Steven, I think you might have overstayed your welcome here. It is rather unnerving seeing someone seriously defending the mass rape and murder of human beings while criticizing someone denouncing the mass rape and murder of human beings—and then claiming to be holding the moral high ground. I honestly don’t know what to make of this. Unless there is literally a Nazi flag hanging on the wall behind you.

Much worse is the general error of thinking ideology drives history in general, ludicrously so in the case of long-term structural change like the emergence of serfdom/feudalism.

You do know ideology means “belief system,” right?

Or do you somehow not know that policies come from ideas, and ideas come from belief systems—and are justified and defended by belief systems?

That is literally what makes the difference in history between human beings and, say, rock formations.

So, really, Steven, you’ve just spun right off the cliff of making any sense here. This is how far you have had to retreat to dodge being exposed making vacuous points and then doubling down on them.

It has really been quite amusing to watch, frankly.

But my words fail, so here are the words of others.

17 “Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death. 18 Whoever takes an animal’s life shall make it good, life for life. 19 If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, 20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him. 21 Whoever kills an animal shall make it good, and whoever kills a person shall be put to death. 22 You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the Lord your God.”

A life for a life implies one life for one life. The insistence that more people have to die for the deaths of Israelis is deeply racist. What is the acceptable ratio, five dead Palestinians to one, or is it ten? More?

Palestinians of course are losers. One of the great figures of liberal thought through centuries said, regarding losers so vile as to resort to arms in desperation.

“So, then, Catilina, if you cannot die with a good grace, you ought at the very least to take yourself off with great alacrity to some other land, and having thus saved your life from a host of just and amply merited penalties, resign it to a future of exile and solitude.”

It is poetic that Catiline and Palestine can be rhymed.

“If they cannot keep themselves going, the best thing would be for them to collapse as promptly as possible, and with so little noise that the incident is kept quite private from their fellow-citizens and even from their nearest neighbours. For I cannot see why, if they are unable to live decently, they should also have this passion for a shameful death. Why should they think it less painful to die in a large company than by themselves?”

This is still I think an authentic expression of the liberal spirit.

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

The Zionist colonial assault is the equivalent of the Ancien Regime. It does not deny the individual horrors of those who fight against tyranny but a false equivalence is defense of that tyranny.

“But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice—is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”

And that is why the Palestinians must make war, as horrible as it always is. As I say, my feeble words fail. But let us consider the actions of one man? The rebels under Nat Turner slaughtered women and children, including at least one baby in the crib, even going back to kill the previously overlooked child. Yet, among the white citizens fleeing for their lives, was one George H. Thomas, a boy about fifteen years old. His actions as one of the great Union generals spoke his judgment as to how unforgivable slave rebellion was.

I think the umbrage was always about my objecting to the gratuitous endorsement of Zionist outrages. That’s addressed, with a little help from other writers, and I’m done.

First, re Pinker, it is hard to see how Pinker discerning a slow trend toward better is okay while if I see a slow trend towards better over a span of centuries it is not. For the record, I am a lot more ambiguous on Pinker’s notions of “better.” Even more, I reject Pinker’s notions that ideas and “values” of the Enlightenment drove that improvement. And I heartily detest Pinker for the probability he means by “Enlightenment, ” white European. Ideas and “values” (professed morality, which should never be taken at face value, by the way,) come from experience, life. Not so by the way, Pinkter’s graphs I find especially dubious. They are, given the nature of Better Angels huge topic, philosophical arguments. Accepting Pinker, even as merely reductive I think, is thus I think bad philosophy.

As for the modern extremist sexism being the norm in the past, which is the only rational meaning I can find, once again….I am not sure that kind of baby mill sexism where women were anticipations of the fiction of Margaret Atwood was really a thing. And yet again, praise for abstinent women was simply not the same kind of sexism carelessly imputed as the norm. Augustus’ pro-natalist legislation was very notable as being both unusual and a failure. Also, it was in no way inspired by “Christian fascism” which still isn’t a thing, except in the rhetoric here.

“One can argue that it was a maladaptive response to their condition, which is still false (we can see clearly how much of ancient sexism was pretty clearly a response from men to need to be able to control access to sex and know they weren’t being cuckolded even as they themselves happily cuckolded other men), but it was at least clearly maladaptive.”

If there is population pressure, sexism that result in fewer girl babies, will “help” reduce that pressure by limiting breeding in the most effective way possible, attacking the choke point so to speak. So I’m not sure it was maladaptive, which I suspect depended very much on the geographical and historical situation of any given time and place.

As for the reading the collective mind of dead men? I don’t believe in telepathy at all, nor collective minds nor in the power of intuition to know the past. Most men in the past so far as I can tell didn’t have the material resources to control access to sex for more than one partner. Indeed, throughout many of these centuries I suspect the need for women’s labor to survive at all, which gave them a de facto leverage in the household no matter what the official ideology decreed. And for that matter, many women wanted more children so that some would survive to help them, personally, when the surviving children got old enough. It is even possible that some women, particularly physically strong ones who coped well with pregnancy, even enjoyed conjugal relations, as unacceptable a thought as that might be today.

The late Roman Empire was the aftermath of a vast systemic collapse (the fifty year civil war and resulting collapse of the fiduciary economy in the 3rd century), which led to a massive increase in fascism (the death penalty expanded astronomically; state control of society ramped up extremely, e.g. draconian price controls began and the free market was eliminated; and the use of force to effect political will became normed rather than identified as corrupt) and a measurable decline in societal knowledge (philosophy, literature, the humanities and sciences, and art all declined in quality and scale) and a substantial increase in income disparity (the poor got poorer, and more numerous; the rich got fewer and more rich, concentrating power—at least until barbarian armies trashed things). It was the brink of the Dark Ages for a reason. And it is characterized by exactly such reversals of progress as Constantine’s enslaving of millions of free farmers with his Orwellian invention of serfdom, and the universal elimination of the freedom of religion and speech under Theodosius.

Advocating abstinence in marriage is rejecting the baby mill sexism and that really was a Christian thing too. Why die on the hill where you simply pretend the Quiverfull types are somehow typical, either now or then. They aren’t and you know it. And that sort of nonsense claim is exactly why I was prompted to use the word “imaginary.”

As to the rhetorical question about why I don’t compare slave societies of the Republic or the so-called golden age of the Empire, given that my objection is that in very many way, serfdom/feudalism was overall an improvement for humanity in Europe and the Mediterranean littoral, and equating them is false and misleading and ultimately reactionary politics, the question is, how is that relevant? I never implied that even for some of the common people the Republic or the Empire was not a cartoon hell of whip-wielding, rags and crusts of bread, daily rape of women. At least, not on any charitable reading! Once again, if I accuse Christian orphanages of wide-spread infanticide, I am not arguing for Christianity improving things. Every argument against a false position I don’t hold is a genuine example of the cheap rhetorical trick called, the straw man.

Lastly, “He argues that Christians inherited an already-terrible situation and then implemented policies, effectively Christian fascism, such as serfdom that guaranteed that it would only get worse. Again, maladaptive responses to a bad situation, motivated by an ideology with harmful components, particularly an opposition to the idea of progress, empiricism, and discovery.” Fascism is a twentieth century phenomenon (I do think it has deep roots in the nineteenth in the US both antebellum and in Redemption/Jim Crow, as well as Tsarist Russia,) and it is cheap rhetoric to try to inflame.

Much worse is the general error of thinking ideology drives history in general, ludicrously so in the case of long-term structural change like the emergence of serfdom/feudalism. The ideology changed but the supposed expression didn’t. The Church was merely one of the feudal lords, always secondary to the lay nobility and the feudal monarchs. The history of Christian monasticism is not the history of the medieval period, nor even the history of the papacy. The popes were not everything even in Rome itself.

Ideology rationalizes and only takes an transformative role when a mass movement transforms ideas from excuses for what is into plans for what might be.

To the Fred B-C comment which begins with the rhetorical question about why I’m stanning Hamas…

Let me begin by quoting myself, “…Under a serf/feudal system, which in practice was always ‘contaminated’ by some free holds (quite extensively in Byzantine Anatolia if I understand it correctly) just as there were usually some slaves…”

Then, Fred, “In any case, you accuse Richard of not responding, but Richard repeatedly argued a fortiori, such as saying that even if serfdom was better than slavery it wasn’t so much so as to turn Christians into abolitionists. (A fact we know because they also had slaves!) Which you materially didn’t engage with.” The agreement with me that Christians had slaves is italicized, presumably to imply I didn’t know something I had already said yet my non-existent ignorance somehow refutes me.

As for the sentence fragment? I didn’t argue Christians were abolitionists, not of slavery nor anything else. I objected to the bizarre and ultimately reactionary claim that nothing really changed over centuries and slavery/Roman empire; serfdom/feudalism; wage-slavery/modern(ish) times….that all were “functionally” the same. That doesn’t absolve Christianity of anything. In regards to orphanages, the ostensible topic, I accused medieval and early modern orphanages of being de facto infanticide mills. Again, that is not defending Christianity and it is exceedingly uncharitable to misread this way.

Similarly, I did not and do not “stan” Hamas. The Palestinian people have the right, no, a kind of duty, to fight against their oppressors. It is exactly the same argument you use to “stan” Nazis, with one terrible difference: Your argument to defend Nazis is false. The war in Ukraine did not begin with the invasion of Ukraine, it began with a fascist coup. For years the fascists randomly bombed ethnic Russian/Russian speaking lands. The right of self-determination belongs to the ethnic Russians/Russian language speakers, not their fascist enemies. Shame on you.

Steven: Why are you stanning Hamas? “Israel is a brutal apartheid state” is not contradicted by “Hamas are thugs who Israel helped bring about by destroying secular, sane alternatives to negotiate with them (and then the few remnants of those alternatives discredited themselves by being incompetent conservative nationalists”. This is a position fucking Noam Chomsky can hold.

And it really is just a total violation of intellectual charity to react this way to his point. “Empty virtue signaling” is all he says. Yes, Richard calls them “evil”… which they are. Just like how the Azov Nazis are evil and yet they are on the right side against Russia because nations have the right to resist against invasion and annexation. This isn’t that hard. I’m getting flashbacks to the trolley problem discussion.

In any case, you accuse Richard of not responding, but Richard repeatedly argued a fortiori, such as saying that even if serfdom was better than slavery it wasn’t so much so as to turn Christians into abolitionists. (A fact we know because they also had slaves!) Which you materially didn’t engage with.

Steven: Google “quiverful”. Then please explain what you think “imaginary” means.

Seriously, why die on this hill? This is really beneath you. I’m not saying every society or every religion or every ideology in the past was as extreme as to reduce women to purely baby factories. But many were. And most of the others that weren’t still had very overt sexist mythology. Christians have almost never meaningfully challenged any of that. Because they’ve inherited ancient Jewish sexism

As far as greater personal freedom: You say “late Roman Empire”. Even if you’re right about that (and I defer to Richard on this one but it’s fairly clear you are not), why pick that? Why not compare it with the Roman Empire or the Republic when they weren’t in a period of extended decay? Richard has been really clear about this. He doesn’t say Christians single-handedly ruined Rome. He argues that Christians inherited an already-terrible situation and then implemented policies, effectively Christian fascism, such as serfdom that guaranteed that it would only get worse. Again, maladaptive responses to a bad situation, motivated by an ideology with harmful components, particularly an opposition to the idea of progress, empiricism, and discovery.

The fact is that for the vast majority of Rome huge swaths of the populace had levels of personal freedom that, while laughable to our modern eyes, were nothing like anything but the most powerful nobility in the Dark Ages.

Steven: I was very specific. I think if you read what I said again you’ll see that I made a very specific claim. That is, Richard has endorsed Pinker’s claim that there’s been a general trend toward upward improvement… after the Enlightenment . (Which is also generally Pinker’s thesis: He doesn’t argue that things just generally get better, he argues that science, reason, and Enlightenment values can make things better. I personally think he’s reductive in a lot of ways, but I do think he’s right just like Dr. King was that the arc of history generally does bend toward justice). That isn’t a contradiction with saying that the Dark Ages were a bad period. Pinker himself concedes that bad periods happen. The general trend is the point.

So, yeah, Richard is arguing that, in a lot of ways, progress stopped or even reversed in the Dark Ages. And he’s cited data, from indications of mortality to indications of economic and industrial density, that show this really starkly. It really was a sharp fall off a cliff that took a long time to recover from.

As for women pumping out babies: Steven, I really think you’re being intentionally dense here. For one, today, we definitely don’t need to increase our population, and yet the idea that women should be domestic baby factories sticks around, especially among religious extremists. So it clearly never was never some rational response, but rather an attempt to control women. But even in ancient societies… why does the fact that women need to be pregnant a lot of the time mean they should only be in the home? Not all societies were equally bad in this regard. There were female guilds at certain parts of medieval Europe. Certain Greek women had immense control over their household operations. Edward Cohen argues, “Many Athenian women participated in the cash economy of Classical Athens, sometimes working at mundane tasks for limited compensation, sometimes exercising control over sizeable assets, sometimes engaging in commercial transactions of significance. Some women soared financially, and their accomplishments (and their names) tend to be memorialized in our sources. The toil of anonymous female slaves, however, almost invariably underlay this success, for Athens was a ‘slave society'”.

https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/pdf/doi/10.4324/9781315621425.ch50

Did those societies with relatively egalitarian conditions for women experience immediate economic collapse? No.

See, what I originally asked wasn’t “Why should people in certain circumstances have larger families?” I used the word “just”. As in, why should women be reduced to merely wombs?

And so my point was that ancient societies did have overt sexism, in exactly the way you are suggesting people today don’t tend to advocate. (Which is false, by the way, but you’re right that the extreme sexism of the past is today viewed as extreme and thus fringe). That was in addition to covert sexism and to economic needs. This is why I went on at some length as to why ancient sexism actually had pretty serious economic costs. One can argue that it was a maladaptive response to their condition, which is still false (we can see clearly how much of ancient sexism was pretty clearly a response from men to need to be able to control access to sex and know they weren’t being cuckolded even as they themselves happily cuckolded other men), but it was at least clearly maladaptive.