From Veldhoven, in the Brainport Eindhoven region of the Netherlands, comes the bleeding-edge point of the spear of human technological capabilities: the manipulation of nature and the organization of the human economic division of labor at a truly insane and unbelievable—and that is not hyperbole: I simply do not believe that Naked East African Plains Apes with brains of only 1400 cc each and neuronal processing clock speeds only one-ten-millionth as fast as NVIDIA Blackwells in our data centers actually manage to do this…
The stack is vertical and unforgiving. Cymer → Zeiss → ASML → TSMC (right now using CoWoS) → Shin-Etsu Chemical → NVIDIA chip-design → CUDA (NVIDIA’s software stack): Cymer makes the light. Zeiss makes the mirrors. ASML assembles the machines to make the EUV photolithography carve the right circuit paths. Shin-Etsu Chemical makes and slices the pure silicon crystal wafers for TSMC to imprint with the chips NVIDIA designs that then run CUDA. And it is, right now, the single most pricey economic value chain in the world today. And all parts of it are essential. (OK: Shin-Etsu faces competition, and you could with perhaps a 30% penalty replace TSMC with Samsung or Intel, and you could with perhaps a 75% penaltry replace NVIDIA’s chips-plus-CUDA with an alternative).
And yet, somehow, right now, rather than being divided up, NEARLY ALL THE MONIES FLOW TO NVIDIA.
Rightly recommended by the Accidental Tech Podcast <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0QTVSHTjBKExtdExrBca5w> of John Siracusa, Casey Liss, and Marco Arment: the most mind-blowing hour you can spend learning about engineering today. It is all about the Twinscan NXE and EXE EUV (Extreme Ultra-Violet) photolithography silicon chip-making machines manufactured by ASML at its factories in Veldhoven in the Brainport Eindhoven region of the Netherlands, and elsewhere:
Yes, “Brainport” is a Dutch term for regions built around dense collaboration between industry, universities, and government to create knowledge‑intensive growth.
ASML has no competitors in the making of EUV photolithgraphy. It and its partners own the business in a way that nobody else—not Applied Materials, even—can match.
Engels pitched methodology; but Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy delivered very little in the way of actually, you know, critiqueing political economy, let alone using that as a springboard to transform how you should think about the economy, or what one should do to bring progress toward true human flourishing. The “Preface” endures, the book does not. Perhaps Marx thought he needed to publish it to demonstrate that he was doing something more than occasional pieces in the long drought between 1852 and 1867. But, if so, it does not look to me as though it was a successful demonstration…
Columbia’s Adam Tooze said a couple of days ago that he is thinking a lot about the 1859 Preface to Karl Marx’s abysmal A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
Adam Tooze: Top Links 976 <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-976-ai-investment-surges>: ‘[I] keep thinking of this…. [Karl Marx] “Men… enter into definite relations… independent of their will… [with] their material forces of production…. [That] constitutes the economic structure of society… on which arises a legal and political superstructure and… forms of social consciousness…. Material productive forces… come into conflict with… [property] relations of production… [which] turn into their fetters [on development]. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure…. [Then come] the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out…. This consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life….
New superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve….
In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last… form… antagonistic… emanat[ing] from the individuals’ social conditions of existence—but… bourgeois society create[s] also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation…
Theology: the millenarian claim (made in 1859!) that the end was at hand of the long era in which human societies were societies of domination,
Stage Theory of History: The six modes of production—tribal, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, bourgeois, and socialist—as the successive stages of human history, social revolutions driving the transitions between them.
Theology: Refracted through Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis: the claim that history has an arrow of progress driven by econo-political change.
Sociology & Ideology: The conflicts generated by the rupture between old relations of production and the requirements of the new, growing forces of production play themselves out in ideological forms.
Political Economy: Relations of production constrain technological development and investment, and then constraint fails as society’s property order is broken by social revolution.
Historical Materialism: The relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience their worklife. And then everything else has to be fitted to that
I argued strongly that to pick up one (or more) of these six claims and then to try to develop it and demonstrate its truth and draw forth its implications for human knowledge, human society, human political action, and the human future is what it is to be a “Marxist” in any sense meaningful. And I argued:
At the moment, COVID-19 is recorded as the cause of death for about 1/100 of the 0.4% of 19-64 year-olds who die each year—and failing to get your mRNA vaccine quadruples that. But it really looks like unvaccinated 19-64 year-olds have a greater risk of death not 0.016%/year higher than the vaccinated, but fully 0.12%/year higher. And the presumption has to be that there are an extra 6.5 19-64 year-olds who die from something else that they would have successfully fought off, had they gotten vaccinated and so had suffered under less of a metabolic burden from fighting COVID…
Receiving the mRNA vaccination for COVID-19 is very strongly and causally associated with lower mortality from COVID: only ¼ of those who would die from COVID otherwise die if they were smart enough to get vaccinated.
But there are more correlations in the system:
Is receiving the mRNA vaccination for COVID-19 associated with lower non-COVID mortality because it indicates that you are a sensible person who can actually undertake to take reasonable care of your health?
Is it associated with higher non-COVID mortality because people in bad health have more powerful incentives to actually get vaccinated?
Is it associated with lower non-COVID mortality because COVID-19, even if it does not kill you, is a substantial drag on your metabolism and so opens your way to other things that do kill you?
Well, clearly (2) is not dominant: for every four people who die if they do not get the vaccine, only three people die who do.
Laura Semenzato & al.: COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination & 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults Aged 18 to 59 Years in France <https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2842305>: ‘A total of 22,767,546 vaccinated and 5,932,443 unvaccinated individuals were followed up for a median (IQR) of 45 (44-46) months. Vaccinated individuals were older… on average, more frequently women (…51.3%]…vs… 48.5%) and had more cardiometabolic comorbidities… (9.3%… vs…7.8%]. During follow-up… 0.4%… and.. 0.6%… all-cause deaths occurred in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups…. Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19… and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality… with a similar association observed when excluding severe COVID-19 death. Sensitivity analysis revealed that vaccinated individuals consistently had a lower risk of death, regardless of the cause…
So is it (1) or (3)? Sample selection for intelligence in a life-preserving sense, or reduced metabolic load?
Probably both play a role, but reduced post‑infection disease burden is the more plausible dominant channel. There broad, cause‑specific reductions across major ICD‑10 categories. It would be very hard to explain all of these reductions solely by health‑preserver selection.
And we do, by now, know a lot about SARS‑CoV‑2 infections. They do elevate medium‑to‑long‑term risks across organ systems: cardiovascular, thrombotic, metabolic, neurological, and still others. This is consistent with a persistent metabolic and inflammatory burden. Such a burden could easily raise non‑COVID mortality.
Complementary data show vaccination lowers the risk and persistence of post‑COVID conditions (including in breakthrough cases), reinforcing the pathway whereby fewer or milder infections reduce later non‑COVID mortality. Thus there is a very clear channel here: Reducing infection and severity, vaccination plausibly cuts these downstream hazards. This aligns with extensive evidence on long COVID’s multi‑system consequences, and elevated post‑acute event risks.
While residual confounding can’t be completely ruled out (but when can it?), the preponderance of evidence does suggest the primary driver of the roughly 25% non‑COVID mortality reduction is fewer and less severe infections—and thus a lighter post‑infectious physiological load—rather than vaccinated individuals simply being “more sensible.”
So right now 1/5 of the American population is unvaccinated. Just doing the arithmetic: At the moment, COVID-19 is recorded as the cause of death for about 1/100 of the 0.4% of 19-64 year-olds who die each year—and failing to get your mRNA vaccine quadruples that. But it really looks like unvaccinated 19-64 year-olds have a greater risk of death not 0.016%/year higher than the vaccinated, but fully 0.12%/year higher. And the presumption has to be that there are an extra 6.5 19-64 year-olds who die from something else that they would have successfully fought off, had they gotten vaccinated and so had suffered under less of a metabolic burden from fighting COVID.
Why did science emerge—& persist—in early modern Europe? Instruments, math, & print: the bundle that built nullius in verba, the Republic of Science, and then modern science as we know it— why & how Europe’s geographic & élite fractures forged a method that made empircal curiosity about nature’s workings pay…
Science as we know it didn’t blossom in Europe by accident; it was subsidized by rivalry and craft. Add print, religion’s institutional shelters, and academies—and novelty suddenly could make a payroll. Earlier efflorescences had stalled; Europe’s persisted because it lowered the cost of verification. The bundle—artisans + math + print + institutions + more—made curiosity compounding because that specific bundle aligned incentives for empirical truth about nature rather than for the support of élite power.
Draw a line in the sand for “science as we know it”. The convenient dates are 1543 and 1687: Andries van Wesel—Vesalius—with his De Humani Corporis Fabrica and Mikołaj Kopernik—Copernicus—with his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium as the front door, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica as the oak-and-iron back gate, and in between the Royal Society’s nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for what is true. There and then a distinctive way of knowing—mathematico‑experimental, evidence‑seeking, increasingly public, and then institutionalized—was born in early modern Europe. It persisted, rather than sputtering out. Europe did not invent curiosity, or cleverness. It assembled a social machine in which curiosity could keep paying its own way. And for the first time cleverness was not tuned to elaborating the ideas in sacred texts, or to advancing ideas that were useful to the lords of the society-of-domination who ran its force-and-fraud exploitation machine. Cleverness was, rather, tuned to determining what worked out there in the world of nature.
We can see a knot of mutually reinforcing forces:
élite fragmentation and status‑competition that raised the payoff to being right;
a craft world of instruments that forced an interventionist epistemology;
a religious‑intellectual climate that, ambivalently but often positively, authorized empirical inquiry;
printing press-enabled networks that forged a public and logistics for ideas; and
institutions that lowered the cost of arriving at and maintaining stable belief.
These together made the Republic of Science more than a heroic efflorescence episode: they made it a going concern.
Fragmented Elites & the Political Economy of Being Right
Strong bureaucratic empires and unified élite cultures are excellent at assimilating improvements into “more of the same.” Early modern Europe, by contrast, was unsuccessful at both. It was not a unified empire. It did not have a unified élite. There was a patchwork rather than a monopoly—on both force of arms, and on the ideology that granted one status as one of those who deserved to dominate. First, there were stable geography-marked kingdoms. Dukes of Burgundy may have merely ruled “our lands over here” and “our lands over there”; but kings of England, France, Aragon, Naples, Portugal and Bohemia; Princes of Wales; Dukes of Saxony, Bavaria, Milan, Lorraine, Brittany, and Austria; and a few others had a social reality and thus a durable political strength much more than a selection of lordships owing a common feudal allegiance. And kings, popes, dukes, bishops, burghers, theologians, urban merchants, craft guilds, and even universities all fought with ideas and swords to reconfigure the logic of societal order and hierarchy, seeking better position sat the trough of the 1/3 of all the farm produce and craftwork that flowed to the dominators.
Josef Schumpeterian creative-destruction vs. Karl Marxian base-superstructure: What history actually looks like as Marx’s 1859 vision promised imminent revolution followed by utopia, sketching six bold claims about how technologies drive economies drive societies. The evidence since 1870 points to rotating, sectoral upheavals—not synchronized social revolutions: sectoral churn and institutional lag. Historical materialism, soft-true; stage theory and millenarianism, not so much. Even stripped of millenarian theology of utopia, the Marxist apparatus explains far less than it promises…
Columbia’s Adam Tooze says this AM that he is thinking a lot about the 1859 Preface to Karl Marx’s abysmal A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
Adam Tooze: Top Links 976 <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/top-links-976-ai-investment-surges>: ‘[I] keep thinking of this passage right now: Karl Marx 1859, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “In… existence, men… enter into definite relations… independent of their will… appropriate to… their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society… on which arises a legal and political superstructure and… forms of social consciousness.... It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces… come into conflict with… relations of production or… the property relations… framework…. From forms of development… these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure….
It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production… and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out…. This consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life….
No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.
In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.
The bourgeois mode of production is the last… form… antagonistic… in the sense… of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence—but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation…
Let us look at the passage. (I have reparagraphed the passage to make the separate thoughts clearer.) Here we have, working backward:
Theology: a millenarian claim (made in 1859!) that the era in which human societies were societies of domination—ones profoundly shaped by the presence in them of an élite that successfully runs an exploitation-and-domination scheme on the rest, taking one third of the crops and one-third of the crafts for itself—is now about to end. Why? Marx himself never set out a rational argument—he pretty much limited himself to CAPITALISM BAD. (But Engels, two decades later, did make one in his Socialism: Utopian & Scientific.)
Stage Theory of History: The five pre-socialist modes of production—tribal was later added by Engels to Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and bourgeois—as the successive stages of human history before the socialist mode of production brings an end to the societies of domination, with history’s ages of social revolution driving the transitions between them.
Theology: In this case, refracted through Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis: the claim that history has an arrow, in that when a society’s relations of production become fetters constraining its economic development there has already been sufficient technological development to drive a social revolution which will produce new and progressive different relations of production.
Sociology & Ideology: The conflicts generated by the rupture between old relations of production and the requirements of the new, growing forces of production play themselves out in ideological forms—men “become conscious of this conflict and fight it out” in ways substantially removed from the actual material basis of the rupture.
Political Economy: As advancing technology and investment transforms the forces of production, the previous existing relations of production—the “property” order of society—no longer fits them. The relations of production constrain technological development and investment for a while, and then the pressure of constraining development breaks society’s property order via an era of social revolution.
Historical Materialism: The relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience their worklife. And then everything else—“legal and political superstructure and… forms of social consciousness”—has to be fitted to the combination of technology and the property order, to the forces and relations of production.
I would argue strongly—this is, in fact, an intellectual hill I would die on—that to pick up one (or more) of these six claims and then to try to develop it and demonstrate its truth and draw forth its implications for human knowledge, human society, human political action, and the human future is what it is to be a “Marxist” in any sense meaningful, other than grabbing that term as a positive or negative marker of tribal allegiance. If someone shows up calling themself a “Marxist”, and cannot demonstrate which of the threads from at least one of these six claims they are pursuing in their thinking—well, they should find something else to call themself.
Conversely, looking at the development of social science since 1870 or so, it is a fact that nearly everybody else doing historical social science worth reading who is not picking up and developing one of these six claims is spending a lot of their time trying to disprove and dispel one or more of them.
I would also argue strongly that (6) Historical Materialism is, in a soft sense, true: to be stable, human relations of production have to be fitted to the technology of society and thus to the way people experience their worklife; and the rest of society is not determined by the forces and relations of production, but is constrained by the necessity that it fit with them.
Moreover, I would also argue that (5) Political Economy is equally true, except for the “social revolution” part—changing technology does cause immense trouble for societal order as the rest of society finds itself no longer properly fitted to it. Then follows a reworking. But the reworking does not have to be driven by anything one would call “social revolution”.
As for (2) Stage Theory—well, setting up ideal-types of forms of techno-economic-societal orders that are in some sort of rough homeostasis, and thinking of history as the transitions from one to another, can be very useful. Indeed, it is next to impossible for us East African Plains Apes of very little brain to think at all coherently without it. But are “[tribal,] Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and bourgeois” the right stages? My rough guesstimations as to how different the techno-economic underpinnings are at a global scale gets us something more like:
Attention info-bio tech: 2040 (human technological capability index H = 35)
Globalized value-chain: 2000 (H = 15)
Mass-production: 1960 (7)
Applied science: 1920 (3)
Steampower: 1870 (1)
That’s an almost 2.5-fold shift for what seem to me to be meaningful differences at a global scale in the modern age.
But then, if we cast back looking for roughly equally large quantitative shifts in the deeper past, we get to:
H = 0.4 in 1400—I guess I am happy calling that “Mediæval”.
H = 0.15 in -1000—I guess I am happy calling that “Ancient”.
H = 0.06 in -5000—I guess I am happy calling that “tribal”.
But I do have a strong sense that we need to set up our ideal-type stage benchmarks differently before the modern age—that it is not just modes of production, but of distribution, communication, domination, and legitimation that matter. Hence I would be happier with:
1700: Commercial-imperial (H = 0.65)
1200: Feudal (H = 0.35)
-500: Ancient (H = 0.2)
-3000: Early bronze (H = 0.8)
-7000: Tribal (H = 0.065)
-48000: Gatherer-hunter (H = 0.03)
The shifts in society are profound, yet they come accompanied by changes in the value of known and applied technologies that seem to me, quantitatively, less than those seen between what I regard as the natural ideal-type benchmarks to set up in understanding history since 1870.
With (4), I think Marx has left reality behind: History and its conflicts are sometimes about forces and relations of production and the relationships of those to the “superstructure” that is the rest of society. History and its conflicts are sometimes really conflicts over forces and relations of production but are masked by ideologies so that they seem to be about something else. And history and its conflicts are sometimes not about forces and relations of production at all, but are really about other things—that when people fight over whether God is three-personned with the Father almighty, the Son giving us mercy, and the Holy Spirit bringing compassion, or whether al-‘Azīz, al‑Raḥmān, al‑Raḥīm are three principal attributes of divine unity, that is, usually, really what they are primarily fighting about. And (3) as well is nonsense on stilts: the arc of history does not bend toward justice, or even prosperity.
And (1), of course, was Millenarian theological fantasy.
Yet, as I said, a huge amount of effort over what is now one and a half centuries has gone into either trying to develop and prove these six threads or demolish and disprove them. Plus there is the historical fact that the writings of Karl Marx became the sacred texts of one of the most destructive world religions ever.
What else do I have to say about this? Three things—but let me delay those, because this has grown long enough as it is.
Note: The full quoted Marx passage as Tooze gives it:
Karl Marx (1859): Preface to “A Contribution to the CI am running a few minutes late; my previous meeting is running overitique of Political Economy”: ‘In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals’ social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.…
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Jarrod Hayes & Adam B. Lerner: ‘Mearsheimer’s interventions reveal some larger problems for IR… First and foremost is the issue of agency and responsibility…. If, as Mearsheimer’s theory predicts, the Russian invasion is due to its inevitable quest for regional hegemony in the balance of power, why blame anyone?…. Second… the Politico… describ[ing] weighty moral issues in the same gamified tone as fantasy baseball… portray[ing] the predictions of our theories as excuses for war crimes…. If the Russian Foreign Ministry is citing you favorably, you might want to have a good look in the mirror…
Stephen Kotkin: Don’t Blame the West for Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: ‘Way before NATO existed in the 19th century, Russia looked like this. It had an autocrat, it had repression, it had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or arrived in the 1990s. It’s not a response to actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today…. NATO expansion has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again…. Russia is a great power, but not the great power…. In trying to… manage the differential between Russia and the West, they resort to coercion, a very heavy state-centric approach…. That works for a time, ostensibly…. And then, of course, it hits a wall…. The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the conflation of the Russian state with some personal ruler…. They get a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism. So Putin is what he is… ruling in Russia…. Russia cannot successfully occupy Ukraine…. They don’t even have a quisling yet…
Russia today has a population of 150 million people. Of those some 120 million are “Russians” and 30 million are classified as ethnic minorities. Russia’s GDP is in the range of Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Brazil, Britain, and France—20% above France, 30% below Japan. In a world in which NATO exists to make real into implement, for Europe at least, the dreams of ending war and military coercion set out at the San Francisco founding of the United Nations, Russia’s ability to bully other countries via its military is very small. It can wreck things, but “making a desert and calling it ‘peace’” is no longer a rational strategy.
Military conquest seems unlikely to be durable in this day and age, unless accompanied by nigh-complete ethnic cleansing and demographic replacement.
But was it ever? In 1721 King Frederick I Vasa of Sweden surrendered Swedish Ingria, Estonia, Livonia, Kexholmslän, and Karelia to Tsar Peter the Great. But Peter accepted that his conquest was limited: the Germanic-speaking Baltic nobility retained “their financial system, their existing customs border, their self-government, their Lutheran religion, and the German language”. Starting in 1860 the Tsarist Empire attempted to erode these privileges and “Russify”. But as of today of all these conquests of the Great Northern War of the early 1700s, only Peter’s conquest of Swedish Ingria—where St. Petersburg now stands—has stuck.
Indeed, in this day and age, military adventures appear more likely to make durable enemies rather than win subjects and influence. It will be very difficult to get Ukrainians to think of themselves as in any sense Muscovites after this.
Thus if Russia wants to be a great power rather than a contained menace, it must rely on its soft power. Hence a Russia that wants to have influence over the course of the world in the future and lead the people of Ross and the other Slavic peoples and their neighbors into the future will have to rely on its soft power: its role as a provider of natural resources, and both the wealth and the possibly weaponized interdependence that come with resources; plus its cultural power. A Russia that wants to be an influential Russia should be building not tanks but touring companies of the Bolshoi Ballet, and binding the world economy to its resource base.
The problem is—the problems are—(a) that Putin is not rational, (b) that Russia’s autocratic domestic politics have long leaked into its foreign-policy adventurism and right now is doing it again in a way that seems strongly counterproductive, and (c) the very unrealistic “Realist” assumption that only the United States has agency, and as the only actor with agency bears complete responsibility for whatever bad things happen, would cloud our thought on all this, if we let it.
Perhaps the most strange and bizarre thing about Mearsheimer is that the theory he draws on implies that states seeking regional hegemony are never satisfied with any borders, and continue adventuring in a pointless quest for more security until they run up against a force to contain them. “Realism” in its tragic model recognizes that spheres-of-influence borders are always and inherently potentially bloody. Thus the only question for a consistent Mearsheimer is whether Muscovy will bloody Donbas, Moldava, the Hungarian Plain, the Fulda Gap, or the Rhine.
But the drive to blame America first overrides consistency.
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They found what they had sought above all things, and yet find that it slipped away and left them permanently unsatisfied. & now there they are & we are they…
Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
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Hoisted so I can find this easily in the future: From January 2023. With a little bit of reëditing:
“West” or “Dover Circle”? A student asked me why, in my lectures earlier this week, I kept on referring to the “North Atlantic” rather than the “Western” economies. Why did I use the first to refer to those that have become vastly richer than the world average over the past 200 years? Even as of the early 1800s, “North Atlantic” made more sense than did “West”. By 1960, “North Atlantic” itself became less apposite. Would “Global North” be a good replacement? And in the 2000s things have changed still further: I have swung around to think that a more useful and informative label would be “Dover Circle-Plus”: those economies and societies that are, that have received very large settler inflows from, or that have strained every nerve to emulate the particular economic structures and patterns and practices that developed in the years after 1500 in a 300-mile radius circle centered on the port of Dover at the southeast corner of England:
When asked why I kept on referring to the “North Atlantic” rather than the “Western” economies, I responded: I was not aware that I had settled on “North Atlantic”— I had thought that I found myself bouncing around when I am not focusing on what descriptor to use.
I do, however, try to avoid “West”. Part it is that “West” is out-of-date. “West” comes from a time and a place now long ago: a time and a place when it was assumed that pretty much everything of interest was in Eurasia, and that the most important thing was the contrast between the western edge of Eurasia and everything else that was east—that was the “Orient”, from the Latin word for the direction from which the sun rose.
But even then, “West” as in “Western edge of Eurasia” did not really cut it.
The phrase does not even begin to take off until after 1840 or so. And by then, there was no sense in which Portugal, Spain, Italy, and southern France were no longer securely among the relatively rich. The United States, and Canada too, were very rich indeed, and the United States’s population was growing rapidly. Even as of the early 1800s, “North Atlantic” made more sense than did “West”.
And today? “Global North”? “Global North” is not quite right either: New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and soon—we hope—Chile?
Here is a hill to defend: A more useful and informative label would be “Dover Circle-Plus”: those economies and societies that are, that have received very large settler inflows from, or that have strained every nerve to emulate the particular economic structures and patterns and practices that developed in the years after 1500 in a 300-mile or so radius circle centered on the port of Dover at the southeast corner of England.
For nearly all the time since the invention of agriculture, the Eastern core is the Yellow River and Yangtze Valleys, according to Morris. He sees it as, by 1900, moving a little further east: gaining Manchuria and Japan, while losing Sichuan and the upper Yellow River Valley. By 2000 the core has further gained Taiwan island and the Pearl River Delta, but lost has non-coastal China (including Manchuria).
There is continuity here: political continuity, cultural continuity, unbroken chains of influence, even substantial continuity of genetic descent.
This is in great contrast to the “Western core”. Morris claims that from -9600 to 1400 it extended from Basra on the Persian Gulf to Tbilisi in the Caucasus to Ithaka off the northwest corner of Greece to Thebes in Egypt. Then, from -250 to 250 it…moved? …had added on? … comprised Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia. Yet after 250 it reverted back to the original Basra-Tbilisi-Ithaka-Thebes quadrangle.
In 1400, however, that then pops like a bubble. For the period 1400 to 1800, according to Morris, the “Western core” picked up stakes and moved to Western Europe. And by 1900 the Western “core area” has extended a pseudopod across the Atlantic to the American northeast and contracted in Eurasia, where it is: Ireland and Britain, the Low Countries, northern and western France, and northwest Germany.
Come 2000, Morris’s “Western core” is the continental United States plus the more-settled parts of Canada.
Truly a moveable feast.
I feel a great lack of continuity here. What has the civilization of Uruk in -3000 have to do with the civilization of Silicon Valley today? In what sense are they both “the West”, save that there are some people at Stanford who read The Story of the Man Who Saw the Deep, the Epic of Gilgamesh <https://archive.org/details/gilgameshnewrend00ferr>?
And so on. In the aftermath of the fall of Rome, barbarian invasions and western Christendom then meld themselves into European feudal civilization, which picks up the torch. The torch is handed off to the Renaissance. The Reformation, The Enlightenment rise of representative government and common-law systems: governments that exist to secure people’s natural rights and that derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Then the British Industrial Revolution. And on to modern democratic capitalism, or capitalist democracy.
But this is like picking out pictures of things you like in a photograph and claiming that they are “yours”.
Moreover, the phrase rocketed up in prominence just in those early-1900s years in which anything that might be called “civilization” in Europe was catastrophically falling apart. Europe in those years was indeed becoming, as Mark Mazower calls it, the “Dark Continent”. And at its apogee at the start of the 1950s—I think that my long-ago teacher the brilliant Judith Shklar put it very well in her assessment of why it was that in the post-WWII United States, “Western Civilization” had a moment:
Judith Shklar: A Life of Learning <https://www3.nd.edu/~pweithma/Shklar/Haskins%20Lecture.pdf>: The real ideal of many teachers at Harvard in the 1950s was the gentleman C-er. He would, we were told, govern us and feed us, and we ought to cherish him, rather than the studious youth who would never amount to anything socially significant. There was, of course, a great deal of self-hatred in all this…. Harvard in the 1950s was full of people who were ashamed of their parents’ social standing, as well as of their own condition… closet Jews and closet gays and provincials… obsessed with their inferiority… [to] some mythical Harvard aristocracy….
[There] was also a bizarre refusal to think through the real meaning of the Second World War…. I found Harvard conversations unreal. I knew what had happened in Europe between 1940 and 1945, and I assumed that most people at Harvard also were aware of the physical, political, and moral calamity that had occurred, but it was never to be discussed…. If these matters came up in class, it was only as part of the study of totalitarianism, and then it was pretty sanitized and integrated into the Cold War context….
A look at the famous “Redbook,” which was the plan for the general education program at Harvard, is very revealing:
Its authors were determined to immunize the young against fascism and its temptations so that “it” would never happen again.
There was to be a reinforcement of The Western Tradition, and it was to be presented in such a way as to show up fascism as an aberration, never to be repeated.
I would guess that in the pre-war Depression years some of the young men who devised this pedagogic ideology may have been tempted by attitudes that eventually coalesced into fascism, and now recoiled at what they knew it had wrought. They wanted a different past, a “good” West, a “real” West, not the actual one that had marched into the First World War and onward. They wanted a past fit for a better denouement.
I found most of this unconvincing…
“Western Civilization”, the Harvard Redbook, Humanities 1 and Social Sciences 2, the through-line of cultural, political, historical, and logical development from Gilgamesh to FDR—an ideological project principally aimed, whether consciously or unconsciously, at constructing a fake but usable past for a post-World War II New Deal Order of social democracy in a free, capitalist, and above all anti-Leninist anti-Stalinist anti-Hitlerian society.
In fact, there was no single torch. There were no hand-offs. And if there had been a single torch, it would come with all kinds of things that we do not like at all.
However, do not get me wrong: There is a great deal of value in teaching:
Matthew Yglesias: Thankful mailbag <https://www.slowboring.com/p/thankful-mailbag>: ‘There’s just a big divergence between what most people see as potentially valuable in the liberal arts and what most humanities faculty think is valuable and important…. Educated professionals… it’s good for them to be inculcated with… values… the history of proto-constitutionalism in England and the classical republics… religious freedom… [which] develop[ed] out of the specific circumstances of the Protestant Reformation….
Historical events… Greece to Rome to “the Dark Ages” and the Renaissance and Reformation and the founding of America… philosophical lineage from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke and Mill and Rawls… literary and artistic cultures… informed by these… and that also informed them…. That kind of traditional broad liberal education would of course involve some exposure to radical critics of Anglo-American liberal capitalism….
[But] current trends on campus are toward an atmosphere where the radical criticism predominates…. The critical theories themselves would tell you, there’s no way Anglo-American liberal capitalist society is going to sustain generous financial support for institutions whose self-ascribed mission is to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society…
But I do substantially disagree with Matt here. For one thing, I do not think Matthew has Ground Truth as to what is going on in American universities. I have said this before, and I do believe I have receipts:
Thus it does annoy me when people speak of cultural-civilizational patterns rooted in the early-modern imperial-commercial age Dover Circle and then the Dover-Circle-Plus as “the West” and talk of and unreflective believe in some “it” that is “Western Civilization”, which the people living in the Thames Valley of the island of Great Britain in the 1800s possessed as rightful heirs.
Earlier peoples ascribed the rôles of torch-bearers in this relay would have been very surprised to learn that the inhabitants of the Thames Valley were in any way them or their heirs. In the -50s, Roman Senator and Proconsul Marcus Tullius Cicero snidely snarked argued that the Britons had no silver and were too stupid and uneducated to make good slaves—hence they were not worth imperializing. Athens had very little tolerance for Jerusalem. And Jerusalem had even less tolerance for Athens.
If you want continuity starting at the Western edge of Eurasia of the same kind as you see in the “Eastern Core”—political, cultural, linked chains of influence, some continuity of genetic descent—you certainly cannot start before 800, and almost surely not before 1500. And you have to start in the Dover Circle.
But do not carry this tradition-demolition project too far.
In 800 the Dover Circle a backwater, technologically behind—and hundreds of years technologically behind, much of the time—the world average. But around the year 800, in the Dover Circle, a local barbarian, a Frankish king, Charles, son of the usurper Pippin the Short, extended his military reach from his sometime capital city of Aachen or Aix-la-Chapelle in the Dover Circle to the Elbe River in Germany, the Tiber in Italy, the Ebro in Spain, and to the borders of Hungary. Pope Leo II then crowned “Charlemagne” Emperor, the first emperor dwelling west of Constantinople for three and a quarter centuries. And after that interesting things did begin to happen between Stockholm and Sevilla, ultimately concentrating in the Dover Circle.
But they did not happen rapidly. Even as of 1500 the Dover Circle held no place special in world civilization. Yes, the Dover Circle by 1500 was no longer a backwater. Yes, it ad from 800 to 1500 had a rapid creative run of growth and technological advance for a pre-Imperial-Commercial civilization in the Middle Ages. But much of that was simply a Viking-raided backwater’s catching up to world civilization. In 1500 it certainly had no “edge” in governance or culture, and in technology whatever edge it had was narrow—ships and gunpowder and cannon, and perhaps precision machinery like, clocks.
Maybe it has a small technological edge on average in 1500. Perhaps 1.1 over the other high civilizations of Eurasia? It did forge ahead after 1500 in technology faster than the world average, but not that much faster.
It certainly developed a politically and militarily important technological edge in ocean navigation and gunpowder weaponry. Caravels begin to dominate the world’s oceans from 1500 on—although the first great exploratory-imperialist wave comes from Portugal and Greater Castile. But do not overstate that edge. The Ottoman Empire was still besieging Vienna in 1688. It was only in ships that it dominated up until 1800. And its ships did not dominate always: the Omani from Muscat threw the Portuguese out of East Africa, and then ruled the coasts of the Indian Ocean from Zanzibar.
As of 1500 the Dover Circle had potential. And I see that potential as consisting of five important elements:
The Joseph Henrich point: the Mediaæval church’s war on cousin marriage and on relationship affinities—an attempt to make Jesus, and the Church, the place you went to for help—had created a diffuse sociability in which you could, within reason, trust almost everyone in society who you dealt with, rather than just your close kin. Diffuse sociability rather than clan-based was to be very important after 1500.
Harold J. Berman’s point, in his 1983 Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, that the struggle over whether emperors bossed popes or popes bossed emperors had created for the first time ever Dover Circle civilizations were places in which the default assumption was that the law was not a mere tool of the most powerful, but that even the most powerful were bound by the law.
Durable proto-nation states rather than more or less evanescent continent-spanning empires amped up the pressures of military competition for governmental effectiveness.
The primarily rural-military basis of the Dover Circle aristocracies, which meant that cities were an anomaly in the major military-political power network, and so became self-governing, making merchants not the clear subordinates but the near-equals of warriors and bureaucrats among the society-of-domination élites.
The Patricia Crone point that Dover Circle societies were imperfect and rather unsuccessful society of domination. In the other high civilizations of Eurasia-Africa (and MesoAmerica), it was very clear how the society-of-domination élite ran its force-and-fraud game, it was very clear that it was a sweet deal, and it was very clear to all that big changes would turn many big power brokers into big losers; in the Dover Circle, by contrast, kings, aristocrats, merchants, priests, and more all had claims to various levers of society of domination power.
All these created a remarkable plasticity in social organization—a situation in which many things could be tried, some of which would turn out to be productive and effective. Society was not bound by kinship, not under the thumb of a ruler unbound by procedure and law, subject to fierce incentives to improve productivity and efficiency to mobilize for war, creating a place in which at least some societal power could be exercised by those—merchants—more interested in efficiency in productivity than in exploitation, and in which the possibility of change and revolution in favor of some élite faction was regarded by large segments of the élite with something other than horror and dismay.
Only place, and only time, all of these came together was in the post-1500 Dover Circle.
Even in the late 1700s it was touch-and-go. The British started to conquer India, but they could not maintain their hold on North America. What had been a perhaps 1.1-1 edge in technological prowess in 1500 was only perhaps 1.4-1 in 1770.
Even in the 1800s the French failed in their conquest of Mexico and had a devil of a time conquering and colonizing Algeria.
Not until 1880 and the machine gun did it become the case that Dover Circle-Plus armies could march anywhere and conquer anything (save, for the Italians, Ethiopia; and save, for the British and the Russians, Afghanistan). And in the end the durable expansion of the Dovber Circle to the Dover Circle-Plus of today was as much a soft- as a hard-power process.
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Newton wasn’t just the architect of modern physics and celestial mechanics; he was also theologian and alchemist. “voyaging through strange seas of thought” indeed. Even the “Principia” was intuition dressed-up as geometry…
The Isaac Newton we mostly know is the Newton of physics at Cambridge University before 1696, and then the Newton the Age of Reason Enlightenment Grandee, the quarter-century President of the Royal Society, and the Master of the Royal Mint up until his death in 1727.
The relatively affable man-about-town renowned genius receiving callers later in life—the person who may (or may not) have said:
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me…
The diamond-hard brilliance of insight into natural physical law early in life—the person who could write to Robert Hooke in a sort-of friendly and sort-of not dispute over priority:
What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much in several ways, and in particularly in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants…
recognizing the importance of cumulative teamwork across the ages in discovery, while the subtext is that he, Isaac Newton, is a very tall person himself.
Newton was indeed among the First of the Scientists—those who sought ideas that described how the world revealed itself in experiment, and then back-propagated those into premises which were valid only by their success at organizing the results of experiments, and hence always subject to debate and change, as experimental knowledge grew. He was, in his rôle as physicist, not one of those who started with rock-solid premises and sought to derive from them by logical deduction detailed implications that would be equally rock-solid. He was, in his rôle as physicist, not one who developed and promoted ideas that felt right for the acknowledged or unacknowledged reason that they were convenient for a ruling caste that operated a society-of-domination by which it took 1/3 of the crops and 1/3 of the crafts, giving nothing in return. And in this role, and in his role as one of the main Philosophers of the Age of Reason promoting the advance of a world in which not just claims about Natural but about Moral Philosophy required reasonable reasons, he was and remains an inestimable treasure for humanity.
However, Keynes’s extensive reviews of Newton’s papers identified a third Newton, an intermediate Newton, after the Principia but before London. A man, in the words of Wordsworth that Keynes picked up, appropriated, and first applied to Newton: “voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone…”:
[Having] read the riddle of the heavens… he believed that by the same powers of his introspective imagination he would read the riddle of the Godhead, the riddle of past and future events divinely fore-ordained, the riddle of the elements and their constitution from an original undifferentiated first matter, the riddle of health and of immortality… if only he could persevere to the end, uninterrupted, by himself, no one coming into the room, reading, copying, testing-all by himself, no interruption for God’s sake, no disclosure, no discordant breakings in or criticism, with fear and shrinking as he assailed these half-ordained, half-forbidden things…
He was that after physics. And then his friends rescued him from what Keynes believes had become the edge of madness by convincing him to move to London, and re-engage with human society. ANewton who was not only among the First of the Scientists and the Philosophers of the Age of Reason, but also among the Last of the Magicians:
It is with some diffidence that I try to speak to you in his own home of Newton as he was himself. I have long been a student of the records and had the intention to put my impressions into writing to be ready for Christmas Day 1942, the tercentenary of his birth. The war has deprived me both of leisure to treat adequately so great a theme and of opportunity to consult my library and my papers and to verify my impressions. So if the brief study which I shall lay before you today is more perfunctory than it should be, I hope you will excuse me.
One other preliminary matter. I believe that Newton was different from the conventional picture of him. But I do not believe he was less great. He was less ordinary, more extraordinary, than the nineteenth century cared to make him out. Geniuses are very peculiar. Let no one here suppose that my object today is to lessen, by describing, Cambridge’s greatest son. I am trying rather to see him as his own friends and contemporaries saw him. And they without exception regarded him as one of the greatest of men.
In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason.
I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child bom with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.
Had there been time, I should have liked to read to you the contemporary record of the child Newton. For, though it is well known to his biographers, it has never been published in extenso, without comment, just as it stands. Here, indeed, is the makings of a legend of the young magician, a most joyous picture of the opening mind of genius free from the uneasiness, the melancholy and nervous agitation of the young man and student.
For in vulgar modern terms Newton was profoundly neurotic of a not unfamiliar type, but - I should say from the records - a most extreme example. His deepest instincts were occult, esoteric, semantic-with profound shrinking from the world, a paralyzing fear of exposing his thoughts, his beliefs, his discoveries in all nakedness to the inspection and criticism of the world. ‘Of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew’, said Whiston, his successor in the Lucasian Chair. The too well-known conflicts and ignoble quarrels with Hooke, Flamsteed, Leibniz are only too clear an evidence of this. Like all his type he was wholly aloof from women. He parted with and published nothing except under the extreme pressure of friends. Until the second phase of his life, he was a wrapt, consecrated solitary, pursuing his studies by intense introspection with a mental endurance perhaps never equalled.
I believe that the clue to his mind is to be found in his unusual powers of continuous concentrated introspection. A case can be made out, as it also can with Descartes, for regarding him as an accomplished experimentalist. Nothing can be more charming than the tales of his mechanical contrivances when he was a boy. There are his telescopes and his optical experiments, These were essential accomplishments, part of his unequalled all-round technique, but not, I am sure, his peculiar gift, especially amongst his contemporaries. His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted. Anyone who has ever attempted pure scientific or philosophical thought knows how one can hold a problem momentarily in one’s mind and apply all one’s powers of concentration to piercing through it, and how it will dissolve and escape and you find that what you are surveying is a blank. I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary - ‘so happy in his conjectures’, said De Morgan, ‘as to seem to know more than he could possibly have any means of proving’. The proofs, for what they are worth, were, as I have said, dressed up afterwards - they were not the instrument of discovery.
There is the story of how he informed Halley of one of his most fundamental discoveries of planetary motion. ‘Yes,’ replied Halley, ‘but how do you know that? Have you proved it?’ Newton was taken aback - ‘Why, I’ve known it for years’, he replied. ‘If you’ll give me a few days, I’ll certainly find you a proof of it’ - as in due course he did.
Again, there is some evidence that Newton in preparing the Principia was held up almost to the last moment by lack of proof that you could treat a solid sphere as though all its mass was concentrated at the centre, and only hit on the proof a year before publication. But this was a truth which he had known for certain and had always assumed for many years.
Certainly there can be no doubt that the peculiar geometrical form in which the exposition of the Principia is dressed up bears no resemblance at all to the mental processes by which Newton actually arrived at his conclusions.
His experiments were always, I suspect, a means, not of discovery, but always of verifying what he knew already.
Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty - just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.
He did read the riddle of the heavens. And he believed that by the same powers of his introspective imagination he would read the riddle of the Godhead, the riddle of past and future events divinely fore-ordained, the riddle of the elements and their constitution from an original undifferentiated first matter, the riddle of health and of immortality. All would be revealed to him if only he could persevere to the end, uninterrupted, by himself, no one coming into the room, reading, copying, testing-all by himself, no interruption for God’s sake, no disclosure, no discordant breakings in or criticism, with fear and shrinking as he assailed these half-ordained, half-forbidden things, creeping back into the bosom of the Godhead as into his mother’s womb. ‘Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone’, not as Charles Lamb ‘a fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle’.
And so he continued for some twenty-five years. In 1687, when he was forty-five years old, the Principia was published.
Here in Trinity it is right that I should give you an account of how he lived amongst you during these years of his greatest achievement. The east end of the Chapel projects farther eastwards than the Great Gate. In the second half of the seventeenth century there was a walled garden in the free space between Trinity Street and the building which joins the Great Gate to the Chapel. The south wall ran out from the turret of the Gate to a distance overlapping the Chapel by at least the width of the present pavement. Thus the garden was of modest but reasonable size. This was Newton’s garden. He had the Fellow’s set of rooms between the Porter’s Lodge and the Chapel - that, I suppose, now occupied by Professor Broad. The garden was reached by a stairway which was attached to a veranda raised on wooden pillars projecting into the garden from the range of buildings. At the top of this stairway stood his telescope - not to be confused with the observatory erected on the top of the Great Gate during Newton’s lifetime (but after he had left Cambridge) for the use of Roger Cotes and Newton’s successor, Whiston. This wooden erection was, I think, demolished by Whewell in 1856 and replaced by the stone bay of Professor Broad’s bedroom. At the Chapel end of the garden was a small two-storied building, also of wood, which was his elaboratory. When he decided to prepare the Principia for publication he engaged a young kinsman, Humphrey Newton, to act as his amanuensis (the MS. of the Principia, as it went to the press, is clearly in the hand of Humphrey). Humphrey remained with him for five years - from 1684 to 1689. When Newton died Humphrey’s son-in-law Conduitt wrote to him for his reminiscences, and among the papers I have is Humphrey’s reply.
During these twenty-five years of intense study mathematics and astronomy were only a part, and perhaps not the most absorbing, of his occupations. Our record of these is almost wholly confined to the papers which he kept and put in his box when he left Trinity for London.
Let me give some brief indications of their subject. They are enormously voluminous - I should say that upwards of 1,000,000 words in his handwriting still survive. They have, beyond doubt, no substantial value whatever except as a fascinating sidelight on the mind of our greatest genius.
Let me not exaggerate through reaction against the other Newton myth which has been so sedulously created for the last two hundred years. There was extreme method in his madness. All his unpublished works on esoteric and theological matters are marked by careful learning, accurate method and extreme sobriety of statement. They are just as sane as the Principia, if their whole matter and purpose were not magical. They were nearly all composed during the same twenty-five years of his mathematical studies. They fall into several groups.
Very early in life Newton abandoned orthodox belief in the Trinity. At this time the Socinians were an important Arian sect amongst intellectual circles. It may be that Newton fell under Socinian influences, but I think not. He was rather a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides. He arrived at this conclusion, not on so-to-speak rational or sceptical grounds, but entirely on the interpretation of ancient authority. He was persuaded that the revealed documents give no support to the Trinitarian doctrines which were due to late falsifications. The revealed God was one God.
But this was a dreadful secret which Newton was at desperate pains to conceal all his life. It was the reason why he refused Holy Orders, and therefore had to obtain a special dispensation to hold his Fellowship and Lucasian Chair and could not be Master of Trinity. Even the Toleration Act of 1689 excepted anti-Trinitarians. Some rumours there were, but not at the dangerous dates when he was a young Fellow of Trinity. In the main the secret died with him. But it was revealed in many writings in his, big box. After his death Bishop Horsley was asked to inspect the box with a view to publication. He saw the contents with horror and slammed the lid. A hundred years later Sir David Brewster looked into the box. He covered up the traces with carefully selected extracts and some straight fibbing. His latest biographer, Mr More, has been more candid. Newton’s extensive anti-Trinitarian pamphlets are, in my judgement, the most interesting of his unpublished papers. Apart from his more serious affirmation of belief, I have a completed pamphlet showing up what Newton thought of the extreme dishonesty and falsification of records for which St Athanasius was responsible, in particular for his putting about the false calumny that Arius died in a privy. The victory of the Trinitarians in England in the latter half of the seventeenth century was not only as complete, but also as extraordinary, as St Athanasius’s original triumph. There is good reason for thinking that Locke was a Unitarian. I have seen it argued that Milton was. It is a blot on Newton’s record that he did not murmur a word when Whiston, his successor in the Lucasian Chair, was thrown out of his professorship and out of the University for publicly avowing opinions which Newton himself had secretly held for upwards of fifty years past.
That he held this heresy was a further aggravation of his silence and secrecy and inwardness of disposition.
Another large section is concerned with all branches of apocalyptic writings from which he sought to deduce the secret truths of the Universe - the measurements of Solomon’s Temple, the Book of David, the Book of Revelations, an enormous volume of work of which some part was published in his later days. Along with this are hundreds of pages of Church History and the like, designed to discover the truth of tradition.
A large section, judging by the handwriting amongst the earliest, relates to alchemy - transmutation, the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life. The scope and character of these papers have been hushed up, or at least minimized, by nearly all those who have inspected them. About 1650 there was a considerable group in London, round the publisher Cooper, who during the next twenty years revived interest not only in the English alchemists of the fifteenth century, but also in translations of the medieval and post-medieval alchemists.
There is an unusual number of manuscripts of the early English alchemists in the libraries of Cambridge. It may be that there was some continuous esoteric tradition within the University which sprang into activity again in the twenty years from 1650 to 1670. At any rate, Newton was clearly an unbridled addict. It is this with which he was occupied ‘about 6 weeks at spring and 6 at the fall when the fire in the elaboratory scarcely went out’ at the very years when he was composing the Principia - and about this he told Humphrey Newton not a word. Moreover, he was almost entirely concerned, not in serious experiment, but in trying to read the riddle of tradition, to find meaning in cryptic verses, to imitate the alleged but largely imaginary experiments of the initiates of past centuries. Newton has left behind him a vast mass of records of these studies. I believe that the greater part are translations and copies made by him of existing books and manuscripts. But there are also extensive records of experiments. I have glanced through a great quantity of this at least 100,000 words, I should say. It is utterly impossible to deny that it is wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value; and also impossible not to admit that Newton devoted years of work to it. Some time it might be interesting, but not useful, for some student better equipped and more idle than I to work out Newton’s exact relationship to the tradition and MSS. of his time.
In these mixed and extraordinary studies, with one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot treading a path for modern science, Newton spent the first phase of his life, the period of life in Trinity when he did all his real work. Now let me pass to the second phase.
After the publication of the Principia there is a complete change in his habit and way of life. I believe that his friends, above all Halifax, came to the conclusion that he must be rooted out of the life he was leading at Trinity which must soon lead to decay of mind and health. Broadly speaking, of his own motion or under persuasion, he abandons his studies. He takes up University business, represents the University in Parliament; his friends are busy trying to get a dignified and remunerative job for him - the Provostship of King’s, the Mastership of Charterhouse, the Controllership of the Mint.
Newton could not be Master of Trinity because he was a Unitarian and so not in Holy Orders. He was rejected as Provost of King’s for the more prosaic reason that he was not an Etonian. Newton took this rejection very ill and prepared a long legalistic brief, which I possess, giving reasons why it was not unlawful for him to be accepted as Provost. But, as ill-luck had it, Newton’s nomination for the Provostship came at the moment when King’s had decided to fight against the right of Crown nomination, a struggle in which the College was successful.
Newton was well qualified for any of these offices. It must not be inferred from his introspection, his absent-mindedness, his secrecy and his solitude that he lacked aptitude for affairs when he chose to exercise it. There are many records to prove his very great capacity. Read, for example, his correspondence with Dr Covell, the Vice-Chancellor when, as the University’s representative in Parliament, he had to deal with the delicate question of the oaths after the revolution of 1688. With Pepys and Lowndes he became one of the greatest and most efficient of our civil servants. He was a very successful investor of funds, surmounting the crisis of the South Sea Bubble, and died a rich man. He possessed in exceptional degree almost every kind of intellectual aptitude - lawyer, historian, theologian, not less than mathematician, physicist, astronomer.
And when the turn of his life came and he put his books of magic back into the box, it was easy for him to drop the seventeenth century behind him and to evolve into the eighteenth-century figure which is the traditional Newton.
Nevertheless, the move on the part of his friends to change his life came almost too late. In 1689 his mother, to whom he was deeply attached, died. Somewhere about his fiftieth birthday on Christmas Day 1692, he suffered what we should now term a severe nervous breakdown. Melancholia, sleeplessness, fears of persecution - he writes to Pepys and to Locke and no doubt to others letters which lead them to think that his mind is deranged. He lost, in his own words, the ‘former consistency of his mind’. He never again concentrated after the old fashion or did any fresh work. The breakdown probably lasted nearly two years, and from it emerged, slightly ‘gaga’, but still, no doubt, with one of the most powerful minds of England, the Sir Isaac Newton of tradition.
In 1696 his friends were finally successful in digging him out of Cambridge, and for more than another twenty years he reigned in London as the most famous man of his age, of Europe, and - as his powers gradually waned and his affability increased - perhaps of all time, so it seemed to his contemporaries.
He set up house with his niece Catharine Barton, who was beyond reasonable doubt the mistress of his old and loyal friend Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax and Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had been one of Newton’s intimate friends when he was an undergraduate at Trinity. Catharine was reputed to be one of the most brilliant and charming women in the London of Congreve, Swift and Pope. She is celebrated, not least for the broadness of her stories, in Swift’s Journal to Stella. Newton puts on rather too much weight for his moderate height. ‘When he rode in his coach one arm would be out of his coach on one side and the other on the other.’ His pink face, beneath a mass of snow-white hair, which ‘when his peruke was off was a venerable sight’, is increasingly both benevolent and majestic. One night in Trinity after Hall he is knighted by Queen Anne. For nearly twenty-four years he reigns as President of the Royal Society. He becomes one of the principal sights of London for all visiting intellectual foreigners, whom he entertains handsomely. He liked to have clever young men about him to edit new editions of the Principia - and sometimes merely plausible ones as in the case of Facio de Duillier.
Magic was quite forgotten. He has become the Sage and Monarch of the Age of Reason. The Sir Isaac Newton of orthodox tradition - the eighteenth-century Sir Isaac, so remote from the child magician born in the first half of the seventeenth century - was being built up. Voltaire returning from his trip to London was able to report of Sir Isaac - ‘twas his peculiar felicity, not only to be born in a country of liberty, but in an Age when all scholastic impertinences were banished from the World. Reason alone was cultivated and Mankind could only be his Pupil, not his Enemy.’ Newton, whose secret heresies and scholastic superstitions it had been the study of a lifetime to conceal!
But he never concentrated, never recovered ‘the former consistency of his mind’. ‘He spoke very little in company.’ ‘He had something rather languid in his look and manner.’
And he looked very seldom, I expect, into the chest where, when he left Cambridge, he had packed all the evidences of what had occupied and so absorbed his intense and flaming spirit in his rooms and his garden and his elaboratory between the Great Gate and Chapel.
But he did not destroy them. They remained in the box to shock profoundly any eighteenth- or nineteenth-century prying eyes. They became the possession of Catharine Barton and then of her daughter, the Countess of Portsmouth. So Newton’s chest, with many hundreds of thousands of words of his unpublished writings, came to contain the ‘Portsmouth Papers’.
In 1888 the mathematical portion was given to the University Library at Cambridge. They have been indexed, but they have never been edited. The rest, a very large collection, were dispersed in the auction room in 1936 by Catharine Barton’s descendant, the present Lord Lymington. Disturbed by this impiety, I managed gradually to reassemble about half of them, including nearly the whole of the biographical portion, that is, the ‘Conduitt Papers’, in order to bring them to Cambridge which I hope they will never leave. The greater part of the rest were snatched out of my reach by a syndicate which hoped to sell them at a high price, probably in America, on the occasion of the recent tercentenary.
As one broods over these queer collections, it seems easier to understand - with an understanding which is not, I hope, distorted in the other direction - this strange spirit, who was tempted by the Devil to believe at the time when within these walls he. was solving so much, that he could reach all the secrets of God and Nature by the pure power of mind Copernicus and Faustus in one.
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I woke up in a bad mood this morning. Thus I want to circle around again—like a dog to its vomit—and set out the two things that really piss me off about James Hankins’s excerpt from his The Golden Thread that he chose to publish in First Things: one that is full-blown fascist, and the other that is profoundly anti-Christian:
The full-blown fascist—not neofascist, merely—is this:
James Hankins: The Greatness of Alexander <https://firstthings.com/the-greatness-of-alexander/>: ‘Alexander’s ancient biographers seem unconcerned with… [his] atrocities…. It hardly excuses Alexander that such actions were normal practices in ancient warfare, and that execution and enslavement of defeated enemies was permitted under some ancient laws. However excused, such actions were surely not those of a philosopher-king.
We are shocked by these things, and by the failure of the ancients to condemn them, forgetting that our grandfathers saw no crime in the fire-bombing of German cities from the air or the nuclear incineration of two Japanese cities filled with innocent civilians….
It can be puzzling that the moral assessments of ancients and moderns differ so much from each other. We are inclined to think of these differences as stemming from the moral blindness of the ancients. Such condescension towards the past is an odious modern habit of mind…
World War II was a just war fought by the allies in ways that were—sometimes—unjust. It is simply a lie to claim that “our grandfathers saw no crime in the fire-bombing of German cities from the air” or that “our grandfathers saw no crime in the… nuclear incineration of two Japanese cities filled with innocent civilians”. There were great efforts made to grapple with the moral dilemmas of how to fight World War II to minimize the total amount of atrocity. And there was great concern over what we were doing, inside and outside the military. We did not ignore then, and we do not forget now.
More important, the only purpose of “forgetting” in Hankins’s passage here is to slide into full-blown moral relativism: because the West did not always live up to its high ideals about how to fight a just war justly, we have no standing to judge Aleksander for fighting unjust wars systematically unjustly—and that it is an “odious modern habit of mind” if we attempt to do so.
Hankins has now wedged himself into the fully fascist position that large-scale war-crimes are just hunky-dory. And that really does piss me off.
James Hankins: The Greatness of Alexander <https://firstthings.com/the-greatness-of-alexander/>: ‘If we fail to see the greatness of a man like Alexander, perhaps the reason is that we ourselves are too petty, too stunted in our outlook to appreciate it. As the Chinese poet Han Yu wrote, “A man living at the bottom of a well will think the sky is small.” We can’t accept greatness in part because we find it difficult to take ancient religion seriously; we moderns overlook the divine element in human nature, and the ability of the divine to transform us. For us, Alexander’s wish to be recognized as a god can only be evidence of insanity or, at best, a cynical ploy to win support among superstitious men. The ancients excused Alexander’s pretensions to superhuman status on the grounds that he did in fact have a great soul; his opinion of himself was justified. It was not hubris, because the gods did not punish but rewarded him with unbroken success. The ancients saw what we fail to see, or what we prefer not to see: that human beings can, exceptionally, achieve greatness, and this can only come through divine help…
We are too petty and stunted to understand Aleksander’s greatness
Because we overlook what ancient religion knew:
That the divine can transform us
And make us great through divine help
Yes, Hankins claims that divine favor rested upon Alexander. Yes, Hankins claims that the favor of God Almighty, the Α & Ω, The One Who Is, rested upon him. For “[when] human beings… exceptionally, achieve greatness… this can only come through divine help”. And “the ancients saw [this but]… we fail to see, or… prefer not to see” it.
Now people are situational. I am sure James Hankins is a good guy in the Senior Common Room. I would love to learn from him about Francesco Petrarcha, Leonardo Bruni, and Marcello Ficino.
But this public presentation of himself that he has taken on—no thanks. Yuck!
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A pushback from two-and-a-half years ago about one of the weirdest emanations of neofascism I have seen in this past truly weird decade: no, Aleksander III Argeados of Makedon was not “Great” in any senes carrying strong connotations of being in some way worthy of admiration; superbly skilled at the deeply unfortunate and disturbing human social practice of war yes, with very large amounts of the virtues useful in that social practice, yes; but a murderous psychopath too, as a very large part of the package…
Followed by a, “no, my colleagues are just teaching it differently” backpedal:
James W. Hankins: ‘People teaching in Western fields… almost all of these people regard the language of “western civilization” as minimally outmoded and maximally “white supremacist”. I am an outlier because I think that the civilizations of the West should be taught as a tradition, and preferentially at the undergrad level. Most of my colleagues disagree and make some sort of obeisance to global history and assume the equality of all “cultures”…
And then by what I can only read as a frantic attempt at full clawback, as his colleagues are all of a sudden not deluded fools making “obeisance to global history and… the equality of all ‘cultures’”, but are rather truly outstanding learned scholars:
James W. Hankins: ‘I keep reading people who say that no one is teaching Western civilization any more at Harvard, citing my Compact article. It’s not what I said. Harvard (where I’m still on the faculty till 30 June) has 17 outstanding people teaching in Western fields, ancient, medieval and modern…
CROSSPOST: BRET DEVEREAUX: Once You Imagine Alexander’s Victims as People…
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Replying to @Vermeullarmine: [James] Hankins’ assumption that Plutarch and Arrian lived “beyond fear or favor” is a blinkered one given that, for instance, Arrian was in the court, as it were, of Hadrian and an excessively negative work on Alexander might well have been read as a critique of the emperor…
Indeed, it is basic enough to be acknowledged as a matter of course in the third paragraph of Elizabeth Bynam’s chapter in the Landmark (2010, ed. James Romm). Likewise, there’s a reason Antony is the last of Plutarch’s parallel lives; no Augustus.
But while I’m discussing it, I suppose I might note a few other things. First, I must assume that, as an excerpt, the parts that dealt with the third major account, by Q. Curtius Rufus, will have gone elsewhere. Surely he could not be left out entirely. Odd also in a treatment of Arrian’s view of Alexander there’s no mention of the fairly clear theme of Arrian’s sketch of Alexanders character: that imperial power corrupted and degraded his once admirable character (explicit, framed in anti-Persian rhetoric in Bk7, e.g. 7.8.3). But more broadly the ‘I can’t imagine why they don’t like Alexander, it must be because they overlook the divine element in human nature’ tone is odd to me given that the evolution of Alexander scholarship is.. like… comps-topic level basic historiography. As in, I literally had a PhD comps question on this, the shift to viewing Alexander through the lens of his victims (esp. Badian, Bosworth) or scholars finding Philip II more interesting (Borza).
James W. Hankins doesn’t engage with those arguments meaningfully. He does engage with the notion that Alexander at times may have transgressed the limits of war, but not that Alexander in fact launched a series of unprovoked wars, for what seems to be the glory and fun of it. The Greeks and Romans found that admirable, but we don’t need to. Once you imagine Alexander’s victims as people against whom Alexander is launching an unprovoked invasion, it becomes really hard to like Alexander, because as a society we no longer measure greatness by who is the best at killing.
That isn’t ‘standing in a well, unable to see the sky is wide’ but rather, standing at the foot of a giant pile of corpses and, at long last, refusing to declare it a great work of art. One might argue with that position, but it is hard to accuse it of smallness of mind…
And here is the piece Bret is commenting hammering on:
James Hankins (2023): The Greatness of Alexander <https://firstthings.com/the-greatness-of-alexander/>: ‘King Alexander III of Macedon is beyond doubt among the greatest figures in world history. But was he a great man, the finest kind of human being? His extraordinary success, in combination with his moral weaknesses, must have been frustrating for some ancient moralists since, according to the philosophers, a man’s worth and his ability to lead other men was dependent on the excellence of his moral character. Good moral character, they believed, could be acquired by the study of philosophy. According to the great educator Isocrates, in the finest leaders, good moral character was strengthened by wide-ranging study of the best literature, arts, and sciences.
Alexander studied for years with Aristotle, the fountainhead of Western scientific thought, whom some would say was the greatest moral philosopher who ever lived. Aristotle even wrote a number of works, now lost, intended to instruct his pupil in the arts of kingship. According to Plutarch the young king was “by nature a lover of learning and a lover of reading.” He was an admirer of the great lyric poets and Athens’ fifth-century tragedians as well as a voracious reader of history. He was steeped in Homer, author of the two great epics that formed the Bible of the Greeks. According to multiple sources the young conqueror always carried his Homer with him on campaign, keeping it under his pillow, along with a dagger. He modelled his own behavior on Achilles, Homer’s supreme, flawed hero.
Alexander, in other words, according to ancient ideas had the perfect formation to be a philosopher-king. There were some authorities—chiefly Plutarch—who insisted that he met the conditions to deserve such a title. Another biographer, Arrian, while stopping short of that assessment, praised his many virtues of leadership and his extraordinary accomplishments, while excusing his faults as those of a hot-blooded young man misled by scheming advisors. He points to one admirable quality ignored by modern writers on Alexander, a character trait rare among men of supreme power: The great conqueror was capable of remorse for his own faults and made no effort to conceal them. These admissions of bad behavior had good effects on his own character and gave some kind of solace to those he had injured.
Both Plutarch and Arrian, though living long after Alexander’s time, beyond fear or favor, had access to far more information about him than anyone possesses today. Yet their assessment of the conqueror is strikingly different from that of his modern biographers. For in modern times Alexander’s reputation has suffered a disastrous fall. Since the Second World War it has become common for historians to compare Alexander casually to Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan, or to dismiss him as a “Homeric pirate,” or to psychoanalyze him as suffering from extreme paranoia and megalomania. Modern writers, as though determined to cut him down to size, focus on Alexander’s vices, which (rightly) seem appalling to us: his ruthless elimination of rivals for the throne, and his towering, drunken rages, leading to rash acts of violence against some of his most loyal companions. These included his trusted commander Cleitus, who had saved his life at the battle of Granicus, and the Persian expedition’s official historian, Callisthenes, Aristotle’s nephew, who died in jail after refusing to kneel before the monarch-god. Moderns find it difficult not to interpret Alexander’s obsession with his own image as the mark of a deranged narcissist, or to see his insatiable thirst for victory as anything other than a mental disorder.
Alexander’s ancient biographers seem unconcerned with what modern readers (rightly) find most abhorrent: the atrocities for which he was responsible. These include the annihilation of Thebes, the slaughter and enslavement of enemies who had surrendered to him, the wolfish plundering of conquered cities. It hardly excuses Alexander that such actions were normal practices in ancient warfare, and that execution and enslavement of defeated enemies was permitted under some ancient laws. However excused, such actions were surely not those of a philosopher-king. We are shocked by these things, and by the failure of the ancients to condemn them, forgetting that our grandfathers saw no crime in the fire-bombing of German cities from the air or the nuclear incineration of two Japanese cities filled with innocent civilians.
Since all the information we moderns have about Alexander’s deeds comes from the same ancient writers who profess to admire him, it can be puzzling that the moral assessments of ancients and moderns differ so much from each other. We are inclined to think of these differences as stemming from the moral blindness of the ancients. Such condescension towards the past is an odious modern habit of mind. But perhaps we should also take stock of the moral myopias of our own time, the deficiencies in our own era’s ways of assessing a person’s worth.
In our age of science and materialism, we tend to look past the high ideals expressed by men in the past, to think that all their achievements must be the product of historical forces beyond their control, that all their heroism is a mere cover for self-interest. We prefer to cut great historical figures down to our own modest size. Arrian, who was a Stoic philosopher as well as a historian, warns against this attitude, writing,
“any one who reproaches Alexander should not do so merely by citing actions that merit reproach, but should collect all his actions together, and then carefully reflect who he himself is and what kind of fortune he enjoys, that he can condemn Alexander, given what Alexander became and the height of human good fortune he attained, the unquestioned king of both continents whose name reached every part of the world, whereas he is himself a lesser man, whose energies are spent on petty things and who does not even get these things right (Loeb translation)…”
If we fail to see the greatness of a man like Alexander, perhaps the reason is that we ourselves are too petty, too stunted in our outlook to appreciate it. As the Chinese poet Han Yu wrote, “A man living at the bottom of a well will think the sky is small.”
We can’t accept greatness in part because we find it difficult to take ancient religion seriously; we moderns overlook the divine element in human nature, and the ability of the divine to transform us. For us, Alexander’s wish to be recognized as a god can only be evidence of insanity or, at best, a cynical ploy to win support among superstitious men. The ancients excused Alexander’s pretensions to superhuman status on the grounds that he did in fact have a great soul; his opinion of himself was justified. It was not hubris, because the gods did not punish but rewarded him with unbroken success. The ancients saw what we fail to see, or what we prefer not to see: that human beings can, exceptionally, achieve greatness, and this can only come through divine help. As the Theban poet Pindar wrote in his eighth Pythian Ode,
“Creatures for a day! What is a man? What is he not? A dream of a shadow Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men A gleam of splendour given of heaven, Then rests on them a light of glory And blessed are their days (Tr. C. M. Bowra)…
This biographical essay is excerpted from The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, by Allen C. Guelzo & James Hankins, forthcoming from Encounter Books in 2024.
And Adrian Vermeule’s endorsement of the greatness of Aleksander III Argeados of Makedon is here:
Adrian Vermeule: ‘“If we fail to see the greatness of a man like Alexander, perhaps the reason is that we ourselves are too petty, too stunted in our outlook to appreciate it. As the Chinese poet Han Yu wrote, “A man living at the bottom of a well will think the sky is small”.
It’s too bad the right-wing neofascist brain-eater ate James W. Hankins’s brain. His Virtue Politics book was interesting—largely wrong-headed, IMHO, but interesting.
One more note. Put me down as somebody who views the language of “western civilization” as always outmoded and, regrettably often, a destructive rhetorical flame thrower deployed by white supremacists. My preference is to talk about the “Dover Circle” as of 1500—the civilizations then in a circle of roughly 400 miles’ radius around Dover, England, and those cultures that have descended from them by direct inheritance and cultural adoption.
For nearly all the time since the invention of agriculture, the Eastern core is the Yellow River and Yangtze Valleys, shifting a little. There is continuity here: political continuity, cultural continuity, unbroken chains of influence, even substantial continuity of genetic descent. This is in great contrast to the “Western core”:
Fom -9600 to 1400, from Basra on the Persian Gulf to Tbilisi in the Caucasus to Ithaka off the northwest corner of Greece to Thebes in Egypt.
From -250 to 250, Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia.
After 250 it reverted back to the original Basra-Tbilisi-Ithaka-Thebes quadrangle.
For 1400 to 1800, it picked up stakes and moved to Western Europe.
By 1900 the Western “core area” has extended a pseudopod across the Atlantic to the American northeast and contracted in Europe
And come 2000, Morris’s “Western core” is the continental United States plus the more-settled parts of Canada.
I feel a great lack of continuity here. What has the civilization of Uruk in -3000 have to do with the civilization of Silicon Valley today? In what sense are they both “the West”, save that there are some people at Stanford who read The Story of the Man Who Saw the Deep, the Epic of Gilgamesh <https://archive.org/details/gilgameshnewrend00ferr>?
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I do confess that I was shocked when I got to the end of James Hankins’s <https://firstthings.com/the-greatness-of-alexander/> biographical sketch of Aleksander III Argeados of Makedon. Why? Because I learned that Hankins believes that Aleksander was indeed great in a largely positive and admirable sense. Moreover, Hawkins believes that his greatness was the result of something the ancients recognized but that we cannot.
So what is that something?
And what was the cause of his greatness (and utter barbarity) at the very disturbing human social practice of war?
That something and that cause is the exceptional fact that divine favor rested upon Alexander.
Yes, the favor of God Almighty, the Α & Ω, The One Who Is, rested upon him. For, to quote Hawkins, “[when] human beings… exceptionally, achieve greatness… this can only come through divine help”, as Hawkins says “the ancients saw [but]… we fail to see, or… prefer not to see”.
At this point my reaction was that somebody should tell Hawkins to put down the keyboard, back up away from the internet, and not return.
So why is this on my screen? Because I was whipsawed by first seeing:
Followed by a, “no, my colleagues are just teaching it differently” backpedal:
James W. Hankins: ‘People teaching in Western fields… almost all of these people regard the language of “western civilization” as minimally outmoded and maximally “white supremacist”. I am an outlier because I think that the civilizations of the West should be taught as a tradition, and preferentially at the undergrad level. Most of my colleagues disagree and make some sort of obeisance to global history and assume the equality of all “cultures”…
And then by what I can only read as a frantic attempt at full clawback, as his colleagues are all of a sudden not deluded fools making “obeisance to global history and… the equality of all ‘cultures’”, but are rather truly outstanding learned scholars:
James W. Hankins: ‘I keep reading people who say that no one is teaching Western civilization any more at Harvard, citing my Compact article. It’s not what I said. Harvard (where I’m still on the faculty till 30 June) has 17 outstanding people teaching in Western fields, ancient, medieval and modern…
CROSSPOST: BRET DEVEREAUX: Once You Imagine Alexander’s Victims as People…
pbs.substack.com/profile_i…[],"quoted_tweet":{"full_text":"No idea who this rather angry fellow is, except that he doesn’t seem to want to address the actual author of the piece, @JamesWHankins1, who he keeps taking off the thread 🤷♂️","username":"Vermeullarmine","name":"Adrian Vermeule","profile_image_url":"pbs.substack.com/profile_i…},"reply_count":2,"retweet_count":1,"like_count":29,"impression_count":10564,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}” data-component-name=“Twitter2ToDOM”>
Replying to @Vermeullarmine: [James] Hankins’ assumption that Plutarch and Arrian lived “beyond fear or favor” is a blinkered one given that, for instance, Arrian was in the court, as it were, of Hadrian and an excessively negative work on Alexander might well have been read as a critique of the emperor…
Indeed, it is basic enough to be acknowledged as a matter of course in the third paragraph of Elizabeth Bynam’s chapter in the Landmark (2010, ed. James Romm). Likewise, there’s a reason Antony is the last of Plutarch’s parallel lives; no Augustus.
But while I’m discussing it, I suppose I might note a few other things. First, I must assume that, as an excerpt, the parts that dealt with the third major account, by Q. Curtius Rufus, will have gone elsewhere. Surely he could not be left out entirely. Odd also in a treatment of Arrian’s view of Alexander there’s no mention of the fairly clear theme of Arrian’s sketch of Alexanders character: that imperial power corrupted and degraded his once admirable character (explicit, framed in anti-Persian rhetoric in Bk7, e.g. 7.8.3). But more broadly the ‘I can’t imagine why they don’t like Alexander, it must be because they overlook the divine element in human nature’ tone is odd to me given that the evolution of Alexander scholarship is.. like… comps-topic level basic historiography. As in, I literally had a PhD comps question on this, the shift to viewing Alexander through the lens of his victims (esp. Badian, Bosworth) or scholars finding Philip II more interesting (Borza).
James W. Hankins doesn’t engage with those arguments meaningfully. He does engage with the notion that Alexander at times may have transgressed the limits of war, but not that Alexander in fact launched a series of unprovoked wars, for what seems to be the glory and fun of it. The Greeks and Romans found that admirable, but we don’t need to. Once you imagine Alexander’s victims as people against whom Alexander is launching an unprovoked invasion, it becomes really hard to like Alexander, because as a society we no longer measure greatness by who is the best at killing.
That isn’t ‘standing in a well, unable to see the sky is wide’ but rather, standing at the foot of a giant pile of corpses and, at long last, refusing to declare it a great work of art. One might argue with that position, but it is hard to accuse it of smallness of mind…
And here is the piece Bret is commenting hammering on:
James Hankins (2023): The Greatness of Alexander <https://firstthings.com/the-greatness-of-alexander/>: ‘King Alexander III of Macedon is beyond doubt among the greatest figures in world history. But was he a great man, the finest kind of human being? His extraordinary success, in combination with his moral weaknesses, must have been frustrating for some ancient moralists since, according to the philosophers, a man’s worth and his ability to lead other men was dependent on the excellence of his moral character. Good moral character, they believed, could be acquired by the study of philosophy. According to the great educator Isocrates, in the finest leaders, good moral character was strengthened by wide-ranging study of the best literature, arts, and sciences.
Alexander studied for years with Aristotle, the fountainhead of Western scientific thought, whom some would say was the greatest moral philosopher who ever lived. Aristotle even wrote a number of works, now lost, intended to instruct his pupil in the arts of kingship. According to Plutarch the young king was “by nature a lover of learning and a lover of reading.” He was an admirer of the great lyric poets and Athens’ fifth-century tragedians as well as a voracious reader of history. He was steeped in Homer, author of the two great epics that formed the Bible of the Greeks. According to multiple sources the young conqueror always carried his Homer with him on campaign, keeping it under his pillow, along with a dagger. He modelled his own behavior on Achilles, Homer’s supreme, flawed hero.
Alexander, in other words, according to ancient ideas had the perfect formation to be a philosopher-king. There were some authorities—chiefly Plutarch—who insisted that he met the conditions to deserve such a title. Another biographer, Arrian, while stopping short of that assessment, praised his many virtues of leadership and his extraordinary accomplishments, while excusing his faults as those of a hot-blooded young man misled by scheming advisors. He points to one admirable quality ignored by modern writers on Alexander, a character trait rare among men of supreme power: The great conqueror was capable of remorse for his own faults and made no effort to conceal them. These admissions of bad behavior had good effects on his own character and gave some kind of solace to those he had injured.
Both Plutarch and Arrian, though living long after Alexander’s time, beyond fear or favor, had access to far more information about him than anyone possesses today. Yet their assessment of the conqueror is strikingly different from that of his modern biographers. For in modern times Alexander’s reputation has suffered a disastrous fall. Since the Second World War it has become common for historians to compare Alexander casually to Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan, or to dismiss him as a “Homeric pirate,” or to psychoanalyze him as suffering from extreme paranoia and megalomania. Modern writers, as though determined to cut him down to size, focus on Alexander’s vices, which (rightly) seem appalling to us: his ruthless elimination of rivals for the throne, and his towering, drunken rages, leading to rash acts of violence against some of his most loyal companions. These included his trusted commander Cleitus, who had saved his life at the battle of Granicus, and the Persian expedition’s official historian, Callisthenes, Aristotle’s nephew, who died in jail after refusing to kneel before the monarch-god. Moderns find it difficult not to interpret Alexander’s obsession with his own image as the mark of a deranged narcissist, or to see his insatiable thirst for victory as anything other than a mental disorder.
Alexander’s ancient biographers seem unconcerned with what modern readers (rightly) find most abhorrent: the atrocities for which he was responsible. These include the annihilation of Thebes, the slaughter and enslavement of enemies who had surrendered to him, the wolfish plundering of conquered cities. It hardly excuses Alexander that such actions were normal practices in ancient warfare, and that execution and enslavement of defeated enemies was permitted under some ancient laws. However excused, such actions were surely not those of a philosopher-king. We are shocked by these things, and by the failure of the ancients to condemn them, forgetting that our grandfathers saw no crime in the fire-bombing of German cities from the air or the nuclear incineration of two Japanese cities filled with innocent civilians.
Since all the information we moderns have about Alexander’s deeds comes from the same ancient writers who profess to admire him, it can be puzzling that the moral assessments of ancients and moderns differ so much from each other. We are inclined to think of these differences as stemming from the moral blindness of the ancients. Such condescension towards the past is an odious modern habit of mind. But perhaps we should also take stock of the moral myopias of our own time, the deficiencies in our own era’s ways of assessing a person’s worth.
In our age of science and materialism, we tend to look past the high ideals expressed by men in the past, to think that all their achievements must be the product of historical forces beyond their control, that all their heroism is a mere cover for self-interest. We prefer to cut great historical figures down to our own modest size. Arrian, who was a Stoic philosopher as well as a historian, warns against this attitude, writing,
“any one who reproaches Alexander should not do so merely by citing actions that merit reproach, but should collect all his actions together, and then carefully reflect who he himself is and what kind of fortune he enjoys, that he can condemn Alexander, given what Alexander became and the height of human good fortune he attained, the unquestioned king of both continents whose name reached every part of the world, whereas he is himself a lesser man, whose energies are spent on petty things and who does not even get these things right (Loeb translation)…”
If we fail to see the greatness of a man like Alexander, perhaps the reason is that we ourselves are too petty, too stunted in our outlook to appreciate it. As the Chinese poet Han Yu wrote, “A man living at the bottom of a well will think the sky is small.”
We can’t accept greatness in part because we find it difficult to take ancient religion seriously; we moderns overlook the divine element in human nature, and the ability of the divine to transform us. For us, Alexander’s wish to be recognized as a god can only be evidence of insanity or, at best, a cynical ploy to win support among superstitious men. The ancients excused Alexander’s pretensions to superhuman status on the grounds that he did in fact have a great soul; his opinion of himself was justified. It was not hubris, because the gods did not punish but rewarded him with unbroken success. The ancients saw what we fail to see, or what we prefer not to see: that human beings can, exceptionally, achieve greatness, and this can only come through divine help. As the Theban poet Pindar wrote in his eighth Pythian Ode,
“Creatures for a day! What is a man? What is he not? A dream of a shadow Is our mortal being. But when there comes to men A gleam of splendour given of heaven, Then rests on them a light of glory And blessed are their days (Tr. C. M. Bowra)…
This biographical essay is excerpted from The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, by Allen C. Guelzo & James Hankins, forthcoming from Encounter Books in 2024.
And Adrian Vermeule’s endorsement of the greatness of Aleksander III Argeados of Makedon is here:
Adrian Vermeule: ‘“If we fail to see the greatness of a man like Alexander, perhaps the reason is that we ourselves are too petty, too stunted in our outlook to appreciate it. As the Chinese poet Han Yu wrote, “A man living at the bottom of a well will think the sky is small”.
It’s too bad the right-wing neofascist brain-eater ate James W. Hankins’s brain. His Virtue Politics book was interesting—largely wrong-headed, IMHO, but interesting.
One more note. Put me down as somebody who views the language of “western civilization” as always outmoded and regrettably option a destructive rhetorical flame thrower deployed by white supremacists. My preference is to talk about the “Dover Circle” as of 1500—the civilizations then in a circle of roughly 400 miles’ radius around Dover, England, and those cultures that have descended from them by direct inheritance and cultural adoption.
For nearly all the time since the invention of agriculture, the Eastern core is the Yellow River and Yangtze Valleys, shifting a little. There is continuity here: political continuity, cultural continuity, unbroken chains of influence, even substantial continuity of genetic descent.
This is in great contrast to the “Western core”:
Fom -9600 to 1400, from Basra on the Persian Gulf to Tbilisi in the Caucasus to Ithaka off the northwest corner of Greece to Thebes in Egypt.
From -250 to 250, Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia.
After 250 it reverted back to the original Basra-Tbilisi-Ithaka-Thebes quadrangle.
For 1400 to 1800, it picked up stakes and moved to Western Europe.
By 1900 the Western “core area” has extended a pseudopod across the Atlantic to the American northeast and contracted in Europe
And come 2000, Morris’s “Western core” is the continental United States plus the more-settled parts of Canada.
I feel a great lack of continuity here. What has the civilization of Uruk in -3000 have to do with the civilization of Silicon Valley today? In what sense are they both “the West”, save that there are some people at Stanford who read The Story of the Man Who Saw the Deep, the Epic of Gilgamesh <https://archive.org/details/gilgameshnewrend00ferr>?
Certainly there was a time in the 1800s when people wanted to tell the Story of Civilization as something like an Olympic-torch relay race. But this is like picking out pictures of things you like in a photograph and claiming that they are “yours”. There was no single torch. There were no hand-offs. And if there had been a single torch, it would come with all kinds of things that we do not like at all.Earlier peoples ascribed the rôles of torch-bearers in this relay would have been very surprised to learn that the inhabitants of the Thames Valley were in any way them or their heirs. In the -50s, Roman Senator and Proconsul Marcus Tullius Cicero snidely snarked argued that the Britons had no silver and were too stupid and uneducated to make good slaves—hence they were not worth imperializing. Athens had very little tolerance for Jerusalem. And Jerusalem had even less tolerance for Athens.
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Time to fly my left-neoliberal freak flag! For a failure to get the history right may well lead us to inaccurate conclusions about what our government-debt outlook really is, & mistake how resulting economic & political-economic problems should be dealt with:
Credible fiscal anchors crowd in private investment when the central bank leans against demand shortfalls and technology makes capital cheaper. Clinton’s OBRA 93 deficit-reduction Reconciliation package accelerated the economy, because macro reality beats tribal signaling. Fiscal credibility, pro-work redistribution, and a supportive Fed plus falling ICT prices crowded in investment, the 1994 yield-curve shift move reflected growth strength and MBS mechanics, not fears of “austerity gone wrong.” The Clinton 1990s really were a fabulous decade that delivered rising employment, low inflation, and real wage gains, with the EITC expansion the single biggest pro–working-poor social-insurance expansion. Labeling this “austerity” misses how structure + demand + technology produced more capital, higher productivity, and a richer America.
And taking claims that Clinton’s OBRA 93 would tank the economy as real fears by credible macroeconomic analysts is to mistake political bullshit for real analytical judgements and warranted fears.
It crowded-in a truly extraordinary boost to investment in America, which was further amplified by the secular fall in the relative price of information-communications capital goods that was the internet boom. And American economic growth was, thereafter, stronger by perhaps 0.5%-points per year. Figure that America today is 15% richer because of Bill Clinton and those of us who worked for and supported him.
OBRA 93 was viewed by us left-neoliberals—us Rubin Democrats—who pushed this in 1993 as very much a second installment of what had been OBRA 90: the George H.W. Bush-Mitchell-Foley deficit-reduction package of three years before. OBRA 93 did have more tax increases and fewer spending cuts in the mix, but by a narrow margin. OBRA 93 was more progressive than OBRA 90, but again by a narrow margin. But both combined revenue increases with spending restraint rather than relying on one side of the ledger alone, both raised top‑bracket income tax liabilities and closed loopholes/preferences to broaden the base and increase progressivity, both tightened discretionary spending caps and enforced them with sequestration/PayGo‑style budget rules to deter backsliding, both protected core social insurance pillars while trimming growth rates in selected programs rather than cutting benefits outright, both sought business‑confidence effects by committing to predictable multi‑year deficit paths to “crowd‑in” private investment, and both were sold as responsible long‑run policy over short‑run optics.
Indeed, the theses of us left-neoliberals—us Rubin Democrats—who pushed this, and convinced Clinton to throw his weight and his administration 100% behind it, was that:
it would indeed crowd-in investment and boost economic growth,
we had a commitment from Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve that he would do his damnedest to adjust monetary policy so that recovery from the 1990-1991 recession was not interrupted by any shortfall in aggregate demand,
neglecting the urgent need for deficit reduction might well wind us with much higher interest-rate risk premiums that would disrupt economic recovery,
because there were signs in financial- and exchange-market reactions to news that the U.S. debt was rising high enough to endanger the dollar’s safe-haven status,
we would get votes from sensible deficit-hawk Republicans and so it would become a “bring us together” bipartisan initiative,
success at boosting the pace of American economic growth would mean that, after a 1990s of the first rapid real wage increases in a generation, those who had become Reagan Democrats in the 1980s would be much more willing to support equity policies as they would no longer feel under as much family financial stress.
(5) was 200% wrong—it turned out that there were ZERO sensible deficit-hawk Republicans: none were willing to accept balanced deficit reduction hitting both spending cuts and tax increases, even though they would talk a good game in the abstract.
(4) was something I was 100% certain of at the time—and maybe it was true then that the safe-haven exorbitant-privilege debt capacity of the U.S. was then not that much more than 70% of annual GDP. But, if so, debt capacity rapidly and extraordinarily expanded once the 2007-8 GFC hit the world economy:
(3), thus, has to be put in doubt. It was an argument I very strongly believed back then. I recall a cold December 1992 night I spent carrying (a) simulation runs projecting interest rates implicit in the then-current yield curve under fiscal business-as-usual and (b) assessments of how the Bush 41 administration had begun to see “bad news” about the deficit not strengthen but weaken the dollar over to Bob Reich’s house, so he could carry them down to DC for Transition-Planning meetings. I still believe it was a risk. But I cannot believe it was an overwhelming risk.
However, (1) and (2) still look very very good indeed. And those by themselves are enough to place us, all of us who worked on and supported OBRA 93 public benefactors, among those whose names are written brilliantly and boldly in the Book of Life—especially as Gene Sperling managed to get and keep in OBRA 93 the EITC expansion that was then and is now the biggest pro-working poor expansion of the American social insurance system ever.
But we got zero Republican votes for OBRA 93. OBRA 90 had passed the House 227-203 (Democrats 217-40, Republicans 10-163, but with an unknown number of Republican “yeas’‘ in reserve if needed) and the Senate 54-46 (Democrats 44-10, Republicans 10-35). OBRA 93 passed the House 218-217, and the Senate 51-50, all Democrats both times.
Marcus Nunes: The Transition to Fiscal Dominance <https://marcusnunes.substack.com/p/the-transition-to-fiscal-dominance>: ‘In the 1990s… a rising debt ratio since 1980 was reduced… by Bill Clinton and the congressional Democrats]… through significant “austerity”, with both goverment spending falling and government revenues rising…. Monetary policy was appropriate, managing to keep NGDP on a stable level growth path, while inflation was low and stable. Throughout the adjustment unemployment was falling and reached 3.9% by the time Clinton left office…. However, there was significant economic debate—and widespread professional concern—that Clinton’s fiscal consolidation would damage growth. Many prominent economists predicted the 1993 deficit reduction package would cause recession or stall the recovery from the 90/91 recession. Just to give a few examples of ‘big names’ that were skeptical:
1. Republican Economists’ Consensus View: The Republican economic establishment was nearly unanimous: this would damage growth. Herbert Stein (Nixon/Ford CEA Chairman): Warned the tax increases would slow recovery. Martin Feldstein (Reagan CEA Chairman): Argued higher taxes would reduce investment and employment. Predicted the package would “significantly reduce economic growth.” Robert Barro (Harvard): Concerned about growth effects of higher marginal tax rates on labor supply and investment. Michael Boskin (Bush CEA Chairman): Predicted negative growth effects, particularly from top rate increases affecting entrepreneurs and small business.
2. Wall Street Consensus: Major investment banks and forecasters predicted slower growth: Goldman Sachs economists initially forecast the deficit reduction would subtract ~0.5 percentage points from GDP growth. Many Wall Street economists worried the fiscal tightening would abort the fragile early-1990s recovery. Bond market initially sold off on fears that fiscal consolidation would hurt growth, reducing tax revenues and making deficit reduction self-defeating.
3. Political Predictions: Every single Republican in Congress voted against the package, many citing economic harm: - Senate: 0 Republican votes (50-50, VP Gore broke tie). - House: 0 Republican votes (218-216). Newt Gingrich predicted: “The tax increase will kill the recovery… This is the Democrat machine’s recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable.” Dick Armey (House Majority Leader): “The impact on job creation is going to be devastating.” Phil Gramm (Senator): “I believe hundreds of thousands of people are going to lose their jobs… I believe Bill Clinton will be one of those people.” (In 1996, Clinton was reelected!)…
(Parenthetically, not mentioned by Marcus: John Kasich of Ohio, back on July 28, 1993: “This plan will not work. If it was to work, then I’d have to become a Democrat and believe that more taxes and bigger government is the answer…” <https://crywolfproject.org/quotes/quote-%E2%80%93-rep-john-kasich-r-oh-cnn-1>. John Kasich lied. He never became a Democrat.)
Now let me pick my bones:
First, damned if I know why Marcus writes “Bond market initially sold off on fears that fiscal consolidation would hurt growth, reducing tax revenues and making deficit reduction self-defeating.” Look at the 10-Year Treasury:
Damned if I can see any bond-market selloff as George H.W. Bush went from clear favorite to win reëlection to loser, and as Clinton shifted to his left-neoliberal deficit-reducer incarnation, as OBRA 93 moved through the congress with only Democratic votes and with only one-vote victories in either chamber, and as it then began to take effect.
Zooming in, adding in the dates that Alan Greenspan raised the Federal Funds rate:
The bond-market selloff came starting only half a year after the passage of OBRA 93, and was a reaction to two things: (A) The first was the extraordinary strength of the U.S. economy, as high-tech emerged as a leading sector and as investment in information and communications technology roared ahead greatly in excess of our expectations. (B) The second was the endogenous duration of mortgage-backed securities, which were then a new thing: as interest rates rose, people stopped refinancing mortgages, holders of MBS found themselves holding assets of much longer duration than they had counted on, and so they dumped long-duration Treasuries into the market; the consequences was that instead of a 1-to-4 gearing of 10-Year to 3-Month interest rate increases, we were surprised by a 3-to-4 gearing.
Both (A) and (B) struck us by surprise, and they made my life working for the Treasury in 1994 extremely interesting—very stressful—and never dull.
But the bond-market selloff did NOT, REPEAT NOT, reflect any fear that “fiscal consolidation would hurt growth, reducing tax revenues and making deficit reduction self-defeating”. The deficit was, by then, falling much faster than according to the benchmarks our initial 1993 forecasts had set.
And the Wall Street economist fears—well, Greenspan was 100% on board with deficit reduction and OBRA 93, and so we interpreted those worries (and the Goldman-Sachs forecasts) as coming from people who were not so much making forecasts of the consequences of a combination of fiscal austerity and monetary ease, but rather people making noises to put themselves into ideological alignment with their largely-Republican client base, by parroting what the Republican politicians were saying.
And the Republican politicians? The Doles had been powerful drivers and advocates of the Bush 41 deficit-reduction package, OBRA 90, three years before OBRA 93. Had OBRA 93 been proposed under a second-term Bush 41 presidency, they would have been strong advocates as well. It was, in their view, good policy. But because the person at the head of the government was not Republican George H.W. Bush 41 but Democrat Bill Clinton 42, root-and-branch opposition to it was good politics. As for the Gramms, the Gingriches, and the Armeys, they were not making forecasts but rather one-way bets: if the economy went into recession for any reason, their predictions that OBRA 93 would be useful; if the economy did not, they knew that the supine press corps would never hold them to account. And it did not.
And now we come to the Republican economists. Were Stein, Feldstein, Barro, and Boskin serious in their fears that OBRA 93 would damage economic growth? Barro, yes. But Stein and Feldstein had been big OBRA 90 boosters, and Boskin had been an OBRA 90 designers. By far the most significant difference between OBRA 90 and OBRA 93 was the partisan identity of the President who would sign it into law. Now I suppose it is possible that Stein, Feldstein, Boskin thought that OBRA 90 was bad policy, and only went along with it because they were team players—professional Republicans. It could be. I never asked any of them. But my hunch is that it is overwhelmingly more likely that the polarity is reversed: that it was their opposition to OBRA 93 rather than their support of OBRA 90 that was subservience to their political masters.
Thus I think Marcus has it more-or-less completely wrong when he says that “there was significant economic debate—and widespread professional concern—that Clinton’s fiscal consolidation would damage growth. Many prominent economists predicted the 1993 deficit reduction package would cause recession or stall the recovery from the 90/91 recession…” The “professional” concern was—Barro aside (and Barro, recall, is the person unhinged enough to claim that the Trump-Ryan-McConnell tax cut of 2017 would raise investment in America by as much as it increased from 1993 to 2000 and increase America’s steady-state capital-output ratio by 40%) a professional Republican, not a professional economist concern.
There had been, recall, no significant economic debate over OBRA 90.
But the rest of what Marcus has to say about fears that we may be undergoing a transition to “fiscal dominance” is good!
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We need a guide to how to deal with the new rounds of escalating weaponized cancel-culture to the max. But only a fool would trust the New York TImes to help think these things through, as here it is once again dealing from the middle of the deck…
Alex Bronzini-Vender says he is writing about what is wrong with Harvard.
And yet his two concrete examples are from Northwestern and Texas A&M?
The most concrete thing he says about Harvard as an institution is that Harvard does bad by (a) pointing to IHRA and (b) saying that the university “considers the examples that accompany the IHRA definition [of anti-semitism] to the extent that those examples might be useful in determining discriminatory intent”?
You see the problem here?: NU. TA&M. might. If all ya got is that Harvard said something you object to “might” be useful, something from TA&M, and something from NU, then ya got nuthin:
Alex Bronzini-Vender: At Harvard and Elsewhere, the New Campus Orthodoxy Is Even More Stifling <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/opinion/harvards-campus-speech-trump.html>: ‘That’s not how it’s playing out. Under federal pressure, Harvard and other universities around the country now police academic inquiry according to murkier standards of fairness. The goal, it seems, is to avoid offending anyone, anywhere, across an ever-expanding matrix of identities and standpoints. Rather than dismantling the excesses of the woke era, the new Trump-friendly programs and policies simply repurposed them to serve a different ideological agenda. The result is a new orthodoxy even more stifling than the last…
Now I would be eager to hear from Ryan Enos and from Steve Levitsky—who are quoted in seeing significant problems with Harvard’s current institutional position. But I want to hear from them in full context. Not what we have here.
And so, once again, I find myself in the same position I find myself with respect to, say, The Free Press. I very hard to see the New York Times editors as working in good faith here.
(Alex himself is, of course, young and a student—and so the appropriate attitude to take to him is to urge him to sharpen and stress-test his arguments.)
OK. What, then, you ask, should we in universities be doing?
We should be doing our jobs. We should not be entering into any transactional “compacts”, but simply do our jobs. And we are deserving of support to the extent that we do our jobs well.
As my brother-in-law Paul Mahoney, still Interim President of the University of Virginia for one more day, wrote in the letter that—in my reading, which could be wrong—made the MAGA Regents of UVA bounce him out of the job tomorrow:
October 17, 2025
The United States Department of Education Washington, DC 20202
Dear Secretary McMahon, Ms. Mailman, and Mr. Haley,
Thank you for your letter inviting comment on the proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. We wholeheartedly agree that “American higher education is the envy of the world.” We also agree with many of the principles outlined in the Compact, including a fair and unbiased admissions process, an affordable and academically rigorous education, a thriving marketplace of ideas, institutional neutrality, and equal treatment of students, faculty, and staff in all aspects of university operations. Indeed, the University of Virginia leads in several of these areas and is committed to continuous improvement in all of them.
We seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals. The integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship. A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education.
Higher education faces significant challenges and has not always lived up to its highest ideals. We believe that the best path toward real and durable progress lies in an open and collaborative conversation. We look forward to working together to develop alternative, lasting approaches to improving higher education.
“Academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship”, and so any “contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education”.
But what is our job? It is complicated. A university is different from the public square. A university is a place in which its members have duties:
to speak,
to listen,
to think,
to learn,
to support one another in those first four duties.
That means that members of a university have academic freedom, not public-square 1st-Amendment free-speech freedom. The idea is to generate, improve, and evaluate ideas; and then to disseminate those ideas; and to create and maintain a community that those who want to take on those duties find a safe, welcoming, and supporting place to do so.
How to arrange an institution and a community that does that best is, as I said, complicated.
The key dilemma is how to support those who are here to listen and to learn, and to weed out those who are not here to listen and to learn (and to encourage them to their proper place(s) go) without discouraging the speaking and the thinking. And here my go-to guru is the most learned Jacob Levy:
Jacob Levy (2016): Safe spaces, academic freedom, and the university as a complex association <https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2016/03/safe-spaces-academic-freedom-and-the-university-as-a-complex-association/>: ‘“Academic freedom”… is not… freedom of speech… not the freedom to lie, to commit research fraud, to submit plagiarized work…. It’s not the freedom of a professor to stand in front of a class and say “have you heard the word of God as I best understand it? Let me preach to you for an hour”. Or “you all really need to vote for Bernie Sanders, his is the one true way for politics.”…
The scope that a professor has… [is] constrained by the subject matter of the… class… the… institution… [and the] identity… [of the] discipline…. [It] is the freedom of both professors and students (researchers and those pursing knowledge), to be judged only according to what they do in the classroom or as researchers and only according to the standards of the discipline…. [That] excludes… evaluat[ing] students, or for the university to evaluate us at all for our political or religious opinions expressed off campus…
Jacob Levy (2024): Campus culture wars are a teachable moment in how freedom of speech and academic freedom differ <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-campus-culture-wars-are-a-teachable-moment-in-how-freedom-of-speech/>: ‘Academic freedom… [is] the freedom to follow arguments and evidence where they lead, according to scholarly methods… the freedom to teach, within the confines of the scholarly mission of the class… and, finally, freedom from evaluation on non-academic grounds, of which the traditionally most important are political and religious grounds….
The university has to protect not only the safety of its other members but also the security of its academic functions. It can’t rule against the language on a sign, but it must intervene to prevent violence between students, or occupations and blockades that would prevent a class from meeting, or an invited speaker from speaking…. Escalation, overreach and the chilling of legitimate protest are all constant dangers…. Police helicopters and billy clubs on campus are always a sign of failure…. These are genuine problems… but many universities have probably erred too far in the direction of the shrug, letting the belief grow that classes may be disrupted or speakers blockaded without consequence….
In the autumn of 2023… members of university… conspicuously did not all sympathize with the same cause…. [So] universities often fell back on… institutional neutrality. But critics… said the institution had shown that it didn’t take it seriously either…. [Plus] the rule that the university shouldn’t take any interest in the rhetoric that’s used in a protest or on social media was harder to take seriously in an era of hate-speech rules, restrictions on exclusionary speech, and a discourse around “safety” that treated hostile language as violence….
The best time to have started to do the right thing was yesterday, but the second-best time is today…. Recommit to academic freedom, freedom of extramural speech, and institutional neutrality, starting now…. A firm defence of the right of pro-Palestinian students to protest non-disruptively; a clear stand against professors using their classrooms as political platforms; a refusal to adjudicate and police the meaning and intent of extramural political slogans or social-media posts; and the discipline to avoid adopting institutional political platforms on foreign, political or social policy. With those rules in place, they can provide the site and space for students and faculty alike to study, explore, discuss and debate, to celebrate, mourn and protest, even the most divisive questions in political life…
Brad DeLong (2017): “Any Community… Flourishes only When Our Members Feel Welcome & Safe…” <https://web.archive.org/web/20170926230940/https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/09/any-community-flourishes-only-when-our-members-feel-welcome-and-safe.html>: ‘A university has three goals: 1. A university is a safe space where ideas can be set forth and developed. 2. A university is a safe space where ideas can be evaluated and assessed. 3. A university is a safe space where scholars can develop, and gain intelligence and confidence. Speech whose primary goal is to undermine and defeat one or more of those three goals does not belong on a university campus. If you come to Berkeley, and if your speech is primarily intended to—or even, through your failure to think through what you are doing, has the primary effect of (1) keeping us from developing ideas that may be great ones, (2) keeping us from properly evaluating and assessing ideas, or (3) driving members of the university away, your speech does not belong here. There are lots of people who want to take advantage of free speech week to neither: 1. develop ideas that may be great ones, 2. thoughtfully and rationally evaluate and assess ideas, nor 3/ make the university a welcoming place for young scholars. Some will want blood in the streets. Some will hope to take advantage of blood in the streets. Somebody may wind up dead, or maimed, as part of a game of political-cultural dingbat kabuki largely orthogonal to the three proper missions of the university. It is a serious concern.
This is still, today, a hill I will defend—but I willlisten to reasoned arguments against it, and try to think and learn. For others disagree. Noah Smith for example:
I think Paul Musgrave has it correct here: face-to-face check-ins are the way to turn MAMLMs from a crutch into an intellectual force multiplier.. Then there is the next, harder step: What is the best way to use our new information-age MAMLM to get our students able to enrich their lives and their bank accounts by becoming wise in their ability to utilize the best that has been thought and known?
AI is here; the question is whether we let it hollow out cognition or use it to strengthen it. The answer, I think, starts with outside-the-class essays and inside-the-room interviews. It continues with hard thoughts about what use to make of these technologies, for MAMLMs are superb survey accelerants and terrible oracles. That combination is, potentially, pedagogically golden.
This is, I think, 100% correct, at least for those professors who want to get real feedback with respect to what their students are learning, or who simply want the grades they give to not be grossly unfair and to do something to motivate students to study:
Paul Musgrave: How to Assess Students in the AI Age <https://musgrave.substack.com/p/face-to-face-university-examinations>: ‘Bringing back the most ancient form of scholarly assessment…. In-person examinations are probably the best route to stress-testing students’ mastery of the work they submit…
These students are going to have modern advanced machine learning models where their descendants at their elbows for their entire lives going forward. They need to get good at using them productively. Teaching students to perform intellectual exercises in a way that assumes these things away is not, in the long run, going to do much to help anybody. So: write the essay outside of the classroom, submit it, and then come in to talk about it.
Paul goes on:
Face-to-face exams involve an enormous amount of upfront investment… [and] scheduling exams outside of class time….
There is a nice advantage, however: once you have administered the face-to-face exam and written your notes…you’re done….
There should be a rubric… breaking out each learning objective to be assessed so that it can be quickly measured. There should also be room for notes…. These should be filled out immediately after the exam and saved quickly…
This means, at least as I see it, half-hour blocks: ten minutes reminding yourself what the student’s outside-the-class work was about, a three-minute opening presentation, your first question and their answer, ten minutes of back-and-forth, a thank-you and five minutes making your notes, and then on to the next student.
Now this is a substantial speedup—an extra thirty hours of professor and TA labor devoted to assessment. Then again, having students give oral presentations and answer questions on their work has a lot of value as a teaching technique. And there is some reduction in time spent undertaking other forms of grading.
But it is not clear that this speedup is not something we deserve to suffer. And, anyway, we are pretty good at kicking and crying with respect to defending our perquisites and lifestyle—feel sorry for underpaid, overworked lecturers in the age of MAMLMs. But even for them, in the university wants performance, it should budget to pay for it.
Paul Musgrave still sounds somewhat defensive and pessimistic in his piece. So let me lean in and be much more optimistic.
Start with Chad Orzel’s <https://chadorzel.substack.com/p/learning-stuff-is-supposed-to-be> reminder: learning is supposed to be fun. If that sounds quaint against the steady drumbeat of “Crisis in Academia!!!!”—the handwringing over status collapse and cheating panics—then perhaps we need to step back and recollect what universities are for. For five millennia, since clay tablets and cuneiform, higher education has had one overwhelming purpose: to train front-end nodes to the East African Plains Ape Anthology Super-Intelligence—our real ASI. We teach people to plug into humanity’s collective brain. We teach people to draw on its accumulated knowledge. We teach people to remix it for their situation. We teach people to use it as a springboard for their own incremental analyses. We teach them to then add their own insights back to the store. And we teach them to then communicate those insights so others can act in the world.
That training is stable across technologies. It is still, as I said, the seven academic labors:
survey a subject;
identify the live issues;
hone a key question;
research the question;
analyze evidence to obtain an answer;
store that answer in useful, durable form; and
persuade others that your answer fits reality.
If you are doing lower and higher education right, you are teaching this process, modeling it, and goading students to practice it. Every new layer of information technology—papyrus, codex, press, arXiv, the internet—changes how we engage with texts and data, but not the core pedagogy. MAMLMs—modern advanced machine-learning models—are simply the latest layer. They are very big-data, high-dimensional, flexible-function engines. They do two prominent things:
serve as natural-language front-ends to un/structured data, and
produce stochastic prose (and code) interpolations—slop machines at their worst, copilot force multipliers at their best.
The lecture survived Gutenberg. The seminar survived MOOCs. The core task—training front-end nodes of EAPANASI—survives MAMLMs.
Why is this going to be fun? Because we get to redesign the pitch and the practice around what actually delights, motivates, and builds capability. Orzel’s point is simple and powerful: much of higher education used to be sold as fun—freedom to choose classes, stay up absurd hours pursuing ideas and projects, and play with lasers (or datasets) in a lab. That joy made it easier to power through the inevitable bureaucratic sludge and credential box-checking. If our public posture has turned grim—caught between “skills-for-jobs” instrumentalism and “last-bulwark-against-fascism” moralism—we can fix that, by re-centering the seven labors and integrating the new tools as intellectual force multipliers rather than crutches, as we together explore new tools for amplifying human thought
What does that look like in the classroom?
What I think I am going to be doing next semester on Day One: I am going to tell the story of the medieval university, of the trivium and quadrivium—how to think, write, speak; arithmetic, geometry, harmony, astronomy—and how they were always about enabling rich lives and rich livings as front-ends to the ASI as it stood in the middle ages. Then I will say, “As then, so now”, for our task is to teach students to do (1) through (7) with today’s tools of thought, definitely including MAMLMs. Make explicit the difference between using a tool to accelerate cognition and outsourcing cognition. The former builds intellectual muscle; the latter atrophies it.
I think this will be hard, but the right kind of hard—the kind of hard that makes teaching worth doing. And fun.
Fun, because MAMLMs let you reallocate attention to higher-order intellectual play. Consider step (1), surveying a subject. A good model can generate competent, if bland, maps of the terrain. Use that as a baseline, then push students to find what the baseline misses—conflicts in sources, under-explored subfields, data series with holes, or historiographic rabbit holes where the debate changed meaning but the keywords did not.
On to step (2), identifying live issues: have them prompt, critique, and iterate until the “live issues” are truly live—specific enough to be tractable, rich enough to be consequential.
Step (3), honing the key question: MAMLMs can produce long lists of candidate questions; the real work is pruning, sharpening, and linking the question to available data and methods.
Step (4), research: models are superb front-ends to archives, APIs, and corpora. They are terrible truth-oracles. That is pedagogically golden. Students must learn provenance, triangulation, replication, and error-detection—skills that are more valuable than ever precisely because the front-end is now more powerful and more fallible.
Step (5), analysis: ask students to build small analytic scaffolds—back-of-the-envelope calculations, toy models, code snippets—and then use the model to stress-test assumptions. The delight is watching them discover that changing one assumption flips their result, and then asking why.
Step (6), storage: the durable forms have shifted—papers, databases, notebooks, reproducible repos. MAMLMs can help them outline, summarize, tag, and index. But the student must choose the representation that is reusable by the next front-end node. Teach them to produce artifacts that other humans can pick up and use: clean datasets with documentation, notebooks with narrative and tests, papers with explicit claims and boundaries.
Step (7), persuasion: here models can help generate drafts and check tone. Yet the heart of persuasion remains human: audience, structure, evidence, and ethos. The fun is having students practice rhetorical craft and then use models as sparring partners to anticipate objections and strengthen argument.
The real joy will come, I hope, from the meta-pivot: students will, I hope, come to see education as play with intellectual force multipliers. They will learn the discipline to work without the tool when needed, and the wisdom to use it when it accelerates them. They learn that writing is thinking, but so are prompting, debugging, and oral explanation.
Will this produce a “degraded education”? Only if you mistake tool use for tool worship. Only if we cannot re-sell higher education to the young not as grim credentialing or joyless bulwark politics but as a dream worth living: the freedom to think, build, and persuade with better tools. If we do that, the coming of MAMLMs is not doom but delight.
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From Imperial Russia & World War I to Lenin, the antinomies of NEP, & collectivization-terror as the only path to True Communism—but, then, incomprhensibly, with the Great Terror Stalin crashed the plane. Why? Plus a few preliminary notes on MAMLM LLM-assisted “deep” active reading…
The third volume of Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin biography—Stalin: Totalitarian Superpower—may, but probably will not, come out in July 2026, things being as they are. But I have already started getting ready, putting volumes 1 and 2 (Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941) on my bedside table, along with Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization and Tolstoy’s War & Peace.
(1) “Deep, active reading” is much easier—and more fruitful—when a capable LLM sits at your elbow: Reading has always been a joint production between author, text, and the reader’s prior scaffolding: what you already know, what associations spring to mind, which gaps you can bridge. An LLM, judiciously prompted, supplies scaffolding on demand. It can surface the hidden priors, name the unstated interlocutors, and map the argumentative terrain the author assumes, thereby lowering the cognitive transaction costs of comprehension. The risk—always—of confabulation is real; but so too, historically, were the risks of misremembered seminar notes and half-digested secondary sources. Net-net, the marginal productivity of your attention rises. You can spend less time decoding the context and more time evaluating the claims.
Situating the author in their proper mise-en-scène is now tractable in minutes rather than weeks. Intellectual work occurs in conversations—institutions, journals, polemics, funding regimes, ideological wars of position. With a few prompts, an LLM can reconstruct the immediate discursive neighborhood: who the author is disagreeing with, which schools they borrow from, which case studies are canonical, and what counts as a “win” in that subfield. This is not just garnish; it changes interpretation.
You no longer have to argue in your own mind with a pale shadow of the author, animated by your partial memory and wishful reconstruction. You can spin-up a serviceable proxy—call it “Author*, footnoted”—that can crisply restate their position, test how it survives steelmanning, and explore counterfactuals (“what if they accepted X?”). The point is not ventriloquism; it is triangulation. By iterating the author’s commitments against alternative premises, you learn where their results are robust and where they are leverage-sensitive. In the Old Régime, that labor was expensive and failure-prone; now it is cheap. If you keep a falsification mindset—verify quotes, check references, demand page numbers—the exercise saves you from arguing with your own projection and, therefore, from flattering your own prejudices.
Hence Platon’s character Sokrates’s dismissal of reading in the Phaidros—book is to mind as painting is to animal—no longer holds. The painted animal does not move; the written text, historically, did not answer back. Today, the text can be made to move. Not the original author, granted, but a dynamic, interrogable model that reconstructs the argument space and responds within it. That changes the epistemic game. A book is now an interface to a live discourse, not merely a frozen artifact. The safeguard is humility: treat the model as a fast index plus an argumentative simulator, not an oracle. But once you do, the asymmetry that worried Plato—passive reader, inert text—erodes. We get something closer to dialectic: a quick, cheap, approximate Sokrates, always on tap, who is good enough to raise better questions and bad enough to force you to check the footnotes.
Slavoj Žižek and Stephen Kotkin discuss Kotkin’s monumental biography of Joseph Stalin. Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 covers the Soviet dictator’s youth, from his humble origins in Georgia as the son of a shoemaker to his days as a revolutionary organizer in Lenin’s inner circle.
My take on their conversation, and on the picture of Stalin that emerges from it:
Stephen Kotkin is convinced that politics, not childhood psychopathic demons, made the man, for it was the experience of building and operating a personal dictatorship that shaped his character; and it was the placement of that character against the wider sweep of geopolitics, ideology, and institutions that explain that character’s choices and the horrible genocidal outcomes. Start with the cataclysm of World War I, which normalized mass violence in politics. Continue with the very hard man Vladimir Lenin—a product of imperial Russia in his ruthlessness, his contempt for softness, his extremism in principle, and his devious tactical pragmatism. Note that a Trotsky who publicly saw himself as Lenin’s equal could not gain control of Lenin’s party in the face of a Stalin who saw himself as Lenin’s immediate pupil, and add the importance of personnel and patronage that enables the General Secretary to construct a personal dictatorship within a bureaucratic state.
For the Bolsheviki, the 1920s presented a structural contradiction: Urban Russia was a Bolshevik single-party dictatorship with state ownership of industry’s “commanding heights”, The countryside—home to more than 85% of the population and 70% of the wealth—remained marketized under the NEP, capitalist-like and socially distinct. The regime repeatedly undermined its own quasi-market because, as Communists, they aimed not to ameliorate capitalism but to eradicate all of it, down to the village market and the private blacksmith forge. Viewed through communist lenses that equated capitalism with imperialist war and wage slavery, forced collectivization and the terror-famine became, tragically, the only effective instrument for doing the job. Party, ideology, siege mentality, youthful mobilization all mattered. But would they have done the job without Stalin? Could anyone else have “gone all the way,” reënserfing a hundred million peasants, collectivizing agriculture, and persisting through the catastrophe of five to seven million dead by starvation, tens of millions starving yet surviving, with cannibalism emerging and régime destabilization a growing threat.
But then comes Kotkin’s hardest problem. The terror-famine of collectivization and forced industrialization has at least a simulacrum of means-ends logic, given the ends, given permissibility of all means given what means had already been used in World War I. But after the success of the collectivization of agriculture and the restabilization of the régime, Stalin then, in Kotkin’s term: crashes the plane. Having consolidated power and built socialism’s foundations, he turns the purging scythe on loyal elites—friends, factory heads, diplomats, intelligence, and the Red Army officer corps—at a scale unmatched by fascist analogues, and Communist analogues too. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a veritable tea party in comparison.
How can political explanation take us to where we want to go? Similar dictatorships did not produce coordinated mass murder of loyal elites.
The revolution was real—mass, participatory, energized by the injustices of tsarism. Yet institutions govern, not brilliant ideas. Lenin and his cohort deliberately built a dictatorship. The methods and core ideas of reigning communism—class absolutism, anti-market dogma, siege geopolitics—were at odds with freedom, abundance, and happiness. Stalin’s story, in Kotkin’s telling, is thus the convergence of structure, ideology, and political technique—made decisive by one man’s willingness to go further than anyone else.
John Holbo: Russell Jacoby Against the Buzzwords: ‘Russell Jacoby… in “Tablet”… approvingly retweeted by Richard Dawkins, then by Elon Musk…. I’m sympathetic to Jacoby’s old line… ‘theory’ silliness… in the 80’s-90’s… perverse incentives… for doing ‘philosophy’ badly in various ways. This was not good…. But… as Jacoby himself used to acknowledge… pretend[ing] ‘ivory tower-types being eccentric’ = ‘barbarians at the gates of western civ’ is one more funny, bug-in-his-ear character in some David Lodge novel. But now Jacoby’s updated his script… these leftists don’t even have power in the Ivory Tower!—they don’t have jobs! they are bitter baristas! resentful HR drones!—that makes them so dangerous!… Their weakness is their terrible strength!… The black comedy quality of this twist—surely this is shaping up [as] a sad David Lodge novel...
And this is the illustration Russell Jacoby chooses to illustrate his article:
Oohhh… kaaaayyyy…
Who is this guy?
I did, long ago, read a very nice, book by Russell Jacoby called Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. It was worthwhile, even if written in embarrassingly crude-and-creaky New Leftese.
Scanning my hard disk, I see his name come up in a few of my notes. So: someone who took the Long March from New Left (“I was part of a Boston bookstore ‘collective’ that interminably discussed everything from the titles the store should stock to the details of our lives…”) to, today, the Paleolithic Right:
Russell Jacoby: The Takeover: Self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students and unleashed them into the public square: ‘The leftists who would have vanished as assistant professors in conferences on narratology and gender fluidity or disappeared as law professors with unreadable essays on misogynist hegemony and intersectionality have been pushed out into the larger culture… staff the ballooning diversity and inclusion commissariats that assault us…. Buzz words of the campus—diversity, inclusion, microaggression, power differential, white privilege, group safety—have become the buzz words in public life. Already confusing on campus, they become noxious off campus…
Let me give the mic back to John Holbo:
What indefensible barbarism do these buzz words buzz on behalf of, sez Jacoby?: “Orwell targeted language that defended ‘the indefensible’... the British rule of India, Soviet purges and the bombing of Hiroshima.... But today, unlike in 1946, political language of Western progressives does not so much as defend the indefensible as defend the defendable.”
So they defend the… defendable.
That doesn’t sound SO indefensible...
And I gotta concur with John. Jacoby feels beseiged by noxious buzzwords:
Wonder about the significance of microaggression? You are a microaggressor. Have doubts about an eternal, all-inclusive white supremacy? You benefit from white privilege. Skeptical about new pronouns? You abet the suicide of fragile adolescents…
I am at U.C. Berkeley.
If the Woke Beast has a belly, the place where I am must be its Ground Zero.
Yet in my personal experience:
Microaggressions: I have come home to my house to find my house-sitter and two of her friends sitting on the floor drinking wine, unburdening themselves on the microaggressions of being a female economics graduate student here at Berkeley. These are powerful, brilliant, capable, accomplished women all—and it grinds them down. It is one of the reasons why Economics does so badly and our pipeline of women (and underrepresented minorities!) leaks so much. Economics’s Talmud-like culture of challenge and debate has many advantages, but it does make microaggression (and macroaggression) a privileged and honored lifestyle.
So my reaction is: Time spent reflecting upon how to make the social world less of a zero-sum dominance and more of a positive-sum cooperation game is rarely wasted.
Pronouns: I had thought that the first principle of being a gentlemen is to treat people as they want to be treated, and, in polite society, at least, take their presentation-of-self at surface value: if a man is introducted to you as M. le Comte de St.-Germain, you refer to him as M. le Comte or St. Germain. There was such a man, who dazzled contemporaries in the 1700s with languages, music, chemistry, and gem‑polishing, claiming exotic pasts—sometimes Spanish, sometimes Portuguese or Transylvanian—and hinting at great age, moving among élites sometimes as a minor fixer or informal envoy, cultivating patronage, performing chemical demonstrations, keeping to a strict diet and nocturnal work habits, with strong relationships to figure like le Duc de Choiseul and Prinz Karl von Hesse. Perhaps the one thing certain about him was that he was not, in fact, M. le Comte de St.-Germain.
If Jacoby wants to write a brief for how impolite society is in fact superior, I might read it.
But he has not done so.
So my reaction is: Adolescence is a time in which everyone is fragile, and needs sympathy and compassion.Civilization is empathy and consideration. Barbarism is the reverse.
White Privilege: If you are an elderly or middle-aged straight white male in America who does not know that you have been playing the videogame of life on the “easy” setting, I judge you to be a pathetic loser. And I cannot interpret Jacoby’s “have doubts about an eternal, all-inclusive white supremacy? You benefit from white privilege” as anything other than a denial that he has been playing on the “easy” setting.
So my reaction is: Knowing how much you are, as Milton and Rose Director Friedman liked to say, “supremely lucky people” is a very important part of self-knowledge.
Am I deluded?
Should I join those like Russell Jacoby who complain about snowflakes—women are snowflakes who are annoyed when told in class that “solving this will put hair on their chest”? Should I complain about those who want a different pronoun—they should just suck it up and recognize that they are “he” or “she”? Should I complain about those who tell me and others that something called “white privilege” has in fact played a substantial part in what success they have had?
Let’s think about that last: White privilege makes you a lucky person who has been, undeservedly, successful. Milton and Rose Friedman could recognize and stress that they had been supremely lucky people. But it is a macroaggression to tell Russell Jacoby, ex-New Leftist, that he is such?
I head over to the internet to look at Jacoby’s curriculum vitae.
I cannot find it anywhere.
The closest I can find is not a .pdf but, instead, an email link to request it.
Odd. I do so. Nothing comes back.
Googling around, I find:
He became professor emeritus at UCLA in 2020. The UCLA website says “education: Universities of Chicago, Wisconsin and Rochester. Ph.D. Rochester, 1974”.
I find little else until I follow a Google link over to a “World Biographical Encyclopedia”, of which I have never heard. Is it reliable?
In any event, Prabook says: ”Bachelor, University Wisconsin, 1967. Master of Arts, University Rochester, 1968. Student, Ecole Pratique Hautes Etudes, Paris, 1970. Doctor of Philosophy in History, University Rochester, 1974. Lecturer, Boston University, Boston, 1974-1975. Scholar in residence, Brandeis U., 1975-1976. Lecturer department History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1976-1979. Visiting assistant professor History, University of California, Irvine, 1979-1980. Visiting associate professor Humanities, Simon Fraser U., Vancouver, B.C., Canada, 1983-1984. Visiting scholar, associate professor, Lonergan U. College/Liberal Arts College Concordia U., Montreal, Canada, 1985-1986. Visiting senior lecturer, University of California, San Diego, 1986-1987. Visiting associate professor of history, University of California, Riverside, 1988-1991. Visiting associate professor of history, University of California at Los Angeles, 1992-1994. Adjunct professor of history, University of California at Los Angeles, 1995-…”
And I think:
Here is someone who bounced around for twenty years with no academic stability…
From short-term non-renewable three-year-or-less position to position—UCLA, UCI, SFU, Concordia, UCSD, UCR, UCLA…
Before finally landing a semi-permanent position at UCLA…
But one potentially insecure: it might well vanish the next time a budget crunch came around…
Or his slot might evaporate into smoke should someone powerful in the senior tenured faculty wants a teaching-heavy job slot for a protégé…
And, as an adjunct, a poition likely to carry a much higher teaching-load burden at UCLA than that of the other professors sitting in the front two rows at seminars…
And so I guess: He doesn’t see himself as lucky.
He didn’t go from Ph.D. to tenure in seven years. He always saw himself as failing to run the course in the expected time, as hanging onto his academic post by his fingernails, as not someone whom patriarchy and white privilege conspired to give him an easy-mode speed-run but as someone whom THE MAN kept down for his entire career. Max Weber would have understood. Weber strongly cautioned those seeking academic careers thus: ““Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief?” If you don’t believe that you can do that, he said, you should leave academia immediately.
I drop over to Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” feature. I am struck by the beginning of the acknowledgements to his 2020 On Diversity:
In my previous books I have been chagrined by the brevity of my acknowledgments; no lengthy roster of esteemed colleagues and devoted friends or rollcall of foundations, institutiosn, and conferences that fêted the author. Alas, my short list has barely changed over the decades…
And I again guess: Another sign that he sees himself not as lucky but as unlucky—as lacking the devoted friends, esteemed colleagues, and, perhaps most important, the hard-working and tireless but interested adversaries to read his stuff and point him in a better direction.
Plus: I am struck by the beginning of Jacoby’s introduction to the 1996 reissue of his 1975 Social Amnesia:
Social Amnesia… written amid the dying embers of the New Left…. I was part of a Boston bookstore “collective” that interminably discussed everything from the titles the store should stock to the details of our lives. Anti-psychoanalytic sentiment…. Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics…. The bookstore carried Pavlov… billed as a materialist and revolutionary, not Freud who was attacked as an idealist and reactionary…. What bothered me was not a sheer ignorance of psychoanalytic thinking, but the cheap criticism that Freud was nineteenth century…. The criticism implied that those who come later are smarter: the critics and their friends. This outlook had a great future…
And I again guess: He sees himself not as lucky but as vastly unlucky: Even his friends were not his constructive adversaries but, rather, his enemies—in the sense that they made deliberate decisions to remain ignorant of what he saw as crucial.
So I think: Maybe what Jacoby is doing is crying out that he was not, personally, privileged?
Maybe what Jacoby really wants to say, but cannot quite bring himself to, is that his ancestors’ American white-ethnic experience was not all that easy, and he does not see his experience as all that easy?
That others had it easier?
That—let me list the surnames of all of my great-great-grandparents—the Wymans, Richardsons, Paysons, Ushers, Wards, Carters, Andersons, Lords, Slocums, Creases, Parkinsons, Bradfords, Whipples, DeLongs (solid WASPY Huguenots), Siglins (token Protestant Germans), Gallaghers (token Irish Catholics!), and such all had it easy, but the Jacobys did not? That the Jacobys should be numbered not among the goats but among the sheep, on the side of the strivers who deserve good things, on the side of those who never yachted off of Marblehead or Newport, as opposed to the entitled parasites who did?
But if that is what he really means to say, then he should say that!
I have constructed an image of Russell Jacoby in my mind’s eye. It may well be a false image. But it is a strong one.
In the image in my mind’s eye HE REALLY REALLY RESENTS being told that there was anything “easy” about his life and career: About being born in New York in 1945. About leaving New York for Chicago as a teenager and then dropping out of the University of Chicago (for academic? financial?) reasons. About finishing his B.A. at lower-status (and cheaper!) Wisconsin-Madison in 1967. About using graduate-school to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. About finding his New-Left commitments blocking him from getting the tenure-track job he deserved while the universities were still fat and growing through the mid-1970s, even as he recognized that they were idiots. About having three years to prove that he deserved a tenure-track slot, and it not appearing, and getting bounced. About trying to do it again. And again. And so on.
In this image, he REALLY does not like being called THE MAN—someone who has an unearned position, who benefits from white privilege, who needs to recognize that he is one of the, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, “careless people” who can and does unthinkingly break things with their actions, and even their words, and so must be careful.
This image I have constructed does explain to me how ex-New Leftist Jacoby can write:
The New York Times published an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton that called for the national guard to stem looting in the wake of the George Floyd riots. Employees of the Times protested and charged that the piece put Black staffers “in danger.” Again, this was an article in the editorial section of the paper, page 14. In the American adaption of Stalinist show trials, the editor of the opinion section [James Bennet] confessed. He regretted “the pain” he caused. He resigned…
For, as John Holbo points out, that is not at all an adequate description of what went down:
Jacoby has his parade.... But in each case (and others) isn’t it more complicated?... I’ll only offer one example.... Tom Cotton.... A bunch of NYTimes staffers say Cotton’s op-ed made them feel ‘unsafe’, which does sound snowflake-y. But... Cotton explicitly called… for the extrajudicial execution of American citizens, en masse, by the US military....
Indeed. Would anyone sane and balanced not think that massively boosting Tom Cotton’s violent fantasies beyond their normal spread has the potential to make us all unsafe?
And James Bennet? The victim of the “American adaption of Stalinist show trials”? James Bennet is, right now, a senior editor at the Economist. He writes the Lexington column. He did not suffer the fate of a defendant at a Stalinist show trial: He was not shot dead with a bullet in the back of his skull in the basement of Lubyanka Prison on Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow.
I came for the cowboys-&-indians movie with the evil Comanche warrior queen crossed with “Apocalypse Now” <https://braddelong.substack.com/publish/post/182676675>, lampshaded in the movie by General Ardmore’s snarky calling Colonel Quarrick “Cochise”.
I must admit, however, I was not then expecting to be confronted with the sacrifice of Isaac, a mega-Moby-Dick with not one but thousands of angry whales, a high-tech AI-driven military with no ability to identify whether its IFF tags are being carried by soldiers with the proper biometric markers that decides to build its major base in the middle of the galaxy’s most gigantic petroleum refinery ever, plus elements from every single other story ever made, all in a package a clear hour shorter than the Extended Edition version of “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”.
On the other hand, the Odyssey trailer they showed seemed to me to be very skillfully handled: It simply tells the story of the Trojan Horse and then cuts off—compelling, with a realistic-looking Late Bronze Age Anatolia, and genuine dramatic tension that also paints Odysseus as, clearly, a villain: a very complicated man indeed.
If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…
Long story short: a 40-year-old woman named Bari with an Ivy League pedigree, who maintains a constant spotlight on her identity as a Jewish lesbian snuffed out a story about a concentration camp on CBS News 80 years after Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast from Buchenwald. Time erases memories for individuals, but also collectively, within societies…
It would have astonished Americans living in 1885 that the most famous American in the world, Ulysses Grant, who saved the Union, would at best ring a vaguely familiar bell for some Americans just two lifetimes after his death.
The same is true of another titan — the American broadcast journalist Edward Roscoe Murrow, who died in 1965. His news values at CBS were murdered in 2025 by a woman born in 1984 and a boy with a wealthy daddy born in 1983.
Pity.
Murrow was a truth-teller and a serious man in a world gone mad and consumed by lies.
His was a voice that the American people could trust in a moment of enormous consequence — just like they can trust the voice of Sharyn Alfonsi today.
The collapse of trust in the American media is a result of the business decisions that destroyed Murrow’s ethic by the corporate executives he warned about with tremendous prescience. Before then, when broadcast journalism was in its infancy, there was only possibility.
Many people say that the following is the greatest news broadcast in history.
There were no pictures that accompanied the report. Only Murrow’s words.
Close your eyes and listen to them. You will quickly move past the scratchiness of the recording, and be transported back to a relatively recent moment at a profoundly evil place.
Below is Murrow’s report from Buchenwald.
This is where the fascist road led.
The man describing the scene had chartered a plane to Vienna seven years earlier, as the Nazi Army rolled into Austria during the Anschluss of 1938.
The justification for the Anschluss was a doctrine of racial purity that sought to unify Aryans and the Germanic people around a thousand-year Reich that promised freedom, prosperity and national greatness. It would protect them from the hordes of subhumans stepping on the master race and closing in from all sides. What Hitler said was needed was “living space.”
Edward R. Murrow’s first live report was from Vienna on March 13, 1938. It was a multi-point broadcast of a live event over shortwave radio that reached seamlessly into millions of American homes, a modern miracle of technology, engineering and journalistic grit.
Here are the words that began the greatest career in modern American journalism.
This is Edward R. Murrow, speaking from Vienna.
It’s now nearly 2:30 in the morning and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived.
Murrow surely could not have predicted the journey that would take him from Vienna to Buchenwald, but the American people could count on him to explain what was happening as the crisis grew into human civilization’s greatest test and catastrophe.
Murrow was trusted because he earned trust. Trust builds by drops, but is lost in buckets — a fact about which the majority of America’s media mandarins seem oblivious or wholly indifferent.
“This is London” meant something because the man delivering the news could be counted on to explain it, as well as be trusted to deliver it.
He built the greatest assemblage of broadcast journalists in world history. They illuminated the opaqueness, horror, truth and challenges of World War II. They looked over the edge of the abyss into the pit of tyranny, war, suffering and evil.
Listen to Murrow tell the truth about fascism before we jump and talk about Bari Weiss, who is much closer to Leni Riefenstahl than Murrow:
tahl than Murrow:
If you are unable to listen to his news report, you can read it here.
When the Nazis needed to show the International Red Cross how good the Jews had it in the Reich, they needed a stage to impress the cynical, gullible and naive. The place to which the Nazis took their moral dupes was the fortress town of Terezin in conquered Czechoslovakia.
There they built Theresienstadt, the show camp, and filled the store windows with bread that the Jews could not eat, and clothes they could not buy with money they were not allowed to possess.
A key difference between the Nazis and MAGA is that, while both practiced cruelty, MAGA glorifies it. The Nazis downplayed their viciousness.
They hid it from the world, themselves and their own citizens to the maximum degree possible.
This was the purpose of places like Terezin. The camp was created to prove that the Nazis weren’t in fact cruel, but gracious keepers of their subhuman charges.
MAGA has no such concerns. They practice cruelty expressly to celebrate it, and market it to inspire more cruelty. The old Nazis would have loved Silicon Valley’s algorithms, but only MAGA has gotten the chance to harness their innate and vicious power to bring out the worst in ordinary people. Look at this example of a message from an ICE public affairs team member from a Washington Postarticle about ICE’s “media machine,” as the story refers to it:
The last time I visited Terezin I sat on a bench outside of the school attended by the Jewish children that were mostly gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
They did not survive the monstrous lie of their imprisonment and the awful power of the state to decide who was human, and who was not.
It turned out that Terezin was not what the Nazis said it was.
In the end, it was a death camp.
So is this:
Kristi Noem during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador (Photo credit: Alex Brandon/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
The watch that Kristi Noem is wearing is a $50,000 Rolex.
Democracy is what keeps you safe and protects your liberty. This does not.
All over the world, wherever people are oppressed and downtrodden, trampled and abused, they must know that there is a place that rejects their oppression and tormentors in the name of freedom and the rights of each human being.
They must know that in the darkest nights there is a place and a people who will not only stand with them, but see them.
Freedom is the most powerful force in the world, but it is fueled by hope. Hope can be smothered and strangled by indifference, which is always seeded by cynicism and hypocrisy.
America is that place in the world, and the American presidency is the office that must never become faithless towards the cause of human dignity and freedom.
Bari Weiss is a cynical, corrupt and deeply unserious character who is partisan, frivolous and incompetent.
There hasn’t been a ship’s captain with more water over their head since John Smith on the morning of April 15, 1912.
She is an abysmal leader and a worse journalist, with the judgement of Donald Trump Jr. on an all-you-can-sniff night at the Cartagena Trump Hotel and Casino.
This is what was published in The Free Press in April 2025 about the concentration camp covered by “60 Minutes” in the story spiked by Weiss…but not before it aired on Canadian TV. OOPS!
→ The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax: House Republican Riley Moore went to the super maximum security prison in El Salvador to take some photos in front of the inmates. “I just toured the CECOT prison in El Salvador,” he writes, with pictures of him giving a thumbs-up, shirtless inmates standing at attention behind him. Moore gave a double thumbs-up in front of the men, densely packed in their cold metal bunk. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem took the same tour recently, posting a fun videoin front of caged, tatted men.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) tried to visit that very same prison in El Salvador this week. He was calling for the release of a mistakenly deported Maryland man, but was denied access. It seems as though Cory Booker is planning a similar trip.
The El Salvador supermax prison is becoming the new Ohio Diner. It’s the new Iowa State Fair. It’s the new Jeffrey Epstein jet: It’s where every political leader needs to visit, the place to see and be seen if you’re ambitious and in politics today. Journalists will be hanging out at the prison to get everyman voices from the El Salvador supermax. Lobbyists will be standing by the metal detectors, pollsters in the outdoor gym yard. A gorgeous steakhouse will open up in the nearby shantytown (I actually have no idea what’s nearby the supermax, but I assume it’s a shantytown). And at the rate we’re going, soon TGIF will be written from inside one of the cells.
Back in the States, D.C.’s top party guest is El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, who came for an official White House visit this week. He and Trumpo discussed—what else?—that supermax prison!
They agreed that there was nothing to be done about the mistakenly deported Maryland man, now in Salvadoran custody.
Two leaders of two great countries simply cannot find that one random wrongly deported man, and everyone should move along (I’m assuming that means he’s dead, right?).
After Bukele left the White House, he thirstily tweeted, “I miss you already, President T.” Trump returned the favor, learning to sayMAGA in Spanish: “¡America grande, otra vez!”
→ Homegrown criminals: Trump, who literally cannot take his mind off that Salvadoran prison, was asked if he is considering deporting criminals who are American citizens.
He said he would love to. “I call them homegrown criminals, the ones that grew up and something went wrong, and they hit people over the head with a baseball bat and push people into subways just before the train gets there, like you see happening sometimes.
We are looking into it and we want to do it. I would love to do that.” I like the addition of homegrown to criminals. It makes it feel a little fancier.
A little more bespoke. These aren’t big-box store criminals. They’re locally grown!
Ponder the indecency and immorality involved in publishing this.
What does this say about Bari Weiss, and maybe more importantly, all of the billionaires like Bill Ackman, who share the Bari Weiss fetish, and think her repeating their delusions back to them in the language of millennial empowerment is evidence of both their clairvoyance and wisdom?
Funny stuff.
Hilarious.
Now let’s put it through another filter:
lter:
Nazi symbols for Jews and gays
Does Bari Weiss understand these symbols?
As someone who is Jewish and gay, does she appreciate who was made to wear them?
Now, imagine going back in time 80 years.
Imagine Murrow getting ready to report from Buchenwald, but being told that the story isn’t ready because there was no one from the SS or Himmler’s staff available.
This is precisely what Bari Weiss just did.
The decision by the administration to remain silent was their statement.
Bari Weiss reached for Stephen Miller’s number like he was her preferred cat sitter, and demanded that his voice be included in a story for which he had already made the decision to include his voice by refusing to share it.
The silence was the point, and the point was very simple.
What Bari Weiss lacks is the common sense to interpret the message, which was perfectly clear.
It was aimed at Sharyn Alfonsi, “60 Minutes,” CBS News and the American people.
The message was, “F*#k you.”
Bari Weiss responded like a true MAGA lady.
Bari Weiss is a sinister force in America, who serves two sinister families. One is named Ellison, and the other is named Trump.
They aren’t on the level.
Bari Weiss isn’t on the level.
Here’s the truth: CECOT is a concentration camp to which the American government shipped human beings with full knowledge that they would be tortured.
Bari Weiss didn’t just kill the story for Trump.
Bari Weiss laughed at the story with Trump and Stephen Miller. She’s in on it with them. She’s the cheering section, and she believes that the brown people sent there deserve it, just like the Nazis said of the Jews. What does that make her exactly?
Bari Weiss, it is fair to say, is quite enamored with her origin story — even going so far as to describe her resignation letter from The New York Times as “the resignation letter heard around world,” which it wasn’t. Mostly, no one knew or cared outside the elite cliques she pals around with that have convinced themselves that they are victims of a woke conspiracy that only Bari can see.
Very few people have the raw hustle skills to look the billionaire male in the eye and convince themselves they are omniscient, omnipotent, wiser than the gods and a bigger victim than the next billionaire. It is the type of skillset that leads to a giant security detail, a casting opportunity on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” an Erika Kirk town hall, an invite to the Bezos wedding and the corner office at CBS News.
It has nothing to do with journalism, and everything to do with politics, which, of course, is Bari Weiss’s true passion.
She is in the propaganda business.
Bari Weiss doesn’t serve the public interest. She serves the Ellison family, and the Ellison family has a partnership with MAGA and Trump.
The head of CBS News shouldn’t be the glue cementing the union.
Should they?
The story about CECOT is a story about evil. It is a story that cracks open massive government lying and abuse. It is a story that was dangerous for Donald Trump, so Bari Weiss killed it.
I’ve seen the story. You need to watch it too if you haven’t yet. Here it is:
I know what Bari Weiss did.
Long story short: a 40-year-old woman named Bari with an Ivy League pedigree, who maintains a constant spotlight on her identity as a Jewish lesbian snuffed out a story about a concentration camp on CBS News 80 years after Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast from Buchenwald.
It was the most despicable act by an American media executive in the 21st century — and that is no small accomplishment. Even more amazing is that it took the unctuous millennial only 76 days to do it.
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The Day Trek Changed: From “Where No Man” to Wrath— & a real franchise was born. Sixty years ago, production wrapped on the second “Star Trek” pilot: Where No Man Has Gone Before” Friday, December 24, 1965. That, I think, was the first true franchise-hinge moment. The second came seventeen years later, with Nicholas Meyer taking the quarterdeck of HMS Star Trek on the voyage of “The Wrath of Khan”…
Sixty years ago, Friday, December 24, 1965, production wrapped on the second “Star Trek” pilot: Where No Man Has Gone Before” . That, I think, was the first true franchise-hinge moment. It created “Star Trek”. But it did not make “Star Trek” a cultural phenomenon, or an economic IP franchise engine worth the attention of the princelings and princesslings of Hollywood. That came after.
I recall a friend whose daughter returned home from her first semester at an engineering college. She immediately said: This vacation we are going to watch all 80 episodes (including “The Cage”) of the three seasons of ST:TOS. And they did.
But that would not have happened without the second franchise hinge moment, the one that came second came 17 years later. What was that second moment? It was the launch and then the phenomenal launch of the movie: “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan”.
The way things had gone down between 1964 and 1982 was, roughly:
1964: Gene Roddenberry drafts his “wagon train to the stars” concept and pitches “Star Trek” at Desilu (Desi-Lucy, i.e, Desi Arnez’s and Lucille Ball’s studio); initial series bible takes shape.
1964–1965: Pilot “The Cage” is produced with Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike; NBC famously passes but asks for a second pilot.
1965–1966: Second pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (Shatner as Kirk) convinces NBC to order the series.
September 1966: “Star Trek” premieres on NBC; Season 1 begins the Kirk–Spock–McCoy era.
1967: First-season episode “Space Seed” introduces Khan Noonien Singh, once and future super-villain.
1968: Season 2 airs; ratings struggles continue despite critical and fan support.
1969: Season 3 airs after a time-slot move; series is canceled after three seasons and 79 episodes (pilot “The Cage” still unaired).
1973-4: the animated series briefly revives the brand.
1979: “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” releases; financially strong but seen as ponderous, triggering a rethink of tone and budget.
1980: Rethink and budget finishes, with “Star Trek” getting one more swing at the ball.
1982: “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”—Nicholas Meyer’s Hornblower-in-space reframe—restores energy, stakes, and audience enthusiasm.
Hollywood accounting is notoriously the domain of thieves, but $139 million worldwide on a roughly $35–44 million budget. But expectations had been sky-high after Star Wars, and overruns plus marketing and distribution costs meant Paramount judged the return underwhelming.
There is a peculiar kind of mindwarp found in the big-budget-studio piece of Hollywood that is in sharp contrast to the Golden Age of pre-TV. Pre-TV, you needed a lot of movies to fill a lot of theatres owned by studios. So you made movies, rapidly. And a base hit was a base hit. But in the post-TV post-theater-chain-breakup world, simply saying “this will be a solid single” in terms of market no longer got the greenlight. For there were others out there pitching things they promised were guaranteed homers. And since you did not have to fill your theaters, committing studio and investor money to something that did not aim high tended not to get the enthusiasm: better to hold your financing for someone whose this-will-be-a-homer pitch was convincing. That almost always the people making that this-will-be-a-homer pitch were delusional, and that their sole superpower was one of hypnosis, was something that studio executives and investors rarely learned.
Thus never mind that ST:TNG almost surey was, ex post, a better financial use of Paramount’s own and investors’ money than the marginal other Paramount project. It wasn’t cloud-castle good and profitable. And so, if “Star Trek” were to have a future in the 1980s and beyond, the successor movie would have to show better performance-price ratios. Hence Paramount pushed for a cheaper, livelier sequel model. $12 million budget for ST:TWoK.
And here came the second franchise hinge: At least as Nicky Meyer recounts it (and I find him completely plausible), it turned out to be a very strange hinge of the franchise indeed as he carried: ST:TWoK on his back, from plot and script coherency through the final day of shooting and into post-production. The final script, and then on through direction and editing to produce Khan’s coiled rage, Spock’s earned death, Kirk shaved down from preening star to captain outmatched by foe and fate, and submarine-tight direction restored stakes and audience trust.:
No Nicholas Meyer taking control of the quarterdeck to produce a final script in twelve days, no “Wrath of Khan”. No “Wrath of Khan”, and “Star Trek” as a Hollywood, cultural, and economic phenomenon dies after ST:TMP. Odds are that nothing subsequent—extraordinarily varying in quality as it has been—from the best moments of ST:TNG and ST:DS9 to the bizarre and strange storm of photons that is the recent ST:§31 Michelle Yeoh vehicle would ever have been made.
If someone keeps advancing despite demonstrable incompetence at public‑reason journalism, perhaps they are doing a different job than advancing public reason—effectively, and deliberately…
Dan Drezner says that Bari Weiss’s claims, and her allies claims, that she had valid editorial objections to the “60 Minutes” El Salvadorian GULAG Trumpist deportations story are horseshit:
Dan Drezner: The Amateurism of Bari Weiss <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-amateurism-of-bari-weiss>: ‘Weiss fails to comprehend the difference between reading about the abuse of prisoners in CECOT and watching video demonstrating the same. This is the kind of story where video packs a much bigger wallop…. The segment would have been stronger with an on-the-record interview with Miller or Homan…. But—and this is a very important but—it’s not obvious to me how Weiss or 60 Minutes producers could have secured such interviews…. Third… damning… is… Weiss[’s], “but what about all the violent criminals Trump did deport?” schtick[. It] puts the lie to her faux-balance horseshit and convenient hypocrisies. The CECOT story is not about any deportations of violent criminals. It is about the Trump administration disregarding proper evidentiary standards and the rule of law…
He notes the possibility that it was a political decision, writing “at worst she’s ham-handedly trying to help appease Trump in the interest of promoting her boss’ business empire”. Because:
Paramount’s [has a] hostile bid [in] to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD)…. [Frida Ghitis:] “Trump sent a message that he was unhappy with ‘60 Minutes’ since the Ellisons bought CBS…. Paramount clearly understood: ‘60 Minutes’ would have to treat him better. It’s reasonable to conclude that this is the reason CBS did not broadcast the story…. Shelving a ‘60 Minutes’ story critical of the administration only moments before it’s about to air, in the middle of a battle for the president’s approval of a merger, is not routine. And the timeline here… is damning…
But then he backs off, a bit. And so Drezner concludes:
At best, Bari Weiss is unserious and unschooled about her job…. In either case, she is not very good at her job…
But I have a different view: Suppose that people do succeed, even though you think they are not good at doing their job. What should your response be? Perhaps the right response is one of Bayesian humility, of stepping back and asking what the job that they are doing really is. Quite probably it is a different job entirely. And perhaps they are doing it well.
What is the job?
In my view, much of our discussion of what is going on with respect to the sphere of public reason these days would be improved if people had 1984 on their bedside table, and committed themselves to read daily from it:
George Orwell [Eric Blair] (1948): Nineteen Eighty-Four <https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021h.html>: ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats…
What happens if we combine a sensitivity to Nineteen Eighty-Four with Bari Weiss’s actions and the maxim that “the purpose of a system is what it does”?
Then we are led to this conclusion: Stop asking whether Weiss is good at journalism. She is good at the job she’s actually doing: performing submission to power and recruiting others to the ritual. In today’s media oligopoly, that job pays. The big tell is her “I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you…” As if she does not know that the “60 Minutes” staff has a bigger contacts rolodex database than she does.
We have long known that Trump thinks that grabbing women by the crotch and raping women in Bergdorf-Goodman dressing rooms is a thing, because celebrity. But does it matter that it is also fourteen-year-old girls?: “Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch’, whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the [prison] system…”
And even if it is genuine, in this world of DeepFakes it may not matter at all that it is genuine, and even if there is a trusted chain-of-custody it may not matter even so:
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Fake “standards” become real censorship: the segment Bari Weiss & the Ellisons do not want you to see—a cleared 60 Minutes report vanished, and why that matters for power and truth, as corporate calculus meets state cruelty on the Cecot story’s path to the cutting room floor’ the demand for a Stephen Miller cameo wasn’t “balance”—it was veto…
The Trump Administration refused to be interviewed by 60 Minutes for this segment on El Salvador’s prison camps and migrants to the U.S. deported by I.C.E. Bari Weiss declared that the segment could not be aired without a segment interviewing a Trump Administration senior official. Full stop.
Alison Gill: WATCH: The 60 Minutes CECOT Segment <https://www.muellershewrote.com/p/watch-the-60-minutes-cecot-segment>: ‘I was sent the CECOT segment anonymously in a group chat. The segment apparently aired on Canada’s Global TV app and was shared by this Bluesky user jasonparis.bsky.social. You can watch the entire segment below! Please share widely!…
I think she probably sincerely believes an investigative team at 60 minutes would have a difficult time getting in touch with stephen miller, or that they haven’t thought about the language they’re using…
I am not so sure. There is serious money involved in keeping Trump not-sour on the Ellisons and on Paramount Skydance. Their view may be that this will simply blow over—and, if it doesn’t, if CBS News collapses, well it was never going to be a profit center for Paramount Skydance anyway, but was only a point of vulnerability. The plutocratic Ellisons almost surely know by now that the kleptocratic Trumps view them not as their allies but as their prey. But they may think that the Trumps have them by the plums, and that a short-run libtard media storm is of very little account.
After all, give it a month, and the Atlantic will be happy to run another “Bari Weiss confounds critics!” story, won’t it?
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With my comments appended. Adrian Monck’s introduction to the post: 3.7 million applicants. 40,000 positions. One professor’s survival guide: Renmin University Professor and social media star Nie Huihua explains what China’s civil service exam gets you – and why the prize 3.7 million applicants are chasing might not be worth winning…
Adrian Monck: How to Get a Job in the Chinese Communist Party <https://7thin.gs/p/china-communist-party-jobs>: ‘There’s a phrase that circulates on Chinese social media: “every road leads to biānzhì”—biānzhì is a job with the state, which means a career, benefits and a pension…. Tech jobs disappeared in the regulatory crackdowns. Property sector careers vanished with the developers. Export manufacturing faces tariffs and reshoring…. The only rational destination was… government…. Your parents were right. Nie Huihua… has become an unlikely guide to this world. His videos on bureaucratic life have racked up tens of millions of views. His new book, The Operating Logic of Grassroots China, is a bestseller. In a recent podcast, he asked a question his audience of aspiring civil servants rarely considers: what happens after you get in?
‘Before you apply, understand what you are joining. Nie’s core insight[:]… “hierarchical resource allocation.”… Resources flow toward power, and power is organised by administrative rank…. Higher-ranked officials can secure resources from above. Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen are not rich because they are efficient. They’re rich because they are politically important, which attracts resources, which makes them efficient, which reinforces their importance. This has practical implications… The position you secure determines… the entire infrastructure of a decent life…. Geography is destiny, but geography is set by administrative hierarchy….
The examination tests memorisation and procedural knowledge. It doesn’t test what actually determines success.
Nie is pretty direct about what you need to do well…
The rest of it is below Adrian Monck’s paywall. But let me excerpt the list of things you need to succeed as a government official, according to Nie Huihua are:
Sharp eyes (眼尖) – knows who’s rising, who’s falling, and what superiors actually want as opposed to what they say
Zipped lips (嘴紧) – keep secrets, no leaking, don’t gossip
Tireless legs (腿勤) – run errands without complaint, always available, never say no
Write well (文笔好) – draft reports, speeches and minutes fluently, makes superiors sound intelligent
Poker face (喜怒不形于色) – conceal frustration, anger, and over-enthusiasm
Thick skin (能忍辱负重) – accept unfair criticism, take the blame for others’ failures, don’t fight back
Let me now reflect on what I have posted from Monck’s piece, and on the rest of it below his paywall:
I have to start with the big and major point: Most of this is normal—for the human collective societal-organizational institution we call “bureaucracy”. Every civil service everywhere—across time, across space, across political systems—complains about the same things. The gap between what gets measured and what actually matters. The perverse incentives that emerge when you try to make legible what is fundamentally illegible. The paperwork that crowds out the actual work. The patron who falls and drags you down (or, optimistically, rises and carries you up). These are not Chinese characteristics. These are bureaucratic characteristics—as true in Washington and Brussels and Whitehall as in Beijing, as true in the 800s as in the 2000s.
What makes China most interesting is not that it has a bureaucracy, and that its bureaucracy has these problems. What makes China most interesting is that it has so much bureaucracy, and has and has had it for so long. Its bureaucracy has thus had more time to think about itself and adjust itself, as a hegemonic institution, than bureaucracy has had anywhere else.
That, I think, must have consequences.
The kejuimperial examination system ran from 607 to 1905: over 1,300 years. It was the world’s first meritocratic institution. The effects persist today—prefectures with more jinshi degree-holders in the Ming-Qing period still show higher educational attainment in 2010; a doubling of jinshi holders, an 0.7-year increase in schooling today. Tang Dynasty poets like Bai Juyi were already writing about preferring “the carefree life” to the burdens office-holding, when “palace eunuchs had gained control of the throne” and political advancement had grown uncertain.
Now Chinese bureaucracy has been, historically, better than most—better than nearly all. Stability, Relative prosperity. Relative peace. Face it, in the long agrarian age, more likely than not CHINA RULED!!
Why? As I see it, three reasons: First, the exam selected for competence. Second, the exam acculturated, for studying hard enough to succeed in it could not but bath the scholars’ brains in the Confucian moral philosophy that emphasizes virtue, merit, and reciprocity. Third, the exam acculturated in another way, as it trained candidates in S.O.P. that meshed with those above, below, and beside you in your position.
You thus got a baseline of meritocratic competence, objective alignment, and confidence that you understood what your collaeages were likely to do. Other systems struggled to match this, and failed.
But—here is the rub—since before the first Tang Emperor, “exam” and “job” have selected for different things. The exam selects for competence. The job selects for compliance with the will of your superior, who if you are lucky becomes your patreon. If you are not lucky, he makes you the fall guy and moves you out so one of his clients can move in. If you are lucky, and if your patron rises, you rise as well, with high probability. But if your patron falls, you fall.
All this is par for the bureaucratic agrarian-age course. The defects of the hegemonic Confucian bureaucratic order and the scholar-bureaucrate-extractor-landholder-student-scholar cycle were small beer compared to the defects of other agrarian-age societies-of-domination.
But this is no longer the agrarian age. In the modern Schumpeterian Age, stability = ossification and dysfunction as the underpinning of every single ruling-class order vanish as the mode of production earthquakes. And that puts prosperity and peace in grave danger.
Plus we now have to layer on top of this the specific dysfunctions of contemporary Chinese governance. First, a great deal of Chinese local government is based on lthe sale of land development rights. That only works with rising land values. That only works with income growth. It might work, alternatively, with population growth, but without income growth you have population decline. Statistics are dodgy. But it does look like, since the plague, land sales revenue has collapsed from 2/5 to 1/5 of local government revenue. This is a dire crisis, without—so far—even a hint of a solution.
Second, Chinese local government officials are tasked with conducting regional industrial development policy, including venture capital investments. They have no particular skill at these. Moreover, their incentive structure is bad: short tenures, risk aversion, pressure to show activity and so forth. That makes them likely to be systematically worse than private investors would be. And, of course, credit for any successes are taken out of the hands of worker-bee bureaucrats and grabbed by higher-upstream bosses; while the manure from failures higher up rains down.
Third, since 2012 Xi Jinping has attempted to curb corruption and improve bureaucratic performance by instituting what the Russian writer Gogol dramatically wrote about in 1836 in his story of Khlestakov, who is mistaken for the real Inspector General. increased central inspections. The —central investigators examining local officials—dates to imperial times but has intensified into what Minxin Pei describes the transformation of this xunshi system as a shift “from purge to control”: rather than pruning the worst, guarding against the inevitable arrival of the Inspector General becomes a major focus of effort. Overcentralization looms.
The Party-State recognizes all of this: Nie Huihua’s analyses are critique sanctioned and welcomed by the highest levels, not samizdat whispers. And yet Nie Huihua offers no systemic solutions. None. Instead, he offers a survival guide for careerists—including exercise (as you can control your health even though you control nothing else), read history (to gain a sense of how things might suddenly change and be different), and learn English (to keep as many options open as possible).
Are China’s bureaucratic pathologies truly worse than those of its peer aspirants to “forging the future” status on this here globe?
I think they are different in kind and—right now—more constraining:
India’s problem-set is state capacity scarcity: fragmented administration, uneven tax extraction, limited local delivery—yet also plural centers of accountability and competitive politics that, while noisy, periodically refresh incentives.
Europe’s challenges are coordination and risk appetite: it can write excellent rules and mobilize subsidies, but often hesitates at the frontier—industrial bets arrive diluted, and macro impulses are counter-cyclical at precisely the wrong times.
America’s maladies are polarization and veto-point overload: it still does science, scale, and capital formation superbly; it does follow-through haphazardly.
China’s disadvantage is that the greater hegemony of the bureaucratic operating system—hierarchical resource allocation, land-finance dependence, inspection-centric control—makes discretion costly and truth dangerous. When promotion follows patrons rather than performance, risk shifts downward and blame flows downward faster. In that environment, Nie Huihua’s survival lexicon—sharp eyes, zipped lips, tireless legs—is rational. But it is not developmental. And with land sales now a fraction of pre‑pandemic revenues, local governments’ room to maneuver has shrunk at precisely the moment when experimentation is most needed.
Can Xi Jinping and other forces surmount this?
To a degree:
Xi Jinping can recentralize fiscal capacity.
He has already intensified oversight.
He can compel sectoral mobilizations (chips, EVs, grid, machine tools) and will get visible output.
But my inner von Hayek forces me to believe that the deeper problem is informational: overcentralization starves the center of honest signals and starves the periphery of initiative.
The historical Chinese fix—meritocratic exams and shared Confucian norms—uniquely aligned competence in an agrarian-age society-of-domination.
It did not align incentives for dissent, error-correction, and local search.
Unless the Party-State rebalances toward transparency, longer tenures, accountable budgets, and permissioned risk at the edge, China will continue to deploy capacity impressively while discovering—too late—that that was not where it actually needed most to adapt.
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Agglomeration locks in advantage; weaponized tariffs unlock dysfunction. Macro self‑sufficiency hides micro choke points—and China sits at the hub. The U.S. lost trust; China gained leverage; decoupling shrank to slogans…
Big economies look nearly self‑sufficient—until a single input fails. China’s hub advantage, the U.S.’s trust deficit, and Brexit’s self‑inflicted friction show why weaponized trade weakens coalitions more than China. Global supply chains are an omelette—entangled, efficient, and hard to reverse. The macro story (large domestic shares) masks micro fragility: specialized intermediates, scaled clusters, and dense spillovers that make agglomeration self‑perpetuating. China’s role as dominant supplier of intermediates creates asymmetric leverage; the U.S., Japan, and Germany are more exposed to China than vice versa. Tariffs, deployed unpredictably, erode allied coordination and deepen reliance on precautionary stockpiles rather than capacity. Brexit exemplifies how added friction shreds regional resilience. If the race to be the furnace that forges the global future isn’t already decided, agglomeration economics—not punitive trade optics—will decide it soon.
Richard Baldwin: Does Geopolitics have an Omelette Problem? <https://rbaldwin.substack.com/p/does-geopolitics-have-an-omelette>: ‘Coordinating complex manufacturing processes at great distances was impossible in the days of landlines, faxes, and express mail…. With ICT, G7 firms found they could lower costs by taking their technology and managerial know-how and combining it with low-wage labour abroad. This offshoring, and the industrialisation it triggered in emerging economies, reorganised and entangled manufacturing on a global scale…. By the 2000s… a global supply chain “omelette.”… Cooking the omelette propelled efficiency and progress… had miraculous results… pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty…. [But] today, shocks are no longer rare, localised, and passing…. Extreme weather events and purposeful or accidental digital disruptions…
Look at… the row countries’ imports of industrial inputs from the column countries… normalized by the gross manufacturing output of the importing nation…. All the entries below 1% are zeroed out for clarity….
China is the dominant supplier of intermediates… [but] has very low exposure…. The US is the second most significant source of industrial inputs… but the numbers are smaller than China’s…. The exceptions are… “Factory North America”…. Germany is number three…. Its column is lit for most nations, and its role is especially important in “Factory Europe”…. All the big European nations are significant suppliers to each other….
One general observation…. The numbers are all pretty small. At the macro level, the big nations are largely self-sufficient…. However, these average over all inputs and all manufacturing sectors. The vulnerabilities that are a major concern today take place in very special inputs and very specific importing sectors…
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