Interesting Links, a Brief Explainer on Indo-European Studies, and Some Fun New Media
Interesting Links, a Brief Explainer on Indo-European Studies, and Some Fun New Media
Let's Nerd Out
Hello Friends,
Here are some announcements and interesting links.
APL 2024
Registration is now open for the 2024 meeting of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. I always greatly enjoy this annual meeting. I will be presenting on a panel and keynote speakers include Col Douglas Macgregor and Patrick Deneen, who I suspect will get put through the wringer.
Here is the theme of the conference:
My Recent Writing/Podcasts
Matthew Bryant and Me in Law and Liberty on the Dismal Situation in Ukraine
The three most recent episodes of War, Economy, and State are out where Ryan and I discuss Edwin van de Haar's new IR book Human Nature and World Affairs: An Introduction to Classical Liberalism and International Relations Theory, the Pentagon’s plan for military industrial base central planning, and an update on the situation in Ukraine.
Keep an eye out for the Spring edition of The Independent Review, which I think will be coming out this month, where I was invited to review John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato’s new book How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy. I, of course, liked the book, but I argue it has some methodological flaws. Hopefully the review will be useful, and I can safely say it will be the only review of the book that references Mises’ Epistemological Problems of Economics, lol.
New Releases from CL Press/CL Reprints
CL Press/Reprints has several new releases, available in inexpensive physical copies or as free PDFs.
Markets with Chinese Characteristics: Economic Liberalism in Modern China by Evan W. Osborne
Just Sentiments: 22 Smithian Essays edited by Dan Klein and Erik Matson
On the reprints front, we have three volumes of John Ramsay McCulloch's "Scarce and Valuable Tracts" series from the middle of the 19th century:
Scarce and Valuable Economical Tracts
Scare and Valuable Tracts on Commerce
Early English Tracts on Commerce
We also have Adam Smith by James Anson Farrer, published 1881.
Recommended Essays
The latest Econ Journal Watch edition is out with some great reads. Of particular note:
McKinsey’s Diversity Matters/Delivers/Wins Results Revisited by Jeremiah Green and John R. M. Hand. In short, McKinsey studies saying DEI garbage is great for business are garbage themselves.
Christianity Changes the Conditions of Government is comprised of some excerpts from the 19th century book The Ancient City by Fustel de Coulanges dealing with the role of Christianity in the rise of the West. In a foreword, Dan Klein connects this work to more recent work in Inventing the Individual: Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop.
Classical Liberalism in Russia by Paul Robinson is based on his recent book Russian Liberalism. I have not read his book, but I enjoyed his episode on the Econ Journal Watch Podcast last year. Robinson’s concluding remark that “Russian liberalism is in a very poor condition, repressed by the state and despised by most of the Russian people” about sums it up.
What I Have Been Reading
Starting sometime last year I went on a bit of a pre-written history kick. This is often called “pre-history” but as a good historicist I reject that framing, but that is a rant for another time. This all began in 2020 or 2021 when I was reading a random book on Druids that I had probably picked up at a library sale or something where the author noted similarities between Celtic and Hindu religious practices likely rooted in their shared Indo-European origins. I had heard of Indo-European languages before, but was not too familiar with it, and this prompted me to slide down a rabbit hole from which I have yet to emerge. (I have put together a playlist of some lectures and videos that I have found informative and I especially recommend following Razib Khan’s substack). I give a brief rundown of Indo-European studies at the end of this section.
At any rate, in this vein, I began reading a series of four books on pre-written or “deep” history that I have enjoyed immensely, so far. The first of these was A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution by Lesley Newson and Peter J. Richardson. This book was phenomenal, and for the first time truly opened my eyes to Hayekian spontaneous order. While I find that any thinking about millions of years ago is basically all speculation, I found many of the authors points about humans in the last 100k years to be quite insightful and in many cases necessarily true. In some instances the points they make seem to be so obvious that at first they do not need mentioning, but then I would realize I had never explicitly thought that. For instance, at one point they state that in the past there may have been people who did not want to go through all the dangerous hassle and years long rigamarole of having children, they then state quite bluntly that if such people existed they are not out ancestors.
As the authors draw closer to the present, their points about continuing natural selection are quite eye opening. For instance, they state that many people think that with the advent of modernity natural selection of humans has ceased. Very few people are starving to death or being eaten by saber toothed tigers. But natural selection is continuing its long inexorable march, most notably via plummeting birth rates. They also convincingly argue that such changes are ultimately not the result of technological changes (ie birth control) but rather changes in values. This book seriously altered my world view in many respects.
Next I read Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott. Many readers are likely familiar with Scott’s previous anthropological work, notably Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed. This was an interesting read exploring the rise of agriculture and its effects on human institutions of governance. It was definitely a fun and interesting read, though I think his story has some holes that would be interesting to see addressed. He openly says that the "non-state" people were much better off than the sedentary grain-core people in states who were all little better than slaves. Yet, I do not think he addresses what I would consider to be a rather important question of why these states formed if living in them was so awful.
Especially in early states, the agricultural surplus was so limited that they could not support an especially large population of elites and non-agricultural workers. So why did the vastly more numerous farmers put up with the state and its taxes at all if it was such a rotten deal, as Scott seems to say?
Ultimately, Scott is very much on the side of the "nonstate" people, though he does recognize their flaws, and while this can lead to some problems, the book is ultimately a helpful perspective to contrast the historical "state-centric" perspective we are used to.
The third book was War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage by Lawrence H. Keeley. Not only does this book refute the idea that primitive societies were more peaceful via extensive archeological evidence, but he also has some very sound philosophical musings on the Rousseauistic impulses that have led to the zeitgeist possession of many anthropologists and their insane assertions in the face of archeological evidence that the past was just so great and peaceful.
Keeley shrewdly notes that if the Neo-Rousseauistic view is taken to its logical conclusion then we are just "one nuclear winter away" from eternal peace and harmony.
I would add that while this book is from the 90s, the renaissance in Indo-European studies that has occurred in the last decade thanks to improvements in ancient DNA sequencing has provided even more empirical evidence in support of his arguments.
Finally, the fourth book I purchased for this mini series is Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich. I just started this book and will try to report back once I have finished it. In brief, this book documents what has been learned since the advent of the ancient DNA revolution that began roughly around 2010. Scientists discovered an efficient way to extract DNA from ancient remains and as a result have revealed immense amounts of previously unknowable information about our past that has upended many previously held beliefs.
One of the most notable seismic shifts has occurred in the field of Indo-European studies. In brief, sometime in the 18th century, people began to notice linguistic similarities between ancient Greek and Latin and the Sanskrit with which the sacred Rig Veda scriptures of Hinduism. At first, based only on linguistics, scholars were able to infer that there must have been some shared predecessor language which became known as proto Indo-European (PIE), and using comparative linguistics that identified cognates (ie words that sound the same) mapped out the PIE language family, which extends from Western Europe all the way to Bangladesh and includes all European languages with the exceptions of Basque, Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian; Armenian, Iranian, Sanskrit, and Hindi. To clarify, Turkish and Arabic are not Indo-European languages.
For centuries there has been debate about the homeland of the original Proto-Indo European speakers and how the language spread so far and wide. Theories of the PIE homeland have ranged all over the map, from Scandinavia/Northern Europe, the Pontic steppe, and Anatolia to Northern India.
Thanks to the Nazis, the whole subject became a bit taboo, and the idea of people migrating around, rather than changes being the result of cultural spread, fell out of favor, with a few exceptions, notably Maria Gimbutas who theorized there was a migration that displaced the “Old Europeans”, but she was considered an oddball.
However, one archeologist bucked this trend in the late 2000s, and that was David Anthony and his book The Horse, The Wheel, and Language. (I have not read this book, in part because it predates the ancient DNA revolution and in part because he is writing a new one that takes said revolution into account, but I have listened to hours of interviews of him/discussions of the book.) Anthony noted that thanks to linguistics we have a dictionary, as it were, of PIE words, and these words can actually provide clues about the homeland of the PIEs and the way they lived. He then cross-referenced this with his own archeological work in the Pontic steppe and theorized that that is where PIE emerged.
This was a radical position, but then the ancient DNA revolution came along shortly after and proved that he was in fact quite correct. We now know that the PIEs were likely a group called the Yamnaya who lived in what is now the steppes of Ukraine and Russia north of the Black Sea. They were likely the first to domesticate horses, and combined with the importation of cart/wheel technology from Mesopotamia they became the first pastoral nomads around roughly 3k BC.
Their decision to abandon farming in river valleys and adopt pastoral nomadism is likely one of the most important events in the past 5k years of human history. Ancient DNA has conclusively demonstrated that PIE did not spread via exchange or cultural transmission. Instead we know that the Yamnaya and their descendants began a centuries long invasion of Europe that displaced, and in some places outright exterminated the genetic lineage of the male “old Europeans”. Aside from remote places like the Orkneys and Sardinia (which has the lowest Indo-European genetic admixture of anywhere in Europe) the Yamnaya and their descendants moved in and became the ancestors to Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Celts.
Then, at one point, Yamnaya descendants in Northern Europe began to migrate back to the east, invented chariots, and then swept into Central Asia, then the Iranian plateau, and on into Northern India, where we now know, thanks to genetics, that they formed the upper castes in Indian society, especially the Brahmins.
It is hard to overstate how much the Indo-European migration has shaped the world we live in today. The genetic mutation for blonde hair and white skin (though Northern European levels of paleness came latter) comes from the Yamnaya, as does the mutation for lactose tolerance. Aside from even genetic descendants, which surely must number in the billions, it is estimated that 46 percent of the world’s population, including the entire Western hemisphere, speaks an Indo-European language.
Keep in mind this is all an extreme simplification and 15k foot view of things and I am leaving out numerous things, like the Tocharians, disease susceptibility, and the Yamnaya cultural legacy that is still with us today (for instance, Jupiter, Zeus, the Norse god Tyr, and the Hindu god Mitra-Varuna are all the later day manifestations of the Yamnya sky-god Dyēus Pətḗr.)
Almost all of what I have just written has only been known thanks to the ancient DNA revolution, which David Reich and his lab at Harvard played an instrumental role in ushering in. As he notes in the introduction, the pace of genetic analysis and breakthroughs continues to accelerate to an amazing degree, and it seems likely that major insights that upend and upset long held beliefs about human history will continue to be made.
Media Notes
I wanted to flag some interesting media that has recently come out.
The first is the video game Helldivers II, from the Swedish game developer Arrowhead, which is probably the hottest video game on the market at the moment. It is a first person shooter where you play as a helldiver (ie an assault soldier who is deployed via an atmospheric drop pod) to combat the enemies of Super Earth. In and of itself this game would not be notable (though it actually does have a very innovative game play where every battle affects the giant galaxy spanning campaign so that all 5 to 8 million or so players are playing together, complete with a Dungeons and Dragons-style DM), but what makes it worth mentioning is the game’s purposefully over the top emphasis on “managed” democracy and liberty.
The game is clearly a spoof of the late 90s movie Starship Troopers and I think that the degree to which the internet has embraced the ironic use of the word “democracy”, especially in this extremely militarized fashion (for more on how “democracy speak” jives with militarism see Emily Finley’s superb recent book The Ideology of Democratism), speaks to just how tired the general public (or at least the large segment of gamers and streamers) is of the elite’s perpetual hyperventilation about “threats to democracy” from Trump and Putin and anyone who doesn’t think a man is a woman. Comparisons to the war on terror, Henry Kissinger, propaganda, and manipulation of events during election season pour forth profusely in memes, streamer banter, and pronouncements from the Helldivers CEO/creative director who is always dropping bangers like this:
Anytime I read The Washington Post and see its ridiculous “Democracy Dies in Darkness” subheading I now can’t help but think of it as a meme spoof of the game.
See one of extremely amusing trailer for Helldivers:
I am holding off on playing the game because until I have gotten some big projects out of the way, but it is increasingly seeping into the memesphere of the internet and gives me a smidgen of hope that the “normies” do realize that our elites are just full of “managed democracy” bs.
The other media of note is the recent launch of the anime Spice and Wolf. Spice and Wolf is a series of Japanese light novels that follows the journey of the traveling peddler, Kraft Lawrence, and the wolf-girl harvest goddess, Holo, that joins him on his travels. In 2008 a 2 season anime was launched that was simply superb and one of the first anime that I watched back in the day. This new release is a reboot (differentiated as Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf) of the series that starts at the beginning, but fans are hopeful that it will continue on in the story past where the original anime ended. As expected, the reboot continues the warm, cozy, wholesome vibes.
Now, as a card carrying weeb, there are many animes that I enjoy (and I hope to write more about them in the future), but I am flagging this one because it actually has a lot of economics packed into it, especially in the first season which has a whole arc based around monetary economics, Gresham’s Law, and currency speculation that is simply delightful in that it is not shoehorned into the story, but fits in naturally.
As one person online put it:
Here is the trailer:
The reboot just launched and is airing on Crunchyroll, but if you are waiting for the next episode to come out and can’t contain your excitement you can watch the original series on Crunchyroll and Hulu.