Written by Nicholas Agar.

No philosopher has ever reflected on death with as much data about the state of his own body as Bryan Johnson.

Johnson made a fortune selling his online payment business to PayPal, enabling him to invest an estimated $2 million annually on medical monitoring, supplements and outlandish interventions. He hopes these can enable him to make good on “Don’t Die”, the brand he chose for both his philosophy and his business. Over 7.5 million people follow him and his efforts to radically extend life (across various social media platforms). Some followers become customers of his anti-aging business “Project Blueprint” and get priority access to his latest death hacks. Surely what works for him will work for them too.

A recent medical misfortune invites Johnson to reconsider his claim to be “the healthiest person on the planet”. He has been diagnosed with Auto-Immune Gastritis (AIG). An estimated 2 to 5% of people have AIG and it can be managed. But it is bad news for his plan to live forever and the business built on “Don’t Die”.

Some online critics attribute Johnson’s AIG to the extremity of his biohacks, which include travelling to Honduras to be genetically modified, plasma transfusions, and experiments with immune-altering chemotherapy. Johnson responds to these doubters that his condition “would be much worse … had I not taken care of my body”.

Whether or not Johnson’s interventions contributed to his condition is a medical question. More interesting to me is the philosophical question it raises.

No longer the healthiest, Johnson can still claim to be “the most measured human” in history. Perhaps his next contribution should be to the philosophy of mortality, rather than the science of longevity. All of his data about himself places him in a unique position to add philosophical insight into the processes of aging and dying.

No one has observed the aging of a single human body with Johnson’s dedication. That puts him in a privileged position to reflect on mortality itself.

Philosophers from Søren Kierkegaard to Martin Heidegger argued that death is not the problem but a misguided relationship to it can be. Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode) suggests that our lives improve when we stop treating mortality as a problem awaiting a solution, and recognise it as the condition that gives authenticity and meaning to our lives.

It is hard to imagine the shock of Johnson’s AIG diagnosis turning him into a Heideggerian philosopher. But something that could be bad news for his super-longevity business could prompt him to explore the philosophical applications of his unprecedented store of data on his own aging body. Among the philosophical questions he might address, once he accepts that every human life has an end, concerns what to do with the extraordinary resources that remain at the disposal of some.

When Andrew Carnegie sold Carnegie Steel in 1901, he became one of the richest people in history. He enjoyed the perks of immense wealth. Some of Carnegie’s excesses are reminiscent of today’s billionaires’ use of Venice as a wedding venue. He liked booking entire ocean liners to take him and his friends to Scotland.

Yet he seems to have accepted that mortality imposes a deadline on every life. Carnegie thought that moral obligations came with that deadline. He argued in his 1889 essay The Gospel of Wealth that great fortunes should be regarded as held in trust for the benefit of society. We should ask why his most famous injunction seems more striking today than when it was originally proposed: “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

Carnegie chose institutional immortality over biological immortality. He now lives on vicariously through the good works of Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Institution for Science.

Extreme wealth now seems to promise experiences that Carnegie could scarcely have imagined—the possibility of colonizing other planets and the hope that aging itself might become optional. Proselytisers of the Gospel of Wealth among today’s tech elite should welcome reminders of the gap between fantasy and reality that come from an unexpected medical diagnosis.

Carnegie sought a form of immortality that biology could never provide—institutions that would outlive him and continue serving future generations. Johnson’s diagnosis is a reminder that the dream of defeating death remains uncertain. Suppose his remarkable experiment ultimately teaches us less about escaping mortality and more about living wisely in its shadow. That may turn out to be his most enduring contribution.

Nicholas Agar is a New Zealand professor of ethics at the University of Waikato and the author of Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement.

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Written by Rosemary Hopcroft.

My most cited paper to date, ‘Sex, Status, and Reproductive Success in the Contemporary U.S.’ was initially rejected by the very journal that eventually published it: Evolution and Human Behavior. Although no stranger to rejection, I couldn’t believe it. I thought that if anyone would want the paper, they would.

The paper reported a positive relationship between personal income and number of biological children for men—but not women—using data from a representative 1994 sample of the U.S. population. These data were unusual at the time in that they included information on men’s fertility as well as women’s. By submitting it to Evolution and Human Behavior, I thought I was offering exactly the kind of paper the journal existed to publish. Yet they didn’t want it.

I hadn’t bothered to send it to a journal in my own discipline of sociology. At the time, evolutionary ideas applied to human social behavior were effectively unmentionable. This is despite the fact that the discipline prided itself on theoretical pluralism. The phrase “let a thousand flowers bloom” was widely invoked—all theoretical flowers, it seemed, except that one.

My mentor, Pierre van den Berghe, knew this all too well. Although internationally respected, he was consistently excluded from the mainstream of the sociology department where I was a graduate student, and few students wanted to work with him. There were private jokes and open laughter—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—at his expense.

I remember one occasion when he carefully explained to a sociologist colleague the evolutionary reason why she had obtained certain empirical findings. He wrote out the explanation on a single sheet of yellow legal paper, filling the entire page, and gave it to her. I know this because she pinned it to the wall of her office, adding the sardonic caption: “And that’s how it is!”

Pierre continued trying to educate his sociologist colleagues, often with a memorable turn of phrase. “We (humans) are unique, but we are not unique in being unique” he wrote in an important paper entitled ‘Why most sociologists don’t (and won’t) think evolutionarily’. I have memories of my embarrassed self squirming during departmental seminars when he delivered forthright and often colorful evolutionary explanations.

But Pierre was tenured and seemed to enjoy provoking his fellow sociologists. Épater la bourgeoisie (“shock the bourgeoise”) as they say in his native language. Yet, like many academics, I am sure he would have welcomed their respect. I once told him that one of his colleagues had remarked to another graduate student, “You can’t argue with him—he has an answer for everything.” Pierre was delighted. And, indeed, he usually did have an answer for everything.

As the child of an Australian physician and medical researcher, I had grown up hearing evolutionary theory applied to human behavior. Ironically, I probably pursued a PhD in sociology partly as a reaction against some of my father’s ideas. Even so, it never seemed reasonable to me to dismiss evolutionary theory out of hand.

Pierre was constantly suggesting empirical tests of evolutionary hypotheses using sociological data, but statistical analysis was not his forte and relevant data often did not exist. Having studied anthropology at the Sorbonne, he had been trained in the grand French tradition of ethnography, and his appointment at the University of Washington was joint in both Sociology and Anthropology.

As a sociology graduate student, I could have done some of the analyses he suggested, but I did not dare. I knew from watching what happened to Pierre that basing my dissertation on evolutionary theory was a surefire route to academic unemployment. Instead, I relied on a theory that was somewhat more acceptable at the time—rational choice theory. Eventually, I obtained a tenure-track position and, in due course, tenure.

But once you know something, you cannot unknow it. Evolutionary ideas continued to percolate in my mind. Having children also gave me a much deeper appreciation of the emotional and psychological mechanisms described by evolutionary psychologists. I was delighted to watch evolutionary psychology develop as a field, and my curiosity persisted.

After I received tenure, I decided I might as well test some evolutionary hypotheses. Frankly, I assumed that my sociology colleagues didn’t read what I published anyway. As long as I produced enough publications for my annual performance review, I expected everything would be fine. (And it would have been if I had done a better job of keeping my mouth shut.)

What better hypothesis to examine than the classic evolutionary prediction of a positive relationship between social status and fertility? Sociologists and demographers dismissed the idea, as everyone knew that status and fertility were negatively associated in developed societies. But as Pierre repeatedly pointed out, demographers always measured women’s fertility, not men’s. When I found data on the biological fertility of a nationally representative sample of American men, collected as part of a module attached to the 1994 General Social Survey, I thought: why not investigate?

The results were striking. For men, personal income and number of biological children were significantly positively related. For women, I found the opposite pattern. Time has been kind to those results. In 2018, I was fascinated to learn from a Swedish researcher that what had been true of American men in 1994 was also true among younger cohorts of Swedish men and even women. The changing relationship between status and fertility in affluent societies—against the backdrop of historically low fertility rates—is now well documented. Fertility has declined most sharply among those with the lowest levels of income and education.

Yet when I first tried to publish my paper in the early 2000s, no one wanted it. I did not even consider submitting it to a sociology journal. Instead, I sent it to journals that I thought might be receptive. Each one of them rejected it. Eventually, I shamelessly picked up the phone and argued my case to the editor of Evolution and Human Behavior, who ultimately agreed to publish it.

This was not easy for me at the time. I was a relatively young female academic challenging a senior male editor from another discipline. But my confidence in the robustness of the findings outweighed my reluctance. I confess I did it once again, years later, with a different editor from the same journal. I thank both of them for their willingness to intellectually engage with me (and/or their desire to get me off the phone). I hope the success of both papers vindicates my behavior.

Now, as I discover the pleasures of being a grandmother and no longer worry about the academic rat race, I find myself thinking of my late father. I never talked to him about my research because we were estranged by the circumstances of his last marriage and the fact we lived on different continents. I would like to say to him, “Yes, you were right all along.” I also think of Pierre van den Berghe, for whom I now have an even deeper intellectual respect than when he was alive. Roll on Pierre, wherever you are.

Rosemary Hopcroft is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She is interested in applying evolutionary theory to sociological issues, as well as comparative and historical sociology.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

Somewhere there is, I am sure, an example of an online political argument that ended in a genuine change of mind. But I have yet to see it. In fact, online political argument more often divides friends than persuades enemies. Yet many of us engage in it, sometimes constantly and feverishly, like addled gamblers repeatedly pulling the lever of a losing slot machine. Twitter, for example, is full of debate—most of which seems designed to exacerbate disagreement and rancor, not mitigate it.

This appears to falsify a simplistic but superficially plausible view of the goals and functions of political behavior and, indeed, of the human mind itself: that we try to discover what is true about the world and then persuade other people. The predictable outcome of belittling ideological opponents or adopting extremist political slogans is certainly not that other people will be persuaded. Yet there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tweets a day that do just this, often from people of not inconsiderable intelligence.

Nor does our way of engaging with political material, newspapers, magazines and journal articles seem optimal for arriving at the truth. For many of us come to dwell in ideological cocoons, reading only material that confirms our tribe’s beliefs. And if, from time to time, we stray from that cocoon, it is only to remind ourselves just how silly or even sinister the outgroup really is. And perhaps to provide ammunition for our next tweet assailing our ideological foes with acerbic ingenuity.

This is almost certainly not the behavior one would see from a rational agent designed to pursue the truth and persuade others. Thus, we need another model of ideological behavior, one that accounts for the apparently self-defeating behavior of many ideologues.

A plausible alternative is that political beliefs, like many other higher-level beliefs with social consequences, are more about signaling tribal allegiance and competing for status and belonging than they are about discovering and converting others to the truth. From this perspective, the alienating nature of much political discourse is not a quirk or a flaw, but a design feature. Like a “Jesus Saves” shirt, a septum ring, or a tattoo of Satan, political discourse quickly and reliably sorts team us from team them.

Participants engaged in political discourse thus often act like partisan lawyers, rather than scientists attempting to ferret out the truth. They learn the claims and nomenclature of their tribe. They cite the sources their tribe approves of. And they consult alternative sources only to anticipate arguments they might be forced to rebut.

At first, these claims might seem puzzling. We might concede that humans are often rude online and that they avoid reading materials that might falsify their passionately held convictions. But to believe falsehoods? To avoid the truth altogether? That’s a stretch. Why would evolution select for an organism whose brain was not designed ultimately to seek the truth?

Tribalism.

Evidence suggests that mortal human competition is old and ubiquitous. Throughout human evolution, coalitions assembled and struggled for limited resources such as territory, food, water and mates. At best, the vanquished were relegated to less desirable lands; at worst, they were slaughtered. Fossilized indicators of violent death are common, and support this gloomy vision of human nature and the pervasiveness of violence and competitiveness.

Tribal conflict is not an anomaly. It is not the creation of capitalism or modernity. It is an enduring feature of humans and is likely ineradicable.

Four thousand years ago, it might have manifested as violent warfare; today, it might manifest as rhetorical jousting on social media. But whatever its modern shape, it is important to understand that it was constant and potentially mortal throughout human history, creating intense selection pressures for tribal behavior, including an ability to discriminate between ingroup and outgroup members; a propensity to punish disloyal or ineffective ingroup members; and a propensity to reward loyal and effective ingroup members, generally with resources and prestige.

Tribes face an information problem because a person’s level of loyalty is often difficult to ascertain. Maybe Bobby is just pretending to be loyal and at the first sign of impending conflict, he will flee to the enemy. Maybe Jill is just pretending to be loyal to obtain status and resources before joining another tribe. A tribe infiltrated by frauds, cheats and skeptics is a weak tribe indeed. Like a flawed crystal, it easily fractures, the shards being anything from hurt feelings to thousands of dead men and women.

One potential solution to this problem is the development of costly signals of loyalty. These are signals that loyal members can afford to display but that most disloyal members cannot or will not. For example, a sincere Catholic may be willing to spend many hours at church, may learn Ecclesiastical Latin, and may assent to beliefs that many outsiders view as ridiculous. A fraudulent Catholic would not.

Thus beliefs themselves can be particularly useful costly signals of tribal loyalty precisely because they might alienate outgroup members. I will explain these costs in more detail, but for now, let us accept that beliefs can function as signals of tribal affiliation.

Before proceeding, it is important to understand that the human mind is not a truth-maximizing machine; it is a fitness enhancing machine. Other things equal, it maximizes reproductive fitness. And thus it must assess not just the epistemic costs and benefits of belief, but all the costs and benefits, including the social ones. And that means that it often believes things that are false or implausible if those things are socially rewarded.

One might reasonably retort: but surely false beliefs are incredibly costly? Believing that a deadly plant is not poisonous, after all, might end your life in a few hours. No more life, no more children. That is pretty bad for reproductive fitness. Surely it would be better to behave and believe rationally, while lying if necessary about socially important beliefs. If you are born into a group that believes that trees are evil spirits descended from Gorgonos, a three-headed lion spirit, then just say, “Sure, I believe in Gorgonos and in the supernatural trees” publicly, while privately maintaining an accurate representation of the world.

Two responses. First, lies might be more expensive than false beliefs. A lie requires monitoring two conflicting representations, those that you really believe and those that you only pretend to believe. For some things, this is not particularly difficult. Answering ,“Yes I finished my homework” without having even opened the book is presumably as natural to a kid as feigning death is to an opossum. And it does not require much cognitive sophistication.

But for other things, lying is more difficult because it requires constant tracking of complicated representations. Telling some people that you believe in elaborate metaphysical doctrines when you do not might become cognitively taxing. You must take the time to learn the doctrines, and you must distinguish those to whom you can tell the truth from those to whom you must lie. Moreover, you must hope that you do not accidentally reveal your true beliefs. And that only takes one slip in potentially many thousands of yearly interactions.

Furthermore, social groups are not naïve. They know that people often feign belief to receive the benefits of membership. Therefore, they vet potential members, watching constantly for signs of dishonesty. And these signs can be quite subtle.

Suppose, for example, you are not a radical feminist, but all the powerful professors at your university are. So you pretend. You are eating lunch with a few professors when a provocative student peaks in and cracks a joke that might be vaguely sexist. How should you respond? A true believer does not explicitly think about this: he just becomes offended. But a liar? Well, he must simulate the emotional reaction of a believer, then decide the appropriate response. And that small hesitation might give him away. “Did you see John chuckle slightly at that repulsive joke? I sure did.”

Thus group vetting may have selected for various kinds of self-deception and erroneous beliefs, because groups make the task of lying more difficult while potentially increasing the value of a genuinely held false belief.

And second, as thinkers from Sigmund Freud to Robert Kurzban have argued, the human mind is dynamic and contradictory—it can produce multiple representations about the world that are not necessarily consistent with each other. In other words, it can compartmentalize. And this compartmentalization insulates a person from the full costs of holding false beliefs. A person might believe both that prayer really works and also that if a ship is sinking, one should do everything to survive, not sit quietly in the corner asking for God to intervene.

Notice that different types of beliefs have different costs and benefits. What we might call ideological beliefs (e.g., “tradition is a source of wisdom”) are often only vaguely related to concrete empirical claims (e.g., “a diet lacking in vegetables is bad”), whereas, what we might call practical beliefs (e.g., “I should drive early in the morning to beat traffic”) are more closely related.

At the same time, ideological beliefs might have important social consequences, whereas practical beliefs do not because almost everyone believes them, and they do not distinguish the loyal from the disloyal, the orthodox from the heretic.

The fitness value of a belief, to formalize this, is the sum of the social and the empirical benefits minus the social and the empirical costs.

If the human mind is capable of distinguishing these beliefs because it receives differential feedback about them, then a single mind might come to embrace ideological beliefs that are contradicted by its own practical or empirical beliefs.

Consider, for example, the belief in a blissful afterworld. I have known people who sincerely believe, so far I can tell, that all human souls will eventually be saved and spend eternity in a state of ecstasy. One consequence of this, one might think, is that they would be rather insouciant about dying. If the result of death is bliss, then death is not so bad. Yet these same people certainly seemed to hold the practical belief that death is terrible and to be avoided.

This can give rise to what we might call the sincere hypocrite—the person who sincerely believes an ideological claim while also sincerely believing practical and empirical beliefs that appear to contradict it.

Consider the vocalist in a politically radical rock band (The Mad Marxists) that advocates communism. He may sincerely believe that capitalism is an exploitative and immoral system while also benefiting from its fruits and negotiating his contracts ruthlessly. Imagine, for example, his record label offering his band 500k. He retorts, “Absolutely not. We are worth more than that. Why, just last year, we sold three million records. Do you have another band selling that many records?!”

Although he may genuinely detest capitalism, he also seems to accept premises about supply and demand and the legitimacy of worth in such a market. Of course, he might argue that even anti-capitalists have to work within the capitalist system, and these might even be reasonable arguments. (Anti-monarchists, after all, had to participate in a monarchist society.) Whatever the validity of such arguments, the more important point here is that one’s ideological beliefs might contradict one’s practical beliefs and one might not even see the contradiction unless forced to do so.1

Now consider the immediate costs and benefits of ideological belief (“capitalism is a vampire that sucks the world dry!”) to this hypothetical marxist singer. His band’s identity is formed around denouncing capitalism. If the singer read some Friedrich Hayek or Russ Roberts and thought, “You know what, I’ve been wrong about this. It’s virtually impossible to create a prosperous planned economy,” and then went public with his change of mind, it would ruin his band and likely many of his friendships. His status would plummet.

At the same time, his false belief that communism is better than capitalism is virtually costless, at least epistemologically. It does not affect his day-to-day behavior. It does not affect his contract negotiations. It does not even affect public policy, since even if he persuaded one hundred thousand fans to become communists, few of them would vote and the country would remain capitalist. He would still enjoy the fruits of capitalism while denouncing its supposed crimes.

But then what is the cost of the belief? The whole point of beliefs as signals is that they’re costly. But if the cost is largely not in the possession of wrong beliefs, then what is it in? My best guess is that the chief cost is in alienating outgroup members. Take, for example, the political slogan “Transwomen are women.” This belief reliably signals commitment to progressivism because it rankles, irritates, and antagonizes those who are not progressives.

If you are on a date with a person whose politics you do not know, and you assert confidently, “Transwomen are women,” they might respond favorably, or they might end the date very quickly. The foregone relationship, or the risk of losing access to certain social networks, represents a genuine opportunity cost. The signal is costly not because it leads immediately to maladaptive behaviors such as eating poisons or treating men as women, but rather because it alters one’s set of potential social relationships. In effect, it narrows one’s social network and makes it more costly to defect from the group (progressives, in this case).

Notice that this has a perverse effect: the more alienating the belief, the most socially costly it is, the more reliably it functions as an honest signal of group loyalty. The sentiment, “I believe in reasonably generous immigration policies, but recognize that there are complicated tradeoffs” might be laudably humble and conciliatory, but for that very reason it is not an effective tribal signal.

On the other hand, the sentiment, “No human is illegal” is much more audacious, suggesting, as it does, that borders themselves are illegitimate. And for that reason, it is also a more effective tribal signal. The person who asserts that no human is illegal is risking irking others—sometimes even to the point of severing friendships. This is why house signs generally do not say, “We believe in reasonable immigration polices that respect national sovereignty.” House signs are not designed to persuade or inform; they are designed to signal tribal loyalty.

Here it is useful to distinguish this model of political beliefs from another prominent signaling account of political beliefs: Rob Henderson’s luxury beliefs. According to Henderson, luxury beliefs are “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.” Put more technically, the claim seems to be that luxury beliefs are differentially costly, imposing greater marginal cost on the working class than on the rich.

Henderson thus contends that luxury beliefs are like luxury goods or tastes: they honestly signal status, wealth, leisure and so forth. But, in my view, this analogy is flawed because luxury beliefs do not really function like luxury goods or tastes.

Let’s take luxury goods first because they are the most straightforward. Consider a Porsche. The cost is immediate and obvious: it is very expensive. Therefore, it reliably signals wealth. People who are struggling to pay for their monthly groceries are unable to purchase a Porsche and then keep up with the insurance payments. And, importantly, luxury goods are impressive to most audiences. In other words, their signaling value is not tribal; it is universal. Even the woman who blasts Rage Against the Machine and makes “Fuck the system” her life slogan would probably admire a guy driving a Porsche, in spite of her own stated desires.

Now, let’s take luxury tastes, which are a bit more complicated. Consider the claim “I love Cicero’s Latin prose.” The cost is obvious. In the United States of 2026, very few people learn Latin. And learning Latin as an adult is very difficult. It requires thousands of hours of leisure time and a high-level of verbal intelligence. Therefore, if somebody says, “I love the Latin of Cicero” and then says, “Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?” one can reasonably infer that the person is intelligent, conscientious, and has ample free time—in other words, that the person has high intellectual capital.

Like luxury goods, luxury tastes are often impressive to most audiences. Even the humble midwesterner who abhors intellectual pretentiousness would probably admire a person who can quote Cicero on demand.

Now luxury beliefs. The cost is not at all obvious. Consider a commonly cited example from Henderson: “abolish the police.” It is not costly to learn to say “abolish the police.” It is a simple slogan with some simple moral claims behind it. Henderson’s retort, I think, would be, “There is a hidden cost: rich people can get by more easily in a world where the police are abolished because they depend less on the police.” According to his model, an insulating variable buffers the rich person from the costs of the signal, but not the working-class person.2 In this case, the insulating variable is living in peaceful communities with private security.

Leaving aside some complications about what counts as the working class, there are two problems here. First, if the insulating variable is the key, the people who should advocate most strongly for abolishing the police are those who live in relatively crime-free, rural communities—so people who live in small towns in Iowa, Montana, Wyoming and so forth, who protect themselves with guns because the two or three police officers in the town would take thirty minutes to get to their house.

But this is clearly not the pattern we see. In fact, such rural people (who tend to be Trump voters) are some of the least likely to support “abolish the police.” In other words, the proposed insulating variable is not really a good predictor of support for “abolish the police.” Ideological alignment is.3

And second, even if the structure of the costs were as Henderson contends, this would create a kind of social signaling dilemma in which the optimal move is still to signal. That is, even if “abolish the police” would actually hurt the working class more than the rich, the optimal move for any particular member of the working class would be to signal and receive the benefits for doing so.

Consider this from the working-class persons’s perspective. He can either not signal, in which case he does not get the status benefit. But other working-class people might signal anyway, getting the status benefit and causing the policy to be enacted. Or he can signal, in which case he at leasts gets the status benefit, even if he also pays the costs of the policy. In many realistic cases of this dilemma, signaling is the dominant strategy and it is always better to signal.

To formalize this in a simplistic way, the utility of signaling equals the status benefit minus the personal cost times the additional probability that an individual’s signal may lead to the adoption of the policy.

In many cases, the additional probability that any individual person’s signal will in fact lead to the adoption of the policy in question is very low. If Thomas, a man who works at a factory in a dangerous neighborhood in Atlanta, espouses the belief that we should abolish the police, his actual effect on the policy landscape would be virtually zero. Thus, if he could get any status benefit for signaling, it would be worth it from a fitness perspective.

Notice also that unlike luxury goods and luxury tastes, luxury beliefs are not impressive to most audiences. They are not universal.

If you are out with a man on a date, and you say, “I just think it’s important to abolish the police,” his reaction will depend almost entirely on his politics. If he’s a conservative, he will think, “Ugh, she’s a progressive. I should have known.” Whereas if he’s a progressive, he might think, “Ah, we share values. This is promising.” In fact, most of the proposed luxury beliefs in the literature seem designed to be maximally vexing to conservatives. They do not function like luxury goods or luxury tastes; rather, they function like progressive tribal beliefs.

This is not to say that the cost-structure Henderson attributed to luxury beliefs is uninteresting. There may very well be beliefs that signal some quality to others because the believer is relatively insulated from the costs. Somebody who finds the flavor of meat repugnant might more easily espouse that belief that “Meat is murder,” for example. Or somebody who is sexually undesirable might more easily espouse the belief that “Sex outside of marriage is sinful.” But I do not think we would refer to these as luxury beliefs, and I also do not think the most commonly cited examples of luxury beliefs fit this pattern. But they do fit the pattern of tribal signaling.

If we understand political belief in this way, we can understand why political beliefs are so divisive and why online environments are particularly caustic. In real-world communities, people of course still belong to different tribes and still signal with alienating slogans. But in such communities the value of compromise is also often much higher than it is online.

For in real-world communities, people have to live work, and cooperate with each other—behaviors which make life better for everyone. Contentious political disagreements can interfere with cooperation and can lead to costly bickering and social breakdown. Thus, compromise is important.

Because of this, even dedicated political partisans might value compromise and discourage their own tribe from engaging in rhetoric that is too incendiary. At the little league game, saying, “Immigrants are criminals who are poisoning the country” probably will not be well received, even by border hawks. Families want to maintain comity so they can continue to engage in a cooperative venture (baseball) that is valuable for the children.

The value of compromise online, however, is substantially lower. In fact, compromise online is often seen as a weakness, a failure, a sign that one will retreat when the battle begins. Extremity is rewarded, even if many people privately think, “Yeah, that’s probably a bit much.” If nothing else, it captures attention, which is in limited supply online. At the backyard barbecue, you might be competing for attention with ten to twenty other people; online, you are competing with tens of thousands of people.

Furthermore, in real-world communities there are many other ways to display costly commitment to a cause. You can dutifully show up to meetings. You can knock on doors. You can display thorough knowledge of your tribe’s views. And so on. Online, the ways to display costly commitment to a cause are more scarce. You do not usually attend meetings online. You do not often write long policy papers or answers interrogations about tribal beliefs.

Thus, the alienating cost becomes possibly the preeminent signaling cost. And participants compete to provoke the most outrage in the outgroup. This is probably why people on Twitter often boast about being “blocked” by somebody from the outgroup. “Look, I’m so dedicated to the cause, so fiery and formidable, that I was blocked by this prominent member of their tribe!”

Before concluding, one might reasonably ask: If everything in this article is true, how do we ever discover the the truth? How have we flown men to the moon, created smartphones, and so forth?

Although this is not a simple question, my best guess is that philosophy and then institutionalized science were the most important historical developments—philosophy because it often highlights contradictions between different levels of representations, and institutionalized science because it incentivizes empirical accuracy over tribal signaling.

But whatever the answer, I think this is the right question. Instead of asking how we come to hold false beliefs at the abstract (ideological) level, we should ask how we ever come to hold true beliefs.

Only roughly twenty-six hundred years ago, Thales speculated that everything was made from water. Now, physicists believe that everything is made from atoms that are so small there are some twenty to sixty quintillion of them in a single grain of sand. As economists are fond of saying, incentives matter. Science incentivizes truth. Politics incentives signals of loyalty. Science gives us the Neanderthal genome; politics gives us the “I love liberal tears” coffee mug.

To conclude, the human mind has a complicated, dynamic structure and is capable of generating and believing many contradictory beliefs at different levels of representation. Being trained or predisposed to care about consistency, philosophers may find this obnoxious, but it is not pathological. In fact, I’d wager that all of us have some contradictory beliefs. Because of this, we are often insulated from the epistemological effects of holding erroneous high-level beliefs. We may sincerely believe that God intervenes in the world, while also believing that emergencies require action, not patience while we wait for divine aid.

This means that the costs and benefits of high-level beliefs are predominantly social. Such beliefs are used to signal loyalty to tribes (and perhaps sophistication and social capital). These signals of loyalty do not need to be true; they only need to be costly. One important cost they can bear is the alienation of outgroup members. Thus, slogans that are extreme and antagonistic are often more useful to political tribes than those that are reasonable and conciliatory.4

Political debates, especially online political debates, do not persuade people because they are not especially designed to. They are designed to allow partisans to signal their tribal allegiances. Given this, the miracle is not that social media is as full of rancor and hostility as it is, but that it’s not full of more.

Bo Winegard is an Editor of Aporia.

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Written by Noah Carl.

There’s a certain type of liberal centrist commentator who really cares about immigration—or, more precisely, about opposing restrictions on immigration. For such individuals, there are a few positions more detestable than wanting to drastically curb the number of migrants entering the country.

These commentators are typically highly educated. They’re often academics. Many of them departed for Bluesky when Elon Musk took over Twitter (as a way to protest the rise in anti-immigration1 and racist content that followed his acquisition of the platform). They tend to think of themselves as the “adults in the room”. Being seen as outward-looking and cosmopolitan is a core part of their identity.

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Written by Peter Frost.

If as race realists seem to believe higher intelligence reliably produces civilizational superiority, then East Asian civilizations should have dominated the world. The most technically capable civilizations on earth, possessing ships and navigational tools that their competitors lacked, looked out at the wider world and largely declined to conquer it.
—S.R. Kanobana, ‘What if race realists are right?’

Why didn’t East Asians use their civilizational advantage to conquer new lands Actually, they did, and long before Western Europeans. The Han subjugated what is now South China and large parts of central Asia. On a smaller scale, Vietnam embarked on a southward push from the tenth century onward:

But this expansionism then gave way to self-imposed isolation — through the various Haijin policies of China beginning in the fourteenth century, the Sakoku policy of Japan from 1603 to 1868, and the Soeguk jeongchaek policy of nineteenth-century Korea. The main reason was fear of disruptive foreign influences, particularly via Christian missionaries.

If East Asia had not gone down this path, the last few centuries would have been rather different, with China absorbing much of Southeast Asia, and Japan becoming an imperial power much earlier.

The Japanese, remember them? Once they left their bubble, they lost no time getting into the game. By mid-1942, their empire comprised 12-15% of the world’s population, with close to a million Japanese settled in Manchuria, over 700,000 in Korea, and 300,000 in Taiwan, plus many more to come…

Yet Kanobana is right when he says that “the highest-IQ populations on the planet [did] not produce the grandest empires.” Whereas East Asian imperialism remained regional, European imperialism became decidedly global. Why?

Fear of foreign religions

Again, the main cause was self-imposed isolation at a time when European powers were pushing into the Americas, Africa and Asia. When Japan finally opened up to the world, there wasn’t much left to take — other than China and lands already taken by European powers.

The self-imposed isolation was driven mostly by a longstanding fear of foreign influences — especially foreign religions that promised a better life after death in exchange for renouncing betterment in the here and now. A millennium earlier, many Chinese were living in Buddhist monastic communities. One historian alleges that northern China had some 40,000 temples and 3,000,000 monks and nuns — more than a tenth of the population.1 These figures seem inflated, yet we have the example of neighboring Tibet, where monks once made up 13% of the population and 26% of the men.2

The loss of productive workers alarmed government officials, like this one in the eighth century:3

Today the Buddhist and Taoist clergy throughout the empire eat but do not till, clothe themselves but do not weave. They disseminate dangerous talk and harmful theories with which to deceive the ignorant. The annual cost of food and clothing for a single monk amounts to some thirty thousand cash. The taxes supplied by five adults do not equal that amount.

There were also demographic consequences. Monks rejected marriage, produced no heirs, and recognized no obligations to their parents — all this, to free themselves from earthly concerns and attain nirvāņa. These aims stood in contrast to those of Confucianism, which viewed the family as the foundation of society.4

Things came to a head in the ninth century, when the state forced nearly 300,000 monks and nuns to return to secular life, while confiscating temple properties and melting down statues to make coins.5 Eventually, the monasteries were allowed to operate — on the condition of being registered and taxed. They also had to accept the state’s role in approving high-ranking monastic leaders.

Thus, when Christian missionaries arrived in the sixteenth century, they were seen as bringing the same evils their Buddhist precursors had brought. By promoting celibacy and undermining family loyalty, these foreign religions challenged the Confucian view of life as a debt to be repaid to one’s ancestors and descendants.

No constraints on bad emperors or bad decisions

Empire-building was constrained not only by fear of foreign religions but also by lack of continuity in governance. The achievements of one emperor could be undone by the failures of the next. As Francis Fukuyama points out:6

In dynastic China, this was known as the “bad emperor” problem: Every now and then, a terrible tyrant would emerge and burst the boundaries of custom and accepted morality, doing enormous damage to the society.

For Fukuyama, even good emperors were not above this problem. “Even if a despot is benevolent, how does he or she know, in the absence of a free press and formal procedures such as elections that reveal preferences, what the common interest is?”7

European empires were more sustainable because religion acted as a check on state overreach. Christianity created parishes, schools, hospitals, universities, ecclesiastical courts and, more broadly, what we call “the rule of law” — all of which existed alongside the state and, to some degree, above it. In East Asia, religious institutions were weaker, less independent and less developed. State institutions were therefore less constrained, being accountable solely to the state.

Fukuyama’s argument overlaps with one advanced by Jonathan Schulz in a study of global variation in human psychology: Christianity replaced a situational morality based on kinship with a universal one of fair play toward kin and non-kin alike. This morality took root especially in northwest Europe, where human relations have long been characterized by weak kinship ties, nuclear families, late marriage and solitary living for at least part of adulthood. In such an environment, people “tend to be more individualistic, independent, analytically minded, and impersonally prosocial (e.g., trusting of strangers) while revealing less conformity, obedience, in-group loyalty, and nepotism.”8

Schulz attributes this mindset to the efforts of the Western Church, based in Rome, which banned cousin marriages up to the seventh degree. He argues that this ban promoted individualism by breaking up clans. However, a taboo against cousin marriage seems to have prevailed even in pre-Christian times, notably among the pagan Germanic peoples. The initial ban was taken from the Visigothic Code in the seventh century, and writers used the term “Germanic” to describe the stricter method, adopted in the ninth century, for calculating forbidden degrees of marriage.9 Also, studies of ancient DNA show a very low rate of cousin marriage in pre-Christian Western Europe.10

The Western Church probably adopted an existing taboo against cousin marriage in line with its policy of Christianizing pagan customs. As the new faith moved further west and north, it assimilated local traditions, including mental and behavioral norms.11

Western Christianity thus became focused on individualism, universal morality, original sin and the need to manage feelings of guilt. This mental and behavioral package — now enforced more effectively by the Church through its superior organization — helped create a society based more on universal rules than on shared kinship.

This was the magic bullet that led to global dominance by people who had hitherto lived on the fringes of the known world. Western Europeans proved to be better at building societies that encompassed not only close kin and close friends but also millions who might not even know each other.

Conclusion

East Asians failed to build global empires for two reasons: (1) self-imposed isolation, motivated mainly by fear of Christianity and the disruptive effects it might have; and (2) a failure to build institutions that can act independently of the state and limit its excesses.

In Europe, such institutions were built by the church. Does this mean that East Asia made a mistake in keeping Christianity out?

Not necessarily. A religion may have different consequences in different populations. Among practicing Buddhists, monks were much less widespread in India than in Tibet, where they became 26% of the male population. China might have become a second Tibet, with a similar level of material development, if it had treated this foreign faith more leniently.

Buddhist missionaries exploited a weakness of East Asians — low time preference, which leads to lifelong anxiety about death and the hereafter. Would Christian missionaries have exploited this weakness with even more success? And would they have been even more successful in undermining family loyalty?

In East Asia, Christianity has gone furthest in South Korea, where it is the largest organized religion and has converted almost a third of the population. Initially, converts destroyed their ancestral tablets and refused to bow before the corpse, tomb or picture of a deceased parent. Such practices are still condemned by the Protestant churches.12

Traditionally, ancestral reverence is seen as part of a social contract between the generations — as the glue that holds them together:13

Offspring are indebted to parents for the love and sacrifices of the latter during their earliest years. The care and support of elderly parents is a repayment, though inevitably inadequate, of this indebtedness … Korean children are not encouraged to be independent of their parents. Instead, parents view children as extensions of themselves and inculcate children with a spirit of mutual dependency between successive generations.

This view clashes with Western individualism: “Not only do American parents encourage their children to be independent and self-reliant in their earliest years, but parents are also extremely loathe to become dependent on their adult offspring in old age”.14

Elder care seems to be an Achilles heel of South Korea and, more broadly, the formerly Confucian countries of East Asia:15

While American caregivers cited love and affection more frequently, Korean caregivers emphasized that their motivations were primarily based on filial responsibility, strongly influenced by the Confucian sentiment, including three core values: (1) respect for parents, (2) family harmony, and (3) sacrifice for parents.

As these values disappear, elderly parents no longer receive the same support. Many turn to suicide: “South Korea’s elderly suicide rate is not merely the highest among the member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, it is the highest in the world.”16

South Korea also has the world’s lowest fertility rate, at only 0.8 children per woman.17 Relatedly, it has the highest rate of single-person households at 42%.18 Could all this be due to the replacement of Confucianism with Western individualism? China is not far behind. In fact, it might soon overtake South Korea in the race to the bottom.

This is what happens when the software of Western culture is run on the hardware of Eastern minds. Such an outcome was already foreseen a half-millennium ago, when East Asians put a stop to their empire-building and withdrew into isolation.

Peter Frost has a PhD in anthropology from Université Laval. His main research interest is the role of sexual selection in shaping highly visible human traits. Find his newsletter here.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

Endorse it. Applaud it. Celebrate it. But whatever you do, do not call it replacement.

The share of whites is declining in the countries their ancestors built. Not by chance. Not by accident. And not by some inexorable law of social gravity. But by conscious policy decisions. Without hyperbole, one might say that elites have purposefully pursued immigration policies, including lenient enforcement of borders, that have radically changed the demographics of Western countries—the primary effect being the diminishment of white majorities.

And yet, the claim that whites are being replaced by the concerted efforts of elites is not only rejected in mainstream discourse; it is condemned as a dangerous conspiracy theory. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, replacement theory is “a far-right conspiracy” which has been “widely ridiculed for its absurdity.” According to PBS, it is a “conspiracy theory [that] says there’s a plot to diminish the influence of white people.” And according to the New York Times, it is a “racist, sexist doctrine” spreading in “far-right circles.”

Across mainstream outlets, the rhetoric is almost identical. Those who believe that whites are being replaced are ridiculed as “far-right” or “extremists” who hold “conspiratorial beliefs.” Often, these discussions—or should I say, denunciations, for they are rarely discussions—conflate different views about white decline, suggesting that anybody who believes that the decline of whites is being caused by intentional policy decisions also believes that such decisions are heavily influenced by a coven of nefarious Jews.

The goal is obvious: make reasonable skeptical conversation about demographic change nearly impossible. Thus, replacement becomes the ghost that only materializes for applause. If you celebrate it, it exists; if you denounce it, it not only disappears but becomes a symptom of some feverish political delusion.

The goal in this essay is to address replacement theory dispassionately as something between an empirical hypothesis and a political narrative. Though I focus especially on the United States, similar analysis likely applies to other Western countries.

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Written by Noah Carl.

Western Europe and its offshoots (the US, Canada etc.) have gone further than any other countries in embracing “diversity” and admitting culturally dissimilar migrants. Both of America’s two largest states, California and Texas, are now majority minority. More than 40% of school children in the Austrian capital of Vienna identify as Muslim. Out of 25 players on the French national football squad, only five are of European ethnic origin. And leading institutions in North America openly discriminate against white men.

Western Europe and its offshoots also score lowest on measures of racism. For example, the World Values Survey asks respondents whether they would dislike having “people of a different race” as neighbours.1 West Europeans, North Americans and Anglo-Oceanians are among the least likely to say that they would. People in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa are far more likely to answer in the affirmative. (South Americans resemble West Europeans in their answers, which makes sense given that many have Spanish, Portuguese or Italian heritage.)

Not only that, but Western Europe and its offshoots consistently come lowest on measures of nepotism and in-group orientation. As Joe Henrich writes in his book The WEIRDest People in the World, “WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do”.2

All this evidence has led some scholars to suggest that West Europeans are selected, culturally and genetically, for lower ethnocentrism—that they’re simply less ethnocentric than other populations. Kevin MacDonald makes this case in his book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition. Ed Dutton puts forward similar arguments in Race Differences in Ethnocentrism. And while Henrich doesn’t use the term “ethnocentrism”, he does claim that WEIRD psychology (including less favouritism toward co-ethnics) came about through a long process of cultural evolution, beginning in the 4th century.

Each of these authors has a slightly different theory for the origin of low West European ethnocentrism (though they share common elements). But I won’t get into the details here. The point is that all three suggest that low West European ethnocentrism is something that emerged gradually over many centuries of cultural and/or genetic evolution. Which seems to imply that, by the 20th century, West Europeans had a relatively weak disposition toward ethnocentrism.3

The problem with all these theories is that there’s one huge, glaring counter-example: Nazi Germany (along with related movements in other parts of central Europe). Nathan Cofnas has raised this point in one of his papers:

Germans in 1933 presumably would have reported very high levels of ethnocentrism in a survey … Now it is taboo to express such opinions. In 1933, Germans elected Hitler. In 2005, Germans with basically the same genes as their grandparents elected Angela Merkel, and largely supported her project of bringing in (what will end up being) millions of nonwhite immigrants.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

When I was young, I had a morbid fascination with VHS horror movie covers. The more macabre they were, the more captivating. Most of the films were tasteless, even boring, and many would likely have held little interest for me were it not for one simple but powerful fact: I was not supposed to watch them. And because I was not supposed to watch them, I wanted to watch them. They acquired a transgressive allure.

The names of those films became almost legendary among the children in my neighborhood: Friday the 13th, Halloween, Hellraiser. It was thrilling even to catch one of them, heavily edited for cable. The blood and cursing were largely gone but the transgression was not.

This is hardly a personal idiosyncrasy. Literature, mythology, religion and cinema are filled with stories about the paradoxical seductiveness of the forbidden. Indeed, according to the Christian understanding of the world, the Fall of man began with a prohibition. God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And it was precisely this forbidden fruit that became the object of irresistible desire:

But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

The same pattern recurs throughout Western literature. Many of our most compelling tragic heroes are those who monomaniacally pursued forbidden knowledge or who stubbornly rejected the prohibitions of authority. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Faust bargained for forbidden wisdom. Satan refused to yield to God. Victor Frankenstein violated the limits of nature. Their actions often ended in catastrophe—but their rebellion, their defiance, their refusal to submit, continues to fascinate us. Why?

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Written by Narek Harutun.

Next month will see the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which has already sparked a backlash over perceived historical inaccuracies and unexpected casting choices—such as Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Travis Scott as Demodocus. I therefore wanted to revisit an article that was published a few years ago in Aeon, a usually respectable magazine, titled ‘The whitewashing of Rome’. It was authored by Jaime Mackay, a writer and translator living in Italy who’s ostensibly quite the Italophile.

Mackay begins by discussing the history of fascism in Italy, including Mussolini’s adoption of ancient Roman aesthetics. I will skip over this part. My main objection concerns Mackay’s treatment of ancient Roman history. He writes:

There is a case to be made that the Romans, through the Latin language, were the progenitors of Western culture. As members of an ancient Mediterranean society, however, they didn’t have any notion of whiteness.

This is technically true. An ancient Roman wouldn’t have looked at a Gaul or Dacian and believed they were of the same genus (a Latin term) just because they both had a light complexion. But Mackay then goes further, asserting:

One straightforward reason for this is that they weren’t, or weren’t primarily, what we’d now term white.

It’s certainly true that the Romans did not perceive themselves as members of the “white race” in the modern sense. But to assert that they were not what we would call white? That is preposterous. His primary source of evidence is an article covering a 2019 study that analysed ancient DNA from Rome during the imperial period (27 BC to 300 AD). The study found that:

Of 48 individuals sampled from this period, only two showed strong genetic ties to Europe. Another two had strong North African ancestry. The rest had ancestry connecting them to Greece, Syria, Lebanon, and other places in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East.

To state the obvious, we can hardly reach a definitive conclusion that Imperial Rome, a city of over a million people, was primarily non-white/non-European based on a sample of only 48 individuals. Still, I have to concede that the study does count as valid evidence. However, I noticed that Greece was being lumped in with Syria, Lebanon and the Middle East, so I decided to read the paper for myself. And I found other oddities.

When the authors of the study say that only two samples showed strong genetic ties to Europe, what they actually mean is strong ties to Western Europe. Southern Europe—which includes Greece, Southern Italy, Cyprus etc.—is not considered Western Europe, so it gets conveniently added to the broad category “Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East”. Which genetic clusters do the individuals in these categories belong to?

Two-thirds of Imperial individuals (31 out of 48) belong to two major clusters (C5 and C6) that overlap in PCA with central and eastern Mediterranean populations, such as those from southern and central Italy, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta.

In actual fact then, more than two thirds of the 48 individuals had ancestry linked to Europeans, while only a quarter had ancestry linked to Levantine and Near-Eastern peoples.

Now, given the history of conflict and trade, as well as sheer geographical proximity, I would have happily conceded that today’s populations from Southern Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Malta have more Middle Eastern genetic admixture than their Western European counterparts. But Mackay and his ilk will not even meet us halfway. Instead, Mediterranean peoples are sneakily cleaved away from the larger European population to which they belong.

Furthermore, writers from the Greco-Roman world did not use the word “African” to refer to the black-skinned peoples that inhabit the lands south of the Sahara, as we do today. In ancient times, “African” usually referred to either Punics, Libyans or Berbers, all of whom had what we would regard as light or olive skin, much the same as the Romans and Greeks themselves had. By contrast, “Aethiopian” was the catch-all term to describe black people (i.e., sub-Saharan Africans) like the Nubians, for example.

Mackay goes on to critique the idea that the Greco-Roman world’s iconic, plain-white marble statues constitute evidence of porcelain skin as a beauty standard:

Like others to this day, he made the mistake of assuming that the abundance of plain marble statues that remain from antiquity are evidence that Roman populations preferred white bodies to Black ones. This is wrong for many reasons. Firstly, because there are plenty of examples of statues that were made from grey, pink and green marble. More importantly, though, because literary sources tell us that almost all such works were originally painted in polychrome blues, reds and yellows.

I agree with the first half of this paragraph. Marble statues are, indeed, not evidence of what skin colours Romans considered beautiful. (The Romans did, however, view white skin as the epitome of female beauty, a point I will return to.) But the latter half leaves me confused. Does Mackay think the Romans were painting the skin of their statues in blacks, blues, reds and yellows? He omits that the polychrome paints would obviously have been applied to the clothing or armour of the statue.

In any case, Mackay continues:

Poets too have left numerous odes celebrating Black bodies: Asclepiades, an Asian physician, likens the object of his desire to a ‘coal’ that, when heated, comes to ‘glow like rosebuds’, and Martial describes a woman who is ‘darker than night, than an ant, pitch, a jackdaw, a cicada’ as an ideal of beauty.

This may be his most egregious paragraph. First, notice how he casually refers to Asclepiades as “an Asian physician”. While technically true, the lack of context almost makes me think he hoped the layman would come away with the impression that people who resembled Jackie Chan were prominent citizens in the Roman Empire. They weren’t.

In the Greco-Roman world, “Asian” was the demonym for inhabitants of Asia Minor or Anatolia, the landmass that constitutes most of today’s Turkey, which was at the time colonised and populated by Greeks, especially in the coastal regions. By the time of the late Roman Republic, “Asian” would essentially have been synonymous with “Greek from Asia Minor”. So, all of this is to say: Asclepiades was Greek.

However, the part I really want to home-in on is where Mackay cites two Roman love poems, which he argues idealise phenotypically “black” features, insufferably describing them as “Odes celebrating black bodies”. This is an example of the oft-seen mistake of failing to account for nuances in language. Consider the legendary 9th century King of Norway, Halfdan the Black. Did he have dark skin and African features? Of course not. He earned that nickname on account of his jet-black hair.

Colours can be literal descriptors of hue, as with Halfdan and his hair. Or simple means of differentiating two people who share the same name, as in the case of Alexander’s generals Cleitus the Black and Cleitus the White. But in many areas, particularly art, they are symbolically associated with abstract concepts. Predating any modern form of “racism”, humans throughout history have tended to associate white with purity and innocence and black with death and evil.

The underworld is dark; the bile of depression is black; thieves come out at night. While dark clouds portend danger, white clouds predict peace—and a serene journey for sailors. The dove and the lamb are white. The vestal virgins are clad in white. And so on.

Mackay only cites an excerpt from Martial’s poem, which describes his love interest as “darker than night, than an ant, pitch, a jackdaw, a cicada.” To really understand this you need to read the rest of the poem, which my preferred translation gives as:

She desires me – Procillus, envy me! –
one whiter than a new-wet swan,
than privet, lilies, silver, snow:
but I desire one dark as night,
cicada, black ant, pitch, or crow.
You thought to hang yourself:
I know you well, Procillus, oh, you’ll live.

Here Martial is writing to his friend Procillus, who is envious that a girl “whiter than a new-wet swan” desires Martial. As mentioned earlier, white was purity. It was femininity—the beauty standard of the times. Pale, white skin also signified aristocratic luxury, as working-class Roman women would have developed more of a tan when working outside. Skin whitening cosmetics were often used by Roman women to achieve a paler look.

Martial writes that he is attracted to the darkness of his real love interest. Dark skin may have been enthralling to someone bored by the beauty standards of the time, which were predictable, visible, bright, white. But the description may not even be a physical one. The phrase “darker than night” could very well refer to his love interest’s personality. Perhaps she was mysterious, at times frightening and dangerous, but alluring?

There are various possible interpretations, but simply describing Martial’s poem as an “ode to black bodies” is lazy. While Martial’s love interest may have had dark hair and eyes and tanned or even black skin, that was surely not the crux of his attraction to her.

Mackay proceeds to claim that there were many “nonwhite individuals” who achieved prominence in the Roman hierarchy, citing as an example Lusius Quietus, a Berber general from the 100s.

However, labelling a Berber as “nonwhite” or “African” is tricky and requires nuance. In today’s conception of “nonwhiteness” as “non-European”, a Moroccan Berber does qualify as such. Just like with certain East Asians, their skin may be as light as an Englishman’s, but they are considered non-white because they aren’t European. So, while Berber complexion can range all the way from pale to dark brown, these Berbers would be considered “nonwhite”. Wouldn’t they?

Well, it gets complicated. The U.S. Census would classify Berbers, and all other Middle Eastern or North African people, as “White/Caucasian”. How can this be? It stems from the now antiquated classification of peoples into three major racial groups: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. This system ignored skin colour and was instead defined by peoples’ morphological traits. Europeans, North Africans and Middle Easterners all shared Caucasoid features (skull shape, narrow high-bridged nose, etc.) Hence they all fell under the umbrella of “Caucasian” or “White”.

Now, while I’d argue this makes more sense than Mackay’s approach to racial classification, I wouldn’t bother to argue over it. At the end of the day, I think Berbers are Berbers. They’re an interesting and unique people—neither “white” European nor Arab nor “black” African. And they have managed to maintain their indigenous North African culture despite living under the yoke of various foreign empires for much of their history.

Mackay could have simply argued that there were a diverse range of cultures that lived and served under the banner of the late Roman Empire, and in myriad roles—from slaves to military officers. In that case, there would be little to disagree with. But instead he seems fixated on sticking it to “white supremacists”. He wants us to believe the Rome of the 1st century AD was demographically equivalent to contemporary New York City, with large shares of black and even Asian people.

It gets worse. An actual professor of Roman history from the University of London parroted the very same arguments in 2022. In his article at The Conversation, Richard Alston insinuates that emperor Septimius Severus was black because he was from North Africa, although (unlike Mackay) he is humble enough to hedge the claim:

Severus’ Blackness has historically been questioned ... We cannot prove Severus’ skin colour, but it is wrong to assume that he was light-skinned.

Alston then gives his take on the Berber theologians Cyprian of Carthage and St Augustine of Hippo, both of whom were from North Africa. He asks, “Why would we imagine any of these individuals as White?”

Again, there is a distinct lack of context. Germanic Vandals ruled parts of North Africa for a century. Are they part of black history too? Do the Afrikaners who have dwelt in South Africa since the 17th century qualify as black? I have no issue with recognising Berbers as “non-white”. My point of contention is describing olive-skinned North Africans as “black”. St Augustine of Hippo would have likely resembled a modern-day Spaniard. Are Iberians therefore black? Maybe. After all, it was Dumas who allegedly stated, “Africa begins at the Pyrenees.”

Later in his article, Alston seems to contradict himself, concluding with the patronising declaration that:

Black Romans were central to Classical culture and not as an exceptional few or as slaves or servants. They were soldiers and traders, dramatists, poets, philosophers, theologians, and emperors.

Wait. Did he not concede earlier that Septimius Severus being black is something we cannot prove? Plus, the handful of individuals he selected as evidence of “black Romans” were all North Africans/Berbers, i.e., men that probably looked similar to present-day Iberians? How then did he jump to, “Black Romans were central”?

Emperor Septimius was of Punic heritage and likely had a more swarthy tone than the average native Italic or Gallic citizen of the Empire. He was still not “black”. Not in the sense that Mackay and Alston wish to convince their audience of. The most glaring evidence is an anecdote—likely apocryphal, though still relevant—in which Septimius has an encounter with an Aethiopian (i.e., an actual black person). As the Historia Augusta recounts:

After inspecting the wall near the rampart in Britain … just as [Severus] was wondering what omen would present itself, an Ethiopian from a military unit, who was famous among buffoons and always a notable joker, met him with a garland of cypress. And when Severus in a rage ordered that the man be removed from his sight, troubled as he was by the man’s ominous colour and the ominous nature of the garland, [the Ethiopian] by way of jest cried, it is said, “You have been all things, you have conquered all things, now, O conqueror, be a god.”

Why on Earth would the emperor be troubled by the sight of the Aethiopian’s black skin and consider it a bad omen if he himself were black? Because he wasn’t. Septimius Severeus was a North African Punic.

In their quest to expose the supposed “whitewashing” of ancient Rome, Mackay and Alston ironically engage in their own version of “blackwashing”. Yes, there were black Africans in the Roman Empire, but practically all the examples given were individuals of North African origin, who presumably had olive skin and broadly “Caucasian” features. What’s more, the Romans did see light skin as the pinnacle of female beauty. And despite being slightly darker than their counterparts to the North, most ancient Romans were genetically European and therefore white.

Narek Harutun is an Armenian-Australian writer interested in history, philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology and psychology. He has a Substack and can be reached via email: sevarevcross@gmail.com.

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Written by Noah Carl.

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Written by Adam Rochussen.

If you go to Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the European Union, you’ll encounter a building with a newly unveiled banner that displays the word “DEMOCRACY” in vertical lettering. Underneath is the imperative to “PROTECT WHAT MATTERS”. This is Ursula von der Leyen’s very subtle attempt to imply that the EU represents democracy and democracy is what matters.

The appeal to democracy as an axiomatic good is pervasive. Across the world, there are hundreds of political parties with the term “democratic” (or one of its derivatives) in their name. Germany alone has a “Christlich Demokratische Union”, a “Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands” and a “Freie Demokratische Partei”. The Korean peninsula has also bought into the axiom, with the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” in the North and the “Democratic Party of Korea” ruling in the South.

In the US, we have the “Democratic Party” whose members claim to be deeply concerned about “defending democracy”. Though it’s not just the Democrats who play this game. Here in California, Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco has been trying to investigate election fraud—supposedly to defend democracy. In response, Democratic judges and politicians have been blocking him from doing so—also supposedly to defend democracy. We’ve seen dramatic gerrymandering shifts that we are told are essential to protect democracy, or at least one party’s version of it.

Democracy, in its modern manifestation, has become the ultimate thought-terminating cliché. Rarely do we see an elaboration of why democracy is good. It is simply taken for granted. What even is democracy? And where did it come from?

The myth of mob rule

“Δημοκρατία” (rule by the people) was a revolutionary Athenian idea that emerged roughly 2,500 years ago. Back then, things worked a little differently. Citizens saw political engagement as an essential duty of civic life. To be apolitical, as many profess they are nowadays, no doubt due to polarisation fatigue, carried social stigma. Instead of voting for representatives, the ancient Athenians used a lottery system, which randomly assigned a group of citizens to political office for a certain period. (Though military generals were elected.)

This had several advantages. First, the divide between politicians and citizens was non-existent. There was no such thing as a professional politician. Second, politicians weren’t constantly grovelling for votes by promising more free government money to various constituencies, such as pensioners or welfare recipients.1

They were motivated to rule well, rather than to win elections. Third, the ancient Athenian system avoided elite capture, as power was constantly being reassigned away from any one cabal. The main counter-argument to Athenian democracy is that such a direct system results in “mob rule”. Sounds scary. But is it true?

Claims of mob rule usually centre on rare, misunderstood cases. The trial and execution of Socrates is a prime example. We are told that Socrates was sentenced to death by a majority and that this is bad because we know he was a famous philosopher and therefore presumably innocent. Not quite.

History has been very kind to Socrates, mainly because much of it was written by his student Plato. In reality, Socrates was an anti-democratic (ergo, anti-Athenian) radical who many saw as complicit with the Thirty Tyrants regime—a Sparta-backed violent dictatorship that ruled Athens for eight months in 404 BC.

That regime, led by several of Socrates’ former associates, massacred thousands of Athenians without trial, confiscated private property to fund the Spartan army, and stripped citizenship from everyone who wasn’t loyal.

While the official charges raised against Socrates were quite nebulous—impiety and corrupting the youth—it is likely that his associations with the despised Thirty Tyrants regime played a role in his prosecution. (Note that, after Athenian democracy was restored, an amnesty was passed, granting immunity for crimes carried out during the tyranny.) In any case, the charges against him were perfectly consistent with Athenian law of the time.

But being sentenced to death seems a bit extreme, doesn’t it? Surely that is mob rule gone mad? Again—not quite. Under Athenian law, defendants in Socrates’s position were invited to suggest their own punishments, and Socrates initially joked that he should be rewarded, before suggesting a trivial fine. Unsurprisingly, this mockery resulted in the jurors showing him little mercy. On balance, his execution was probably justified.

Of course, technocratic critics will often cry “mob rule” whenever more political power is extended to citizens. But if the “mob” comprises intelligent and virtuous citizens, who have skin in the game and shared cultural values, then such rule is preferable to the alternative—i.e., professional politicians buying votes, and elites playing status games over which views are more fashionable.

Mob rule is only bad for the elites when ordinary people hold very different views, as seems to be increasingly the case in modern Western democracies. But it was not true in ancient Athens. There, “mob rule” was democracy, and it was good.

We don’t have real democracy

Athenian democracy was a resounding success. It lasted almost 200 years and was only brought to an end because the Athenians lost an opportunistic war against the Macedonians in the wake of the death of Alexander the Great in 322 BC. Despite constant warring, it never broke down for purely internal reasons, and most of its participants were advocates until the end. The Athenians certainly believed in democracy, and many of them died to protect it.

I would actually take Ursula von der Leyen’s advice and “protect democracy” too—if it was the Athenian kind. But today’s democracy is so far removed from Athenian democracy that the only thing tying the two systems together is the name. Before you accuse me of being too radical, I am far from alone here: half of young Britons say they would never fight to defend their country, and 77% of young Americans are physically ineligible for military service due to drug use, lack of physical fitness (being obese) or mental health problems. Most people don’t seem that keen on protecting modern “democracy” either.

The same is true of politicians. As I’ve already described, opposing parties often use the same slogan (“protecting democracy”) to support diametrically opposed policies. The issue of voter ID in the US is a case in point. Republican politicians are currently trying to pass a bill (the SAVE Act) that would make photo ID a legal requirement for voting, citing the need to protect democracy. Democratic politicians, on the other hand, are vehemently against the bill—also citing the need to protect democracy. (Apparently, legitimate voters might not have a photo ID and could therefore be disenfranchised.) This is despite Americans overwhelmingly supporting voter ID.

Politicians contravening the will of the people is remarkably common. Take the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK. A majority of people, motivated primarily by a desire to curb immigration and reduce European control over British law, voted to leave the EU. The technocrats who run the “democracy”, though, simply couldn’t bring themselves to implement the result.2 The Conservative party dragged their heels, completely lost sight of what the referendum was about, took almost four years to actually leave the EU, remained a part of the European Convention on Human Rights, and then ramped up non-EU immigration in the subsequent years.

Back in 2016, Brits were stronger believers in democracy. The referendum saw an impressive 72% turnout. As a freshly enfranchised 18-year-old, I was among the slim minority who voted “Remain”. Despite me disagreeing with the majority at the time, the unwillingness of our politicians and civil service to enact the will of the majority has only degraded my faith and that of many others in British democracy.

The same pattern emerges across other, modern democracies. Even the mighty EU has seen voter turnout in its elections decline since 1979 (albeit with a slight bump after Brexit).

Perhaps people aren’t bothering to vote because they are slowly realising that voting isn’t actually the point of democracy. Progressive movements like women’s suffrage and civil rights in the US have always focused on the universal right to vote as the ultimate end goal. This isn’t how democracy was practiced by the Athenians at all. Lest we forget, there were no votes for politicians in ancient Athens. Rule by the people meant that the people did the ruling: thousands of citizens would gather on the Pynx Hill, discuss motions, and pass them by a simple show of hands. The voting came with the debate. If you weren’t present, you didn’t get to vote.

We are so far removed from the Athenian ideal today that we have lost sight of this notion of civic engagement (beyond marking a ballot every few years). We feel like we’re a part of the debate because we watch clickbait arguments on YouTube, and laugh at clips of the least charitable renditions of our opponents’ views. Or we read cynical, smug op-eds in our favourite “we-are-the-good-guys” news outlet. We identify with a political tribe, but the people leading that tribe hardly care about us beyond their desire to secure our vote.

Helvetian Hellenism

You have probably gleaned by now that I am pretty fond of Athenian democracy. But we can’t have that in the modern world. It’s fantasy! Well, maybe.

Switzerland gets pretty close. Yes, the Swiss have a representative parliament like many other Western countries, but they also retain some Athenian mechanisms, including both mandatory and optional referenda. Federalism assists with the scaling issue, and some Swiss cantons even retain Pynx-style open-air assemblies where voting is done by a show of hands (they call these Landsgemeinde). While Switzerland seems to be thriving under a more Athenian version of democracy, I’m not sure that its system is generalisable across the West as a whole.

I have already referred to the “mob” of Athenians being “highly intelligent and virtuous citizens, who have skin in the game and shared cultural values”. Indeed, it has been conjectured that ancient Athenians had IQs around a standard deviation higher than modern-day Greeks (though polygenic scoring of ancient Greeks does not support this more broadly outside of Athens).

I suspect that this is key for direct democracy to work well. The Swiss enjoy a very high GDP per capita (~13% higher than the US, adjusted for purchasing power). They have a strong national identity, bolstered by strong civic education (despite the country’s ethnolinguistic diversity). And they have a high national IQ. Switzerland therefore shares many of the democracy-enabling characteristics of ancient Athens.

One thing missing from the Swiss model is the random lottery for political leaders (sortition). Clearly, the main worry here is that of ensuring competency (though our present system has hardly solved this problem). We don’t have a good example from the modern era, but there’s certainly a strong, pragmatic case for sortition.

Values and process

When technocratic types get cagey about giving too much power to the people, they reveal that it’s not democracy they care about, but their preferred values. The elephant in the room is that democracy is only useful as long as the people have the right values.

Take Uganda, a reasonably democratic country. In 2023, its parliament passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act with 389 votes for and only 2 against. Critics complain about executive influence on the parliament and general corruption, but this particular law cannot be ascribed to those factors. Opposition to homosexuality was and is extremely popular among Ugandans.

According to polling by Afrobarometer, 97% of Ugandans believe that homosexuality should be illegal. This isn’t because they’re intolerant in general—Ugandans are quite accepting of other religions, ethnicities and nationalities. They just really don’t like homosexuals. Nor does the picture seem to be changing much over time—despite relentless pressure from western NGOs.

The obvious truth is that the process of democracy, when allowed to play out in a population with somewhat illiberal values, does not arrive at liberalism.

Indeed, the Founding Fathers of the United States heavily favoured liberty over democracy when they established the republic. By contrast, Athens prospered under a pure form of democracy because it was small and its citizens were unusually virtuous and civically minded. Either we aspire to create polities with the same class of citizens, or we favour our preferred values over democratic ones when the two come into conflict. Historically, the West has done latter, and we should stop pretending otherwise.

This essay is adapted from one published at Fruit of Eden.

Adam Rochussen is Postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He writes about science, politics, culture and philosophy.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

Although I cannot be certain, I assume that the celebrated heroes of history were better men than I am. I say this not out of confession or humility, but because it is true. More generally, few truths seem more self-evident than that some men are better than others. Yet few propositions today encounter fiercer resistance. The mere assertion appears indecent, transgressive, even faintly malevolent. It certainly runs contrary to the popular interpretation of the soaring words that open the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...”

Yet, for my part, I can make no sense of the claim that all men are created equal unless it is understood as an assertion of political rights. More troubling still, the contemporary egalitarianism that so often invokes these words (while simultaneously despising their author) is not merely empirically false but pernicious, inspiring as it does a species of relativism whose refusal to judge reduces the world to an insipid mélange of mediocrity, where pop songs are celebrated with the same enthusiasm as the masterpieces of Mozart, where rap lyrics are analyzed with the same diligence as the poetry of Chaucer, where the dogmas of Christianity are mocked as readily as the profligate superstitions of New Age belief, and where the West is regarded as merely one civilization among others—notable, if at all, only for its violence and rapacity.

The dominant view today, it seems, is that any admission that some people, some things, or some cultures are better than others is not merely mistaken but morally dubious. “Who are you to judge?” has become our defiant slogan. Yet the case for equality is so frail that its defenders, when pressed, resort to fallacies, sophistries and moral hectoring, among which the motte-and-bailey is perhaps the most common. For these egalitarians begin with the bold claim that human beings are at least roughly equal in their traits and talents, only to retreat, when confronted with obvious counterexamples, to the more defensible but largely vacuous position that although men may differ profoundly in their abilities, they remain metaphysically or morally equal. Having abandoned their original assertion for one much more vaporous, they then frequently impugn the character of those who persist in dissent. “Are you saying that some human beings are inferior to others? How dare you!”

Well, yes and no. This is where precision becomes essential.

Human beings are not merely different; they are different in ways that are directly relevant for moral evaluation. Whatever one might make of equality in the afterlife, on our planet, men are manifestly unequal. I see no plausible way of escaping this conclusion. A talented neurosurgeon is better than a common thief. This example is extreme of course, but the principle applies mutatis mutandis to other comparisons. If the criminal is worse than the law-abiding citizen, then the saint is surely better than the average man. Once we admit the legitimacy of such judgments, the doctrine of human equality (metaphysical or otherwise) begins to look rather shaky.1

Empirical equality. The most expansive conception of human equality is empirical equality or the belief that human beings are, in some meaningful sense, equal in their traits and talents. Yet this doctrine is so clearly contradicted by ordinary experience that it is rarely defended without an intimidating veneer of jargon or a distracting catalog of qualifications. Nevertheless, it remains implicit in many progressive approaches to public policy and is still, in one form or another, a major feature of Marxism and other blank-slate theories of human nature, which treat man as almost infinitely malleable. Change the environment and you change human nature. Inequality is created, not natural. And it persists only because of the systemic injustices of our society.

Although only the most radical progressives explicitly embrace empirical equality, many otherwise moderate liberals hold to it insofar as they regard claims of significant sex or race differences with profound suspicion. Thus, if one points out that disparities between blacks and whites in the United States are partially caused by intelligence differences between blacks and whites, one is often accused of promoting racism. Similarly if one contends that institutions that are dominated by women may function less well than those dominated by men, one is accused of promoting misogyny. The sacred value of equality, though it violates the plain evidence of our senses, is hard to let go.

Metaphysical equality. One way to reconcile the obviously incorrect view that humans are equal with the longing that they be equal is to introduce the concept of metaphysical equality. People who hold this view often use poetic phrases such as that humans are “equal in the eyes of God” or that they have “equal dignity.” They argue that this kind of equality is perfectly consistent with human variation because metaphysical equality is not an empirical claim at all. At first, this might sound like a verbal consolation prize, a way of telling a terrestrial loser that all people are equal in heaven. Yet the doctrine is more powerful that that, for the rhetoric of metaphysical equality has inspired genuine moral concern, sacrifice and even revolution. I do not dismiss its effectiveness as poetry or propaganda, but I do not believe it withstands intellectual scrutiny.

Consider two profoundly different human beings: Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the sadistic SS, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Protestant pastor who resisted Nazism at great personal cost. What, precisely, does it mean to say that these men were metaphysically equal?

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Written by Noah Carl.

The writer David Oks recently penned an article titled “Why China got rich and India didn’t”. It went super viral, racking up over 3,700 likes. Notwithstanding this immense popularity, I don’t think it offers a convincing explanation.

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Written by Noah Carl.

It is well known that the US has a higher homicide rate than other Western countries. In the latest version of the UN’s dataset, it has a rate of 5.8 per 100,000 — compared to 1.3 in France, 1.1 in Britain and 0.9 in Germany. So the country is at least five times more homicidal than its former colonial ruler.

The standard explanation on the Right is simple: racial demographics. The US has a large black population, and black people (for whatever reason) commit homicide at incredibly high rates. Indeed, the US is about 14% black, while the blackest country in Europe, Britain, is only 4% black. Here’s what Ann Coulter had to say in 2013:

On the gun crimes, we keep hearing how low they are in Europe, and oh they’re so low and they have no guns. If you compare white populations, we have the same murder rate as Belgium. So perhaps it’s not a gun problem. It is a demographic problem.

How she could have known that white Americans commit murder at the same rate as white Belgians is unclear, since Belgium does not publish homicide data broken down by race or ethnicity. Indeed, the evidence we do have suggests that she was wrong. Belgium’s overall homicide rate in 2012 was 1.6. Meanwhile, the homicide rate for non-Hispanic white Americans in the same year was 2.7.

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Written by Alden Whitfeld and Arctotherium.

Jason Richwine coined the term “Irish Retort” to describe one of the most common tactics deployed in debates over immigration. Raise any concerns about mass immigration today and the response is automatic: “What about the Irish!”

When Irish immigrants arrived in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were poor, Catholic (as opposed to Protestant) and heavily overrepresented in crime. Nativists panicked then too. Yet over time, the Irish assimilated, climbed up the social ladder, and became indistinguishable from the average American. The implication is clear, though usually left unstated: today’s immigrants will follow the same arc, and any claim to the contrary is just recycled bigotry.

It’s a neat story, rhetorically powerful and emotionally satisfying. The problem is what it leaves out. Careful studies using multi-generational data show that differences in social outcomes are much more persistent than is commonly assumed. What appears to be rapid convergence is often an artifact of looking too narrowly or too briefly. With this in mind, let’s examine how well the story of rapid European assimilation holds up.

To begin with, the story rests on a quiet omission: a very large share of European immigrants didn’t assimilate at all. They went home.

Between roughly 1850 and 1920, return migration was a defining feature of transatlantic mobility. The return rate of European immigrants during this period was 25–40%. In some decades it reached 60–75% (Bandiera et al., 2013). Italians are the canonical case: between 1890 and 1920, more than half returned to Italy (Klein, 1983). This return migration was negatively selected — the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave (Abramitzky et al., 2019). What we now remember as “successful assimilation” is partly explained by survivorship bias. America did not lift entire populations into the middle class. It retained those who were already capable of doing well and quietly shed the rest.1

This selection process radically alters how we interpret the observed convergence in outcomes. Abramitzky et al. (2014) show that most European immigrant groups that arrived in the early twentieth century, including the Irish, Italians and Russians, already had above-average incomes in the first generation. (There was often little difference between first- and second-generation outcomes.) It is not difficult to turn a group into a success story when many of its poorest members voluntarily leave.

Even after accounting for selection, European economic differences did not evaporate entirely. Using a unique three-generation dataset linking immigrant grandfathers in 1880 to their grandsons in 1940, Ward (2020) finds substantial persistence in occupational income across European ethnicities. As this is the first study to use linked grandparent-grandson data, it demonstrates that intergenerational correlations are stronger when measured properly. As Ward notes, his findings cut directly against the “melting pot” narrative in which ethnic differences fade within a generation or two. They don’t.

Nor did immigrants simply arrive as blank slates and then absorb American culture. They brought their values, habits and norms with them, and these left durable imprints on the places where they settled. We understand this intuitively when it comes to cuisine: Italians didn’t just eat pasta themselves; they taught Americans to eat pasta.2 But the same logic applies in other domains.

A growing literature shows that cultural behaviors persist across generations and shape economic outcomes (Giuliano & Tabellini, 2020; Simpser, 2020; Richwine, 2023; 2024). Fulford et al. (2018), using ancestry data for U.S. counties from 1850 to 2010, show that counties settled by immigrants from richer European countries are more productive today. A 1% increase in GDP per capita of the weighted average of the origin countries predicts roughly a 0.3% increase in the long-run GDP per capita of the county.

And this effect is not simply driven by differences in education between immigrant groups. The researchers also find that once traits like historical state capacity (the length of time for which a nation has had an independent state), trust and cooperation are taken into account, formal education no longer predicts a group’s impact on county productivity. Berger & Engzell (2019) report similar results for inequality and mobility: differences across counties reflect the composition of the groups that settled them.

This brings us to another truth about the Ellis Islander wave of immigration that is rarely spoken: the nativists of the time were correct. Specifically, they were correct about the political impact these new arrivals would have.

The 1880–1924 Ellis Island immigrants entered a country with virtually no welfare state. But their descendants powered the New Deal and, more decisively, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, permanently shifting the American political spectrum leftward. Medicaid, Medicare, and the expansion of Social Security were not accidents; they were the predictable consequences of a transformed electorate (and are, incidentally, responsible for America’s fiscal woes). Any short-run cost-benefit analysis conducted in 1920 would have missed the point entirely.

The result was a durable “Europeanization” of American politics, replacing limited government and sectional coalitions with left-right ideological politics. As can be seen in the chart below, there is a strong correlation between the fraction of immigrants in a county between 1910–1930 and support for state welfare spending.

None of this was unforeseeable. Contemporary observers like Senator David Reed explicitly warned, in defence of the Immigration Act of 1924, that mass immigration from populations less accustomed to self-government would produce electorates more reliant on the state.

There has come about a general realization of the fact that the races of men who have been coming to us in recent years are wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans, that they are untrained in self-government — a faculty that it has taken the Northwestern Europeans many centuries to acquire.

Thoughtful Americans have been despondent for the future of our country when the suffrage should be exercised by men whose inexperience in popular forms of government would lead them to demand too much of their Government, and to rely too heavily upon it, and too little upon their own initiative.

What could not be modelled precisely was the timing. Political integration takes decades, and as such, these effects only became electorally decisive in the late 1920s, with milestones such as Al Smith’s 1928 nomination. Had someone conducted a fiscal analysis of this immigration wave in 1920, they would have concluded it was beneficial. But immigration reshaped politics itself: once immigrants and their descendants gained political power, they used it, and this was predictable.3

Studies of internal migration reveal that even regional differences within a country persist over time. Population movements change societies. While the Great Migration is usually discussed among historians insofar as it pertains to black Americans, numerically speaking, a larger number of white Southerners left the South. This movement measurably increased political conservatism, as measured by Republican vote shares, opposition to the Civil Rights Act, support for Reagan’s tax cuts, and opposition to the certification of the 2020 election (Bazzi et al., 2023a; 2023b).4

Evidence from crime and literacy further undermines the lazy analogy between European immigration then and Hispanic immigration now. Moehling & Piehl (2009) show that, while some European immigrant groups were overrepresented in crime, such as the Irish, it was largely in minor offenses like public drunkenness. Differences in serious crime were generally small. While Italians were somewhat overrepresented in serious crime, they still committed far less than Mexicans, who were the clear exception.

The paper also punctures the myth of European illiteracy. Literacy exceeded 85% for most European groups and large majorities spoke English. Again, Mexico stood apart, with substantially lower literacy and English proficiency.

The same pattern is seen in incarceration data from 1900–1930 (Abramitzky et al., 2024). Once again, Mexicans had much higher rates than native-born Americans, whereas all European groups were the same or lower.

Put differently: European differences were real but comparatively modest.5 That is not evidence of dramatic assimilation success; it is evidence that gaps were small to begin with. And the gap between whites and Hispanics, both historically and today, is far larger.6 Invoking the Irish or Italians as evidence for the power of assimilation is therefore not convincing.7 The Irish Retort doesn’t work.

This essay is adapted from a longer article published at Heretical Insights.

Alden Whitfeld is an independent writer who does research on immigration and politics. Arctotherium is an anonymous writer interested in demographics and the future of civilization.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

I’m pretty sure I was wearing my Rage Against the Machine hat when I bought The Portable Edmund Burke. I was young and radical. Reading Chomsky, Zinn, Marx, Fanon. In a charitable mood, I thought conservatism was solace for the old. In a cynical mood, I thought it was a cover for greed and plunder. But I had read about Burke’s eloquence and, fancying some well-written prose, I decided to give him a try. Besides, I delighted in gainsaying bad political arguments. And being intellectually arrogant, I was certain I would find plenty to mock in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

I was not converted overnight. I was not even converted ten years later. But I look back fondly on my first reading of Burke. I was not surprised by the force and beauty of his rhetoric. Even his critics conceded his brilliance as a stylist. But I was surprised by the force of his arguments—or rather, by their moral seriousness. For Reflections is not written like a tight philosophical treatise; it depends as much on the moral imagination as it does on formal reason. And the moral imagination is moved more by poetry than by axioms and deductions.

What I found in Burke was a reverence for tradition, an understanding that institutions are often wiser than individuals, and a recognition that stubborn problems are stubborn precisely because they admit no easy solutions. At the time, I believed that poverty was less a puzzle than a condition created by design. In principle, it seemed no more difficult to solve than elementary algebra. A better society was only a few radical changes away. Of all my early leftist beliefs, this optimism was the first to go.

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Written by Peter Frost.

Mean IQ has risen in Europeans over the past 10,000 years. This upward trend began when hunting and gathering gave way to farming, and it continued as farming brought a cascade of new challenges.1 Nonetheless, there were periods of stagnation and even decline, notably during the Imperial Era of Rome and, more recently, since the early 20th century.2

These are the findings of a new field of research, archaeogenetics, which uses ancient DNA to chart genetic change over time, such as changes in genes associated with cognitive ability. To date, the focus has been on Europe, where we have the most data. But at least one study concerns East Asia, where mean IQ has followed a similar trajectory over time, albeit with interesting differences.3 Eventually, we’ll learn how cognitive ability has evolved in South Asia, the Middle East, West Africa and other regions.4

A new picture of human evolution is taking shape. Was it ever anticipated by Charles Darwin or any of his contemporaries? This question prompted me to look through the early literature for anyone making the following points:

• Mean IQ rose at a faster rate when hunting and gathering gave way to farming.

• This rise continued well into the time of recorded history. It continued as long as new demands were made on cognitive ability, and as long as individuals who met such demands enjoyed higher reproductive success. Whenever this selection pressure weakened, mean IQ stopped rising or even fell.

• There was a positive feedback loop between human intellect and the products of human intellect.

Darwin, in fact, did argue that human evolution continued past the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. But he believed it proceeded at a slower pace. In this, he was influenced by two of his closest associates: Alfred Russell Wallace and Francis Galton.

Wallace thought that cultural change made genetic evolution less necessary for material advancement, particularly with the rise of civilization.5 Meanwhile, Galton saw civilization as weakening natural selection: “the finest young men” are killed in war; the children of short-lived parents marry earlier and have children earlier; and primogeniture prevents the younger sons of landowners from marrying.6

Darwin concluded that cognitive ability increased only somewhat, or perhaps not at all, as humans became “civilized”:7

Hence in civilised nations there will be some tendency to an increase both in the number and in the standard of the intellectually able. But I do not wish to assert that this tendency may not be more than counterbalanced in other ways, as by the multiplication of the reckless and improvident; but even to such as these, ability must be some advantage.

After Darwin, academia followed the lead of either Wallace or Galton. But one contemporary did argue that cognitive evolution accelerated during the time of modern humans.

His name? Friedrich Engels — the lifelong collaborator of Karl Marx. Engels was interested in the natural sciences and the works of Darwin specifically. In 1859, he made a point of obtaining a copy of the first edition of On the Origin of Species. He immediately wrote to Marx:8

Darwin, by the way, whom I am just reading, is quite splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had not yet been destroyed, but now that has been done. Never before has such a wonderful attempt been made to prove historical development in nature, and certainly never with such success.

Over the following decades, he wrote several essays from a Darwinian perspective, most notably The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Apes to Man (1876).9

This essay seems to argue for all three of the above points, particularly the tendency of cultural evolution and genetic evolution to drive each other forward:

The reaction on labour and speech of the development of the brain and its attendant senses, of the increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of conclusion, gave both labour and speech an ever-renewed impulse to further development. This development did not reach its conclusion when man finally became distinct from the ape, but on the whole made further powerful progress, its degree and direction varying among different peoples and at different times, and here and there even being interrupted by local or temporary regression. This further development has been strongly urged forward, on the one hand, and guided along more definite directions, on the other, by a new element which came into play with the appearance of fully-fledged man, namely, society.

The first part seemed obscure to me, so I went back to the original German and used Google Translate:10

The feedback effect of the development of the brain and its obedient senses, of the increasingly clarified consciousness, capacity for abstraction, and power of drawing conclusions on labor and language gave both [labor and language] constant new impulses for further development—a development that by no means came to an end once humans had finally separated from the apes.

In other words, there was a positive feedback loop between the development of the brain (consciousness, abstraction, reasoning) and the growing complexity of work and language, which in turn favored further development of the brain. This is the feedback loop at the heart of gene-culture coevolution — a concept that would remain unknown for another century and a half.

Am I seeing something that isn’t there? Perhaps my interest in gene-culture coevolution is making me assume that others share this interest, particularly the evolutionarily inclined. It is significant, then, that another writer also thought “the best nineteenth-century case for gene-culture coevolution was made by Friedrich Engels in his remarkable essay of 1876.”

That writer was Stephen Jay Gould, and he saw the same feedback loop between genes and culture:11

An enlarging brain (biology, or genes in later parlance) then fed back upon tools and language (culture), improving them in turn and setting the basis for further growth of the brain—the positive feedback loop of gene-culture coevolution.

Adapting to nature: cold winters theory

According to Engels, gene-culture coevolution was not yet predominant when humans were still adapting to new natural environments as they spread around the globe. These humans were already modern Homo sapiens, as shown by his use of the term “fully-fledged man” [des fertigen Menschen].

[Man] spread over the whole of the habitable world, being the only animal fully able to do so of its own accord. The other animals that have become accustomed to all climates — domestic animals and vermin — did not become so independently, but only in the wake of man. And the transition from the uniformly hot climate of the original home of man to colder regions, where the year was divided into summer and winter, created new requirements — shelter and clothing as protection against cold and damp, and hence new spheres of labour, new forms of activity, which further and further separated man from the animal.

This is “cold winters theory” — the idea that the seasonal cycle of northern regions selects for planning, as well as the ability to create special clothing and shelters for winter. It had many proponents in the 19th century, but Engels is most likely referring to a paper written by Wallace in 1864:12

So when a glacial epoch comes on, some animals must acquire warmer fur, or a covering of fat, or else die of cold. Those best clothed by nature are, therefore, preserved by natural selection. Man, under the same circumstances, will make himself warmer clothing, and build better houses; and the necessity of doing this will react upon his mental organisation and social condition … a hardier, a more provident, and a more social race would be developed, than in those regions where the earth produces a perennial supply of vegetable food, and where neither foresight nor ingenuity are required to prepare for the rigours of winter. And is it not the fact that in all ages, and in every quarter of the globe, the inhabitants of temperate have been superior to those of tropical countries? All the great invasions and displacements of races have been from North to South, rather than the reverse.

Adapting to culture: gene-culture coevolution

With the rise of farming, the human mind no longer had to grapple solely with the cognitive demands of the natural environment. Cognitive demands were now being created by culture, itself a creation of the human mind.

Selection for cognitive ability thus shifted farther south, to temperate or even subtropical latitudes. Such regions had the greatest potential for population growth and hence for social complexity — what we call “civilization.”

Engels describes this new stage of human evolution:

By the combined functioning of hand, speech organs and brain, not only in each individual but also in society, men became capable of executing more and more complicated operations, and were able to set themselves, and achieve, higher and higher aims. The work of each generation itself became different, more perfect and more diversified. Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared. Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind — religion.

The southward shift in selection for cognitive ability can be seen in ancient DNA. The inverse correlation between winter temperature and cognitive ability is strongest in the oldest European samples. It then grows weaker over time and finally disappears with the end of hunting and gathering in Europe.13

Engels ended his essay with a criticism of the “Darwinian school” for tending to see the human mind as a disembodied entity — a ghost in a machine — and not as an organ that has evolved to meet specific needs.

All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity of the brain. Men became accustomed to explain their actions as arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time there emerged that idealistic world outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated men’s minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognise the part that has been played therein by labour.

Animals, as has already been pointed out, change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them. In nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing.

Conclusion

It may seem jarring to see Engels advocating not only gene-culture coevolution but also cold winters theory and the idea that the human brain continued evolving into historical times. No less jarring is Gould’s apparent endorsement. For this, I have but one explanation: life isn’t simple.

Engel’s essay was never finished. It would eventually be published in 1925, long after his death, together with other incomplete manuscripts by him on the natural sciences. Had he finished it, and found a better translator, he might have influenced evolutionary thought in the years after Darwin.

As things turned out, the leading intellectual heirs of Darwin were Wallace and Galton. For different reasons, their legacy has discouraged researchers from investigating the recent evolution of cognitive ability.

Wallace rightly believed that the pace of cultural change overtook the pace of genetic evolution in our species. But he wrongly concluded that the growing importance of culture caused genetic evolution to slow down and lose importance. In fact, the human genome changed more quickly as Homo sapiens adapted to faster-changing cultural environments.14

Wallace’s view of human evolution gained broad support, particularly its corollary that culture is overwhelmingly responsible for human differences. The latter view became especially popular from 1933 onward, as alarm grew over the rise of Hitler and Nazi blood-and-soil nationalism — the original meaning of “racism.”15 For many, the struggle against Hitler would continue long after 1945 and eventually become a struggle against any belief that human differences are more than skin-deep.16

As for Galton, he rightly believed that civilization can cause cognitive evolution to halt or even reverse. But he wrongly assumed that stagnation and decline were the usual outcome. In fact, civilization has more often been an impetus for higher levels of cognitive ability.

We’re now in the year 2026. With Nature publishing the latest Reich Lab paper, we can read Engel’s 1876 essay in a new light and acknowledge its significance. Will the same be done for the papers by Davide Piffer, Emil Kirkegaard, Yunus Kuijpers and Michael Woodley of Menie?

The advance of science is due not only to exceptional individuals but also to our willingness to recognize them and build on their work.

Peter Frost has a PhD in anthropology from Université Laval. His main research interest is the role of sexual selection in shaping highly visible human traits. Find his newsletter here.

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Written by Bo Winegard.

Perhaps it will be a mercy killing. The humanities have finished their life cycle from triumph through decadence to decay. All that is left is the dying.

When I am in a surly mood, this seems right. The humanities deserve to die. They have abdicated their cultural responsibility, draining colleges of precious resources while promulgating progressive balderdash. Their eulogy, like that of a once-great man who became an eccentric crank in old age, will focus on the glory of their youth, passing over the waste of their later years in tactful silence.

Yet it’s hard to resist the feeling that something irreplaceable is vanishing beneath the decay. However degraded the modern humanities may have become, they still preserve fragments of a great inheritance: Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, Melville and Tolstoy. One cannot watch such a tradition collapse with indifference. Instead one is led to melancholic reflection and interrogation: What purpose do the humanities, at their best, serve and what exactly is being lost with their disappearance?

My answer is unashamedly elitist.

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Written by Noah Carl.

The debate over the causes of persistent racial IQ gaps tends to get bogged down in statistical nitty-gritty. Researchers clash over questions like “how similar is the linkage disequilibrium structure in different ancestral populations?” and “do signals of polygenic selection persist when using effect sizes from family-based GWAS?” These questions are undoubtedly important (I do not mean to suggest otherwise). However, the excessive focus on such arcane matters risks distracting from the bigger picture: environmentalism is highly implausible.

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Written by Lipton Matthews.

Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at the University of Birmingham, is one of the most prominent voices in Britain’s Empire debate. He has gone so far as to assert that British rule was “far worse” than the Nazis. Andrews represents a broader movement within academia that sees Western colonialism as the defining evil of human history. This movement suffers from a profound lack of perspective. Conquest and domination were not Western inventions but recurring features of human society.

Britain spent over £12 million to suppress the slave trade during the 19th century, a large sum for the era. Yet today, Britons are browbeaten and made to feel guilty over their country’s past. Mongolians, meanwhile, face no such pressure — despite the Mongol Empire being responsible for some of the most catastrophic destruction in all of history. There are no calls for Mongolian reparations; no curricula are being scrubbed; no statues are being torn down.

The simple fact is that conquest, tribute extraction, forced labour, population displacement and domination of subjugated peoples are constants across human civilisation. What makes Western colonialism distinctive is not its brutality but the degree to which it’s been subjected to critical examination.

Few episodes in history match the Mongol expansion in terms of killing. The Mongols offered conquered peoples a choice: surrender and pay tribute, or face annihilation. During the sack of Baghdad alone, hundreds of thousands were killed in a matter of days. Mongol forces also destroyed the House of Wisdom, the largest library in the world at the time. Books were thrown into the river in such quantities that historical accounts describe the Tigris running black with ink, before turning red with blood. Deaths attributed to Genghis Khan’s conquests have been estimated at 40 million, representing roughly 10% of the world’s population.

Not only that. Research has found that Mongol invasions did lasting damage to institutional quality, measurable in contemporary GDP per capita figures. Nations invaded by the Mongols became more autocratic as a result; those that weren’t developed more liberal, decentralised institutions.

The mechanism is straightforward: when resistance was met with slaughter, surviving populations were forced to prioritise the military and national defence. After the expulsion of its Mongol rulers, China turned inward under the Ming dynasty, built the Great Wall and largely abandoned its maritime capabilities. (Zheng He’s fleet, which dwarfed that of even Christopher Columbus, was left to rot.) Russia consolidated into a single autocratic state as a response to the Mongol threat, having previously been a loose federation of principalities. Islam’s Golden Age was effectively ended by the sack of Baghdad.

All this, yet Mongolia receives close to zero criticism. Conquered peoples of Eurasia are not even mentioned in the debate. (As recently as 2008, Mongolian authorities erected a huge, stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan.)

Let us turn from Eurasia to the Americas. Before the Spanish ever set foot there, a vast colonial system had already been constructed by people indigenous to that continent — the Inca Empire.

Incan imperial expansion involved the systematic seizure of resources from newly conquered territories. All wild animals and mineral resources were claimed as property of the state, personified by the divine ruler. Gold, silver and other materials were appropriated from the peoples that had previously controlled them. And provincial elites were required to deliver an annual tribute to the capital.

More significantly, the Inca displaced subject peoples on a massive scale. Between three and five million (a third of the imperial population) were resettled, as entire regions were claimed by the state. At Cochabamba in Bolivia, the emperor ordered part of the eastern valley vacated, and some 14,000 workers drawn from surrounding groups were drafted in to produce food for the army. Underpinning all this was an intricate bureaucracy imposed upon subject peoples, who had no say in who governed them.

Some individuals were permanently detached from their kin groups and then assigned to Inca elites, serving as a kind of bound labour. This included adolescent girls, who were confined to segregated state precincts where they worked until awarded in marriage. These were not isolated abuses, but rather official practices of the Empire.

Among the occupational categories documented in chronicles of the period were administrators with specific responsibility for human sacrifice. Such individuals appear alongside gold miners, feather workers and storehouse guardians in formal registers of state duties. The victims of Inca human sacrifice were of course overwhelmingly drawn from subject peoples, and many were children.

The Inca Empire was, by any reasonable definition, a colonial system. It was built on conquest, seizure of resources, mass population displacement, and detachment of individuals from their local communities. The fact that its perpetrators were not European is irrelevant.

Another case of non-European expansionism with striking parallels to European empire-building is the Nupe colonisation of Okunland in what is now north-central Nigeria, lasting from 1840 to 1897. It warrants attention because it demonstrates that the features most commonly attributed to European colonialism — slave-taking, imposition of administrators and manipulation of local elites — were practiced by an African imperial power against an African subject.

The conquest of Okunland was motivated by political rivalry and appetite for resources. Internal power struggles between Nupe princes made the wealthy region of Okunland an irresistible target. Around 1840, forces led by Etsu Usman Zaki overran several Okun settlements. Between 1840 and 1850, the large town of Kirri was taken. When it fell, able-bodied men were carried off as slaves, and a tribute of 6,000 cowries was imposed on the survivors.

Kabba, the largest Okun settlement, held out longer. Nupe forces pillaged the surrounding countryside in order to starve the population into submission. Eventually, a peace treaty was signed under which Kabba agreed to pay a tribute of 72,000 cowries. The Okun people thus became a Nupe dependency.

What followed was a system of concentrated, unaccountable power. An official known as the Ogba functioned as the sole representative of Nupe authority in a given area. Wielding immense power with no formal checks on his conduct, his aim was to collect as much tribute as possible for Bida (the imperial capital). Matters grew worse under Etsu Maliki, reaching a “monumental level of absurdity”. Taxes were raised so high that when cowries and slaves were not available, people were forced to pay with their own children.

Like European powers, Nupe authorities sometimes governed through local intermediaries. In Oworoland, chiefs who collaborated had their authority extended across entire regions; those who refused were stripped of influence. Empowering local elites is therefore not a European invention. The Nupe did it decades before Britain employed similar techniques across Nigeria. Despite this, only the British version features prominently in debates about colonial injustice.

It is entirely legitimate to examine Western colonialism. What’s wrong is to examine it in isolation, as though conquest and domination were products of European modernity. The Mongols built the largest contiguous land empire in history, causing institutional damage that is still measurable in living standards today. The Inca established a vast colonial system complete with administrators for overseeing human sacrifice. The Nupe colonised Okunland using methods indistinguishable from those later employed by European powers.

Mongolian authorities are not being asked to apologise for 40 million deaths, even as they build giant statues of the man responsible. The Inca legacy is treated as just another part of South America’s cultural heritage. And Nupe colonisation of Okunland remains largely unknown outside of specialist circles. What motivates most academic critics of Empire, it seems, is not so much anti-colonialism as opposition to the West.

Lipton Matthews is a researcher and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute and Chronicles. He is the author of The Corporate Myth. You can reach him at: lo_matthews@yahoo.com

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