hamas practice of raising Gazan children to hate Jews with such an intensity that the result is the war crimes we saw on October 7, 2023, resembles the Apache technique of raising children to torture animals. Can that kind of thing be turned off? In the American case, the answer was reservations. We decry and condemn reservations today, but if you have habituated a people into the ways of terror, is there a better solution than segregation? Education and appeals to common humanity are optimistic but does our experience suggest that they work well enough that we would risk the lives of our children on them?

History is complicated. Sometimes all we can do is acknowledge that complexity.

The Coming Religious Wars.
The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us by Adam Kirsch

https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Against-Humanity-Imagining-Without/dp/B0B2CDZJLN/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3FZGBK21IZXW&keywords=adam+kirsch%2C+the+revolt+against+humanity&qid=1704052230&sprefix=Adam+Kirsch%2Caps%2C219&sr=8-1
I read this short, interesting book on the plane during my trip to India in December 2023. There was no intentional connection between the trip and the book. The book - ”monograph” might be a better description - had the advantage of being lightweight for carrying for 40 hours being about 100 pages in length and being a paperback did not need to be put into “airplane mode” on take-offs.
Adam Kirsch is a literary critic. He's written books on various literary subjects, including Calvin Trilling. In this case, he turns his attention to developing literary/philosophical themes that challenge the humanistic assumptions that are the roots on which the discipline of literary criticism stands. Literary criticism is about the human institution that is literature. Literature is something done by humans as a way of understanding human existence. Humanity as the measure of all things is baked into the project of literature, e.g., stories may be about the actions of gods, but if humans are to understand these stories that they are telling, they will scale them against human beings.
Kirsch identifies two variants in the “revolt against humanity.” These two tendencies - I am loathe to dignify them with the name of “movement” or “school” - seem to be in fundamental disagreement with each other but on further reflection share much in common.
Kirsch calls one tendency is “Anthropocene antihumanism.” Kirsch explains that Anthropocene antihumanism (“AA”) is inspired by revulsion at humanity's destruction of the natural environment. AA is thoroughly premised on the idea of the “Anthropocene” - a geological era that can be identified by human activity at the geological level, e.g., the widespread distribution of artificial plastics in the geological record. This era is also defined as one in which human intervention is inherently destructive:
In the twenty-first century, Anthropocene antihumanism offers a much more radical response to a much deeper ecological crisis. It says that our self-destruction is now inevitable, and what's more significant, that we should welcome it as a sentence we have justly passed on ourselves. Some antihumanist thinkers look forward to the actual extinction of our species, while others predict that even if some people survive the coming environmental apocalypse, civilization as a whole is doomed. Like all truly radical movements, Anthropocene antihumanism begins not with a political program but with a philosophical idea. It is a rejection of humanity's traditional role as Earth's protagonist, the most important being in creation.
This book is a broad survey of the texts and writers that bear on the topic. Not surprisingly, several science fiction writers are mentioned, particularly in the section on Transhumanism. In the section on AA, Kirsch starts with the 2006 film “Children of Men.” I haven't seen this movie (based on a book by English mystery writer P.D. James) but the scene he describers and its resonance with recent actions by Extinction Rebellion and other trendy anti-oil activists makes me want to repair this oversight.
Extinction Rebellion exists. It uses violent rhetoric like extinction and genocide despite its nominal commitment to non-violence. It has spawned other movements, many of whom do all they can to inconvenience the lives of other human beings in the name of the higher good.
I guess I am jaded. This is my second time around with the existential destruction of humanity. The last time was the 1980s when Leftists were assuring us that we had to unilaterally surrender our nuclear weapons to Communists because Western Democracies were the faction that put the world at risk of global nuclear annihilation. Kirsch mentions this prior point where humanity had to face its extinction (amplified by ideological politics):
The idea that life on Earth faces imminent catastrophe due to human recklessness is not entirely new. Since the late 1940s, humanity has lived with the knowledge that it has the power to annihilate itself at any moment through nuclear war. Indeed, the climate anxiety of the 2010s can be seen as a return of apocalyptic fears that went briefly into abeyance after the end of the Cold War. Climate activism features some of the same tropes as nuclear activism: sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg urging the US Congress to avert climate disaster was reminiscent of ten-year-old Samantha Smith, who in 1982 wrote a widely publicized letter to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov asking him to avert nuclear war. (p.18.)
Ah, yes, Samantha Smith, the Ur-Greta Thunberg.
The Left is endlessly uncreative, like Satan.
Kirsch minimizes nuclear extinction because surviving nuclear war merely involves practicing the values of peace and cooperation, which “we already preach.” On the other hand, the ecological holocaust - presumably global warming - arises from the ideology of human flourishing which we believe is right and good. Humanity becomes a kind of parasite, destroying the life of the rest of the Earth:
Instead, it becomes part of a zero-sum competition that pits the gratification of human desires against the well-being of all of nature - not just animals and plants, but soil, stones, and water. If that's the case, then humanity can no longer be considered a part of creation or nature, as science and religion teach in their different ways. Instead, it must be seen as an anti-natural force that has usurped and abolished nature, substituting its own will for the processes that once appeared to be the immutable basis of life on Earth.
This understanding of humanity's place outside and against the natural order is summed up in the term “Anthropocene,” “Anthropocene,” which in the last decade has become one of the most important concepts in the humanities and social sciences. Technically speaking, the Anthropocene is a proposed designation for a new geological era to follow the Holocene, the era that began about 11,000 years ago with the end of the last ice age. The International Commission on Stratigraphy, the scientific body that formally determines the names and dates of geological epochs, has been considering since 2008 whether to determine that we have now entered the Anthropocene or “human era” instead. (19–20.)
One can't help but notice that separating humanity from “nature” is a religious move. Anyone who has tried to make sense of Cardinal De Lubec's musing about “pura natura” can attest to this point. Nature is simply everything in the created world; supernature is the natural world with grace added.

The religious dimension becomes explicit when Kirsch points out:
In our time, the Anthropocene poses an equally profound challenge. If the killing of God demands the birth of the superman, the killing of nature demands the creation of the posthuman - a new being equal to the task of ruling a denaturalized world. The idea of the posthuman gives rise to aspirations that are both ideological - a new way of thinking about what we are - and technological - an actual transformation of the world and of our own bodies. For the same technological power that enables us to remold nature also makes it possible to remake ourselves, in ways that used to seem equally unthinkable. Once we have done away with nature as a limiting concept, why should human nature be an exception? (p. 23–24.)
Proponents of AA have a theory of human anthropology just as Christianity has its anthropology of original sin. The AA version zeroes in on humanity's innate concupiscence which makes human being's capitalistic. Human sin begins with humanity's insatiable appetite for comfort, security, food, and housing. To give nature some space to exist, humans must voluntarily relinquish control over the world. To round out, the intrinsic religious dimension of environmentalism, humanity is to become ascetic and this asceticism will be grounded in mysticism. Recognizing that people renounce things because of a commitment to a goal, including religious goals, environmentalists seek to cultivate a “mystique around the idea of nature, in order to encourage sacrifices on its behalf.” Thus, Biologist E.O. Wilson argues that “nature deserves reverence” because nature is “amazingly comprehensible with so many secrets to unlock.”
Some radical environmentalists view “mystical asceticism” as leaving too much power in the hands of human beings:
In short, as English writer Paul Kingsnorth complains in his 2011 essay “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” “Today's environmentalism is about people.” Kingsnorth is one of the most interesting and significant thinkers about the Anthropocene because he reverses the usual terms of the discussion. Instead of thinking of the environment as the problem, he thinks of the existence of human beings as the problem. (p. 29–30.)
So, humans are the problem.
It is a short step from there to finding that humans are evil:
If he must choose between nature and humanity, Kingsnorth chooses the former, with full awareness of where such a decision may lead. In the celebrated essay “Dark Ecology,” he writes about his uncomfortable realization that his views resembled those of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who believed that “only the collapse of modern technological civilization can avert disaster.” Kingsnorth rejects terroristic violence, advocating instead for individual withdrawal from the system: “Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction,” he urges. But he recognizes that even nonviolent varieties of Anthropocene antihumanism involve an adverse judgment on the human species. Antihumanists reject any claim humanity might once have had to admiration and solidarity. Instead, they invest their admiration in the nonhuman: animals, plants, rocks, water, air. Any of these entities is superior to humanity, for the simple reason that it doesn't destroy all the others. (p. 31)
Antihumanists do not believe that human self-reflection adds anything to the universe. We can reflect on the beauty of a sunset; ticks can find new hosts during a sunset. What is the difference? And who are we to privilege our thinking as opposed to, say, our digestion. Antihumanists have their version of the Christian Fall, which involves a separation from Nature because of their self-consciousness:
This is true first of all in a physical sense. While we tend to think of ourselves as independent, self-contained beings, we are actually quite permeable. “I am surrounded and penetrated by entities such as stomach bacteria, parasites, mitochondria,” Morton writes. Our anxiety about this symbiosis between humans and nonhumans, our insistence on standing alone and apart, is responsible for what Morton dramatically refers to as “the Severing,” the millennia-long process of estrangement from the natural world that has finally brought us to the disaster of the Anthropocene. “Extinction is the logical conclusion of alienation,” he concludes. (p. 38.)
Perhaps, trash should get a vote. Kirsch writes about Political theorist Jane Bennet's reflections on the vibrancy of a random pile of trash. In Bennett's insight the debris became “vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them.” (p. 39.)
From there it is another short step to argue that it would have been better for people to never have existed. According to David Benatar, “all human lives contain much more bad than is ordinarily recognized. Benatar concludes “Humans have the unfortunate distinction of being the most destructive and harmful species on earth. The amount of suffering in the world could be radically reduced if there were no more humans.”
And what would the universe lose if the human experiment in self-reflection disappeared?[1] Not much according to Benatar:
“What is so special about a world that contains moral agents and rational deliberators?” Benatar jeers. “That humans value a world that contains beings such as themselves says more about their inappropriate sense of self-importance than it does about the world.” (p. 45.)
Ok....maybe, but you first.
This perspective seems nuts, but the last twenty years have shown us how quickly things can move from “nutty discussions among academics” to “use my invented pronoun or lose your job.” Kirsch points out that society is facing a demographic decline. How much of that is due to a generalized loss of moral confidence by human beings who may believe that life is not worth living? Kirsch concludes the section on AA with a summary of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction winning “The Overstory” by Richard Powers which has the theme that trees are morally superior to human beings. The Powers' story concludes with a scientist drinking poison distilled from a tree while uttering the last words “Dying is life, too.”
As literature, this is toxically death-affirming.
If you think this stuff is not already here, it is.[2]
Kirsch explains the Transhumanist skein as follows:
Transhumanism, by contrast, glorifies some of the very things that antihumanism decries - scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of reason. But it believes that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens. Some transhumanists believe that genetic engineering and nanotechnology will allow us to alter our brains and bodies so profoundly that we will escape human limitations like mortality and embodiment. Others look forward, with hope or trepidation, to the invention of artificial intelligences infinitely superior to our own. These beings will demote humanity to the rank we assign to animals - unless they decide that their goals are better served by wiping us out completely.(p.12.)
If the AA component of the revolt against humanity is all about original sin and perdition, the Transhumanist (“TH”) is all about the Eschaton and the Second Coming. In the TH scheme, this involves turning the universe into a computer.
In The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil describes himself as a “patternist,” that is, “someone who views patterns of information as the fundamental reality.” Examples of information patterns include DNA, semiconductor chips, and the letters on this page, all of which configure molecules so that they become meaningful instead of random. By turning matter into information, we redeem it from entropy and nullity. Ultimately, “even the ‘dumb' matter and mechanisms of the universe will be transformed into exquisitely sublime forms of intelligence,” Kurzweil prophesies. (pp. 67–68).
In this case, humanity is not the devil but is the god who will “redeem” the universe.
Prior to that is the dream of immortality. Kirsch offers this observation:
But transhumanists believe that we will take the first steps toward disembodiment sooner than most people realize. In fact, while engineering challenges remain, we have already made the key conceptual breakthroughs. First, we know that the human mind has a completely material basis. There is no intangible soul or spirit that occupies our bodies; the experience of being an “I” is produced by chemical-electrical processes in the brain. This thoroughgoing materialism is still resisted by most religious believers, but science has known it for a long time. (pp. 68–69). [3]
Kirsch concludes with a chapter on “Spiritual Warfare.” It seems obvious that what motivates each side is not technical, but theological. Both TH and AA are specific kinds of Christian heresies. I began by noting that I read this on my trip to India. While in India, I had a short discussion about the Hindu idea of “god.” I was told by my Hindu interlocutor that for Hindus, god is not self-aware or sentient. This view completely overturns the Western perspective for whom God is thought thinking itself. Self-awareness is a divine property. It must be because we find self-awareness in human beings, and if it exists in the creation, it must exist in the Creator.
I imagine that Hindus would say that self-awareness is not a divine quality. It is an error on the part of human beings who must get past the illusion of sentience to the awareness that all are one in Brahma.
Perhaps, AA would map nicely onto Hinduism, but I saw nothing in India that suggested that anyone would give someone preaching voluntary extinction the time of day. Individuals in the Hindu tradition may choose to non-violently end their lives, but only when they have achieved enlightenment. For the average Hindu, there are “yogas” and “dharmas” that yoke one to this life. The idea of abandoning one's duty to one's family in order to commit collective suicide would be antithetical to the core teaching of Hinduism. I suspect that they would find the idea of mass suicide to be a distasteful first-world solution to a first-world fetish.[4]
But for some Christians, the idea of original sin and the damnation of the unsaved still lurks in the culture like primitive code. Alternatively, the idea that some will be raised to a resurrection body in a New Jerusalem may be a badly remembered bit of childhood Sunday school. Because these bits of imagery are unhooked from the rest of Christian thought, they can do a lot of damage. Thus, Christianity preaches immanence and transcendence. We are saved in the here and now; God exists in the here and now. Yet, God and our salvation transcend this material plane.
Most importantly, we are not God. We don't decide whether humanity shall go extinct or that it will renounce its ability to self-reflect for the sake of greater efficiency. 
Kirsch makes some good points about how the ideas of AA have a natural constituency among globalists and those who want their utopia in the here and now. Populists, nationalists, and conservatives will oppose both TH and AA.
How serious is this stuff? I'd like to say that it is pure nonsense, but the ideas - particularly the extreme ideas - push the Overton Window way open. If you don't know how wide that window is, you are never going to appreciate the debate.
Footnotes:
[1] I recently reviewed the science fiction novel “Blindsight” by Peter Watts, which argues that self-consciousness may be an evolutionary dead-end. Blindsight argues that humanity may well lose to very efficient Turing-test passing automata which neatly outthinks us by raw processing power while we are engaging in introspection and deciding which course best reflects who we are. https://medium.com/@peterseanEsq/our-dehumanized-future-a291c33ebf07
[2] See also “Blindsight,” supra.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

You might go into this book thinking that it is a science fiction time-travel story. The heart of the story is a serial killer who manages to kill different women across six decades. The killer — Harper Curtis — does not do this the normal way of living through time. Instead, visits the victims — all women who “shine” to him — when they are little and then again when they are in their twenties. While the girls grow up. Harper doesn't age.

How does he do it?

It is not much of a spoiler to share that he has a magical house that lets him open the door to any day that he desires during the period 1929 to 1993.

Wait....what?

What kind of technology does that? It is not technology. The story is not interested in the mechanics of time travel. It and the reader simply assume that this is the way things are. Generally, the reader has enough goodwill to suspend disbelief and make the assumption for the sake of the story. This is part of the bargain between reader and writer — the writer will tell an interesting story if the reader concedes certain points about the way the world works. In fantasy, the concession is that magic works or elves live among us. We know this can't be true, but if we don't allow those assumptions, we don't have fantasy stories.

Science fiction works the same way. A science fiction writer will hand wave at some scientific principle or device, but effectively it is a gesture to a kind of magic. Again, the author can invoke “wormholes” as the basis for time travel, and the reader just has to agree that time travel is scientifically possible and that this device can do it.

Then, there is horror. Horror seems to exist as a separate genre, perhaps shading into fantasy on the “grimdark fantasy” frontier. Horror generally eschews systems of magic, leaving that to fantasy. Humans seem to lack agenda; they are the victims and if they prevail it is because the villain is hit by a car or a nuclear bomb goes off, to allude to the way Stephen King concluded “Fire Starter” and “The Stand.” Fantasy is definitely about human agency struggling and ultimately making a difference. Horror often is about human agency being meaningless. Ancient dark gods exist outside of our time and space who will wipe us out as easily as we swat a fly when the stars are right over R'ylleh.

I've always thought that horror is a genre for the lazy. Horror is about evil. Even if God is not a necessary hypothesis, horror must assume that evil exists and that it can work weird miracles, whatever weird miracles are needed by the author. No explanation is necessary or even attempted. If the author needs a weird, time-traveling house to allow a sociopath to kill women over the twentieth century, then — hey, presto! — the house appears because.....the devil? Ancient alien gods? Fate? Who knows? Evil has its reasons for existence.

“The Shining Girls” is horror. Harper is one of the many destitute men out on the streets during the Great Depression. We know from the start that he is not a good man. When he stumbles into the house after committing a murder, he finds the body of the previous occupant, who has been killed. Harper discovers that the previous occupant used the house's time-travel potential for sensible purposes, namely, making sports bets on contests he knows the outcomes for. In contrast, Harper immediately intuits that there is a list of girls in one room that he must kill. Why? Because Harper is evil and evil explains itself. Horror is simple if lazy.

Kirby Mazrachi is one of the girls numbered among Harper's “shining girls.” Harper botches the job on her and she survives in a way that leaves him thinking he was successful. Kirby's mission is to find her attacker. She interns with Dan Velazquez, the crime reporter who covered her story. She uses Dan's connections at his newspaper to find clues that suggest that there have been murders over the decades where odd objects have been left with the body. One or two of these objects are paradoxically anachronistic. Dan becomes infatuated with Kirby.

In science fiction, Kirby and Dan would have reasoned their way to an answer from the paradoxical clues. In fantasy, Kirby and Dan would have employed courage and inspiration to overcome the adversary. This is horror and so all of the breadcrumb clues don't matter. In the end, Harper learns that Kirby lived and comes to get her before she and Dan have verified that the clues are true. Human agency is ultimately irrelevant.

This may be particularly true in time-travel fiction. This book occasionally gestures at the idea that everything is predetermined. When Harper disposes of the body of the previous owner, he saw the body of another person in a dumpster in 1993. When Harper meets that man later, Harper closes the loop by killing the man in 1931 and dumping him into the dumpster in 1993 before he puts the other body in. The shining girls are on the list because Harper killed them and he killed them because they were on the list. Human agency is so lacking that effect precedes cause.

The story proceeds as a thriller. Dan's unrequited romantic feelings for Kirby remain unrequited. Like the paradoxical clues, the romantic tension was filler.

This book has been turned into a series for Apple TV. I'm sure that it will make a fine bit of entertainment. The story itself is entertaining. The problem is that for me the author broke the deal which was to keep me so entertained that I would not start picking nits in the time-travel house McGuffin. At the end, I wasn't that interested in the characters who were thin personalities revolving around their fixations. Dan came across as potentially the most interesting, but his infatuation with Kirby required its own suspension of disbelief given their two-decade age difference.

The time-travel element was also thin. The author made an effort to research details about the Chicago setting and history. The first “shining girl” murder — the murder of an erotic dancer who painted herself with radium so that she would glow during performances — is a historic fact. There was also a nice scene where Harper takes a woman from 1931 to the Chicago World's Fair of 1937. These kinds of scenes will be visually arresting in the TV series, assuming that viewers know the timing of these events.

These are details. The fact that I'm spending time on these details indicates that the book did not make me want to keep my disbelief suspended. But I was judging it as a science fiction book where the logic is tighter, and humans have agency. As a horror book, this book has entertainment value.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes.

231123 Where the Drowned Girls Go (Wayward Children Book 7) by Seanan McGuire


https://www.amazon.com/Where-Drowned-Girls-Wayward-Children-ebook/dp/B092T8CKS8/ref=sr_1_8?crid=2G2CL1A9B8XH0&keywords=seanan+mcguire+wayward+children&qid=1700772392&s=digital-text&sprefix=seanan+mcquire+wayward%2Cdigital-text%2C818&sr=1-8

We probably don't appreciate how hard it is to grow up until we are old.

Growing up involves dealing with new people, people who don't automatically put our interests first, people we have to compete with for attention and position. We have to learn new rules that may seem arbitrary, rules that are frequently not evenly enforced. Our competition exploit marginal advantages on their side – their prettiness or height – or make us suffer about marginal disadvantages – our plainness or weight. Because we have no sense of proportion, we absolutize everything.

Growing up is Hell.

Seanan McGuire's “Wayward Children” Series is about the trauma of growing up. In McGuire's telling, the traumas of growing up are transformed by the appearance of doors that take unhappy children – mostly girls – to fantastic worlds where they can be mermaid, heroes, vampires, princesses, or strange things, whatever it is that they think they need to get away from their trauma.

Why mostly girls? If you read McGuire's backstory for her characters, it seems that there are a lot of mean girl tormentors and innumerable ways that girls can be tormented by expectations imposed on them by family or society.

Cora Miller was a fat girl. She excelled at swimming. So, naturally, when she found a Door, it took her to a world where she could be a mermaid. She had adventures and became a hero. And then she was expelled by a door that turned her back into a fat girl with aquamarine hair.

The central conceit of McGuire's book is that the “wayward children” are often expelled from their fantasy worlds and then spend the rest of their lives looking for a way back, a way back that will probably never appear.

Some people can't adjust and they go to mourn and mope in a school for wayward children. Others want to forget and they go to the Whitethorn Academy where they can be taught to forget the world they have lived in.

Cora wants to forget. In a prior volume – which I haven't read – it appears that after she came back from the mermaid world – the “Trenches” – she went to a world of Drowned Gods. After returning from that horrible world, she is haunted by the Drowned Gods, who want her back.

She therefore decides to go to the Whitethorn Academy to find safety from the Drowned Gods' whisper in her head.

This book is about the Whitethorn Academy. It is not a happy place.

This book is about how Cora and her friend Sumi, who is a character from earlier books, plot to escape.

This book is about novella in length. It is an easy-reading novel for Young Adults, mostly girls, I suppose. I am neither but I enjoyed it, mostly for the descriptions of fantastic worlds. The characters are generally sympathetic, the prose is clean, and the plot moves along.

231205 The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America 1500-1800 by Wayne E. Lee

https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Off-Way-Indigenous-Warfare-1500-1800-ebook/dp/B0C12J7PR8/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3T7BSC2FDGQGB&keywords=The+cutting+off+way&qid=1701845595&s=digital-text&sprefix=the+cutting+off+way%2Cdigital-text%2C367&sr=1-1

Readers of this book may be surprised to learn that Native Americans, aka “Indians,” were amazingly like every other hunter-gatherer culture in the world. They were warlike. They fought their wars by ambush and surprise. They lived by the military maxim that “if you find yourself in a fair fight, you've screwed up.”

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has read “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage” by Lawrence H. Keeley (1996) https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Lawrence-Keeley-ebook/dp/B005JC0PTK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3VRH7Z6NDWTS4&keywords=The+War+before+Civilization+keeley&qid=1701846530&s=digital-text&sprefix=the+war+before+civilization+keeley%2Cdigital-text%2C188&sr=1-1 Keeley's book gets a fair number of favorable citations in “The Cutting-Off Way” by author Wayne Lee. I read Keeley's book nearly thirty-years ago. I remember being fascinated by the wealth of evidence that debunked the “peaceful savage” myth. I don't know how prevalent the myth is today, but I think I recall being surprised at the wealth of data in the archeological record pointing to the fact that Neolithic hunter-gatherers spent a lot of time killing each other. This archeological record included an abundance of arrows at what were probably “battle sites” and human skeletons exhibiting battle wounds. Keely noted that many archeologists insisted on describing the people they were studying as peaceful, but the “trout in the milk” were all the bodies obviously killed by violence. I remember as a child in the 1960s reading a children's book on ancient cultures, specifically the ancient Mayans, that insisted that the Mayans did not practice warfare. In the 1970s and 1980s, archeologists began to notice that an awful lot of Mayan artworks involved blood and torture. Eventually, the archeologists acknowledged that the “peaceful” Mayans were every bit as warlike as the Aztecs.

Keely offers this nice summary:

“Primitive war was not a puerile or deficient form of warfare, but war reduced to its essentials: killing enemies with a minimum of risk, denying them the means of life via vandalism and theft (even the means of reproduction by the kidnapping of their women and children), terrorizing them into either yielding territory or desisting for their encroachments and aggressions. At the tactical level primitive warfare and its cousin, guerilla warfare, have also been superior to the civilized variety. It is civilized warfare that is stylized, ritualized, and relatively less dangerous. When soldiers clash with warriors (or guerillas), it is precisely these “decorative” civilized tactics and paraphernalia that must be abandoned by the former if they are to defeat the latter. Even such a change may be insufficient, and co-opted native warrior must be substituted for the inadequate soldiers before victory belongs to the latter. “ (p. 175)

These themes are paid off in Lee's book. Lee is interested in rebutting the charge that Indians engaged in a “skulking way of war.” In Lee's view the term “skulking” is derogatory to “Indian courage” and dismisses the “rational calculation behind their mode of combat.” Lee describes the “cutting-off” mode of conduct as follows:
The term comes from a common English expression from the period, “to cut off,” because it so accurately describes the tactical and operational goals of an Indian attack, at both small and large scales—indeed its scalability is one of its primary strengths. Lacking deep reserves of population and also lacking systems of coercive recruitment, Native American Nations were wary of heavy casualties. Their tactics demanded caution, and so they generally sought to surprise their targets. The size of the target varied with the size of the attacking force. A small war party might only seek to “cut off” individuals found getting water or wood, or out hunting. A larger party might aim at attacking a whole town, again hoping for surprise. At small or large scales, most often the attackers sought prisoners to take back to the home village. Once revealed by its attack, the invading war party generally fled before the defenders' reinforcements from nearby related towns could organize.

Lee, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (p. 3). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.

This strategy could be scaled up or down depending on objective.

It was also a completely rational strategy for a hunter-gatherer population. The Achilles Heal of hunter-gatherer communities is their small size and precarious grip on survival. If such a community loses too much manpower (or womanpower) it loses the ability to maintain itself economically, demographically, or militarily. So, hunter-gatherers have to husband their human resources. They can't go in for massive set-piece win-all battles which might leave the winner debilitated.

Of course, this consideration works the other way also. The other side cannot afford to lose population either. Lose too many people and the losers face a death sentence. Such losers find it prudent to pack up and leave for more open territories where they might have better luck or they blend into other stronger populations (“Nations”).

As Keely established with respect to pre-historic and primitive populations and Lee confirmed for North America, hunter-gatherer populations were in a constant state of low-level warfare. The warfare played out fights over resources, slight, or revenge. In some ways, it resembles the feuding of the Hatfield and McCoys and could last just as long. Such wars would be launched by a surprise attack. A successful first strike could be devastating. If the element of surprise was missing, the attacked community could call on assistance and attempt to counter-ambush the attackers or chase them out of the territory while inflicting casualties. The total number of dead might number in the handful, but over time such small numbers could add up to a demographic tipping point.

Primitive warfare had a high lethality – higher than civilized warfare:

Finally, the skulking paradigm likely underplays the level of lethality in precontact warfare in North America. There is archaeological evidence for the long continuity of a style of war that could be highly destructive and lethal. Three examples are the large-scale massacre at Crow Creek in South Dakota in the fourteenth century; a cemetery site in Illinois from the same era indicating a persistent series of violent attacks; and a recent reexamination of 119 precontact burials in southern New England showing that a remarkable 15 percent of them had died from violent trauma, 20 percent of whom were women or children.12

Lee, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (pp. 17-18). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.

If modern America had a death by violence rate of 15% the number would be in the tens of millions.

What this means is that Indian populations were in a constant state of movement and change. The current fad for “land acknowledgments” is based on a false ideology of the “peaceful savage” who has been on the land since time immemorial. In fact, whatever nation is being “acknowledged” is simply the last population that drove the prior population off the land and usually shortly before Americans arrived to bring peace to the land, and, ironically, to save the losers from extinction.

Indian warfare – the “cutting-off way” – made rational sense. It did keep Europeans mostly penned to the Eastern Seaboard for two-hundred years. It had its successes against the Western Way of War when the Indians could attack the logistics of the Westerners or abandon territory rather than stand and defend villages.

Misunderstanding of each sides approach to warfare went both ways. Lee tells the reader about the Powhattan surprise attack that initiated the Second Powhattan War:

“The attack came on March 22, 1622. The Powhatans went about their business normally at the beginning of the day. By this time many of them had regular personal or economic contacts within the English settlements, and at the prescribed moment, all around the English colony, the Indians, already intermingled with the populace, picked up various agricultural tools (having come in unarmed) or appeared from the surrounding woods and set upon the English. They killed all those who came within reach that day, probably more than 350 people, completely wiping out some settlements. Tellingly, however, there was no follow-up. Having administered their lesson, the Powhatans went home. They surely expected retaliation, even as they would from another Native society, but they would not be caught unawares, and probably expected to be able to prevent any kind of equivalent damage to themselves. They prepared for the cutting-off war of raid and counterraid but presumed that their initial successful attack would give them the advantage in the long run.

Lee, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (p. 74). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.

What the Powhattan did not expect was that the Europeans would prosecute the war in the Western way, i.e. staying in the field, shock tactics, willingness to absorb casualties, and fighting to the end.

“Despite these limits to the attack, the English did not respond to the lesson in the expected manner. They prepared to fight a war according to their own model of continuous campaigning: not raiding, but taking, destroying, and hopefully exterminating—largely in the hope of establishing their control over more land. In this the colonists succeeded to a horrifying degree, usually failing to catch very many Indians, but deliberately and thoroughly destroying their towns and crops. Indian efforts to negotiate a peace were repeatedly rebuffed until the war crept to a close in 1632.

Lee, Wayne E.. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 (p. 74). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.

Lee also describes the Tuscarora war of 1712-1713. In the first year of the war, the Tuscarora successfully used forts to fend off an English assault. This gave them the confidence to double-down on the strategy of fortification. This time the English brought artillery and Indian auxiliaries. When they seized the fort, they killed or captured 1,000 out of the 5,000 person Tuscarora Nation. This ended the Tuscarora as an independent nation. They emigrated from western South Carolina and became the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy.

The lesson here is that civilized nations can go into the field when they choose with more firepower and better logistics and stay in the field longer. With the assistance of native auxiliaries providing the irregular warfare skills the Western forces lack, the Western approach can be essentially unbeatable.

Lee provides a chapter comparing the situation of the Irish and the Indians. At the same time that the English were dealing with pacifying Native Americans, they were also dealing with pacifying Native Irishmen. The Irish were unassimilable because of their Catholic religion. Irish forces – the Kerns – were used as native auxiliaries in the same way that the English in North America used Indian forces. Eventually, the Kerns became supernumerary because of technology. Indian auxilliaries, however, remained relevant to the closing of the west.

Lee provides insight into the relationship of Indians with European communities. A careful reader of this review might remember how the Powhattans were integrated into the English settlements where they were able to launch their surprise attacks. Native Americans often flocked to English and American forts for protection when they were on the losing side. Indian Nations were often insistent to have forts situated in their territory because of such concerns and because it invited the traders who provided a life-blood of Western goods. The Indians were dependent on western technology, such as gun powder and guns. Guns often broke. Indians lacked the ability to repair the guns on their own and so needed the English and Americans to fix their guns and sell them the gunpowder that had become integral to their way of life.

Lee gives an explanation for something that always puzzled me, namely, why did Indians give up the bow and arrow. It seems like gun technology is slower and less reliable than a bow and arrow. The answer is in the ‘stopping power.” A lead bullet would put an animal or human down immediately. Arrows could be dodged by humans or leave lethal but not immediately lethal wounds in animals that would then require lengthy pursuit.

History's relevance is never far removed from modern events. I was reading this book shortly after Hamas' brutally uncivilized surprise attack on peaceful Israelis where Israeli women were raped, children were killed, and hostages were taken. It does not take much imagination to recognize this as the classic “cutting-off way” of war. Hamas has recreated the surprise raid and run-away style for the same reasons that Hunter-Gatherer populations did, namely, they can't afford to waste their manpower in a set piece battle that they are going to lose.

The Israeli response is classically “western.” Israel has gone into Gaza with sufficient manpower, firepower, and resolve to exterminate the threat of another surprise attack. It may lack the element of “native auxiliaries,” but if Keeley is right, it may have to jettison some or all of the “decorative” tactics of civilized warfare, e.g., giving warning before bombing, not destroying power and water supplies used by the civilian population, etc. If that happens, it shouldn't be surprising.

The Israel-Hamas analogy also allows us to reflect back on the history of Indian-Western interaction. These were two vastly different civilizations. One of them believed that surprise attacks on civilian populations across the border fell comfortably within the “laws of war.” They couldn't change. For them to adopt a civilized/western perspective would have been idiotic. They could never win that way.

On the other hand, the European society could hardly live next to a population that could come boiling across the border at a time of their own choosing and which would then, as a matter of their laws of war, rape civilian women, kidnap civilian children, and murder civilian men. The Western Way of War required a complete and total response to such depredations.

These civilizations were in conflict. Some one was going to lose.

Someone did lose.

Employment Law (A Very Short Introduction) by David Cabrelli

The volumes in the “Very Short Introduction” series do a good job of providing a survey of the subject. The surveys are often idiosyncratic. They are based on the author's perspective about what the important issues are and what their content consists of. This book surveys employment law from an international perspective. The reader gets a sense of a common zeitgeist setting the agenda for international developments.

I have been practicing employment law for nearly 40 years. When I started practicing law, there was virtually no employment law. There was wage and hour law, but there was not much money in that area. There was Labor Law, but that involved big companies and big unions. Only a few statutes concerning discrimination had been passed but the coverage they provided was shallow and allowed significant exceptions.

Since the late 1980s, employment law has taken off into a major area of practice. In California (and under Federal law), attorneys are incentivized to take employment discrimination cases by the promise of one-way attorney's fees where prevailing employees get paid their attorneys fees but prevailing employers don't. Whistleblower and retaliation cases are also given similar treatment.

Cabrelli's book does a nice job of mapping out the changes over the year. It also invited me to think about employment law from a higher perspective than my usual wont. Typically, I am in the trenches dealing with precise issues of adverse employment actions or causation or the like. Cabrelli's book pitched the level of analysis much higher.

For example, Cabrelli provided an introductory chapter on the history of employment law. The law of economic relationships was originally found in Master and Servant law. Medieval law was divided into (a) Law of Persons, such as husband and wife, parent and child, (b) Law of Obligations, including voluntary obligations, such as contract, and involuntarily assumed obligations, as occurs with negligence, (c) Law of Things, i.e., property rights, and (d) Law of Actions or Remedies, which set out the rules for enforcing rights.

Master and Servant Law started out as part of the Law of Persons, namely as a status based relationship. Then, with the coming of the industrial revolution, the economic transformation led to the emergence of the employment relationship as contractual in nature. I was taught in law school the trope of the move from status to contract. Cabrelli explains:

The Master and Servant regime was supported by statutory and common law rules, which gave the lion's share of the power to the Master: the right to discharge, suspend, or discipline the ‘workman' and imprison him or her for absconding. The Master and Servant laws amounted to a system that repressed workers. In the eyes of the law, there was a presumption that this relationship was an annual hiring and as such, it had a one-year fixed term. However, by the 19th century, evolutions in underlying societal and economic forces generated a gradual change in the ascription of the personal employment relationship from status to contract. This meant that the arrangements entered into between parties to a working relationship came to be thought of as expressions of their free will and liberty, rather than as something thrust on them by operation of the law. The lawyer Henry Summer Maine in his book Ancient Law (1861) claimed that the transition to contract was a socially progressive transformation in the sense that a ‘free man' retains his liberty to contract (as a voluntary act of his will), unlike the servant who is branded with a status which is an ascribed position that he cannot shake off. This change in the perception of the working relationship as one rooted in voluntary agreement coincided with the repeal of the Master and Servant laws by the Employers and Workmen Act 1875 in the UK. The demise of the master and servant model also took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the USA, and other common law jurisdictions such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. By the beginning of the 20th century, it had become settled that the relationship between a person performing work and the hirer of his labour was no longer one regulated by the law of persons, but had evolved into a consensual form of exchange located within the law of obligations (contract law). This was the birth of the modern employer–employee relationship rooted in the contract of employment. The importance of this transition from status to contract lies in the symbolic power of contract.

Cabrelli, David. Employment Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (pp. 39-40). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

Contract law is generally not concerned with content. Contract law permitted a tremendous amount of diversity in the development of contract terms. Some content-based terms made their way into the 1875 Labor Code.

Cabrelli also explores the nature of the employment relationship. He defines the “standard employment contract” as having the following key features: “(1) it is a full-time contract (2) with a single employer (3) for an indefinite period of time (4) to perform personal services (5) at the employer's premises (6) irrespective of whether the employer has sufficient work to provide the employee or not.” Obviously, with Zoom and Gig jobs, the traditional paradigm is breaking down, which may be a reason why the California Supreme Court recently redefined the employment relationship to include a broader swathe of economic relationships.

Cabrelli identifies the key criteria of employment as follows:

“There are three features that are key to the classification of any contract or relationship for the supply of services as one of employment: the first is the idea of ‘control'; the second is ‘subordination'; and the third is ‘dependence'. If we take the notion of ‘control', this is one of the oldest criteria for the identification of a contract of employment. It stretches back to the Victorian era in Anglo-American common law countries. It is a reference to the ability of the putative employer to (i) decide what work the employee will do, and (ii) give instructions to the employee to carry out certain kinds of work, as well as (iii) the power to monitor and superintend that work. It will also involve the employer in the ‘how', ‘where', and ‘when' of the work that the employee is instructed to do, that is the nature of the skills concerned, including the location at which the work is to be performed and its timing.

Cabrelli, David. Employment Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (pp. 57-58). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

In California, the fight is usually over “control.” The California “ABC” Test de-emphasizes control and asks, inter alia, whether the putative employee's work is an intrinsic part of the firm.

Cabrelli uses the term “binary divide” to distinguish between employment and other relationships. Cabrelli writes:

The ‘binary' divide is a reference to the chasm that exists between the individual service providers operating in the ‘world of work' on the one hand, and those engaged in the ‘business world' who take their own commercial risks on the other hand. This is the distinction between the contract of employment entered into by the individual employee and the commercial contract for services entered into by the self-employed individual who is an independent contractor. And we can understand the significance of this dichotomy if we repeat the words: an employment contract equals an employment relationship and rights; no employment contract equals no employment relationship or rights.

Cabrelli, David. Employment Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 61). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

I had never really thought about employment law as being about giving rights, or that one has to achieve or qualify for these rights, but this is not a bad way of thinking about the issue. Typically, I am thinking about the reasons why a person is not an employee so that they can't obtain minimum wage or overtime, which is the negative form of this concept. A substantial panoply of advantages come with employment, but there are disadvantages such as losing out on the ability to form trade secrets. There are also burdens associated with employment, such as the fiduciary duty that employees owe to their employers.

Cabrelli also notes that employment is a unitary concept. An employee is a single person; an employer is likewise. (I have a case where employment non-discrimination duties are extended beyond the employer who pays the salary to the employee to the employer who controls the place where the employee works.) Cabrelli anticipates that there will be changes in this area as economic relations change. California law recognizes some joint employment under some circumstances.

Cabrelli also discusses statutory rights – family medical leave and wage and hour. American law provides far less in the way of these benefits than Europe or Japan. An issue is whether these benefits reduce economic efficiency. Cabrelli offers this model in arguing for economic efficiency:

In the preceding discussion about access to family-friendly leave and rights, there was an implicit assumption that these kinds of leave are expensive. Alongside the libertarian concerns about state interference in the employment relationship, the cost of these rights will feature heavily in debates about the introduction of paid leave schemes. There are claims that these rights and forms of leave do pay for themselves by offsetting any labour costs through higher productivity rates. This is the idea that employees who are entitled to take paid parental leave will feel greater loyalty to their employer and be more motivated at work. As such, they will raise their game and generate more output, the aggregate of which will be higher than the staff costs imposed by the paid leave. By the same token, in response to those increased labour costs, the argument is that employers will be shaken up and incentivized to generate new production techniques in order to accelerate output.

Cabrelli, David. Employment Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 83). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

Cabrelli's chapter on Dismissals is interesting in its comparative law approach. Cabrelli introduced Otto Kahn-Freund:

In 1933, the home of the prominent German lawyer Otto Kahn-Freund was raided by the SA (Sturmabteilung), the Nazi party's infamous shock troops. Kahn-Freund was a judge in the Berlin Labour Court and in a recent judgment, he had ruled that three technicians employed by a radio station who had attempted to sabotage a national radio broadcast by Hitler had been unfairly dismissed and that they should be paid damages in compensation. The Nazi government had strong-armed the radio station into sacking the employees on the basis that they were Communist party members or supporters, despite the lack of any evidence to that effect. When news of the subsequent ransacking of Kahn-Freund's home reached him when he was on holiday with his family in England, he decided not to return to Germany and instead sought permanent refuge in that country. Kahn-Freund went on to establish himself as the father of labour and employment law in the UK, and arguably in Western Europe. As an émigré labour law scholar, Kahn-Freund became a lecturer and Professor of Labour and Employment Law at the London School of Economics and Oxford University, and was partly responsible for the introduction of British legislation in 1971 protecting employees from unfair dismissals. This involved a legislative regime that prescribed that employers must have one of five just causes, or reasons, for the dismissal of their employees in order for them to avoid liability. The objective of this system was to provide employees with a moderate measure of job security and security of earnings.

Cabrelli, David. Employment Law: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (pp. 108-109). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

California follows an “at will” paradigm where an employer needs no reason to terminate an employee. During the course of my career, this paradigm was under attack by contractual concepts that would allow the concept of “just cause.” In my experience, most long-term employees are told that they have job security, and they come to believe it, often foregoing other opportunities. However, during the 1990s, this movement was turned back by the courts applying doctrines against oral modifications.

One's job life is a declining asset. Because of their age, employees lose the ability to obtain new jobs. Most employees fired after the age of 50 never get a job that pays as much as the job they were fired from.

French and British law provide for dismissal based on just cause. That said, the British solution pays a comparative pittance for what is lost by termination. The preference of these systems is for reinstatement or reintegration of the employee with the employer.

Cabrelli finishes with discussions of business reorganization, collective bargaining, and strikes. These are areas that are virtually unrelated to my day-to-day practice. These sections, though are interesting, from both a historical perspective and a matter of policy.

Cabrelli writes his book from a non-libertarian perspective. He argues that employment is largely defined by monopsony, in which the employers as a limited number of purchasers can dictate market terms. I'm not sure that this model is entirely accurate given the number of employers in the market. Admittedly, the large employers are limited in number but the majority of the economy is far more equally matched. This seems like a simplistic model. Likewise, the idea that statutory benefits are paid for by increased worker loyalty also seems like a stretch as does the ability of English regulators to keep the market at peak performance.

I am disposed to a free market perspective, but I was willing to give the other side a hearing. I am not going to hold Cabrelli's statism against him. This is a very short introduction and cannot be expected to provide support for all of these issues.

This is going to be a book with little interest to most people. However, most of us are employees. Employment more directly affects us than a lot of political decisions. It is definitely a topic worth knowing about.

Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World by Jeff Fynn-Paul.

The Woke distortion of history has provoked a hopeful reaction, a new crop of books looking at the basics of American history. The most recent entry in the field is “Not Stolen” by Professor Jeff Flynn-Paul. Flynn-Paul is a professor of Global History and Economics at the University of Leiden. If you are expecting this book to have been written by a Dutchman, guess again — Flynn-Paul was born in America, educated in Canada, and merely works in Europe. I've seen some of the videos featuring Flynn-Paul's discussion of his works, and he is as American as a homeless vagrant in the streets of San Francisco.


This book is a survey of American history — the American history you were supposed to learn in grade school but never learned because they were too busy teaching you to hate America. This book is in the same genre as “War on History” by Jarrett Stepman, which I reviewed last month. However, where Stepman's survey goes from the Era of Discovery to World War II, Flynn-Paul's interest is the transition of the New World from terra incognita to part of the Western World. As a result, he covers topics like Columbus, Thanksgiving, and the Trail of Tears.

The advantage that Woke History has is that it is so easy to learn and remember. In Woke History, there are good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are always Western oppressors who are motivated by evil impulses unique to Westerners because of Capitalism or Christianity. The good guys are the natives, who are victims who lived in peaceful harmony until the Oppressors shattered their world with a multi-century rampage of persecution and slaughter.

If you have that paradigm in mind, you can quickly backfill the details.

The problem is that history is complicated. People are remarkably like people. In any group, there are some good, many bad, and most moving from side to side. Oppressors are often Victims, and Victims can be Oppressors in their turn. The Woke Narrative ignores facts that contradict the Woke Narrative. For example, if Americans wanted to exterminate the Indians, why did Thomas Jefferson make an effort to distribute the Smallpox vaccine to the Indians? Jefferson sent the smallpox vaccine with the Williams and Clark expedition. In 1832, the Secretary of War was charged with the responsibility of distributing the smallpox vaccine to the Indians. (American efforts in this regard look a lot like the efforts of the German colonial administration to distribute Rinderpest vaccine to African cattle to save the African population from starvation. [See The Case for German Colonialism.])

Did you know that? I didn't know that.

On the other hand, you've probably heard that the American military gave blankets from smallpox wards to Indians to start plagues when, in fact, there is no evidence that any such thing ever occurred. There is a single written document of such a strategy. It occurred During the French and Indian Wars at Fort Pitt, which was under siege by the Indians. The commander expressed reluctance to try it because it could have sparked an outbreak among his forces, some already suffering from smallpox. On the other hand, the Indians in the area were also dealing with their smallpox outbreak. Hence, the significance of this effort at primitive biological warfare — not the first time such a thing was tried in sieges — is doubtful.

History is complicated. You have to know it empirically, not infer it based on the Narrative.

I want to hit some of the points that stood out for me.

Flynn-Paul addresses the issue of genocide. Determining the population of pre-Columbian America involves extrapolation and inference verging on speculation. In recent years, the Narrative has been pushing an extremely high population figure for America. For example, the Narrative claims that 7 million people died on the island of Hispaniola as a result of Columbus. But this population figure is absurd:

“Our best guess is that England in 1500 had only 2.1 million people, living on double the area of Hispaniola. (England's maximum capacity before the agricultural revolution of the seventeenth century was probably less than five million.) If Hispaniola really had seven million people in 1491, that would make its population roughly triple that of England at the time, and its population density about six times higher.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 55–56). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

This is unlikely: the natives of Hispaniola had a stone-age technology and no draft animals.

The more likely figure is in the tens of thousands:

“This is why archaeologists and other specialists believe that the real population of Hispaniola in 1491 was about two hundred thousand people while even the “maximalists” in this subfield argue for only three hundred thousand.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 56). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

Of this lower number, were most killed?

Not at all. Genetic evidence shows that the populations of Hispaniola were not replaced; they were incorporated into subsequent populations.

In places with a heavier population density, the survival of the native population is more noticeable:

“Just as in the former Aztec lands, today we find that “white” Europeans make up a tiny minority of the population in former Incan territory, at between about 10 and 15 percent. The rest are either mestizo or Amerindian. In all three of these countries about half the population is “pure” Amerindian. Since these two population nuclei accounted for perhaps 80 percent of all New World people in 1491, the obvious conclusion is that Europeans did not slaughter or displace the great majority of Indigenous people in the New World.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 66). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

In North America, population densities were far lower:

“The only reason parts of the New World, such as the present-day US and Canada and also Australia and New Zealand, are majority non-Indigenous is because the Indigenous population of these lands was so truly sparse — 1 percent or less as dense as most of Europe at the time.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 128). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

And:

“For the first two and a half centuries after Columbus, Europeans remained confined to limited enclaves in the New World. Large parts of Mexico and Latin America remained in the hands of Indigenous people throughout the colonial period and beyond. As recently chronicled by Pekka Hämäläinen, most of the actual “dispossession” of Indigenous people in North America occurred quite rapidly, during the nineteenth century, due to a combination of natural population increase and European immigration.65 This land grab happened only after the Indigenous population was outnumbered by a factor approaching one hundred to one.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 129–130). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.


I've played war games where one side starts at a lower level but has a greater production capacity over the long run. Things are nip and tuck until the last few turns, when the production capacity overwhelms the other side. That was the situation the American Indians faced. Approximately 10,000 Commanches controlled all of North Texas — slave raiding into northern Mexico — until the mid-19th century when the far larger American population swamped them.

North American population densities were extremely low, which influenced the way that a farming culture moving into industrialization was going to interact with them:

In hunter-gatherer societies, which ranged over at least three-fourths of New World land north of Panama, property ownership was always tenuous in the extreme. Property in these vast empty regions was claimed by small bands, who might visit it only every few years. Population density was well below one person per ten acres; often, it was much lower than this.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 213). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

And:

The Indians' seminomadic lifestyle made it relatively easy for them sell their lands and retreat farther into New York State and the Green Mountains in the hope of avoiding contact with whites — as long as this could be negotiated with other Indian tribes along the way. Population densities in the region began low — highball estimates suggest that about ten thousand Indians were living in all of Vermont in 1500 — so this meant that by 1680, there was space for Indians to migrate through the region after disease, migration, and assimilation had reduced their numbers.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 272–273). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

This data corroborates the historical presentation in “How the Indians Lost their Land” by Stuart Banner.

Migration was endemic in North America. Populations were constantly displacing prior populations, often through genocide. The Commanches waged wars of genocide against the Apaches. The Navaho were in the process of exterminating the Hopi until the Americans put a lid on that process. The idea of land acknowledgments is silly since it merely acknowledges the last group of colonizers before the Americans took over.

Likewise, Indians were quite capable of managing empires with brutal effectiveness. Native populations sided with the Spanish against Aztecs, for example. And, again, as explained in “The Comanche Empire” by Pekka Hämäläinen , ten thousand Commanches ran a military empire that took slaves and property from as far away as northern Mexico and kept Europeans tied up for over 100 years.


Flynn-Paul adds another spike to the argument that Europeans were inherently racist when he points out that Spaniards treated Indian nobility as nobility. They would seek to ennoble themselves by marrying local nobility. This does not speak to any form of White Supremacy argued by the Woke Narrative.

Flynn-Paul has an interesting discussion that gauges Indian technological developments. Most were at a stone-age level. The Aztecs and Incas might have approached the same level as ancient Mesopotamia. Factor in low population density, and the population replacement was inevitable.

Warfare and massacre were not the cause:

“Despite the relative rarity of such massacres in New England history, they feature prominently in popular articles on Thanksgiving. Such portrayals are distorted from multiple angles. First, they are spun to represent one-sided instances of colonist-on-Indian aggression. Secondly, they are spun to appear unprovoked. Third, they are spun as though they were motivated by racial hatred and a desire for ethnic cleansing above all else, based on an underlying greed for land. And finally, they are spun as though this sort of thing was happening all the time — as though they were typical of and “stand for” early New England history. All four of these interpretations are false, or at least misleading. The charge of continuous warfare is a highly embellished view of colonial New England history. According to William M. Osborn, who incidentally is cited on the “Indian Massacres” page referenced above, the total casualties of Indian-settler massacres between 1511 and 1890 were about 7,193 Natives who died at the hands of Europeans, and about 9,156 Europeans who died at the hands of Native Americans.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 240–241). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

Massacres may have been more common in California, but that was at the end of the process when population density and technological differentials were at a maximum. From an ecological/environmental perspective, groups that evolve with each other learn to adapt. When a new apex predator is introduced to the ecology, the effects can lead to extinction, such as when the Indians destroyed North American megafaunas while African megafaunas continued to survive.

Flynn-Paul observes:

“According to our best guess, before the arrival of the Spanish in the 1760s, there were perhaps three hundred thousand Indians living in California. The great majority of these lived in the fertile central valley and certain coastal regions, since this provided the Natives with an abundance of food. Early observers noticed that while California itself provided some of the most bountiful sustenance anywhere in North America, the California Indians were among the most “primitive” of all North American people. The going theory is that the abundance of food, in this case, made life so easy that the Indigenous people of California did not bother to innovate. Instead, they took advantage of the Eden-like conditions to live relatively simple lives.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 362–363). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

However, even California raises questions.

One question is raised by the fact that the massacre rate doesn't account for population collapse:

Herein lies the crux: Madley's book gives the impression that in 1849, there were some one hundred and fifty thousand Indians living peaceably in California — but that twenty-odd years later, most of these had been hunted to near extinction for sport by gleefully genocidal white hunting parties, including those organized by Serranus Hastings. This is certainly the impression that the law professor Paul Caron got from Madley's book, and the figure of “100,000 killed” can be found splashed liberally across less-cautious corners of the internet. The problem is, the number of Indians who were killed outside of active warfare during the entire course of the “genocide” was in reality less than five thousand — meaning that some 97 percent of California Indians were not massacred during this time period. A 3 percent slaughter rate is horrendous enough — but it's a far cry from the 88 percent slaughter rate that Paul Caron claims in his blog post.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (p. 360). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

The explanation is complex:

According to the sources we have, it seems that a major downturn in the California Indian population occurred during and after the Wars of Mexican Independence, which broke out in 1810 and carried on until 1821. Soon after independence, the Mexican governors then proclaimed the “secularization” of the mission system in California, although this proved a decidedly mixed bag for the California Indians. Under the Mexican system, California Indians remained subject to forced labor by secular landowners who rapidly purchased the old mission lands. It was the Mexican government, then, that created the custom whereby Indians could be indentured and “sold” for their labor. Under this system, Indian children were often sold outright as slaves. The Mexican custom was carried over into the American period, and it became the grounds for much abuse. What few writers wish to emphasize is that this indentured servitude was outlawed by the California legislature as a follow up to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 — less than fifteen years after the Americans took over in California. It took another decade, partly due to the lack of resources brought about by the Civil War, for this emancipation to be effectively enforced however. In the chaos created by the harsh and anarchic situation left by the retreating Mexican government, a great number of California Indians seem to have disappeared — to the extent that a population, formerly three hundred thousand strong, melted away, mostly during the brief Mexican period between circa 1810 and 1848. By the time the Americans got hold of the territory, the Indian population in California is believed to have been between one hundred thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand people. Of course, modern critics opt for the higher number because this makes the Americans look worse. What happened to the approximately one hundred and fifty thousand California Indians who disappeared during the last few decades of Spanish and Mexican rule in California? No one knows for certain.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 365–366). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

Social upheavals can have huge effects through mechanisms other than outright murder. Flynn-Paul explains that social upheaval can mean that children just are not born because of lower birth rates:

“In light of these cold, hard population figures, with tens of millions of mestizos and Amerindians living precisely where their ancestors lived five hundred years ago, where then is the “holocaust” of one hundred million dead claimed by Stannard and others? Up to 75 percent of them never existed at all — they are a figment of the Berkeley School's fevered imaginations. In places such as Hispaniola, the pre-Columbian population is exaggerated by the media and government organizations by several thousand percent. Of those Indigenous people who did “disappear” after 1491, most did not die a horrible death. Many were simply not born, because cultural upheaval tends to cause lower birth rates. Of those who actually died under adverse conditions introduced by Europeans, even Stannard recognizes that some 90 percent of Indigenous casualties of European intervention were due to neutral causes such as disease, rather than war. Nor as we will see in later chapters is there evidence that Europeans deliberately infected Indian populations with smallpox or other diseases.

Fynn-Paul, Jeff. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (pp. 67–68). Bombardier Books. Kindle Edition.

None of this means that Indians were not murdered or oppressed. They certainly were, but facts matter. History is complicated.

The Woke Narrative knows that facts matter. The Narrative has been shaped by many people who have gone out of their way to exaggerate historical events into events of monstrous barbarity. Presumably, that is necessary, or someone might notice that the natives were engaging in slaving and sacrifice on a far larger scale. In the case of the Aztecs, this was genuinely monstrous:

231103 Sappho by Sappho


Sappho was a Lesbian.

No, she was.

Her husband was also a Lesbian.

They both lived on the island of Lesbos where everyone was Lesbian.

She was also one of the earliest-known poets of any gender or sexual orientation.

What we think we know about Sappho is mostly speculation or “tradition” – honored speculation that has some time behind it. Sapphic poetry was intended to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. Sappho may have been the leader of a school. Some of the poems written for other women seem “steamy.” Sappho was writing her works in the Seventh Century BC, which places her centuries before Plato and Aristotle, in a Greece that was only emerging from its Dark Age following the Bronze Age Collapse.

What we have of Sapphic poetry are fragments preserved in other works, usually as an example of work use or grammar. As is the case with most poetry, the fragments are a snapshot of a moment or a feeling, they evoke more than they explain. Take this for example:

RICH AS YOU ARE
Death will finish you:

afterwards no
one will remember

or want you: you
had no share in
the Pierian roses

You will flitter
invisible among
the indistinct dead
in Hell's palace
darting fitfully

Sappho. Sappho: A New Translation (World Literature in Translation) (p. 111). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

Wow!

What is going on there?

Is Sappho taunting a rival with the prospect that her art will not be remembered or is she perhaps in a melancholy mood considering her own fate?

The collection can be read quickly. I read this with a group for the Online Great Books, and the discussion after reading it was productive.

If you are not already a poetry reader, you might give that kind of approach a shot.

Our Dehumanized Future


Blindsight (Firefall #1) by Peter Watts

It is the late 21st century and humanity is already being pushed off the stage. Artificial intelligence has rendered a great many human beings excess to requirements. Those that want to remain employed have to resort to bizarre augmentations and brain surgeries to stay competitive. As a result, biologists have transformed themselves in order to interface directly with sensors and distribute the minds across the equipment. Linguists may undergo brain surgery to divide their brains into different units so that new minds can share the body and process information in parallel. Synthesists exist to translate bleeding edge science down to a common denominator that can be understood by non-specialists, but the synthesists never actually understand the substance of what they are translating.

The rest of humanity is either on welfare or is moving to “heaven,” a virtual reality for their minds, while their bodies are warehoused.

In short while the human race may be holding out, notwithstanding a demographic collapse in the birth rate, it has been divided into two camps: “ghosts in the machine” without causal effect on reality and zombies carrying out assignments without, or with limited, human awareness.

And that was before the aliens took a snapshot of Earth in the Firefall.

As a result of this mysterious event, Siri Keeton awakens on the ship “Theseus” from five years of hibernation in the Oort cloud facing an immense alien structure being constructed around a sub-Jovian gas giant. Siri is a synthesist who lost the values of empathy as a child when half of his brain was removed to stop epileptic seizures. He is a high-functioning autistic who interacts with other people by miming their behavior. He's accompanied by a linguist who brain has been reconstructed to house four other persons, a cyborg military specialist, and a biologist whose control over his own body has been compromised by his augmentation for working through his instruments. There is also a vampire captain.

Wait. What???

Apparently, vampires were a real thing in human prehistory. They were smarter, stronger, and faster than humans and required a chemical in human flesh to survive. In order to avoid overpredation on humans, they learned to hibernate for decades. Unfortunately, they had a brain glitch that sent them into seizures when they saw a right angle, which never happens in nature but which became common when humans began building cities. So, they went extinct, but by the magic of genetics, their genes were reconstructed and the species was resurrected (with the need for human flesh omitted, but the predator instincts and the “cruciform glitch” kept.)

I thought that was the weirdest and unnecessary element of the book when it was introduced, but as the book progressed it made sense in the context of the book's themes of a dehumanized near future.

The crew attempts to communicate with the strange structure, which calls itself “Rohrschack,” but nobody's home.

Wait. What??? No one's home and it gave itself a name.

At this point, the author Peter J. Watts moves into a lot of really great “philosophy of mind” stuff.

It turns out that whoever is building Rohrschack is a “Chinese Room.” The Chinese Room thought experiment was developed by philosopher John Searle to explain that AI that passes the Turing Test may not actually be sentient. The AI system may just be operating according to a very advanced recipe of giving outputs in response to different inputs which make sense to the recipient of the outputs but which the system does not comprehend or understand. The parallels to Siri are apparent, but, also, there are parallels to vampires, who exist in a “half-dreaming” state closer to their predatory role, where they constantly calculate cost and benefits without a moral overlay.

The Theseus crew eventually discovers living entities about the Rohrschack which should not be intelligent but which are clearly much smarter than humans on an individual basis. This leads to speculation among the crew that the aliens have sacrificed self-consciousness as unnecessary to the evolutionary imperative of survival.

While all this philosophy is going on, the action never stops. This book is a page turner. I became invested in the characters for all their autistic weirdness.

Ultimately, the book concludes with the unsettling notion that perhaps consciousness is a losing proposition and the vampires are the future.

This is a very good book

Bloom by Wil McCarthy

https://www.amazon.com/Bloom-Wil-McCarthy-ebook/dp/B006PV826W/ref=sr_1_1?crid=157TJSLA4XOIK&keywords=bloom+wil+mccarthy&qid=1695508183&s=digital-text&sprefix=Bloom+wil+%2Cdigital-text%2C157&sr=1-1


It is less than one hundred years into the future and humanity is in a very bad way. We've abandoned the Earth and are precariously ensconced on a few moons of Jupiter and some asteroids, waiting for the final shove toward extinction. There is a desperate plan to complete a starship and send some of the survivors to another system where they might be temporarily safe. The inner solar system up to around the asteroid belt has been taken over by something called the Mycosystem.

What happened?

That's not clear, but it appears that nano material was created, released, or arrived on Earth where it quickly used everything to replicate itself. Some humans evacuated to the Moon, but were shortly followed by the nanites that performed the same feat to the Moon. The Earth and the Moon have been turned into huge balls of nano material, except for the poles since the nanites – mycora – needs warmth and light.

The Jovian society has transformed into a society under siege – the Immunity – ready to react against any intrusion by mycora which could “bloom” like fungus into exponentially expanding fungus-like “technogenic life” that would reduce everything into more mycora. A bloom elicits a prompt response by counter-nanites, freezing devices called “witches tits,” and lasers.

The story opens when amateur “Berichter,” or reporter – Jovian English is heavily influenced by a German Swiss element - John Strasheim is recruited for a mission to return to Earth. Since this is deep in the Mycosystem where mycoran spores are being blown around by the solar winds. The ship Louis Pasteur has been built with material that might fool the mycora to allow it to pass without being converted into mycora. The accent is on “might.” The technology hasn't been tested and if it fails, the ship is spore fodder.

There is also a human threat. Some humans have become infatuated with a crypto-religious belief that the Mycosystem is intelligent and potentially godlike. These people have organized themselves into the Temple of Transcendent Evolution, which may be performing experiments to upgrade mycora in a way that would make it effective against the Immunity.

Strasheim's story involves a months long trip on a ship with six specialists and a living space that might be the size of a college dorm room.

Author McCarthy does a great job of baiting hooks of interest, tension, and adventure. There are questions about sabotage and espionage. There is a space battle of sorts. New facts are learned about the Mycosystem and the purpose of the mission as the story develops. Strasheim is very well developed as a character and we get to know a few other characters in a way that makes them likeable and sympathetic. I was pulled along by McCarthy's story.

I particularly liked the “big think” element of the story, which was not really the question of the Mycosystem's intelligence, but the idea of entire planets being consumed by a nanite plague. Venus swells up to the size of Neptune, for example. This is a far different setting than we commonly see in science fiction, although a similar disaster, involving “mataglap,” is the basis of the society that is presented in Walter Jon William's Aristoi.

This was a fun read in a vein that was almost a throw-back to the hard science of earlier science fiction.