Tag: history

They knew all along

Ronald Reagan and the Queen of England discussed economics and the prospects for the future in 1991.

The footage begins with the former president asking if the coffee being served is decaffeinated. The Queen calls replies ‘No, it’s ordinary’ before calling over a waiter to request some, then telling Mr Reagan ‘We try our best. It’s coming.’

Their conversation then turns to economics.  Mr Reagan, who finished his second term as president in 1989, told the British monarch: ‘Now if you’ve got two thirds… paying for the bureaucrats and give only one third to the needy people, something’s wrong there.’

The Queen responded by saying that ‘democracies are bankrupt’ because of such policies.

‘But you see all of the democracies are bankrupt now, because of the way the services have been planned for people to grab,’ she told him.

‘I know, we tried to get some of these things changed and reduce them,’ said Reagan.

‘For example, we have a rule to this day, that a supervisor’s salary is based on the number of people he supervises,’ he continued.

‘Well now, you have a group of people that have no interest in reducing the payroll, even if they can, because it will reduce their salary.’

The Queen, who had hosted the event for Florida’s grandest society including another former US president – Jimmy Carter – agreed.

‘Obviously, yes. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? I think the next generation is going to have a very difficult time.’

The answer, obviously, was to flood the West with credit and third world immigrants, because monetary and population inflation are good for the economy. It’s interesting, though, that both public figures already knew that which eluded the public and most opinion-leaders for another 17 years.

That’s because you’re not American

Sarah Silverman explains how she was shaken and scared by the sight of a young man flying an American flag.

I had a boyfriend many years ago, he was my first boyfriend who had his own house, and one day I went outside to see what he was doing, and he was hoisting an American flag up the flagpole in his front yard. And I instantly felt very weird. It didn’t make sense, but I felt this feeling of like, um, I felt scared – yeah, I felt scared. So I was like, ‘Uh, what are you doing?’ and he said, ‘Raising the flag,’ and I was like, ‘Why?’ and he’s like, ‘Um, because I love America?’ and I was like, ‘Right, right, of course.’ But inside I was shaken.

And then I calmly walked to my car and I got inside and I called my sister Susie to tell her what happened. Now, maybe you’re thinking, ‘What do you mean what happened? Nothing happened, your boyfriend put an American flag up at his own house.’ No, you’re totally right, I had no idea why I was freaking out. I just – I had this very visceral reaction and my sister, who knows shit because she’s a rabbi in Israel, explained to me, she was like, ‘Dude, nationalism is innately terrifying for Jews. Think about it: flags, marching, blind allegiance? These things tend to ring a bell for us.’ Right. Of course. Duh. It made sense.

I would be very interested to hear how those who genuinely believe that Jews are Americans to explain this reaction. Especially if they can do so without resorting to civic nationalist historical revisionism.

Then, for an encore, I’d like to hear how Japanese are true Englishmen and Dalits are true Brahmins.

What the civic nationalists and Israel uber alles crowd don’t seem to recognize is how fundamentally offensive, racist, and anti-American their false narrative is. In order for their revisionist myth to be true, there can be no genuine American nation. There can be no heritage America. There can be no American people and there can be no American history. Which, of course, is precisely why revising and destroying history has been one of the primary goals of the Fake Americans for more than 100 years.

“Ethno-nationalism” is a redundancy. There is no nationalism that is not ethnic and a more proper term for “civic nationalism” is “civic statism”. “Ethno-nationalism” is just anti-nationalist propaganda, and it is such an intrinsically false concept that it did not even exist before 1955.

Mailvox: do not “correct” me

I so despise the sort of midwit who leaps upon every possible opportunity to “correct” someone in order to show off how smart he is, and in doing so, demonstrates his own ignorance. Add in a dash of smug passive-aggression if you want to maximize the annoyance factor. Here is a suggestion: if you think I’ve gotten something wrong, look it up. If the 14 years of this blog serve as a reliable guide, there is about a 98 percent chance you are wrong.

VD: We can only hope that he will treat them in much the same way Sulla treated his political opponents

valiance: The way *Marius* treated his political opponents, surely?

VD: No.

From Infogalactic: Sulla

At the end of 82 BC or the beginning of 81 BC, the Senate appointed Sulla dictator legibus faciendis et reipublicae constituendae causa (“dictator for the making of laws and for the settling of the constitution”). The “Assembly of the People” subsequently ratified the decision, with no limit set on his time in office. Sulla had total control of the city and republic of Rome, except for Hispania (which Marius’s general Quintus Sertorius had established as an independent state). This unusual appointment (used hitherto only in times of extreme danger to the city, such as during the Second Punic War, and then only for 6-month periods) represented an exception to Rome’s policy of not giving total power to a single individual. Sulla can be seen as setting the precedent for Julius Caesar’s dictatorship, and for the eventual end of the Republic under Augustus.

In total control of the city and its affairs, Sulla instituted a series of proscriptions (a program of executing those whom he perceived as enemies of the state). Plutarch states in his “Life” of Sulla (XXXI): “Sulla now began to make blood flow, and he filled the city with deaths without number or limit”, further alleging that many of the murdered victims had nothing to do with Sulla, though Sulla killed them to “please his adherents”.

“Sulla immediately proscribed eighty persons without communicating with any magistrate. As this caused a general murmur, he let one day pass, and then proscribed two hundred and twenty more, and again on the third day as many. In an harangue to the people, he said, with reference to these measures, that he had proscribed all he could think of, and as to those who now escaped his memory, he would proscribe them at some future time.” -Plutarch, Life of Sulla (XXXI)

The proscriptions are widely perceived as a response to similar killings which Marius and Cinna had implemented while they controlled the Republic during Sulla’s absence. Proscribing or outlawing every one of those whom he perceived to have acted against the best interests of the Republic while he was in the East, Sulla ordered some 1,500 nobles (i.e., senators and equites) executed, although it is estimated that as many as 9,000 people were killed. The purge went on for several months. Helping or sheltering a proscribed person was punishable by death, while killing a proscribed person was rewarded with two talents. Family members of the proscribed were not excluded from punishment, and slaves were not excluded from rewards. As a result, “husbands were butchered in the arms of their wives, sons in the arms of their mothers”. The majority of the proscribed had not been enemies of Sulla, but instead were killed for their property, which was confiscated and auctioned off. The proceeds from auctioned property more than made up for the cost of rewarding those who killed the proscribed, making Sulla even wealthier. Possibly to protect himself from future political retribution, Sulla had the sons and grandsons of the proscribed banned from running for political office, a restriction not removed for over 30 years.

The Roman invasion of Britain

Caesar’s invasion site is believed to have been found:

The first Roman invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar in 55BC is a historical fact, with vivid accounts passed down by Tacitus, Cicero and Caesar himself. Yet, despite a huge landing force of legionaries from 800 ships, no archaeological evidence for the attack or any physical remains of encampments have ever been found.

But now a chance excavation carried out ahead of a road building project in Kent has uncovered what is thought to be the first solid proof for the invasion. Archaeologists from the University of Leicester and Kent County Council have found a defensive ditch and javelin spear at Ebbsfleet, a hamlet on the Isle of Thanet. The shape of the ditch at Ebbsfleet, is similar to Roman defences at Alésia in France, where a decisive battle in the Gallic War took place in 52 BC.

Experts also discovered that nearby Pegwell Bay is one of the only bays in the vicinity which could have provided harbour for such a huge fleet of ships. And its topography echoes Caesar’s own observations of the landing site.

Dr Andrew Fitzpatrick, Research Associate from the University of Leicester’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History said: “Caesar describes how the ships were left at anchor at an even and open shore and how they were damaged by a great storm. This description is consistent with Pegwell Bay, which today is the largest bay on the east Kent coast and is open and flat.

“The bay is big enough for the whole Roman army to have landed in the single day that Caesar describes. The 800 ships, even if they landed in waves, would still have needed a landing front 1-2 km wide. Caesar also describes how the Britons had assembled to oppose the landing but, taken aback by the size of the fleet, they concealed themselves on the higher ground. This is consistent with the higher ground of the Isle of Thanet around Ramsgate.”

Thanet has never been considered as a possible landing site before because it was separated from the mainland until the Middle Ages by the Wanstum Channel. Most historians had speculated that the landing happened at Deal, which lies to the south of Pegwell Bay.

This is, of course, absolutely fascinating in its own right. It would be intriguing to compare the layout of the land with the historical descriptions. But it is also an important lesson in the difference between history and archeology, and how there is very little physical evidence of many events that are widely accepted as having taken place.

Science is simply not a viable metric for the past, due to the intrinsic limits of scientody.

Only a DAY of gratitude?

Steve Sailer reveals his hateful anti-semitic hatefulness as he proposes but ONE measly day to celebrate Jewish immigration and thank these valuable contributors to America for their efforts in making America more deeply and truly American:

Reading the columns of David Brooks, Bret “I have always thought of the United States as a country that belongs first to its newcomers” Stephens, and Roger Cohen, I now realize we should have a national holiday celebrating the immigration of their ancestors to the United States.

This National Day of Adulation and Gratitude for Jewish Immigration might be the only hope of keeping them from trying so hard to convert every other American national holiday into an occasion for their own ethnocentric ancestor worship.

Worse, instead of frankly admitting that they really, really like their own kind, the Brookses, Stephens, and Cohens feel compelled to concoct elaborate globalist theories about why every single American national holiday is a mandate for letting in not just their forefathers, but every scimitar-waving Muslim on earth.

If Steve didn’t hate and envy Jews, he would have proposed at least a week of celebration, although perhaps repurposing the 40 Days of Lent would be more appropriately demonstrate the boundless debt of gratitude every American no doubt feels to these true blue Americans who are exactly like every other American except for having arrived later and being more special.

Thanksgiving and the Indian traitor

There is an important Thanksgiving lesson here for Americans, who have repeated, and repeatded again, Massasoit’s fatal mistake:

Massasoit was the sachem, or political and military leader, of the Wampanoag confederation, a loose combination of villages in southeastern Massachusetts. About five years before the Pilgrims arrived, Massasoit’s people had been decimated by diseases brought by earlier European traders. Entire villages had been depopulated—including a Patuxet village that the newly arrived Pilgrims settled into and named New Plymouth.

As Mann explains, Massasoit was in a bind. The epidemic that had hit the Wampanoag hadn’t touched their longtime enemies to the west, the Narragansett. Massasoit feared his weakened people would be overrun, so he decided to gamble and let the Pilgrims stay. European traders had been visiting New England for at least a century, but Indian leaders always forbid them from establishing permanent settlements. The relationship was strictly transactional. Far from seeing the Europeans as superior, writes Mann, the Indians had good reason to take advantage of these strange newcomers:

Shorter than the natives, oddly dressed, and often unbearably dirty, the pallid foreigners had peculiar blue eyes that peeped out of the masks of bristly, animal-like hair that encased their faces. They were irritatingly garrulous, prone to fits of chicanery, and often surprisingly incompetent at what seemed to Indians like basic tasks. But they also made useful and beautiful goods—copper kettles, glittering colored glass, and steel knives and hatchets—unlike anything else in New England. Moreover they would exchange these valuable items for cheap furs of a sort used by Indians as blankets. It was like happening upon a dingy kiosk that would swap fancy electronic goods for customers’ used socks—almost anyone would be willing to overlook the shopkeeper’s peculiarities.

Massasoit’s plan was to allow the Pilgrims to stay—as long as they allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett.

“We’ll bring in the foreigners as allies to defeat our domestic enemies.” This  was neither the first time nor the last time someone has made that mistake. See: the British Labour Party, the U.S. Democratic Party. And in the case of the Wampanoag, the strategy turned out as history reliably dictates. The natives never seem to grasp the possibility that one day they will be outnumbered by the newcomers.

As for Massasoit and the Wampanoag, their peace with the Pilgrims lasted more than 50 years, until 1675, when one of Massasoit’s sons launched an attack and triggered a conflict that would encompass all of New England. The Europeans won, in large part, according to Mann, because by then they outnumbered the natives.

50 years. Interesting. Why, it was just 52 years ago that the Naturalization Act of 1965 was enacted….

Mailvox: midwit history

It’s no secret that I am not a fan of midwits. These responses to my previous post on Fake Americans and their Fake History may help explain why. They are the walking, talking examples of Dunning-Kruger in action. When I talk about them being relative retards, this is exactly the sort of thing I’m describing. Be sure to note how JM actually thinks he is correcting me.

According to your theory Britain, Canada (until two decades ago or so), Australia and New Zealand should be the best examples of freedom loving people in a land where the rule of law exists, where the government is not massive and social and economic freedoms are respected, in other words, Switzerland or close to it since their populations are by far MUCH MORE ANGLO than whatever you find in the U.S., less “tainted” by Germans, Italians, French and so on. I think we can all safely agree and that ALL the countries mentioned and less free and their populations endure more oppressive governments (female idiocy to the max, PC quasi-dictatorship, socialist policies, end to the right to bear arms, etc etc.). The worst part is that peoples of those countries CLAIMED FOR, ELECTED, AND ENACTED their governments actions with glee, only a tiny minority resisted or tried to do so. 

That’s ridiculous. The “British brethren” of the British Empire were obviously a different subset of Anglo stock than the American settlers. Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage is a necessary requirement of reliable community support for individual liberty and limited government, but it is not a sufficient one. Many Canadians are descended from British settlers who were loyal to the crown and were driven out. Australia is descended from criminal deportees; if you ever wondered why Sydney is a center of gay depravity, look up the crimes for which many of those criminals were deported.

As for the British themselves, they went through several hundred years of exporting and killing off their best and boldest. It should be no surprise that those who remain today are little more than island-dwelling dodo birds, blithely welcoming the newcomers who have already replaced them in their capital.

Anyone who thinks Switzerland is a bastion of individual liberty has never spent more than five minutes there. A friend of mine who worked in Zurich for five years collected various fines I would not have believed possible, including one for excess noise after 10 PM and another for turning on his fog lights when the amount of rain did not necessitate doing so. To put it his way, “imagine a homeowner’s association run by uptight German women.”

Whether you like it or not, your theory is full of holes and cannot explain why the peoples whose entrance you decry were allowed to enter en masse by the “virtuous protestant men of British stock” that inhabited the US back then, while the countries that should be shining examples of freedom due to their Protestant ethic (hahaha) and Anglo-saxon “pure” heritage sink ever so low. You don’t seem to realize that Irish and Italians were brought as low cost labor not out of a “duty bring white men of good character”. You don’t seem to realize that if anything, the mixture of European peoples in the U.S. might have slowed down the destruction of the liberties that many Americans take for granted etc.

This guy’s binary reasoning is so inept that he would similarly argue that my theory of NFL defense is full of holes and cannot explain how the Vikings were able to score on the Rams; obviously if the Vikings reached the end zone, then the Rams must have intended for them to do so.  And the idea that the addition of various peoples with no tradition of liberty or limited government somehow managed to slow down the destruction of now-vanished American liberties that their most illustrious members openly worked to destroy is simply too stupid to be mendacious.

Every generation has a faction arguing that relaxing the rules can’t possibly do any harm. The Founders were no exception; the fact that they were naive about immigration and failed to adequately protect their posterity from themselves does not change the fact that their original vision for the United States in no way approximated anything even remotely close to what we see today. The irony is that in JM’s arguing for American civic nationalism and the irrelevance of national origin, he is actually making a strong case for utterly ruthless ethnic cleansing, as evidently permitting even one otherwise unobjectionable exception is sufficient cause to give future civic nationalists grounds to destroy the nation.

Sertorius is similarly confused, but less obnoxious:

The Framers absolutely intended a British ethnostate, yet welcomed all white men of good character. Which was it? And since “intention” implies instrumentality, where exactly are the plans–even if they’re just jottings on a cocktail napkin–that will bring forth such a polity?

Both. First, they had a very different definition of “white” than we do today. Second, they only intended to allow enough whites of good character to permit them to fully assimilate through interbreeding. (Notice that they didn’t establish a reliable mechanism for policing “good character” either, therefore they must have intended to import criminals and Satanists, right?) Third, they had set up a structure in which the several States were supposed to be entirely sovereign. They felt that this arrangement would suffice to address any fundamental differences; what would it matter to Massachusetts or Virginia if Pennsylvania was adulterated by Germans? Of course, the Civil War proved them wrong only four-score-and-change years later.

The Founding Fathers didn’t intend a single British ethnostate, but rather, a number of distinct British ethnostates as well as a few mixed white ethnostates. If you recall, they were rather favorably influenced by the historical Greek city-states. This is exactly why citizens of the USA should be praying for a reasonably peaceful breakup and non-violent ethnic cleansing instead of desperately trying to preserve the unsalvageable.

The real problem the civic nationalists have with history is that it clearly spells out the horrors that are likely on the way for the West. They avert their eyes and offer silly, nonsensical arguments about the intentions of the Founders in order to dispel the fear that is quietly gnawing at their bellies. But it won’t work, and in any event, nothing they say, and nothing I write, is going to make any difference whatsoever. I have no doubt that back in 372 AD, there was a Roman living in the town of Marcianopolis who was looking on in disbelief as 200,000 desperate Visigoths were permitted to cross the Danube to protect them from the Huns. Because refugees.

What could he have done about that? What possible difference could his arguments and his opinion have made? I like to think that Roman was smart enough to leave Marcianopolis and go very far away before Fritigern rose up to pillage the Roman north and slaughter the Emperor Valens at Adrianople six years later.

America-first immigration

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas lays down the history to civic nationalists and globalists alike:

For too long, a bipartisan, cosmopolitan elite has dismissed the people’s legitimate concerns about these things and put its own interests above the national interest.

No one captured this sensibility better than President Obama, when he famously called himself “a citizen of the world.”  With that phrase, he revealed a deep misunderstanding of citizenship. After all, “citizen” and “city” share the same Greek root word: citizenship by definition means that you belong to a particular political community. Yet many of our elites share Mr. Obama’s sensibility. They believe that American citizenship—real, actual citizenship—is meaningless, ought not be foreclosed to anyone, and ought not be the basis for distinctions between citizens and foreigners. You might say they think American exceptionalism lies in not making exceptions when it comes to citizenship.

This globalist mindset is not only foreign to most Americans. It’s also foreign to the American political tradition.

Take the Declaration of Independence. Our cosmopolitan elites love to cite its stirring passages about the rights of mankind when they talk about immigration or refugees. They’re not wrong to do so. Unlike any other country, America is an idea—but it is not only an idea. America is a real, particular place with real borders and real, flesh-and-blood people. And the Declaration tells us it was so from the very beginning.

Prior to those stirring passages about “unalienable Rights” and “Nature’s God,” in the Declaration’s very first sentence in fact, the Founders say it has become “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands” that tie them to another—one people, not all people, not citizens of the world, but actual people who make up actual colonies. The Founders frequently use the words we and us throughout the Declaration to describe that people.

Furthermore, on several occasions, the Declaration speaks of “these Colonies” or “these States.” The Founders were concerned about their own circumstances; they owed a duty to their own people who had sent them as representatives to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. They weren’t trying to free South America from Spanish or Portuguese dominion, much as they might have opposed that dominion.

Perhaps most notably, the Founders explain towards the end of the Declaration that they had appealed not only to King George for redress, but also to their fellow British citizens, yet those fellow citizens had been “deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.” Consanguinity!—blood ties! That’s pretty much the opposite of being a citizen of the world.

So while the Declaration is of course a universal document, it’s also a particular document about one nation and one people. Its signers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to each other, in English, right here in America—not in Esperanto to mankind in the abstract.

Civic nationalism is globalism lite. It has failed in America, it is failing in Europe, and it is no more viable than communism, libertarianism, or any other utopian social policy.

The senator’s proposed RAISE Act is still woefully insufficient in the present circumstances, but it is a significant improvement on the disastrous current system.

Book Review: SAPIENS by Yuval Harari III

Review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by C.R.Hallpike

Part III of IV

Anyway, what was needed here to control these much larger populations were networks of mass co-operation, under the control of kings, and Harari takes us almost immediately into the world of the ancient empires of Egypt, and Mesopotamia, and Persia and China. But how were these networks of mass communication created?

He recognises, quite rightly, the importance of writing and mathematics in human history, and claims they were crucial in the emergence of the state:

…in order to maintain a large kingdom, mathematical data was vital. It was never enough to legislate laws and tell stories about guardian gods. One also had to collect taxes. In order to tax hundreds of thousands of people, it was imperative to collect data about people’s incomes and possessions; data about payments made; data about arrears, debts and fines; data about discounts and exemptions. This added up to millions of data bits, which had to be stored and processed (p. 137).

This was beyond the power of the human brain, however.

This mental limitation severely constrained the size and complexity of human collectives. When the amount of people in  a particular society crossed a critical threshold, it became necessary to store and process large amounts of mathematical data. Since the human brain could not do it, the system collapsed. For thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, human social networks remained relatively small and simple (p. 137).

But it is simply not true that kingdoms need to collect vast quantities of financial data in order to tax their subjects, or that social systems beyond a certain size collapsed until they had invented writing and a numerical system for recording this data. If Harari were right it would not have been possible for any kingdoms at all to have developed in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, because there were no forms of writing systems in this region until quite late when a few developed under European or Islamic influence (Ethiopia was a special case.)  Nevertheless, pre-colonial Africa was actually littered with states and even empires that functioned perfectly well without writing.

They were able to do this because of the undemanding administrative conditions of early kingdoms. These are based on subsistence agriculture without money and have primitive modes of transport, unless they have easy access to river transport like Egypt, Mesopotamia or China. They also have a simple administrative structure based on a hierarchy of local chiefs or officials who play a prominent part in the organization of tribute. The actual expenses of government, apart from the royal court, are therefore relatively small, and the king may have large herds of cattle or other stock, and large estates and labourers to work them to provide food and beer for guests. The primary duty of a ruler is generosity to his nobles and guests, and to his subjects in distress, not to construct vast public works like pyramids. The basic needs of a ruler, besides food supplies, would be prestige articles as gifts of honour, craft products, livestock, and above all men as soldiers and labourers. In Baganda, one of the largest African states, with a population of around two million, tax messengers were sent out when palace resources were running low:

The goods collected were of various kinds –  livestock, cowry shells, iron hoe-blades, and the cloths made from the bark of a fig-tree beaten out thin [for clothing and bedding]…Cattle were required of superior chiefs, goats and hoes of lesser ones, and the peasants contributed the cowry shells and barkcloths….the tax-gatherers did not take a proportion of every herd but required a fixed number of cattle from each chief. Of course the hoes and barkcloths had to be new, and they were not made and stored up in anticipation of the tax-collection. It took some little time to produce the required number, and the tax-gatherers had to wait for this and then supervise the transport of the goods and cattle, first to the saza [district] headquarters and then to the capital. The amount due was calculated in consultation with the subordinates of the saza chiefs who were supposed to know the exact number of men under their authority, and they were responsible for seeing that it was delivered (Mair 1962:163). (Manpower was recruited in basically the same way, and in Africa generally was made up of slaves and corvée labour.)

Nor do early states require written law codes in the style of Hamurabi, and most cases can be settled orally by traditional local courts. No doubt, the demands of administering early states made writing and mathematical notation very useful, and eventually indispensable, but the kinds of financial data that Harari deems essential for a tax system could only have been available in very advanced societies. As we have just seen, very much simpler systems were quite viable. (Since the Sumerian system of mathematical notation is the example that Harari chooses to illustrate the link between taxation, writing, and mathematics, it is a pity that he gets it wrong. The Sumerians did not, as he supposes, use a ‘a combination of base 6 and base 10 numeral systems’. As is well-known, they actually used base 60, with sub-base 10 to count from 1 – 59, 61 – 119, and so on. [Chrisomalis 2010:241-45])

When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint-stock companies to provide the needed social links. (p. 115)  

The idea of people ‘inventing’ religious beliefs to ‘provide the needed social links’ comes out of the same rationalist stable as the claim that kings invented religious beliefs to justify their oppression of their subjects and that capitalists did the same to justify their exploitation of their workers. Religious belief simply doesn’t work like that. It is true, however, that what he calls universal and missionary religions started appearing in the first millennium BC.

Their emergence was one of the most important revolutions in history, and made a vital contribution to the unification of humankind, much like the emergence of universal empires and universal money. (p. 235)

But his chapter on the rise of the universal religions is extremely weak, and his explanation  of monotheism, for example, goes as follows:

With time some followers of polytheist gods became so fond of their particular patron that they drifted away from the basic polytheist insight. They began to believe that their god was the only god, and that He was in fact the supreme power of the universe. Yet at the same time they continued to view Him as possessing interests and biases, and believed that they could strike deals with Him. Thus were born monotheist religions, whose followers beseech the supreme power of the universe to help them recover from illness, win the lottery and gain victory in war. (p. 242)

This is amateurish speculation, and Harari does not even seem to have heard of the Axial Age. This is the term applied by historians to the period of social turmoil that occurred during the first millennium BC across Eurasia, of political instability, warfare, increased commerce and the appearance of coinage, and urbanization, that in various ways eroded traditional social values and social bonds. The search for meaning led to a new breed of thinkers, prophets and philosophers who searched for a more transcendent and universal authority on how we should live and gain tranquillity of mind, that went beyond the limits of their own society and traditions, and beyond purely material prosperity. People developed a much more articulate awareness of the mind and the self than hitherto, and also rejected the old pagan values of worldly success and materialism. As one authority has put it:

‘Everywhere one notices attempts to introduce greater purity, greater justice, greater perfection, and a more universal explanation of things’ (Momigliano 1975:8-9; see also Hallpike 2008:236-65).

One of the consequences of this new cultural order was a fundamental rethinking of religion, so that the old pagan gods began to seem morally and intellectually contemptible. Instead of this naively human image of the gods, said the Greek Xenophanes, ‘One God there is…in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind… effectively, he wields all things by the thought of his mind.’ So we find all across the Old World the idea developing of a rational cosmic order, a divine universal law, known to the Greeks as Logos, to the Indians as Brahman, to the Jews as Hokhma, and to the Chinese as Tao. This also involved the very important idea that the essential and distinctive mental element in man is akin to the creative and ordering element in the cosmos, of Man as microcosm in relation to the macrocosm.

Intellectually, the idea that the universe makes sense at some deep level, that it is governed by a unified body of rational laws given by a divine Creator, became an essential belief for the development of science, not only among the Greeks, but in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. As Joseph Needham has said, ‘…historically the question remains whether natural science could ever have reached its present stage of development without passing through a “theological stage” ‘ (Needham 1956:582).

Against this new intellectual background it also became much easier to think of Man not as a citizen of a particular state, but in universal terms as a moral being. There is the growth of the idea of a common humanity which transcends the boundaries of nation and culture and social distinctions of rank, such as slavery, so that all good men are brothers, and the ideal condition of Man would be universal peace (Hallpike 2016:167-218).

Harari tries to create a distinction between ‘monotheistic’ religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and ‘natural law religions’, without gods in which he includes Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Stoicism, and the Epicureans. From what I have said about the concepts of Logos, Hokhma, Brahman, and Tao it should be clear that his two types of religion actually had  much in common. In Christianity, for example, Jesus was almost immediately identified with the Logos. The Epicureans, however, do not belong in this group at all as they were ancient materialist atheists who did not believe in natural law of any kind. One of the most obvious facts about states in history is that they all were hierarchical, dividing people into different classes with kings and nobles at the top enjoying wealth and luxury, and peasants or slaves at the bottom in poverty, men privileged over women, some ethnic groups privileged over others, and so on. Harari attributes all this to the invention of writing, and to the ‘imagined orders’ that sustained the large networks involved in state organization.

The imagined orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair. They divided people into make-believe groups, arranged in a hierarchy. The upper levels enjoyed privileges and power, while the lower ones suffered from discrimination. Hammurabi’s Code, for example established a pecking order of superiors, commoners and slaves. Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained. (p. 149)

 But since these sorts of hierarchies in state societies are universal in what sense can they have simply been ‘make-believe’? Doesn’t this universality suggest that there were actually laws of social and economic development at work here which require sociological analysis? Simply saying that ‘there is no justice in history’ is hardly good enough. In particular, he fails to notice two very significant types of inequality, that of merchants in relation to the upper classes, and of craftsmen in relation to scholars, which had major implications for the development of civilisation, but to which I shall return later.

Harari says that religion and empires have been two of the three great unifiers of the human race, along with money: 

Empires were one of the main reasons for the drastic reduction in human diversity. The imperial steamroller gradually obliterated the unique characteristics of numerous peoples…forging out of them new and much larger groups (p. 213)

These claims have a good deal of truth but they are also quite familiar, so I shall not go into Harari’s discussion of this theme, except for his strange notion of ‘Afro-Asia’, which he describes not only as an ecological system but also as having some sort of cultural unity, e.g. ‘During the first millennium BC, religions of an altogether new kind began to spread through Afro-Asia’ (p. 249). 

Culturally, however, sub-Saharan Africa was entirely cut off from developments in Europe and Asia until Islamic influence began spreading into West Africa in the eighth century AD, and has been largely irrelevant to world history except as a source of slaves and raw materials. And as Diamond pointed out in Guns, Germs and Steel, Africa is an entirely distinct ecological system because it is oriented north/south, so that it is divided by its climatic zones, whereas Eurasia is oriented east/west, so that the same climatic zones extend all across it, and wheat and horses for example are found all the way from Ireland to Japan.

Harari says that at the beginning of the sixteenth century, 90{b05c51a15f0a42d8e7dd687f4cc4bfffd66a97ee173a2742c6182468204332c9} of humans still lived in ‘the single mega-world of Afro-Asia’, while the rest lived in the Meso-American, Andean, and Oceanic worlds. ‘Over the next 300 years the Afro-Asian giant swallowed up all the other worlds’, by which he actually means the expanding colonial empires of the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British.

But to refer to these nations as ‘Afro-Asian’  is conspicuously absurd, and the whole concept of Afro-Asia is actually meaningless from every point of view. The general idea of Eurasia, however, does make a good deal of cultural as well as ecological sense, not only because it recognises the obvious importance of Europe, but because of the cultural links that went to and fro across it, so that the early navigators of the fifteenth century were using the Chinese inventions of magnetic compasses, stern-post rudders, paper for their charts, and gunpowder, and were making their voyages to find sea-routes from Europe to China and the East Indies rather than relying on overland trade.

Part IV will be posted tomorrow.