The Star-Spangled Banner? Four verses (the second is the one that begins with “On the shore dimly seen…”). America the Beautiful? Also four verses. Yankee Doodle? Three verses. John Brown’s body you just kind of improvise more verses until everyone is too embarrassed to continue.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when somebody told me recently that there was a rarely-sung sixth verse to Battle Hymn of the Republic.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on.

It’s not the most sense-making thing (what is the glory of the morning on the wave?) But I have loved the song for so long that it still affects me. It almost seems deliberately written to be excluded, to be learned later, as if it’s some secret confidence or final warning. If I ever become Christian, it’ll probably be because of this song.

But the wiki page for the Battle Hymn is a trove of all kinds of treasures:

– The original John Brown’s Body song was an attempt to tease a soldier named John Brown in the regiment who invented it.

– Julia Ward Howe says she woke up one night, wrote it while half-asleep, went back to bed, and couldn’t remember any of it the next morning till she checked her notes.

– Mark Twain gave it a gritty reboot for the Philippine-American War. Other parodies and adaptations include ones by workers, consumers, the First Arkansas Colored Regiment, extremely uncreative college footballers, awesome old-timey would-be school arsonists, and me.

But for me the most interesting part is the evolution – and I use that phrase deliberately, taking a memetic perspective is hardly ever more interesting than just doing things the old fashioned way, but in this case I think it is. The song started off as a kind of boring standard spiritual that only sort of got the tune right, progressed into “John Brown’s Body” which fixed the tune a little bit by trial and error but had embarrassingly stupid lyrics, and then a lot of people recognized there was some value in the tune and tried to dignify it up and finally it was Howe’s effort that worked. You can almost see it gaining adaptive fitness at each stage until it suddenly explodes and takes over the world.

I know this is a weird post without much content. My computer is broken and although I have an emergency backup I’m without any drafts or my list of things I wanted to write about. Now I’m just winging it.

I decided to read Red Plenty because my biggest gripe after reading Singer’s book on Marx was that Marx refused to plan how communism would actually work, instead preferring to leave the entire matter for the World-Spirit to sort out. But almost everything that interests me about Communism falls under the category of “how communism would actually work”. Red Plenty, a semi-fictionalized account of the history of socialist economic planning, seemed like a natural follow-up.

But I’d had it on my List Of Things To Read for even longer than that, ever after stumbling across a quote from it on some blog or other:

Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded.

Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on.

And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all.

Needless to say, this is Relevant To My Interests, which include among them poetic allegories for coordination problems. And I was not disappointed.

II.

The book begins:

Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called “the planned economy,” which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending.

And this was the first interesting thing I learned.

There’s a very settled modern explanation of the conflict between capitalism and communism. Capitalism is good at growing the economy and making countries rich. Communism is good at caring for the poor and promoting equality. So your choice between capitalism and communism is a trade-off between those two things.

But for at least the first fifty years of the Cold War, the Soviets would not have come close to granting you that these are the premises on which the battle must be fought. They were officially quite certain that any day now Communism was going to prove itself better at economic growth, better at making people rich quickly, than capitalism. Even unofficially, most of their leaders and economists were pretty certain of it. And for a little while, even their capitalist enemies secretly worried they were right.

The arguments are easy to understand. Under capitalism, plutocrats use the profits of industry to buy giant yachts for themselves. Under communism, the profits can be reinvested back into the industry to build more factories or to make production more efficient, increasing growth rate.

Under capitalism, everyone is competing with each other, and much of your budget is spent on zero-sum games like advertising and marketing and sales to give you a leg up over your competition. Under communism, there is no need to play these zero-sum games and that part of the budget can be reinvested to grow the industry more quickly.

Under capitalism, everyone is working against everyone else. If Ford discovers a clever new car-manufacturing technique, their first impulse is to patent it so GM can’t use it, and GM’s first impulse is to hire thousands of lawyers to try to thwart that attempt. Under communism, everyone is working together, so if one car-manufacturing collective discovers a new technique they send their blueprints to all the other car-manufacturing collectives in order to help them out. So in capitalism, each companies will possess a few individual advances, but under communism every collective will have every advance, and so be more productive.

These arguments make a lot of sense to me, and they definitely made sense to the Communists of the first half of the 20th century. As a result, they were confident of overtaking capitalism. They realized that they’d started with a handicap – czarist Russia had been dirt poor and almost without an industrial base – and that they’d faced a further handicap in having the Nazis burn half their country during World War II – but they figured as soon as they overcame these handicaps their natural advantages would let them leap ahead of the West in only a couple of decades. The great Russian advances of the 50s – Sputnik, Gagarin, etc – were seen as evidence that this was already starting to come true in certain fields.

And then it all went wrong.

III.

Grant that communism really does have the above advantages over capitalism. What advantage does capitalism have?

The classic answer is that during communism no one wants to work hard. They do as little as they can get away with, then slack off because they don’t reap the rewards of their own labor.

Red Plenty doesn’t really have theses. In fact, it’s not really a non-fiction work at all. It’s a dramatized series of episodes in the lives of Russian workers, politicians, and academics, intended to come together to paint a picture of how the Soviet economy worked.

But if I can impose a thesis upon the text, I don’t think it agreed with this. In certain cases, Russians were very well-incentivized by things like “We will kill you unless you meet the production target”. Later, when the state became less murder-happy, the threat of death faded to threats of demotions, ruined careers, and transfer to backwater provinces. And there were equal incentives, in the form of promotion or transfer to a desirable location such as Moscow, for overperformance. There were even monetary bonuses, although money bought a lot less than it did in capitalist countries and was universally considered inferior to status in terms of purchasing power. Yes, there were Goodhart’s Law type issues going on – if you’re being judged per product, better produce ten million defective products than 9,999,999 excellent products – but that wasn’t the crux of the problem.

Red Plenty presented the problem with the Soviet economy primarily as one of allocation. You could have a perfectly good factory that could be producing lots of useful things if only you had one extra eensy-weensy part, but unless the higher-ups had allocated you that part, you were out of luck. If that part happened to break, getting a new one would depend on how much clout you (and your superiors) pulled versus how much clout other people who wanted parts (and their superiors) held.

The book illustrated this reality with a series of stories (I’m not sure how many of these were true, versus useful dramatizations). In one, a pig farmer in Siberia needed wood in order to build sties for his pigs so they wouldn’t freeze – if they froze, he would fail to meet his production target and his career would be ruined. The government, which mostly dealt with pig farming in more temperate areas, hadn’t accounted for this and so hadn’t allocated him any wood, and he didn’t have enough clout with officials to request some. A factory nearby had extra wood they weren’t using and were going to burn because it was too much trouble to figure out how to get it back to the government for re-allocation. The farmer bought the wood from the factory in an under-the-table deal. He was caught, which usually wouldn’t have been a problem because everybody did this sort of thing and it was kind of the “smoking marijuana while white” of Soviet offenses. But at that particular moment the Party higher-ups in the area wanted to make an example of someone in order to look like they were on top of their game to their higher-ups. The pig farmer was sentenced to years of hard labor.

A tire factory had been assigned a tire-making machine that could make 100,000 tires a year, but the government had gotten confused and assigned them a production quota of 150,000 tires a year. The factory leaders were stuck, because if they tried to correct the government they would look like they were challenging their superiors and get in trouble, but if they failed to meet the impossible quota, they would all get demoted and their careers would come to an end. They learned that the tire-making-machine-making company had recently invented a new model that really could make 150,000 tires a year. In the spirit of Chen Sheng, they decided that since the penalty for missing their quota was something terrible and the penalty for sabotage was also something terrible, they might as well take their chances and destroy their own machinery in the hopes the government sent them the new improved machine as a replacement. To their delight, the government believed their story about an “accident” and allotted them a new tire-making machine. However, the tire-making-machine-making company had decided to cancel production of their new model. You see, the new model, although more powerful, weighed less than the old machine, and the government was measuring their production by kilogram of machine. So it was easier for them to just continue making the old less powerful machine. The tire factory was allocated another machine that could only make 100,000 tires a year and was back in the same quandary they’d started with.

It’s easy to see how all of these problems could have been solved (or would never have come up) in a capitalist economy, with its use of prices set by supply and demand as an allocation mechanism. And it’s easy to see how thoroughly the Soviet economy was sabotaging itself by avoiding such prices.

IV.

The “hero” of Red Plenty – although most of the vignettes didn’t involve him directly – was Leonid Kantorovich, a Soviet mathematician who thought he could solve the problem. He invented the technique of linear programming, a method of solving optimization problems perfectly suited to allocating resources throughout an economy. He immediately realized its potential and wrote a nice letter to Stalin politely suggesting his current method of doing economics was wrong and he could do better – this during a time when everyone else in Russia was desperately trying to avoid having Stalin notice them because he tended to kill anyone he noticed. Luckily the letter was intercepted by a kindly mid-level official, who kept it away from Stalin and warehoused Kantorovich in a university somewhere.

During the “Khruschev thaw”, Kantorovich started getting some more politically adept followers, the higher-ups started taking note, and there was a real movement to get his ideas implemented. A few industries were run on Kantorovichian principles as a test case and seemed to do pretty well. There was an inevitable backlash. Opponents accused the linear programmers of being capitalists-in-disguise, which wasn’t helped by their use of something called “shadow prices”. But the combination of their own political adeptness and some high-level support from Khruschev – who alone of all the Soviet leaders seemed to really believe in his own cause and be a pretty okay guy – put them within arm’s reach of getting their plans implemented.

But when elements of linear programming were adopted, they were adopted piecemeal and toothless. The book places the blame on Alexei Kosygen, who implemented a bunch of economic reforms that failed, in a chapter that makes it clear exactly how constrained the Soviet leadership really was. You hear about Stalin, you imagine these guys having total power, but in reality they walked a narrow line, and all these “shadow prices” required more political capital than they were willing to mobilize, even when they thought Kantorovich might have a point.

V.

In the end, I was left with two contradictory impressions from the book.

First, amazement that the Soviet economy got as far as it did, given how incredibly screwed up it was. You hear about how many stupid things were going on at every level, and you think: This was the country that built Sputnik and Mir? This was the country that almost buried us beneath the tide of history? It is a credit to the Russian people that they were able to build so much as a screwdriver in such conditions, let alone a space station.

But second, a sense of what could have been. What if Stalin hadn’t murdered most of the competent people? What if entire fields of science hadn’t been banned for silly reasons? What if Kantorovich had been able to make the Soviet leadership base its economic planning around linear programming? How might history have turned out differently?

One of the book’s most frequently-hammered-in points was that there was was a brief moment, back during the 1950s, when everything seemed to be going right for Russia. Its year-on-year GDP growth (as estimated by impartial outside observers) was somewhere between 7 to 10%. Starvation was going down. Luxuries were going up. Kantorovich was fixing entire industries with his linear programming methods. Then Khruschev made a serious of crazy loose cannon decisions, he was ousted by Brezhnev, Kantorovich was pushed aside and ignored, the “Khruschev thaw” was reversed and tightened up again, and everything stagnated for the next twenty years.

If Khruschev had stuck around, if Kantorovich had succeeded, might the common knowledge that Communism is terrible at producing material prosperity look a little different?

The book very briefly mentioned a competing theory of resource allocation promoted by Victor Glushkov, a cyberneticist in Ukraine. He thought he could use computers – then a very new technology – to calculate optimal allocation for everyone. He failed to navigate the political seas as adroitly as Kantorovich’s faction, and the killing blow was a paper that pointed out that for him to do everything really correctly would take a hundred million years of computing time.

That was in 1960. If computing power doubles every two years, we’ve undergone about 25 doubling times since then, suggesting that we ought to be able to perform Glushkov’s calculations in three years – or three days, if we give him a lab of three hundred sixty five computers to work with. There could have been this entire field of centralized economic planning. Maybe it would have continued to underperform prices. Or maybe after decades of trial and error across the entire Soviet Union, it could have caught up. We’ll never know. Glushkov and Kantorovich were marginalized and left to play around with toy problems until their deaths in the 80s, and as far as I know their ideas were never developed further in the context of a national planned economy.

VI.

One of the ways people like insulting smart people, or rational people, or scientists, is by telling them they’re the type of people who are attracted to Communism. “Oh, you think you can control and understand everything, just like the Communists did.”

And I had always thought this was a pretty awful insult. The people I know who most identify as rationalists, or scientifically/technically minded, are also most likely to be libertarian. So there, case dismissed, everybody go home.

This book was the first time that I, as a person who considers himself rationally/technically minded, realized that I was super attracted to Communism.

Here were people who had a clear view of the problems of human civilization – all the greed, all the waste, all the zero-sum games. Who had the entire population united around a vision of a better future, whose backers could direct the entire state to better serve the goal. All they needed was to solve the engineering challenges, to solve the equations, and there they were, at the golden future. And they were smart enough to be worthy of the problem – Glushkov invented cybernetics, Kantorovich won a Nobel Prize in Economics.

And in the end, they never got the chance. There’s an interpretation of Communism as a refutation of social science, here were these people who probably knew some social science, but did it help them run a state, no it didn’t. But from the little I learned about Soviet history from this book, this seems diametrically wrong. The Soviets had practically no social science. They hated social science. You would think they would at least have some good Marxists, but apparently Stalin killed all of them just in case they might come up with versions of Marxism he didn’t like, and in terms of a vibrant scholarly field it never recovered. Economics was tainted with its association with capitalism from the very beginning, and when it happened at all it was done by non-professionals. Kantorovich was a mathematician by training; Glushkov a computer scientist.

Soviet Communism isn’t what happens when you let nerds run a country, it’s what happens when you kill all the nerds who are experts in country-running, bring in nerds from unrelated fields to replace them, then make nice noises at those nerds in principle while completely ignoring them in practice. Also, you ban all Jews from positions of importance, because fuck you.

Baggy two-piece suits are not the obvious costume for philosopher kings: but that, in theory, was what the apparatchiks who rule the Soviet Union in the 1960s were supposed to be. Lenin’s state made the same bet that Plato had twenty-five centuries earlier, when he proposed that enlightened intelligence gives absolute powers would serve the public good better than the grubby politicking of republics.

On paper, the USSR was a republic, a grand multi-ethnic federation of republics indeed and its constitutions (there were several) guaranteed its citizens all manner of civil rights. But in truth the Soviet system was utterly unsympathetic to the idea of rights, if you meant by them any suggestion that the two hundred million men, women and children who inhabited the Soviet Union should be autonomously fixing on two hundred million separate directions in which to pursue happiness. This was a society with just one programme for happiness, which had been declared to be scientific and therefore was as factual as gravity.

But the Soviet experiment had run into exactly the difficulty that Plato’s admirers encountered, back in the fifth century BC, when they attempted to mould philosophical monarchies for Syracuse and Macedonia. The recipe called for rule by heavily-armed virtue—or in the Leninist case, not exactly virtue, but a sort of intentionally post-ethical counterpart to it, self-righteously brutal. Wisdom was to be set where it could be ruthless. Once such a system existed, though, the qualities required to rise in it had much more to do with ruthlessness than wisdom. Lenin’s core of Bolsheviks, and the socialists like Trotsky who joined them, were many of them highly educated people, literate in multiple European languages, learned in the scholastic traditions of Marxism; and they preserved these attributes even as they murdered and lied and tortured and terrorized. They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. But their successors – the vydvizhentsy who refilled the CEntral Committee in the thirties – were not the most selfless people in Soviet society, or the most principled, or the most scrupulous. They were the most ambitious, the most domineering, the most manipulative, the most greedy, the most sycophantic: people whose adherence to Bolshevik ideas was inseparable from the power that came with them. Gradually their loyalty to the ideas became more and more instrumental, more and more a matter of what the ideas would let them grip in their two hands…

Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khruschev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.

And in the end it all failed miserably:

The Soviet economy did not move on from coal and steel and cement to plastics and microelectronics and software design, except in a very few military applications. It continued to compete with what capitalism had been doing in the 1930s, not with what it was doing now. It continued to suck resources and human labour in vast quantities into a heavy-industrial sector which had once been intended to exist as a springboard for something else, but which by now had become its own justification. Soviet industry in its last decades existed because it existed, an empire of inertia expanding ever more slowly, yet attaining the wretched distinction of absorbing more of the total effort of the economy that hosted it than heavy industry has ever done anywhere else in human history, before or since. Every year it produced goods that less and less corresponded to human needs, and whatever it once started producing, it tended to go on producing ad infinitum, since it possessed no effective stop signals except ruthless commands from above, and the people at the top no longer did ruthless, in the economic sphere. The control system for industry grew more and more erratic, the information flowing back to the planners grew more and more corrupt. And the activity of industry , all that human time and machine time it used up, added less and less value to the raw materials it sucked in. Maybe no value. Maybe less than none. One economist has argued that, by the end, it was actively destroying value; it had become a system for spoiling perfectly good materials by turning them into objects no one wanted.

I don’t know if this paragraph was intentionally written to contrast with the paragraph at the top, the one about the zombie dance of capitalism. But it is certainly instructive to make such a contrast. The Soviets had originally been inspired by this fear of economics going out of control, abandoning the human beings whose lives it was supposed to improve. In capitalist countries, people existed for the sake of the economy, but under Soviet communism, the economy was going to exist only for the sake of the people.

(accidental Russian reversal: the best kind of Russian reversal!)

And instead, they ended up taking “people existing for the sake of the economy” to entirely new and tragic extremes, people being sent to the gulags or killed because they didn’t meet the targets for some product nobody wanted that was listed on a Five-Year Plan. Spoiling good raw materials for the sake of being able to tell Party bosses and the world “Look at us! We are doing Industry!” Moloch had done some weird judo move on the Soviets’ attempt to destroy him, and he had ended up stronger than ever.

The book’s greatest flaw is that it never did get into the details of the math – or even more than a few-sentence summary of the math – and so I was left confused as to whether anything else had been possible, whether Kantorovich and Glushkov really could have saved the vision of prosperity if they’d been allowed to do so. Nevertheless, the Soviets earned my sympathy and respect in a way Marx so far has not, merely by acknowledging that the problem existed and through the existence of a few good people who tried their best to solve it.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s nice to learn you were actually right about everything.

Aretaeus of Cappadocia was a 1st century AD Greco-Roman physician who is notable for describing bipolar disorder almost exactly as it is described today. He says: “It appears to me that melancholy is the commencement and a part of mania” and goes on to describe symptoms of the disorder.

I have in front of me the bipolar chapter of both Aretaeus’ De causis et signis acutorum morborum and of the modern Mood Disorder Questionnaire, an instrument used for diagnosing bipolar. I’m going to go through the MDQ questions and see how many I can match to sentences in Aretaeus:

“Do you ever feel so good or hyper you are not your normal self?”

Aretaeus: “And they with whose madness joy is associated, laugh, play, dance night and day”

“…or so hyper it got you into trouble?”

Aretaeus: “They become silly, and doing dreadful and disgraceful things”

“Do you feel so irritable that you start fights or arguments?”

Aretaeus: “They are suspicious, irritable without any cause…others have madness attended with anger; and these sometimes rend their clothes and kill their keepers, and lay violent hands upon themselves. This miserable form of disease is not unattended with danger to those around.”

“Do you feel much more self-confident than usual?”

“Aretaeus: [They] sometimes go openly to the market crowned, as if victors in some contest of skill”.

“Do you get much less sleep than usual, but find that you don’t miss it?”

Aretaeus: “When [tending] to cheerfulness, they are in excellent spirits; yet they are unusually given to insomnolency”

“Do you find that you talk much more than usual?”

Aretaeus: “But the modes are infinite in those who are ingenious and docile,–untaught astronomy, spontaneous philosophy, poetry truly from the muses”

“Do you find you are much more interested in sex than usual?”

Aretaeus: “At the height of the disease they have impure dreams, and irresistible desire of venery.”

“Do you find that spending too much money gets you in trouble?”

Aretaeus: “[They can become] simple, extravagant, munificent, not from any virtue of the soul, but from the changeableness of the disease.”

…and six in the Mood Disorder Questionnaire that I couldn’t find a good analogue for in Aretaeus, but which seem to be in accordance with the spirit of his piece. So I will give Aretaeus a 7/13 or so on mania.

II.

Moving on to depression, we have the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, probably the most commonly used depression screening tool today.

“Do you feel little interest or pleasure in doing things?”

Aretaeus: “The understanding is turned…to sorrow and despondency only.”

“Trouble falling asleep, or sleeping too much”

Aretaeus: “And they also become peevish, dispirited, sleepless, and start up from a disturbed sleep.”

“Feeling tired or having little energy”

Aretaeus: “The patients are…unreasonably torpid, without any manifest cause: such is the commencement of melancholy.”

“Poor appetite, or overeating”

Aretaeus: “But if the disease go on to increase, they are voracious and greedy in taking food, for they are watchful, and watchfulness induces gluttony…But if any of the viscera get into a state of inflammation, it blunts the appetite and digestion.”

“Being so fidgety and restless that you have been moving around a lot more than usual”

Aretaeus: “Wherefore they are affected with madness in various shapes; some run along unrestrainedly, and, not knowing how, return again to the same spot.”

“Thoughts that you would be better off dead, or of hurting yourself”

Aretaeus: “If the illness become more urgent – hatred, avoidance of the haunts of men, vain lamentations; they complain of life, and desire to die.”

I’m giving him 6/10 on the depression side.

III.

So on mania and depression combined, Aretaeus gets 13/23 of the same criteria we use today, which is not bad at all.

I admit that some of the analogies are a little forced, but I think any knowledgeable person reading Aretaeus’ book would have to admit he is generally on the ball with his description of bipolar, not only in gestalt but also in many of the individual symptoms.

His theories of pathogenesis and treatment are, of course, totally off-base. I think he thinks they’re caused by warm or cold or dry or wet weather and imbalances in the four humors? But that goes with the territory.

What impresses me is that people with bipolar disorder in ancient Rome seem to have behaved a lot like people with bipolar disorder today.

And that seems like pretty solid evidence that this disorder, at least, is firmly biologically grounded and not culture-bound.

(which we already knew. Bipolar is very heritable and seems to occur about equally in all nations and cultures. But it’s nice to have confirmation.)

I have updated the Anti-Reactionary FAQ a very small amount, mostly by linking to people’s responses to it at the end. In the more distant future I may have time to rebut all of these responses in detail. I certainly want to examine some of what Moldbug said on Friday in more detail as I think he has an overly rosy view of democracy (did I just say that? yes I did! more when I have time to explain fully)

But today’s victims honorable debating partners are Bryce of Anarcho-Papist, with The Theory of Demotist Singularity and Jim from Jim’s Blog, with the very similar Anti-Anti Reactionary FAQ Part 4: Ever-Leftwards Movement. Both describe a purported effect called the “left singularity” – Bryce very formally with citations scattered throughout, Jim in such spectacular Insane Moonbat mode that spittle may shoot from your computer when you load the page.

What is the “left singularity”? According to Jim:

Every [past] leftwards movement has become ever more extreme, moved leftwards ever faster, eventually resulting in crisis, usually a bloody and disastrous crisis. The reason that leftists of anglosphere puritan origin rule the world is in large part because all the other left wing movements self destructed horribly, leaving Anglosphere leftists of puritan origin the last power standing.

I can confidently predict the collapse of leftism, but alas, not that the saints get to win. It sometimes happens that reactionaries take over after the crisis, and all is peace and order, but the more usual outcome is outside invaders take over, sometimes genocidally, or pirates and brigands take over, and slowly over centuries the brigands transition to being feudal lords.

A reactionary victory is possible. Strange things are apt to happen as history approaches a left singularity. White autogenocide is also possible, in which first all white heterosexual males are murdered, largely by each other, then all whites are murdered (Jews discovering to their great shock and surprise that they are white after all), all heterosexuals are murdered, and all males are murdered, then anyone insufficiently leftist is murdered, then the bar for being sufficiently leftist is raised, and raised again, until some of the remaining leftists wise up and murder everyone who is excessively leftist, thus ending the crisis.

Bryce is calmer, more lucid, and has more interesting arguments – but his theory isn’t that much different:

Democracy is not a politically neutral form of government. In the generation of its activity, it systematically favors leftist reforms to social institutions… Endless change in one direction is simply impossible to sustain… An ongoing breakdown of [social] institutions simultaneously creates the conditions ripe for political profit due to reform, creating a feedback of Leftism which erodes all hierarchies and social networks which are the literal constituents of society…“Singularity” is a point at which [these] phenomena fail to be explainable. As demotism tends inevitably to the left, and accelerates the left, it may very well destroy every last social network and hierarchy on its way down, burning up all available social capital and leaving no survivors. Worst case scenario short of complete annihilation, man is returned to the stone age.

In the past when I have talked to Reactionaries, they usually link this idea with some of the great leftist reigns of terror, like those of Mao or Robespierre (surprisingly, Jim interprets Stalin as acting correctly to prevent a leftist reign of terror, but others throw him in as well).

I would like to argue against this idea of left singularity. But first, a different question – do overgrowth of dry brush, and careless smokers discarding lit cigarettes, prevent forest fires?

It would appear that overgrowth of dry brush and careless smokers discarding lit cigarettes prevent forest fires. After all, park rangers examining national parks that are not on fire often report seeing careless smokers discarding lit cigarettes. But park rangers examining national parks that are currently on fire almost never see careless smokers discarding lit cigarettes, or for that matter any smokers at all. Likewise, park rangers examining national parks that are not on fire, and where there have been no fires for a very long time, often report overgrowth of dry brush. But park rangers examining national parks that are currently on fire, or have very recently had a fire, report seeing almost no dry brush at all. Although correlation is not always causation, it certainly looks suspicious that parks with careless smokers and dry brush are practically never on fire and have usually been fire-free for a very long time, while their smokerless and brushless counterparts are often on fire at that very moment, or have had fires in the very recent past. Until we have better information, we should conclude that brush and smoking are strong protective factors.

What might we say to a park ranger who reasoned this way? Something like “in order to tease out causes, we can’t just look at conditions during the event in question – which are likely effects rather than causes – we need to look at the conditions present before the event.” Once the National Park Service started analyzing fires at time T by observing the conditions at time T-1, they would pretty quickly discover that overgrowth of dry brush and presence of careless smokers cause forest fires, rather than preventing them.

Okay, back to left singularities. Strong oppressive monarchies prevent reigns of terror. We know this because at the exact time a reign of terror is going on, the government isn’t a oppressive monarchy. Hmmmmmm.

What nations are most lauded by the Reactionaries as examples of the system they want to emulate? Bourbon France. Czarist Russia. Imperial China. And of course Austria-Hungary.

What reigns of terror are most condemned by the Reactionaries as examples of the excesses of Progressivism? The French Revolution. The Russian Revolution. Mao’s Great Leap Forward. And coming in honorable mention is Hitler, whom they don’t talk about much because he’s hard to peg as leftist, but who counts as a reign of terror if anyone does.

You may already have noticed a certain very clear T / T-1 relationship here. But just to spell it out:

Robespierre was born and educated in Bourbon France, and began his reign of terror less than five years after the end of the Bourbon monarchy.

Stalin was born and educated in the Russian Empire, and began his reign of terror less than five years after the end of the Romanov monarchy.

Hitler was born and educated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and began his reign of terror fifteen years after the fall of the Hapsburg monarchy.

Mao was born and educated in Imperial China, and began his reign of terror thirty two years after the end of the Qing Dynasty. A bit of a slowpoke, but in his defense China was busy being invaded by the Japanese and nearly everyone else. As soon as they were out of the way, he started reigning in terror as quickly as he could.

Let’s set Mao as an outlier and hypothesize that every one of the great reigns of terror of history will occur less than a generation (= about 20 years) after a repressive rightist monarchy, dictatorship, or colonial regime is in power.

The hypothesis does pretty well. Pol Pot took power eight years after the fall of King Sihanouk, who is difficult to pin down politically but who fits both the “monarch” and the “repressive” criteria pretty well. Cromwell followed nine years after Charles I, who dissolved Parliament and sent his opponents to the infamous Star Chamber. Castro followed immediately after repressive strongman Fulgencio Batista, who had cancelled democratic elections and seized power a couple years before. You may go through and test the hypothesis against your own favorite genocidal maniac. It appears to hold.

The Reactionary model, as I understand it, goes like this:

1) Strong repressive monarchy
2) Some idiot decides to change things to democracy
3) Democracy shifts further to the left…
4) …and further to the left…
5) …and ends in a super-leftist reign of terror where thousands or millions die
6) General Monck rides in to restore order with a strong repressive monarchy

What we’re not seeing is Step 3 or 4, the shifting leftwards. There’s just not enough time. Reigns of terror tend to occur only a couple of years after a country is a strong repressive monarchy on the very far right, sometimes immediately after. So I propose an alternate model:

1) Strong repressive monarchy, builds up pressure and anger
2) Revolution. Well-intentioned but naive revolutionaries hold onto power for a couple of years
3) People still have lots of pressure and anger and are unsatisfied with well-intentioned naive people
4) Angrier, more violent group hijacks revolution. Reign of terror.
5) Foreign, domestic, or natural intervention ends reign of terror.
6) Government mellows out and does pretty okay.

For example, Russia started with the Czarist monarchy. It was overthrown by a broad coalition of people, many of whom were non-Communists, Mensheviks, or at least Bolsheviks less crazy than Stalin. Stalin seized power, started a reign of terror. Stalin dies, is replaced by people like Khrushchev and Gorbachev who are more mellow.

There’s an important difference in the predictions made by these models.

In the Reactionary model, being moderate-left is a really bad thing. It means you are well on the path to becoming far-left and suffering a reign of terror. You should try to become far-right right away in order to get off that slippery slope.

In my model, being moderate-left is a great thing. It means you’re probably at step 6, or else you’ve skipped the process entirely and gone directly to good government, do not pass Go, do not collect 200,000 corpses. The place you don’t want to be is far-right. That means you’re overgrown with dry brush. Historically it means you’re at very very high risk for a disastrous revolution.

In the Reactionary model, a monarch who voluntarily relaxes their powers is dooming their country to inevitable violent revolution.

In my model, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable”. A monarch who voluntarily relaxes their power before being forced to do so by the situation – like the constitutional monarchs of Europe or the King of Thailand – is performing a controlled burn, destroying the overgrowth that would otherwise cause a fire and skipping directly from 1 to 6.

(this is to be distinguished from a monarch who grudgingly gives away of few of their powers when revolution is already in the air in order to placate the revolutionaries, which rarely works)

These countries have the same good results as democratic nations, like the US and UK, which have gone three hundred or so years with only the tiniest traces of state-sponsored violence (and those traces, like the camps for the Japanese during WWII, have not come from the Left). Or like France, where a reign of terror five years after the Bourbon monarchy is clearly contrasted with a hundred fifty terror-free years since it became democratic in 1870.

So the “left singularity” proponents have to explain how a supposed vicious cycle of leftism managed to progress from Louis XIV to Robespierre in five years when there was a monarchy involved, but hasn’t managed to progress much at all in a hundred fifty years when there was democracy involved.

The “left singularity” describes a process that has never happened in all of history. It has never been the excesses of democracy that cause a “leftist” reign of terror. It has always been the excesses of monarchy or a monarchy-like dictatorship. And anyone who disagrees, I challenge that person to show me a good example of a reign of terror in a nation that has been stably democratic (defined here as its real head of government being chosen by free and fair elections, plus well-enforced right to free speech) for at least one generation beforehand.

This brings me back to my point 2.3 from the Anti-Reactionary FAQ – classifying both insane millenarian blood-cults and stable market democracies in the same category might (surprise!) not be such a good idea. The former are primarily a short-term reaction to a repressive regime, which burn brightly then fizzle out. The latter are a stable configuration which have so far been extremely successful and which historically seem like the strongest prophylaxis against the former.

Scharlach from Habitable Worlds objects to my point 3.1.1, which claims that progressive ideals aren’t particularly novel or modern because classical Rome shared many of the policies we most associate with progressivism. I mention welfare, strikes agitating greater rights for the poor, multiculturalism, religious syncretism, sexual libertinism, and utopianism.

Scharlach disagrees. He first points out that classical Roman “strikes” were not about greater rights for the “poor”, per se, but for plebians, a class of non-nobles that actually included some very wealthy people. I accept his clarification, but I would add that modern progressive movements are happy to conflate “class made up of disproportionately poor people” with “poor people” as well, whether we are talking about the unemployed, inner city youth, minorities, high school dropouts, inhabitants of the Third World, or whatever. Heck, modern progressivism calls women a “minority” even though they make up 51% of the population just because it is a convenient way to lampshade their less privileged status. So I don’t think it’s especially unprogressive that “more rights for plebians” was the classical Roman rallying cry, rather than “more rights for the poor” per se.

But the crux of his objection is more philosophical:

But the question is: do these seemingly “progressive” policies stem from what today we would consider progressivism? Do they have anything to do with “social justice”? We should remember that when looking back at history, curious similarities arise, but they do so at incongruous joints, and their existence may not signify anything but the fact that large-scale political ecologies have limited practical expressions. Think of it this way: A society whose political discourse and ideals sanction welfare to the poor because it is believed that the underclass is genetically inferior, incapable of taking care of itself, and might revolt if not given enough food . . . that’s a very different society from one whose political ideals sanction welfare because it is believed the poor have a right to good living standards or that the poor deserve welfare because it re-distributes goods rightly theirs but taken from them through an oppressive economic system.

Contemporary progressive policies emerge from ideals and discourses about morality, justice, oppression, and rights. The poor (especially the dark-skinned poor) deserve the welfare they get; it is theirs by Constitutional right. It is a moral and political imperative not to take away the welfare they receive and to give them more if possible. Progressives actively try to alleviate the shame once associated with receiving welfare. Pointing out that the poor in America have it pretty good is a distinctly right-wing thing to do. ”Food stamps” are now “EBT cards” that look and function like debit cards. Medicaid patients sit in the same waiting rooms as patients paying high insurance premiums, and you can’t tell the difference. (Well, you can, but . . .) Welfare in America has become a right, a moral imperative, a matter of justice and just desserts, a thing that brings no shame, a thing to be proud of, a thing to demand, a thing to stand up for…

So Scott Alexander is correct that social policies in ancient Rome look similar to contemporary progressive welfare policies. But were the motives the same? Did the poor and the plebians get free or reduced-cost corn, grain, wine, and olive oil . . . . because they deserved it? because it was theirs by moral and legal right? because it was a matter of social justice?

I’m not a classicist, so I’m willing to be corrected on this, but as near as I can tell, the Roman dole was wrapped up in discourses about a) the might and wealth of Rome and b) goddess worship. Welfare policies in ancient Rome were built upon very different ideals and emerged from very different motives than contemporary progressivism’s welfare policies. Nowhere have I been able to fine a discussion of the Roman congiarium in terms of rights or justice. The dole was there because it made the emperor more popular and demonstrated the wealth of Rome to the people. What’s more, the dole was personified as Annona, a goddess to be worshiped and thanked. Scott Alexander even recognizes this difference in motive when he says that ancient Romans “worshiped a goddess of food stamps.”

Indeed they did. And that’s the whole point. When was the last time you heard welfare policies discussed in terms of worshipful gratitude, mercy, and thankfulness? If that were the discourse surrounding welfare policy, America would be a very different country. It seems that Roman welfare and American welfare are as different from one another as Jubilee is from abolitionism.

I will agree that the Romans used different philosophical justifications for their welfare state than do moderns, but before discussing this, a lengthy and kind of pointless also-not-a-classicist digression on why the difference may not be as big as Scharlach suggests.

If the essay is trying to compare the grateful Roman poor and the entitled, demanding modern poor, I propose that the Roman recipients of the annona were as entitled and demanding as any modern. Ancient Roman leaders automatically assumed any hiccup in the flow of free grain would lead to riots, and their assumption was justified. You may for example read the section on Roman food riots here. Particular high points are the riots of 22 BC, during which rioters threatened to burn the senators alive if they didn’t produce enough free grain, and the riots of 190 AD, when Papirius Dionysius, the prefect in charge of the grain supply, accused political enemy Marcus Aurelius Cleander of threatening it – the disturbance ended when the Emperor Commodus killed Cleander and his son and threw their heads out to the angry mob (which instantly calmed down and dispersed).

Or the essay may be trying to compare a Roman attitude of giving small strategic grants of welfare to the worthy with a modern attitude that everyone deserves as much welfare as they want at all times regardless of situation or else their human rights are violated. But here, too, I do not think the distinction is as great as is claimed. 83% of Americans believe people on welfare should be required to work, and only 7% oppose such a requirement. 69% believe that there are too many people on welfare and the criteria need to be stricter, compared to only 24% who believe the opposite. People who want welfare benefits need to jump through various bureaucratic hoops (some of which are actually kind of stupid) and usually receive them only for a limited amount of time.

(this interpretation would remind me of my frequent complaint that some reactionaries say “X is an unquestionable dogma of our modern society” when they mean “I heard about a college professor who believes X”.)

So much for our pointless digression. Scharlach probably means something more like “Ancient Rome didn’t have modern concepts of human rights and social justice.” I agree with this. I just don’t think it matters.

I assume Scharlach read my FAQ part 3.3, where I claim that progressive values are closely linked to urbanization and technological/economic growth. But he may not have read my We Wrestle Not With Flesh And Blood…, so I’m worried he might have interpreted me in 3.3 as claiming something like:

Urbanization + Growth -> Progressive Values -> Social Change

If that had been my thesis, then it would indeed be relevant that the ancient Romans didn’t have our version of progressive values. Their social change would be a coincidence, unrelated to ours since it missed the crucial middle step that determined the shape our social change would take.

But I’m not proposing that model. I’m proposing one that looks more like this:

Urbanization + Growth -> Social Change -> Progressive Values

(really the “social change” node should be called “pressure for social change”, and it and the “progressive values” node should have little circular arrows both pointing at each other, but let’s keep it simple)

Let me give an example of what I mean.

A 25th century historian, looking back at our own age, might notice two things. She would notice that suddenly, around the end of the 20th century, everyone started getting very fat. And she would notice that suddenly, around the end of the 20th century, the “fat acceptance movement” started to become significant. She might conclude, very rationally, that some people started a fat acceptance movement, it was successful, and so everyone became very fat.

With clearer knowledge of our era, we know better. We know that people started getting fat for, uh, reasons. It seems to have a lot to do with the greater availability and better taste of fatty, sugary foods. It might also have to do with complicated biological reasons like hormone disrupters in our plastics. But we have excellent evidence it’s not because of the fat acceptance movement, which started long after obesity rates began to increase. If we really needed to prove it, we could investigate whether obesity is more common in populations with good access to fat acceptance memes (like, uh, Wal-Mart shoppers and American Samoans).

To us early-21st century-ites, it’s pretty clear why the fat acceptance movement started now. Its natural demographic is fat people, there are more fat people around to support it, they feel like they have strength in numbers. and non-fat people are having trouble stigmatizing fat people because it’s much harder to stigmatize a large group than a small group (no pun intended).

Does this have any relevance for the sort of thing reactionaries talk about? Yes. Let’s look at divorce.

From a historical perspective, no-fault divorce was legalized in the early 1970s, and divorce rates were skyrocketing in the early 1970s. It is incredibly tempting to want to attribute skyrocketing divorce rates to easy-access no-fault divorce.

It’s also wrong. From an excellent article I entirely recommend:

Just from the graph it should be clear how little no-fault divorce mattered, but if you need more formal research it has certainly been done. Even the conservative Institute For Marriage and Public Policy admits in its review article on the subject that “divorce law is not the major cause of the increase in divorce over the last fifty years”, and that even the small bump from no-fault provisions “while sustained for a number of years, eventually fades and the divorce rate moves back to trend”.

I’d guess that the explanation for why skyrocketing divorce rates and no-fault divorce both happened in the early 70s is a lot like the explanation for why skyrocketing obesity rates and fat acceptance both happened in the early 2000s. Lots of people started getting divorced. Under older, stricter divorce laws, this required couples who wanted divorces to manufacture some bogus complaint with the help of lawyers, an embarrassing and expensive process. Eventually the number of people divorcing or wanting to divorce became sufficiently large to form a good political lobby, and the people not involved in the divorce process couldn’t keep stigmatizing divorcees because there were too many of them for it to be easy or convenient. So the divorce lobby won and passed no-fault divorce laws.

I don’t deny that sometimes these ideological movements and the laws they pass have some effect, like the small, quickly fading effect of divorce laws mentioned in the quote above. That’s why I wanted little circular arrows between “Social Change” and “Progressive Values” above. I’m just saying these effects are small and not particularly interesting. They’re the tail wagging the dog.

And I don’t deny that the progressive movement pushing a social change often exists before the social change does. If 100 years from now the existence of vat-grown meat causes all factory farming to shut down, no doubt PETA will claim victory. But just because PETA pushed for the event, and then the event happened, doesn’t mean PETA was the main cause. At best, they kept pushing but it was only the technological change that helped them gain power and respect and enact their positions. At worst, if they didn’t exist then within ten minutes of the invention of vat-grown meat some other group would have sprung up to accept the easy moral victory it provided.

So let’s get back to Rome.

Scharlach points out that the value system associated with Roman welfare was different from the value system associated with our own welfare system.

Ancient Rome had a population of about a million people crowded together, a government vulnerable to the mob, and resources to spare. I propose those situations will, more often than not, inspire a welfare system. They did it in ancient Rome, and they’re doing it in modern DC.

According to legend, Frederick the Great declared of his conquests: “I will begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right” (okay, Reactionaries, I will admit Frederick the Great was hella cool). If Frederick was in the welfare business, he might have said “I will begin by giving welfare. Later, I will find scholars to come up with a philosophy supporting welfare.”

And just as any historical account of why Frederick conquered new territories should focus on his self-interested goals rather than on whatever justifications his scholars later cooked up, so an account of why we give welfare should focus on the economic, material, and technological conditions that inspire it, rather than fretting over how one society talked about the goddess Annona and another talked about social justice. I’m sure if Frederick conquered both classical Rome and 21st-century America, his Roman supporters would declare he was following the will of Jupiter, and his American supporters would declare he was trying to help disprivileged minorities. It would be the historian’s job to see through that (and also to sort out what I expect would be a very confusing timeline of Frederick’s life).

Which brings us back to Rome one last time. I didn’t discuss the Roman welfare state in isolation. I mentioned it in the context of Rome being surprisingly progressive in a lot of other ways – its plebian “strikes”, its multiculturalism, its religious syncretism, its loose sexual morals.

If the resemblance between Roman and modern welfare systems is a mere coincidence, then we have to add a striking number of other coincidences to the list. Eventually the conjunction of all these coincidences starts to look unlikely.

But there is a neat explanation for all of them. States that are militarily secure, economically advanced, multicultural, and urbanized tend to adopt progressive policies (here I am confusingly lumping some values like multiculturalism in as policies, but you know what I mean). Ancient Rome and modern America are both militarily secure, economically advanced, multicultural, and urbanized. In between stand a bunch of countries the Reactionaries like to talk about like the Holy Roman Empire, which were not militarily secure, economically primitive, monocultural, and more rural. Those countries didn’t have progressive policies or values.

The original question was whether ancient Rome could be called a progressive society. I say it was. Scharlach objects that it wasn’t, because it didn’t have the particular brand of progressive philosophy we do today. But I respond that the philosophy is irrelevant to what we presumably care about – social policies and social outcomes. Policies (like welfare) and outcomes (like the existence of a large class of welfare-dependent poor) were the same in classical Rome and modern America, and for the same reasons. Therefore, it is correct and useful to call classical Rome an early progressive society, though with the obvious caveat that it did not go as far in that direction as our own.

Brought peace.

As you may have noticed, instead of another GIGANTIC WALL OF TEXT I am trying to write my rebuttal to Reactionary philosophy in the form of several smaller posts that I can then link together in a sequence index. This particular post addresses Reactionary claims that modern society causes international instability, leading to increased war (or increased “total war”) and the resulting mayhem.

This claim I received mostly from blog posts I can’t find right now and from discussions with Michael Anissimov. It goes that when states are fully sovereign, self-interested, and run by noble classes – as they were long ago – their wars are rare, as short as possible, and mostly fought in a civilized way.

But when states are subject to a larger international order (like the UN or “international law”), interested in ideological concerns, and governed by a host of factions competing for democratic power – as they are today – wars are more common, bungled into increased length and fatality, and turn into “total war” where anything goes and civilians are considered valid targets.

Michael specifically mentioned the Congress of Vienna as an example of the old order, pointing out that a bunch of aristocrats met up, divided Europe among them, and there was peace for decades afterwards. He compared this to the inelegance of modern “police actions” and “foreign interventions”, pointing out how World Wars I and II, at the beginning of the modern era, were unmatched in their deadliness and brutality.

Luckily, these questions about war and the stability of different models of international relations can be investigated empirically. Are wars worse today, or were we worse during the old aristocratic era? By what standards?

Let’s ask the media! War Is Going Out Of Style, says the New York Times. War And Violence On The Decline In Modern Times, trumpets NPR. Josh Goldstein says we are “winning the war on war”, Steven Pinker proclaims the victory of the better angels of our nature, and John Mueller even more triumphantly posits that War Has Almost Ceased To Exist

The statistics bear them out. The BBC notes:

The Human Security Report found a decline in every form of political violence except terrorism since 1992. “A lot of the data we have in this report is extraordinary,” its director, former UN official Andrew Mack, said.

It found the number of armed conflicts had fallen by more than 40% in the past 13 years, while the number of very deadly wars had fallen by 80%.

The study says many common beliefs about contemporary conflict are “myths” – such as that 90% of those killed in current wars are civilians, or that women are disproportionately victimised. The report credits intervention by the United Nations, plus the end of colonialism and the Cold War, as the main reasons for the decline in conflict.

The trend is older than just this decade. According to Goldstein:

In fact, the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population, which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace.

And Steven Pinker shows the following graph:

So there’s more than enough data to show the world has been getting more peaceful over the past seventy years. The most plausible Reactionary response would be that this is too small a time horizon: that the horrors of progressivism should be viewed over a timescale of centuries.

First of all, this shouldn’t be true. A staple of Reactionary thought is that the world has become notably more progressive since World War II, and a hyper-willingness to attribute anything that’s declined since that period to the progressive world-view. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Second, it is very suspicious to say that the part of the data you don’t have good statistics for, and only that part of the data, proves your point.

But in order to address this objection more fully, I tried to get fuzzy ballpark area data on the deadliness of wars in past centuries. My methodology was to comb Wikipedia’s list of wars by death toll, take all the ones with casualties of one million or greater, and organize them by era. The eras I used were 21st Century So Far, 1950-2000, 1900-1950, 1850-1900, 1800 -1850, 1700-1800, 1600-1700, 1500-1600, 1000-1500, 1-1000, and 500 BC – 1. Where casualties were given as a range, I took the center of that range, except in the Taiping Rebellion where I believe the top of Wikipedia’s range is crazy high and so I took nearer the bottom; where conflicts spanned more than one era, I placed them in the one containing the majority of the conflict.

I added up total war casualties for each era, then scaled them by population using 2005 as the standard – that is, deaths were multiplied so that the new number was the same percent of the 2005 population as the original was of its own era’s population. Then I divided by the length of the era to give average deaths per century during that era.

The 1900 – 1950 era indeed came on top, with 626 million projected deaths per century per 2005 population. Second place was 1600 – 1700, with 442 million. Other violent periods of note were 1850 – 1900 (326M), 1000 – 1500 (230M), and 1800-1850 (106M). There was no obvious trend related to time.

However one trend worthy of note is that the 21st Century So Far and the period 1950-2000 were by far the two most peaceful eras of any in the study (both at about 28M).

So the most progressive periods in history are also the most peaceful. And the Reactionaries’ pet period, the 1600s when the Stuarts ruled England and the Hapsburgs were still mighty, was the deadliest age of history outside a World War. I tested what would happen if I limited the domain to Europe, and the results are much the same (with the exception of 1850 – 1900 becoming much more peaceful).

This study is actually biased against me and in favor of the Reactionaries in two ways. First, I eliminated all wars with death counts less than a million, because otherwise it would have taken forever. But that disproportionately eliminates pre-modern wars, since they were fought among lower-population nations – a conflict today need only kill 1/7000th of the population to make my list, but one in 0 BC would have had to kill a full 1/100 or be dropped entirely.

Second, technology! Two days worth of airplanes dropping bombs on Dresden in the 1940s killed more people than several long and bloody medieval crusades. More modern death counts should probably be discounted to take into account the fact that we are just way better at killing each other when we want to, even though we want to much less often. Yes, the era of World Wars saw slightly greater deaths per population than the era of absolute monarchy in Europe. But the Allies were killing people with nuclear bombs, and the Hapsburgs were killing people with bayonets. The 17th century in particular, and the past in general, just really really sucked.

Some Reactionaries, intuiting this pattern, have tried to dismiss it by saying that, while progressive eras have few wars, their wars are much worse – the sort of “total war” that characterized World Wars I and II, and so rose to new levels of killing and barbarity.

But this article lists the worst conflicts of all time by percent of population killed. And you have to go to number six on the list just to get to World War II! World War I isn’t even on the list! The Mongols did not kill 11% of the population of Earth in twenty-one years by not being aware you could harm civilians; the various mercenaries of the Thirty Years’ War were no more innocent.

One last fact noticed in the process of going through Wikipedia’s wars list: in any particular era, it is always the least progressive countries that are having the wars. Even the miniscule death count in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is limited almost entirely to authoritarian African countries and Islamic theocracies. In neither World War was the major conflict two democracies (by any reasonable definition) fighting one another, and at least in the latter totalitarian side deserves a disproportionate amount of blame. The bloodiest conflicts of the past few thousand years, even adjusting for population, have been in China, which is basically Reactionary Utopia with an authoritarian Emperor, a Mandate of Heaven, and strict racial homogeneity. There is a lot of debate over whether two democracies have ever gone to war (answer: it depends how true of a Scotsman you are) but this very fact should cue you in that war and democracy are not positively correlated (and most likely not even neutrally correlated).

So to sum up: as the world has become more progressive over the past seventy years, conflicts and deaths from conflict have dropped precipitously. Virtually every past era was much more violent than our own, and the biases of this study probably mean they were more violent even than our numbers indicated. Every single one of the five deadliest conflicts in human history occurred before the Enlightenment, and in any given era the more progressive countries both start and participate in fewer wars than the less progressive countries.

Very likely this is due partly or mostly to economic factors – the point that no two countries with McDonalds’ ever go to war is a good one. But this does not negate the fact that our current political and social system is the one that economic factors decided to set up in order to achieve their economic goals.

Mimes, in the form of God on high mutter and mumble low
And hither and thither fly – mere puppets, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things shifting scenery to and fro

– an excerpt out of Ligaea, by Edgar Allen Poe

There should be a post debating Reactionaries’ assumptions about the superiority of past cultures and methods. Eventually I hope to write that post. But this is not it. This is the post where I claim that, even granting all of those assumptions, Reaction is somewhere between wrong and impossible. Why?

To borrow Poe’s terminology, history as we learn it in school tends to concentrate on the puppets and ignore the vast formless things.

In a previous essay, I mentioned a pattern of refactored agency in which human beings lack agency and merely respond to incentives. I said they were “actors” reading from the “script their incentives wrote for them”, and anyone who deviated from the part would be outcompeted and replaced.

This seems to broadly describe most historical figures. If Christopher Columbus had decided not to explore America, Cabral or Cabot or someone would have. Caravels existed, people needed a new trade route to India, the only question was who was going to be first.

But the puppetry expands past individuals toward whole empires and movements. If God reached into the year 1900 and removed every single Communist, and every Communist book, and erased all memory of Communism, I think it would take about five minutes before someone reinvented something much like the movement, because there were a bunch of very poor people who felt desperate and cheated crammed up against a bunch of very rich people who weren’t afraid to flaunt their wealth. The new movement might have differed from Communism in minor details – maybe their color would have been blue instead of red – but it wouldn’t be hard to identify.

So much for the puppets. What are these Vast Formless Things giving them their orders? I mentioned liking Guns, Germs and Steel, and I think Diamond has done a good job of proving geography has important historical effects. But geography is fixed, not exactly the sort of thing that’s going to cause revolutions. So after that last post you probably won’t be surprised to hear I think the vastest and most formless Vast Formless Thing of all is technological progress.

Engines Alone Turn The Wheels of History

The largest and furthest-reaching political changes of all time have invariably been the effect of technological progress. The largest of these, the transition from egalitarian bands to the ultrahierarchical divine monarchies of the Bronze Age, seems to have been mostly the effect of the Agricultural Revolution and its corollaries. Without committing to what order these things happened in:

– Need for a guarantee that the crops you planted will still be yours at harvest time inspires idea of private property
– Sedentary lifestyle + concept of property allow accumulation of wealth
– Accumulation of wealth requires law enforcement to protect wealth
– Excess food allows specialization of labor
– Requirement for law enforcement + specialized labor leads to creation of warrior caste
– Powerful warrior caste + everyone else being farmers and losing the martial skills they enjoyed as hunters leads to warrior caste taking over.
– Need for large irrigation/flood control projects in many areas leads to very centralized government

And a lot of these late Neolithic/early Bronze Age cultures turned out the same way. If Ramesses II, Montezuma II, and Agamemmnon went to lunch together, they’d have a lot to talk about, despite being separated by continents and millennia. This suggests that the Generic Bronze Age Government – a god-king served by a bunch of warrior-nobles, plus massive militarism and slavery – probably just made sense given the circumstances.

I don’t want to sound too deterministic and spooky here, but I do think governments have a good way of kind of converging to a local optimum. Ramesses II may not have thought “You know, the Nile floods a lot, so I should institute a strong centralized government with lots of slavery”, but some people tried some things, other people tried other things, the things that worked won out, the things that didn’t passed into the dustbin of history, and we got Ancient Egypt. If God reached into history and tried to turn Ancient Egypt into modern day Sweden, it wouldn’t work any better than His attempt to remove Communism did a few paragraphs ago – within a few years they’d be back to worshipping Pharaohs and invading Canaanites

After the Neolithic, one of the most clear-cut examples of technology changing social structure was the fall of feudalism. Feudalism was based on a very simple calculation: one armored knight could defeat an arbitrary number of untrained peasants. To be an armored knight took your standard 10,000 hours of training; it wasn’t something you can do as a side job. So once again you have at least two castes – the warrior caste and the support-the-warriors caste; since the warrior caste is both smaller and stronger, you end up with an aristocratic system. If you want to govern large territories under an aristocratic system and you don’t have real-time communication, you come up with something like feudalism. And sure enough, we have pretty much the exact same social structure in medieval Europe and Sengoku Japan.

Then some new weapons were invented: pikes, longbows, crossbows, but especially firearms. Now you can get someone who hasn’t trained 10,000 hours, give them a few days of weapon training, hand them a gun or a crossbow or something, and they can kill an armored knight. Now the power doesn’t belong to the people with the best connections among the warrior nobility, it belongs to the people with enough money to hire soldiers and supply them with guns. It took a long time to realize this, especially since guns weren’t that good to begin with, but when people finally got it into their heads feudalism went caput.

The printing press was an even bigger deal. I don’t have my Big List O’ Unbelievable Printing Press Statistics handy here, but the Internet reminds me that there were 30,000 books – total! – in Europe before the invention of the printing press. Fifty years later, 300,000 copies just of Martin Luther’s religious tracts were printed in a single year alone. Among just the simpler and more direct effects:

– Protestant Reformation. Easy one. Lots of people had tried challenging the Catholic Church before, but not only could they not get their message out, but most people weren’t ready for it – only the richest of the rich could even own their own Bible. Basically as soon as the printing press was invented this took off.
– Newspapers. All of a sudden, people who aren’t the highest ranks of the nobility know what’s going on at court. Some people have opinions on this. Start of modern politics where the masses know what’s going on and might complain.
– The Renaissance. All these old Greek and Roman texts are spread. People realize that there are other ways to organize society beyond their own.
– Scientific Revolution. If a scientist discovers something, he can actually sent his work to other scientists in an efficient way, who can then build upon it. This was absolutely not the case for previous scientists, which is why not much happened during those periods.
– Rise of nationalism. Ability of common people to read books means more books printed in vernacular instead of Latin. This causes insular language-based communities which then feed upon themselves to become more delineated nation-states.

I was going to go into the same depth about the Industrial Revolution and the Sexual Revolution (by which I mean near-simultaneous discovery of birth control pills and antibiotics effective against syphilis), but this section is getting long, so if you promise to just agree they Changed Everything I’ll make life easier for both of us and move on.

Forget King James II, Try King Canute

So the biggest changes in history have been predetermined reactions to different technological conditions. This should worry Reactionaries for several reasons.

First, I previously claimed that if Communism disappeared it would be immediately reinvented. If Ancient Egypt had randomly switched to modern Sweden, the realities of life in the Nile flood plain and of Bronze Age technology would have caused it to switch back without even breaking its stride.

I think my claim here is that cultures and ideologies have a sort of homeostatic regulatory mechanism that fits them to their conditions. This is why all Bronze Age cultures converged upon divine monarchies, and all medieval empires converged upon feudalism, and proooobably why all modern cultures converge upon liberal democracy.

Countries that avoid liberal democracy usually regret it. China would be a good example. They tried being really Communist for a while and ended up becoming an economic basketcase. If they wanted to compete on the international stage they realized they needed a stronger economy, and so liberalized their market. A competitive market requires information access, so the Chinese got access to lots of foreign media; I recently learned that any business that wants to pay for it can even legally avoid the Great Firewall. The Internet meant the Chinese could coordinate protests on microblogging platforms, leading to a bunch of riots, leading to an attempt to liberalize the system and crack down on corruption which is still going on. I’m not going to claim that China is definitely going to end up as a democracy, but I think whatever it does end up as is going to be a whole lot more like 2013 USA than like 1963 China.

China didn’t plan to approach the Western model of government. It was just what happened to them automatically when they wanted their country to stop being a hellhole. The same is happening now in Burma, somewhat more slowly in Cuba, and in other places around the world. Even the countries skipping the “democracy” part have been aping the Industrial Revolution, womens’ rights, and so on.

This is probably because many features of liberal democracy are adaptations to our current technological climate. For example, women’s lib seems like an adaptation both to the Sexual Revolution and to the demographic transition where people are no longer having like twenty children all the time. Representative government seems like an adaptation to mass media that allows everyone to be aware of, and usually upset about, what the country’s leadership is doing.

If you like these things, you can call it cultural evolution and assume we’re approaching some great goal of perfection. If you don’t like them, you can call them patches, such that once the demographic transition screws up traditional gender roles, we need women’s lib as a patch to contain the damage. Either way, you better not take off that patch.

So this is my first beef with Reactionaries. They see someone identifying as Progressive saying something – Gloria Steinem pushing for women’s rights or something – and they say “Oh no, that awful Progressive Gloria Steinem is screwing up our traditional gender roles. If only she would be quiet, everything would go back to normal!”

Gloria Steinem is a puppet. If she’s part of some movement, even a large saecular movement calling itself Progressivism, they, too, are puppets. It is stupid to get upset at puppets. If you rip them up, the puppeteer will get new ones.

If you don’t like women’s lib, your enemy isn’t Gloria Steinem. Your enemy is the Vast Formless Thing controlling Gloria Steinem. In this case, that would be the demographic transition.

You might be able to beat Gloria Steinem in a fight, but you can’t beat the demographic transition. Or if you can, it’s going to be through something a lot more complicated than going on a soapbox and condemning it, more complicated even than becoming Czar and trying to pass laws to reverse it.

King Canute tried to order back the tide. It was a dumb idea, but in his defense, it was basically just a religious spectacle so he could wax poetic about the power of God. What’s your excuse?

Amid These Dark Satanic Mills

In the comments to the Enormous Planet-Sized Nutshell post, some people did a good – though not unassailable – job of picking apart some common Reactionary arguments for superior outcomes among past cultures. The crime data may be an artifact, and more believable homicide data suggests the modern era is safer. Modern students may learn different things than are tested on that Harvard exam which are equally valuable.

Whatever. Let’s assume the Reactionaries are totally right. Past was a thousand times better than the present in every way. So what?

The past contained things like “everyone living in close-knit mono-ethnic villages”. We could, perhaps, with great effort and not a little atrocity, restore the “mono-ethnic”. But the close-knit? The villages? Unless we’re going to roll back the Industrial Revolution, the main ingredient of that particular transition, the move to urbanization, is there to stay.

Any statistic in which the present differs from the past is much more likely to be a result of technology than of politics. Reactionaries correctly use this to excuse themselves of advantages like the present’s better health care or greater wealth.

But they have to acknowledge that the same manuever relieves the other side of a lot of their burdens as well. Progressives also have some uncomfortable statistics, usually those relating to social cohesion and trust and happiness. And I am totally willing to throw every one of these out. Of course the move to an urban society is going to do that! Of course having people work factory or office jobs instead of either on the land or in an skilled trade like blacksmithing is going to alienate them. Of course having the average person watch TV four hours a day because it’s a novel superstimulus is going to affect community ties!

I suspect that the most valuable features of past societies – the ones that we read fantasy books to recapture, the ones that make Renaissance Faires and Medieval Times so attractive – have nothing to do with politics and cannot be restored through politics. In order to regain them, you’re going to have to roll back the Industrial Revolution. Needless to say, that makes fighting against the demographic transition look easy.

Perfectly Prepared For A Situation That No Longer Exists

The third and last and most important point I want to bring up involves well-adaptedness.

I often hear Reactionaries make an argument like: the old ways are the result of thousands of years of trial-and-error. Those thousands of years created a remarkably stable culture that survived for centuries. When Progressives throw them out, they are abandoning something we know works for some sort of grand experiment that might end in complete failure.

And I wonder: have these people ever updated a computer program before?

I mean, take Windows 3.11. We know all about Windows 3.11. People had a long time to test it, discover its bugs, find its security holes. Windows 8, on the other hand, is totally new. Goodness only knows what sort of unpleasant surprises are lurking there.

But imagine I decided to uninstall Windows 8 from my computer and replace it with Windows 3.11. Most of my programs aren’t written for Windows 3.11 and they wouldn’t work. Windows 3.11 probably has no idea what to do with Wi-Fi. It probably can’t handle the dual cores of my laptop. Most likely it would ask me to insert floppy disks during the installation and my computer doesn’t have a floppy disk drive.

Even if Windows 3.11, with 1992 programs, on a 1992 machine, is more stable than Windows 8, with 2013 programs, on a 2013 machine – even so, Windows 3.11 with 2013 programs on a 2013 machine would be a total disaster.

I tend to agree with Reactionaries that cultures have a mechanism that gradually adapts them to their conditions. This may not be morally good – if the conditions are “cotton is very lucrative” then the “evolutionarily advantageous” adaptation for a society may be to institute slavery – but they are at least effective and stable.

But a 1600s culture with 2013 technology would be like Windows 3.11 on a 2013 computer: a complete mismatch and a complete disaster. No matter how well Bourbon France was adapted to the 1600s, it would have no idea what to do with 2013. If it tried, it would probably end up converging towards the same 2013-technology equilibrium – liberal democracy – as everyone else in 2013. Maybe Louis XIV could stick around as a figurehead or something.

The Reactionaries are correct that we live in a scary time, a time when changes in technology are way outpacing our ability to have any idea how to cope as a society. Maybe if you froze technology at 2013 levels for a hundred years, we would get a pretty good idea what to do with it and would build a culture as well-adapted to our technology level as the Bourbon French were to theirs.

But, uh, getting rid of our culture and replacing it with Bourbon France doesn’t shortcut that process. We have a four hundred year head start over Bourbon France in adapting to our conditions. If we suddenly became Louis XIV, we’d just be even further behind the adaptation curve, having to reach liberal democracy first before we could get to wherever we’re going.

I don’t think Bourbon France was more successful, as a society, than our society is. But if you convinced me otherwise, it wouldn’t make a shred of difference. Bourbon France + modern tech levels is a society that has never existed and which, I suspect, would be about as successful as Windows 3.11 trying to run Minecraft.

But Seriously, Why Did This Gaping Crack In The Earth Just Open Up? And Why Are You Yelling At The Kid With A Plastic Shovel Next To It?

Our goal was to show that, even granting Reactionaries all their assumptions about the superiority of past civilizations, trying to restore them is impossible.

We noted that the driving force of large-scale historical change was technological progress. That societies underwent cultural evolution into forms that were most adapted to the technological conditions of their age. That this evolution was convergent, and even unconnected civilizations like Ramesses’ Egypt and Montezuma’s Aztecs could come to resemble each other when they faced similar material problems.

Then we noted that what looks like political progress from the outside is just humans reacting to the shifting landscape of incentives. Although feminism appears as a movement spearheaded by particular feminists who got it into their head thats feminism was a good idea and so decided to push it, a causally useful etiology of feminism would trace the technological conditions that predestined it to arise and succeed.

We accused Reactionaries of condemning or excusing such movements as if they were contingent human creations, and of acting like pushing a few humans or institutions out of the way here or there would change them. Instead, we concluded that they were vast tides in the affairs of (wo)men, and that any attempt to order them around was hubris worthy of King Canute.

Then we accused Reactionaries of a bit of a double-standard, excusing traditional societies’ lesser wealth and health by placing the blame on technological progress, but being unwilling to let Progressives do the same in areas where technological progress has inevitably made us worse off, such as the production of feelings of social alienation.

Finally, we accused Reactionaries of arguing that past societies were well-adapted, without specifying well-adapted to what. We hypothesized that if forced to finish this statement, it would end up with “well-adapted to the technologies and conditions of the centuries they flourished”. The very fact that they stopped flourishing and were replaced by our society suggest they are less well-adapted to conditions today. Or, as G.K. Chesterton puts it in a different context:

There is one broad fact about the relations of Christianity and Paganism which is so simple that many will smile at it, but which is so important that all moderns forget it. The primary fact about Christianity and Paganism is that one came after the other. Mr. Lowes Dickinson speaks of them as if they were parallel ideals–even speaks as if Paganism were the newer of the two, and the more fitted for a new age. He suggests that the Pagan ideal will be the ultimate good of man; but if that is so, we must at least ask with more curiosity than he allows for, why it was that man actually found his ultimate good on earth under the stars, and threw it away again.

I do not think these problems completely disprove Reaction. They merely wall off several potential lines of argument in its support: the argument that ancient cultures empirically achieved better outcomes than our own, and the argument that they were more stable and better adapted.

To save Reaction, you would have to try one of the following paths.

First, you could claim that there’s no such thing as cultural evolution, that cultures don’t gradually become more adapted to their conditions via time. This seems plausible, but then the Reactionaries lose their own strongest argument; that older cultures were better adapted. Nevertheless, this is where I think a lot of the remaining probability of Reaction being true would be, and many of the arguments in my pro-Reaction post before continue to stand in this case.

Second, you could agree that cultures evolve, but that for some reason the cultural evolution mechanism has gone berserk over the past few hundred years. To make this stick, you’d have to give some reason this would happen. Then you’d have to prove that it was so berserk that the best we could do is reboot from a saved copy from before its breakdown, even knowing that this will be completely unsuited for modern life.

Third, you could posit that for some reason cultural evolution previously drove us in a Progressive direction, but now it is driving us back in a Reactionary direction, and that you are a legitimate priest of the Vast Formless Things just making their new and revised will known unto man. To make this work, you’d have to figure out exactly when and why the Vast Formless Things changed their minds.

For most of the rest of this sequence I’ll be concentrating on option 1, unless a horde of Reactionaries appear in the comments and tell me they have totally considered this problem before and 2 or 3 is the more commonly accepted view. In option 1, by sort of a coincidence past societies happened to be better than ours, and for coincidental reasons ours went off track. The onus then would be to determine which of our society’s policies are or aren’t bad, and what was the last stable copy of them to reboot from.