PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Pillars of Civilisation
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Summary
In this episode of Brokonomics, I'm joined by the philosopher Karl Marx to talk about the origins of civilization and the role of religion in shaping it. We talk about religion, identity and morality, and how they are related to one another.
Transcript
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Now, in this episode, it kind of relates back to a previous episode that I did.
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So I know that I promised that I would come back and talk about the reframing of the way
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that I see society now, but I've basically got to keep thinking about that until I get
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But what I did do in a previous episode, that one about Morgoth and the origins of civilization,
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I waffled quite badly and sort of came away with an article from that and some various
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And then I got discussing it with Braz and we started riffing on that.
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And I then went to put some more thought into it.
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I think I've got something that's vaguely intelligent to say about that.
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And we were going to do everything we thought of, but then Karl had strong opinions on one
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So maybe we're going to do this over two parts and get Karl in for the next one.
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Northern European identity and virtue in Northern European societies and Germanic societies.
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And how it fits in with Christianity or fits in with Protestantism and sort of elaborate
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Yes, he's a big fan on the whole Protestant angle.
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I mean, first of all, on the previous video that I did, you probably haven't seen it, but
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it was one about Morgoth and the origins of civilization.
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I came out of that thinking that it was the worst episode that I'd ever recorded.
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And I was right on the verge of getting the editors to delete it.
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And then re-record it another time because I was just waffling for like 90 minutes.
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Whenever you get YouTubers together, that is like the number one thing that they discuss,
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how something that they thought was going to be awful did well and how, okay, it's all
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But one of the things I was waffling about in that was my idea that civilization is, because
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I think that our elites think that civilization is something like on a video game tech tree.
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And then you can do whatever you like because you've got it.
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Whereas the argument that I was making in what is now going to be an article, which I might
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even actually even get into the next edition of Islander, is that no, actually, the civilizational
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substrate is something which is inherited before it's understood.
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And for me, the essential framing criteria is that of winter.
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And the reason being is that if you live in a part of the world that has winter, that
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has a strong selection mechanism, you have to adopt certain characteristics, forward planning
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obviously, but norm enforcement, shared rules, deference to hierarchy, because all of those
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You know, an easy example of this would be, if you're living in Africa and somebody steals
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your mango, then you have to go and pick another mango.
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And it is quite annoying, but you can understand why that isn't cracked down on terribly hard.
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If I'm living in Scotland and you steal my grain reserves, my entire family starves in February.
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And so it is a whole different category of enforcement of norm mechanisms.
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And what I'm kind of arguing is that behavioural characteristics seep into the genome.
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And there's good arguments for that, but they do it very slowly.
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So if two parents are tall, it's likely the child is also going to be tall.
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That's a fairly strong relationship from generation to generation.
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Behavioural characteristics, they encode very weakly.
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But if you have a society that's got through winter for thousands and thousands of years,
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the cumulative addition is that you basically get an entirely different set of substrate of
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behaviours, meaning that civilisation is not communicable.
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You cannot just pick up somebody from somewhere and move them into another society and expect
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that civilisational bedrock to translate across.
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Now, when you heard that, you sort of started coming back in a number of ways.
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I don't know if anything jumps out at you immediately.
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So what you're arguing put in a different light.
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A restatement of your case would be along the following lines.
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And this restatement was made by the Catholic reactionary thinker, Joseph de Mestre.
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And his whole argument was that civilisation, state, culture, these are all emergent properties.
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They are not things that you can impose on a society.
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You can't, in fact, liberate people from their norms because these norms, these structures
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that are often reflected in the way the state is formed have far deeper causes that explain them.
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And one possible explanation is being forced to plan for winter and making sure that you
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And the only way for that to happen is for everybody to take responsibility for themselves
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and to behave in a particular way and to plan for the future.
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And if they don't, you brutally enforce that they do.
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There is a bit of a problem here that emerges with sort of places like Central America or India,
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which have built civilisations but don't have the same kind of challenge.
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I mean, I'd argue there is a reason why Britain colonised India and not the other way around.
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Even though both had a civilisation, one of them was considerably more durable than the other.
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There is always a metaphysical dimension to this because what we set as acceptable norms
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And one example here would be the Roma population, which lives in Europe, which has to suffer through
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winter, but they believe that they're allowed to steal whatever they want to steal and to
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There is always an in-group, out-group preference.
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There is always a conception of who we are and what God or the gods allow us to do in different
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So there is the material element, which is the kind of pressure that is imposed on you
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by having to plan for four months, five months, six months with no food.
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You see norm enforcement strongly in tribal desert communities with a strong tribal code that has
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always an in-group, out-group preference and always endless warfare against out-groups.
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But the planning ahead part, while stationary in a winter environment, imposes a different set of
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And so the Mediterranean can get hard winters, especially in mountainous areas in the Mediterranean.
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Somewhere like Egypt, where you have the flooding of the Nile that you have to plan for, because
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if you build incorrectly or you build in the wrong location, like that's it, you're erased from
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And that environment, by being unforgiving, imposes on you the need to plan.
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And if you are a non-nomadic society, the exact term has escaped me right now, then that planning
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has to be more involved and has to be paired with the enforcement of rules and norms.
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Because unlike in the desert, you can't just raid the tribe next door and loot their sheep and cattle.
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But I knew many groups in the Middle East do do exactly that.
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If you live on the border with nomadic tribes, you will constantly see that these urbanized communities
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or these settled communities have an insane amount of hostility towards the nomadic tribes.
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And they might trade with them, but it's very clear that there is zero trust in that relationship
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because you don't know what they might be up to.
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Because they might buy something from you, give you the money, and come back the next night
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And I certainly take your point about Egypt as well.
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Because, I mean, of course, Egypt did have a long-running civilization well before Europe.
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The interesting point for me, perhaps, there is what I keep going back to is the durability
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Because, yes, the Near East, Egypt, has had these precursor civilizations that were very
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But what seems to be a feature of those regions is that, quite often, civilization runs to a point
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In fact, was it Plato made this point in his, depends how you view it, either the parable
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of Atlantis or the absolute truth of Atlantis, whichever way you're going to come at it.
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Where he basically said, look, the Greeks have had civilization many times before.
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And it keeps resetting and it keeps restarting again.
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There is something about that region that is kind of forgiving enough to let it get civilization,
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but also let it collapse and then have to restart from fresh.
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Where European civilization, at least so far, has done well, is that it's kind of durable
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You didn't have much by way of civilization in Northern Europe until Christianity came along.
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So for most of Northern Europe, the Germanics were famously barbarians.
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And then the civilization was centered on the Mediterranean.
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And that's where the Greeks were and that's where the Romans were.
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And presumably you would argue that Christianity was key to building that civilization.
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I'd argue that it changed the moral norms to a high degree.
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And it imposed a vision that could only be expressed through art and architecture.
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And the Europeans, the Northern Europeans, took to it and built wonderful things using it.
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There is an argument that the reason why Christianity was so effective in building civilization
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is after you've got that sort of what I described, which is those inherited mechanisms,
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behavioral norms that kick in, you're still based around a fairly tribal system
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where you've got your in-group and your out-group.
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It's either us or the Celts or the Scots or the Germans or whatever.
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I mean, French history is replete with different bands fighting each other.
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What Christianity could have done is it came along and created a bigger kinship container
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And therefore, we can treat everybody in this container as being part of our kinship.
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And when that scales up Europe-wide, what you get is effectively a Europe-wide civilization.
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But, you know, the German king would send his daughter to be married in Austria or France or whatever it was.
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You know, you have that sort of broader container.
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One was the banning of cousin marriages, which had always been a historic norm.
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Until you had some recent arrivals of questionable character.
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And that meant the dissolution of tribal structures.
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And therefore, your kinship group had to expand.
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There's another element, which is the idea of monotheism.
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You were no longer worshipping different gods and having slight variations on all kinds of different moral systems.
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And that god is characterized by his own sacrifice for your sake.
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Then there's the element of not only was it for your sake that God sacrificed himself on the cross, but it was also your fault.
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Because while historically it was the Jews who called for the crucifixion of Jesus and the Romans who did the deed physically,
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the theological explanation has always been that he died for your sins and he died to redeem you.
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So that's a redemptive feature, which is different, I would argue, from other religions.
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Not that other gods didn't make sacrifices for the sake of their people, but not in this way.
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And then there was the, I would argue, especially the theology around sin and virtue.
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these are all of them, not actual acts, but sins of temperament or thought.
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So lust, not just the act of sexuality outside marriage,
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but the mere, the desire itself is what's described as a sin.
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It's not suppressing the thought in your own head.
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Well, it teaches you to discipline the thoughts in your head.
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Just the feeling itself isn't necessarily a sin.
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But the sins are defined as lust, envy, wrath, gluttony, greed, pride, etc.
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So the moral outlook is focused on what drives you to bad acts.
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It's wrath that causes you to murder someone or perhaps envy.
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Yes, the only thing is they're taking it one level up and placing the responsibility back on you.
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They're not saying don't, they do say elsewhere, don't murder.
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But the sin is getting yourself into a position where murder is the next logical step.
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Because you've succumbed to wrath, you've succumbed to lust, you've succumbed to greed.
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So charity in the virtues doesn't mean give away money liberally.
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It means think well of others so that when you see a poor person, you will treat him fairly.
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So obviously there is the physical element of giving to charity.
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But charity, the virtue, isn't focused on tithing, for example.
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So the dynamics kind of changed from thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not desire your neighbor's wife.
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And if you are already under an enormous amount of environmental pressure that forces you to behave in a certain way that respects norms, that is kind of the next evolutionary step.
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Because you take that norms and planning that are required to survive in a harsh climate with months of winter, and you have to internalize them in a way that changes your temperament, all the while admitting your own guilt for Christ's sacrifice.
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So I don't want to come back to that, but just narrowing down on the point of how a lot of the civilizational substrate is inherited.
00:19:07.960
And I think we are right to counterpose it with the Middle East that doesn't have a lot of the same starting conditions.
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But nevertheless, you see aspects of this appear.
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I mean, one of my arguments is that if you get the right norms, the right behaviors, which tend to be embodied in the population, that is the cheapest possible policing that you will ever get.
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