Culture and Nationhood in the World of Herodotus: An Evolutionary Analysis, Part 4

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Maladaptive Culture: Herodotus on Luxury, Effeminacy, and Decadence

The ancients considered the maintaining of martial virtue and hardiness to be a supreme imperative—not surprising given that if any frailty led to defeat, one’s people could not only lose their self-government, but their very existence. Like Homer and Plato, Herodotus has much to say on the perils of luxury, effeminacy, and decadence. Herodotus is acutely aware of the fragility of nations and civilizations. He says at the beginning of the Histories:

I will cover minor and major human settlements equally, because most of those which were important in the past have diminished in significance by now, and those which were great in my own time were small in times past. I will mention both equally because I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place. (1.5)

Herodotus suggests a cycle of rise and fall of civilizations: as one becomes wealthy and powerful, one tends to lose over the generations the manly virtue which made this possible, becoming at once effeminate and arrogant. This cycle of decadence, which was later famously analyzed by the Andalusian historian Ibn Khaldun, is a common feature of human history. Moderns are apt to forget that until quite recently primitive and nomadic virile barbarians periodically conquered more culturally advanced but decadent sedentary civilizations. One need only mention the ancient Germans, Huns, Vikings, Arabs, Turks, and Mongols.

Herodotus’ characters repeatedly comment on the debilitating effects of luxury and effeminacy, in a word, of being over-civilized. The Persians’ rise to power in the century prior to Herodotus’ writing is explained by their initial Spartan-like ruggedness and simplicity, while their decline is due to their indulgence in comfort and wealth since the passing of Cyrus the Great in 530 BC. Overly rich and arrogant empires seeking ever-more land repeatedly come to grief by attacking impoverished but still-manly free peoples.[1] Read more

Culture and Nationhood in the World of Herodotus: An Evolutionary Analysis, Part 3

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Persian Virtue: A Persian Group Evolutionary Strategy?

The people described in most detail by Herodotus are in fact not the Greeks, but their enemies the Persians, a fellow Aryan people. Herodotus speaks a great deal about Persian culture, often very positively. (For instance: “the Persians are normally the last people in the world, to my knowledge, to treat men who fight bravely with disrespect” [7.238]). The historian is far more critical of individual arrogant Persian rulers, such as Cambyses and Xerxes, than he is of Persia as such.

Herodotus claims that the Persian Empire—which in his day stretched from Greek Asia Minor in the west to India in the east, and from Egypt in the south to the edges of Scythia in the north—had grown through “customs” of monarchic power and conquest. These led every Persian king to expand the empire, at least until this led to unnatural excess and to their downfall.

Persian culture, as described by Herodotus, is in many respects highly adaptive. He says that among the Persians:

After bravery in battle, manliness is proved above all by producing plenty of sons, and every year the king rewards the person producing the most; they think that quantity constitutes strength. . . . they study only three things: horsemanship, archery, and honesty. (1.136)

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Culture and Nationhood in the World of Herodotus: An Evolutionary Analysis, Part 2

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“King Nomos”: The Power of Culture and the Universality of Cultural Chauvinism

Herodotus had traveled far and wide across the Mediterranean, thus coming across nations with often radically different cultural assumptions and ways of life. Accounting for this astonishing diversity, he is much impressed by the social power of culture. As noted above, the historian remarks that “custom [nomos] is king of all” and that every people tends to think that its own customs are the best:

If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group regards its own as being by far the best. . . . There is plenty of other evidence to support the idea that this opinion of one’s own customs is universal . . . Pindar was right to have said in his poem that custom is king of all. (3.38)

Herodotus writes this in the context of the Persian king Cambyses killing a sacred bull during his stay in Egypt, a bull which the Egyptians had considered to be their god Apis. The historian considers Cambyses’ sacrilegious contempt for local Egyptian custom as proof of his madness, an infamy on a par with his murder of his own brother and sister. (Cambyses dies shortly thereafter as a result of his actions.) Herodotus also takes the example of how Greeks and Indians treat corpses differently: Greeks burn their corpses, while Indians (allegedly) eat them, the practice of each being equally repulsive to the other. Hence, by giving societies radically different norms, taboos, and assumptions, cultural drift tends to polarize humanity into different, mutually-uncomprehending groups.[1]

The supremacy of “King Nomos,” or custom, in every society reflects the power of culture to shape that society’s behavior. If genes and physique are the hardware of humanity, culture and ideas are our software. The world-view, assumptions, values, and taboos of a society have a powerful effect on human behavior, even if this can never eliminate our in-born proclivities. Herodotus makes clear that the power of a society’s culture is necessarily paired with a sense of superiority over foreign customs. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? If the members a society thought foreign customs superior, would they not seek to make them their own? A corollary however is that if peoples with starkly different cultures and values must live in close proximity, they are liable to come into conflict. Among foreign cultures, the wise man will tread carefully.

All this does not mean that national cultures are completely closed-off and autarkic memetic units.  On the contrary, Herodotus is quite cognizant of cultural porosity and mutual influence between nations. He freely admits the barbarians’ superior achievements, such as the Egyptians’ calendar and their monumental pyramids, as well as their influence on Greek culture. The Greeks, he says, owe their alphabet to the Phoenicians and much of their religion and basic geometry to the Egyptians. It is furthermore striking that the first great philosophical flourishing of the Greek world, the so-called “Ionian Renaissance,” occurred in the Persian-occupied Greek cities of Asia Minor (today’s western Turkey). The Persians themselves were apparently the most culturally open-minded people in the world, for they “adopt more foreign customs than anyone else” (1.135). Read more

Culture and Nationhood in the World of Herodotus: An Evolutionary Analysis, Part 1

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Herodotus by Jean-Guillaume Moitte, 1806. Relief on the west façade of the Cour Carrée in the Louvre Palace, Paris.

Herodotus (trans. Robin Waterfield), The Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)

In defense of history, the Roman orator Cicero once said: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain forever a child.” In history, we can find the past trajectory of human events and insights into the nature of human existence in other circumstances, two powerful guides for the future. The first historian was Herodotus, a Greek who lived some 2,500 years ago. His massive Histories are an encyclopedic snapshot of that epoch, an enormous collection of stories on all the nations of the known world which he had gathered during his travels.

Herodotus is a perceptive observer of human nature. His humans are indeed riven with contradictions and subject to extreme pressures, torn between often-conflicting personal, familial, and political loyalties. Herodotus’ is a world of sex and violence, of tribes and cultures. Reading Herodotus remains a rewarding experience, for our human nature has not changed much over the past 2,500 years. I propose an evolutionary analysis of the Histories, highlighting in particular the complex and dynamic relationship between environment, culture, and ethnicity. As we shall see, national identity, ethnocentrism, and the condemnation of decadence — what we would call maladaptive culture — are major themes in Herodotus’ work.

The known world of Herodotus can be seen as a kind of enormous grid centered upon the eastern Mediterranean, where most of the Greeks lived, and the Persian empire, by far the largest and most powerful state of the time. In this vast world, the Greeks were a young people scattered across the Mediterranean “like frogs around a pond” (Plato, Phaedo, 109b). The Greeks were well aware of the other great and often mysterious peoples around them: the Semitic trading-nation of Phoenicia in the Levant, the wild nomadic Scythians in the north, the mysterious Ethiopians in the south and Indians in the east, the massive city of Babylon in Mesopotamia, and the venerable Egyptians, among others.

Herodotus’ world certainly featured peaceful commerce, cultural exchange, and ethnic intermarriage among these peoples — the historian is quite broad-minded and free of chauvinism in this respect.[1] But, as Herodotus makes clear, this was also a world of extreme ethnocentrism and brutal wars. The highly diverse material of the Histories, which features myths, stories, and ethnographic portraits of the many peoples of the known world, is united around the rise and decline of the Persian empire: each people is described when they encounter the Persians, the latter being invariably bent on conquest. The work climaxes with the great struggle of an unlikely coalition of Greek city-states led by Athens and Sparta and their ultimate triumph over the Persian invaders. Meditation on war and commemoration of Greek unity and freedom are thus at the center of Herodotus’ narrative. (Incidentally, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that many of the most iconic lines and scenes in the otherwise unrealistic film 300 are actually directly drawn from Herodotus.) Read more

The Pyromaniacs’ Ball: The Grenfell Tower Disaster as a Metaphor for the West

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I hate TV, so I usually hear the news rather than see it. This gives me a lot of chances to put my Evil White Racism to work on predictions. Mostly I’m right, occasionally I’m wrong. When I heard that a disgruntled ex-doctor had shot up a hospital in New York, I assumed that the doctor would be non-White.

Disaster waiting to happen

I was right. He turned out to be a Nigerian who had been sacked for sexual harassment. But I was wrong when I heard about more than a hundred people burning to death as they collected spilt fuel from a crashed tanker. I assumed that, as usual, it had happened in Africa and that, after a frantic few minutes of fuel-scooping, someone had decided to take a well-earned cigarette-break. No: it had happened in Pakistan.

But I was right about the cigarette. The story was a characteristically Third-World horror: mass incineration resulting from casual, chaotic stupidity. The Grenfell Tower disaster in London, by contrast, might be called a characteristically First-World horror. It was mass incineration resulting from carefully organized stupidity. At vast expense and as an act of ecological piety, the tower had been wrapped in highly flammable cladding. A lot of brain-power and organization went into turning Grenfell Tower into a disaster waiting-to-happen. In the end, all it took was an exploding freezer. The fire then grew too fast and climbed too high for the stale pale males of the London Fire Brigade to rescue dozens of trapped residents.

Metaphor for the West: Grenfell Tower

I’d call Grenfell Tower a good metaphor for the Western world as a whole. At vast expense and with conspicuous piety, we are being wrapped in the highly flammable cladding of racial and religious diversity. You can see the chaos of the Third World meeting the careful organization of the First World off the coast of Libya. Criminal gangs push vibrant non-White migrants a short distance out to sea in unseaworthy and dangerously overladen small boats. The vibrant migrants are then picked up by powerful, seaworthy European ships and carried hundreds of miles to Italy, where they begin their new lives as they intend to continue: being fed, clothed, housed and medically tended at enormous expense by European Whites. Read more

Nikki Haley: Warmonger Extraordinaire!

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It must now be a prerequisite of those who become an American ambassador to the UN to possess certain characteristics and traits, the most important of which are rabid warmonger, child killer, and outright liar.

Remember it was Madeleine Albright when asked about the US blockading Iraq which prevented medicine and medical equipment from entering the country that resulted in the estimated death of a half a million children who coldly responded: “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”  Then there is Colin “Weapons of Mass Destruction” Powell who told a bald-face lie about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities which paved the way for the US destruction of the country.

In her brief tenure as UN ambassador, Nikki Haley is fulfilling these requirements quite nicely.  Her latest crazed outburst came on the heels of the bizarre White House press release about another supposed Syrian government gas attack which warned President Assad that he would “pay a heavy price” if carried out.

While the State and Defense Departments were apparently caught off guard by the White House action, Ambassador Haley was not (probably given advanced notice) and issued an even more provocative tweet:

Any further attacks done to the people of Syria will be blamed on Assad, but also on Russia & Iran who support him killing his own people.

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What’s wrong with the Swedes — and so many other Whites?

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Another in the unending list of suicidal behavior by Swedes, this one by Cecilia Wilkström, a Member of the European Parliament for the center-right (!) Liberal Party, who is concerned about the recent drownings in the Mediterranean of Africans attempting to invade Europe. Note that, once again, the Holocaust is front and center stage as a paradigm requiring Westerners to engage in pathological altruism and embrace diversity and their own dispossession.

A Swedish MEP is stepping up a pan-European cross-party campaign for “legal and safe routes to Europe” for migrants in the wake of the latest Mediterranean boat disaster. Cecilia Wikström, has told The Local that EU member states are currently doing so little to help guarantee safe passage that future generations will compare their actions to Sweden “turning a blind eye” to the Holocaust.

The MEP – who is a long-time advocate of safer passage for refugees seeking safety in Europe – made headlines on Monday after she initially told Swedish television network SVT that future generations would liken the approach of EU governments to the policy of appeasement during the Second World War.

Speaking to The Local after the broadcast, the centre-right Liberal Party politician said: “I stand by what I was saying …. I think that my children and grandchildren are going to ask why more wasn’t done to help people running away from Isis, or violence in Eritrea or wherever, when we knew that people were dying in their thousands. [On the contrary, your children and grandchildren are going to wonder how you could be so naive and morally bankrupt as to make them a resented minority in an area that their people had dominated for thousands of years.] People will ask the same question they did after the war, ‘if you were aware, why didn’t you do something?’. In Sweden we allowed our railroads to be used to transfer Jews to Nazi death camps.” …

Some 11,000 migrants have been rescued since the middle of last week and current trends suggest last year’s total of 170,000 landing in Italy is likely to be exceeded in 2015.

Many travel onwards to other countries including Sweden, which takes in more asylum seekers per capita than any other EU nation.

Never mind the obvious point that the vast majority of Africans would love to live in Europe and that helping them enter will ensure that more come. Since the population of Africa is now over 1 billion and is projected to be 4.2 billion by the end of the century, tiny Sweden and the rest of Europe will have their hands full, particularly given that there is absolutely no foreseeable end to the poverty, oppression, and warfare that is endemic to the continent.

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