A year of random voice notes, stitched. Only my words, with the filler trimmed.
My recent hyperfixation has been the Stone Age. The last era or scale of experience I didn’t know anything about. From being a mathematician I already knew about the very early eras up till about the singularity — and the astronomy era of galaxy formations, and the geology era of planets forming, then biology, then comparative biology when you hit the Cambrian explosion and there’s a lot more stuff and competition. Skipping ahead, the development of mammals and cooperation, big social groups and larger levels of abstraction and knowledge that is more persistent. Looking at the archaeology made me more convinced the speed of evolution is increasing and that there really is an arc of progress. It’s just a very cold one. Civilization ratchets forward faster and faster — you can’t just turn it off and go back without huge amounts of people dying, which of course those huge amounts aren’t going to want.
But the shape of the human game inside the ratchet has barely changed. This era might be a return to the bronze age. The bronze age was maybe the first time in history that any individual could acquire way more than they could consume — the earliest building projects are tombs for kings where you put people to work throughout the non-harvest season and make them build it, and the reason you can make them do it is by having a much more complete monopoly on force. Once you have that — once one person can accumulate honor and resource beyond any reasonable appetite — the engine exists, and every era after is a variation on how tempered it is.
The end of the Roman Republic is the cleanest case I know of the engine running hot. Marius, Sulla, Caesar — truly great men, any one of whom could have been the central figure of a lesser age, and not one of them could bear to share. The pool was fixed and it was already too small for them.
I find the medieval era interesting because the most elite end of society was not so different from today, or even the Roman Republic, where competing passions had already reached really rarified heights, and so people are competing for exactly as petty reasons as they do today. But because life was incredibly hard for even rich people — if your son gets the plague, well, that’s just too goddamn bad. And no one, even at the highest end, can truly escape it. People were a lot more serious because life was a lot heavier.
One end of that is still there today. But one end of that has fallen away. Life has become relatively easy for most people. Really easy for most people, let’s be real. The desire among the top for honor — performative — is the same, or maybe even more. But the amount of honor to go around is very limited. Which is why the bronze age comparison keeps coming back: not the texture of life, but the shape of accumulation — the engine running without the thing that used to temper it, on a ratchet that moves faster than anything the bronze age kings had to contend with.
I got really into the first crusade independently, which has really informed my reading. The first crusade is by far the most interesting one and it sets the model for all the others, because it was crazy. Groups of squabbling princes who still managed to pull off an insane victory. Actually several insane victories. One of William the Conqueror’s sons was one of the major Crusaders. It was also the first woke effort because ironically it united everyone.
Listen to Pope Urban II. I challenge every capable man of the sword. Rich or poor, knight or foot soldier. People really did hear what they wanted to hear. Capable man of the sword — so both capable and a man of the sword. Not a peasant. I would love to see the autist ask about the edge cases of this: so would he join and then quit just in front of the bishop?
Squabbling princes. Knights who’ll die over a phrase. Our management of herds of wild populations.
Which culture has been the most brutal in history? Any of the ancient empires really qualify. Caesar committed a massacre against the Gauls, but they would have probably done more or less the same to the Romans if they had the power. The Assyrians would nail people’s skin to the walls. In ancient times people were fine with overwhelming brutality, especially to make people give up. The first Crusaders are up there. But maybe it would be Rome for a combination of brutality and scale — the Romans just scaled things out. The crucifix was novel, but it was not that much worse than all sorts of other ways to get tortured to death. It’s not like people believed in purely painless deaths back then.
Genghis is noted for sparing skilled craftsmen in particular. Even he did what the Taliban couldn’t — you know what those Bamiyan Buddhas were that the Taliban blew up? Like 700 years ago, Genghis showed up there because the locals had killed one of his favorite grandsons and he was really angry. So he basically killed everyone there, practically depopulating it, but he didn’t touch the Buddhas at all. Consistent with him — he would mostly leave artifacts unless they directly were against his goal in some way.